January 7, 2018 — Col. John Alexander

[marduk]

I'm just pointing out that there have been reports where it hasn't been just a sighting on a lonely road. If you review the DC 52 case there were two separate radar installations involved near the United States capitol city, numerous witnesses, and several intercepts by military jets in a cat and mouse game, that at one point resulted in UFOs surrounding one of the jets before streaking off into the distance.

Ruppelt tells how there have ben more than one USAF pilot who had seen UFOs, and that a number of commanders from the air bases he visited believe UFOs are real craft. These craft could certainly have chosen not to show up anywhere they could be detected if they wanted to. But right over the nation's capitol? Near military bases? Near nuclear facilities?

So while I agree that a UFO experience is transformative on a personal level, I'm less certain that they're picking any particular individual out of these cases as singularly important. However if you thought I was going in another direction I'd be interested in knowing what you think that might have been.

Good point.

They also appear interested in nuclear technology, perhaps among others.

But again, they don’t approach institutions. Individuals and technology is their interest.

Which is interesting.

 

[Randall]

Good point. They also appear interested in nuclear technology, perhaps among others. But again, they don’t approach institutions. Individuals and technology is their interest. Which is interesting.

Maybe I'm not clear on what you are referring to as "institutions". I'm thinking governmental, military, and religious locations would be considered institutions. But then again, with religious locations I'm not so sure which cases would be reliable. It seems fairly safe to say however, that with all the associated religious mythology from Ezekiel to Fatima that something has been going on there for a long time. The Bible has sometimes been referred to as one of the greatest UFO books ever written.

That leaves the educational institutions, but then we have the Westall and Ariel school cases. If transportation is considered an institution, there have definitely been sightings near aircraft and airports. If civic infrastructure counts as institutions, then we can add water reservoirs and power lines. Maybe these locations are simply incidental. I don't know. One thing I would say is that if they didn't want their presence to be known at all, they probably could have done that. But instead, their presence has become engrained in culture worldwide. I imagine the percentage of people who have never heard of them is now very small.

UFOs have become so commonplace as a cultural meme that a fair number of people simply don't care or even have an aversion to it. An acquaintance recently commented that they think the subject is boring and they wonder why I bother bringing it up when we've gotten together. It's not like I get evangelical about it, but I figure if they can go on and on about their latest trip or golf game, I can casually bring up UFOs. And of course UFOs are a significant focus for skeptical organizations. Anyway, why are you focusing on this aspect? Do you feel there is some special connection going on between individuals that transcends these sorts of examples?

 

[marduk]

Maybe I'm not clear on what you are referring to as "institutions". I'm thinking governmental, military, and religious locations would be considered institutions. But then again, with religious locations I'm not so sure which cases would be reliable. It seems fairly safe to say however, that with all the associated religious mythology from Ezekiel to Fatima that something has been going on there for a long time. The Bible has sometimes been referred to as one of the greatest UFO books ever written.

That leaves the educational institutions, but then we have the Westall and Ariel school cases. If transportation is considered an institution, there have definitely been sightings near aircraft and airports. If civic infrastructure counts as institutions, then we can add water reservoirs and power lines. Maybe these locations are simply incidental. I don't know. One thing I would say is that if they didn't want their presence to be known at all, they probably could have done that. But instead, their presence has become engrained in culture worldwide. I imagine the percentage of people who have never hear of them is now very small.

UFOs have become so commonplace as a cultural meme that a fair number of people simply don't care or even have an aversion to it. An acquaintance recently commented that they think the subject is boring and they wonder why I bother bringing it up when we've gotten together. It's not like I get evangelical about it, but I figure if they can go on and on about their latest trip or golf game, I can casually bring up UFOs. And of course UFOs are a significant focus for skeptical organizations. Anyway, why are you focusing on this aspect? Do you feel there is some special connection going on between individuals that transcends these sorts of examples?

What I’m trying to get at is the dilemma of “if they’d just land on the White House lawn...”

They haven’t. They haven’t issued any kind of public decree. They didn’t go sit down with guys from MIT or Harvard. They haven’t gone to the newspapers.

They haven’t gone to the UN. They haven’t done a “day the earth stood still” and landed in the middle of a city in a public say. They haven’t done an Independence Day scenario where the first thing they do is hit our centres of societal power.

It’s like those things don’t exist or don’t interest them in the least.

But they do show up in isolated areas. They do show up to individuals or small groups (in general). The only engagement or interaction appears to be with individuals - unless the interaction is provoked (running away from fighter jets for example).

And to your point, they seem interested in certain human technologies.

And I find that fascinating. We are social animals, and our first bias would likely be to engage them on a social or societal level - with their institutions and leadership.

They aren’t.

 

[Randall]

... We are social animals, and our first bias would likely be to engage them on a social or societal level - with their institutions and leadership. They aren’t.

Okay that seems like a fair observation. Even we try to communicate and develop relationships with creatures less intelligent than we are. Some days though, I wonder which one is more intelligent, the dog or its owner . Then again we also use them for study and experimentation. I tend to keep coming back to the idea that if we're the experiment, then they could have reasons for not getting too personal. But maybe they have some social structure of their own. I would imagine there would have to be some sort of hierarchy involved at some level.

 

[marduk]

Okay that seems like a fair observation. Even we try to communicate and develop relationships with creatures less intelligent than we are. Some days though, I wonder which one is more intelligent, the dog or its owner . Then again we also use them for study and experimentation. I tend to keep coming back to the idea that if we're the experiment, then they could have reasons for not getting too personal. But maybe they have some social structure of their own. I would imagine there would have to be some sort of hierarchy involved at some level.

Hmm... I guess I was inferring a general disinterest, but maybe it's more than that.

A hive mind might not even recognize individuals cooperating as institutions, for example. They may be looking for the other hive mind to respond to it, and be frustrated because it perceives it's being ignored - because there's no hive mind for it to respond to.

That kind of thing would explain a great deal, actually. We may be dealing with an individual entity with many fractal-like components.

Just a thought experiment, mind you.

 

[Randall]

Hmm... I guess I was inferring a general disinterest, but maybe it's more than that. A hive mind might not even recognize individuals cooperating as institutions, for example. They may be looking for the other hive mind to respond to it, and be frustrated because it perceives it's being ignored - because there's no hive mind for it to respond to. That kind of thing would explain a great deal, actually. We may be dealing with an individual entity with many fractal-like components. Just a thought experiment, mind you.

I had the same thought and was going to mention it, so maybe we've got more of a hive mind going than we realize.

 

[marduk]

I had the same thought and was going to mention it, so maybe we've got more of a hive mind going than we realize.

Then we're thinking the same thing... that beer is on you!

 

[Han]

I had the same thought and was going to mention it, so maybe we've got more of a hive mind going than we realize.

Keep an eye out for a documentary called:

“Attenborough and the Empire of the Ants”.

Don't want to spoil it so won't say too much, but it changed the way I think about insects forever.

Here is a preview:

Attenborough and the Empire of the Ants, Attenborough and the Empire of the Ants, 2017-2018, Natural World - BBC Two

 

[mike]

And to your point, they seem interested in certain human technologies.

Which might be consistent with coaching us to technological parity.

Look at what i'm paying attention to, maybe you should be asking why ?
Maybe you should be interested too. An intentional giveaway as a clue.

As Hawking has said

“Meeting an advanced civilisation could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus. That didn’t turn out so well.”

Unless our level of technological advancement was on a parity with theirs.

Hence the tease of our aircraft and the "catch me if you can" game.

Maybe they want us to "Catch" up with them, not literally but technologically.

Ive often made this comparison. If the Australian aboriginal had developed the naval technology to travel to England and meet Cpt Cook there. The end results would have been different.
Perhaps they have learned the same lesson we have seen play out here countless times. Let the less advanced civilization develop their own technological parity and come to you.
The alternative always ends badly as Hawking says for the less advanced one.

 

[Randall]

Which would consistent with coaching us to technological parity. Look at what i'm paying attention to, maybe you should be asking why ? Maybe you should be interested too.
As Hawking has said: “Meeting an advanced civilisation could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus. That didn’t turn out so well.” Unless our level of technological advancement was on a parity with theirs.
Hence the tease of our aircraft and the "catch me if you can" game. Maybe they want us to "Catch" up with them, not literally but technologically.

Ive often made this comparison. If the Australian aboriginal had developed the naval technology to travel to England and meet Cpt Cook there. The end results would have been different.
Perhaps they have learned the same lesson we have seen play out here countless times. Let the less advanced civilization develop their own technological parity and come to you. The alternative always ends badly as Hawking says for the less advanced one.

I'm not so sure about the sort of speculation above. For one thing, the sorts of examples that Hawking gives are only examples of how things turned out badly, and the reasons can be seen not so much because of a technological difference, but rather as a combination of cultural and intellectual differences, and a lack of knowledge on both sides of the equation. Technology in and of itself isn't inherently bad, and today far more technologically advanced nations regularly make an effort to assist less technologically advanced ones. It doesn't always work out, but it's not really the fault of the technology.

One thing we're agreeing on however is the theatrical nature of many of the sightings. I'm hesitant to ascribe the same motivations as you however. Instead, I think it's more reasonable to assume that it's simply part of their studies on how we behave in response to the stimuli they offer. This would explain the wide array and bizarre nature of a lot of unexplained phenomena, including phenomena normally associated with other areas of paranormal inquiry, such as poltergeist activity. The silently hovering ship over the field and the table that rises off the floor during a séance aren't so dissimilar, yet the explanations we come up with for each are so different as to be deemed unconnected. But are they really?

 

[marduk]

Which might be consistent with coaching us to technological parity.

Look at what i'm paying attention to, maybe you should be asking why ?
Maybe you should be interested too. An intentional giveaway as a clue.

As Hawking has said

“Meeting an advanced civilisation could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus. That didn’t turn out so well.”

Unless our level of technological advancement was on a parity with theirs.

Hence the tease of our aircraft and the "catch me if you can" game.

Maybe they want us to "Catch" up with them, not literally but technologically.

Ive often made this comparison. If the Australian aboriginal had developed the naval technology to travel to England and meet Cpt Cook there. The end results would have been different.
Perhaps they have learned the same lesson we have seen play out here countless times. Let the less advanced civilization develop their own technological parity and come to you.
The alternative always ends badly as Hawking says for the less advanced one.

Nuclear power is really just a heat engine though.

And nuclear bombs are perhaps the least efficient means at releasing energy. They just do it really fast.

I calculated somewhere here what it would take the direct conversion of several kilos of lead per hour to keep a disc in the sky - and that’s with 100% energy efficiency.

Nuclear power wouldn’t even come close to being good enough.

 

[mike]

and the reasons can be seen not so much because of a technological difference

There are of course many reasons, Diamonds Guns, Germs, and Steel - Wikipedia is an excellent source of info.

But even he makes this point about technology being a factor

Threats posed by immediate neighbors ensured governments that suppressed economic and technological progress soon corrected their mistakes or were outcompeted relatively quickly

The less technologically (and thus socially) advanced cultures tend to get overwhelmed by those more advanced

Cargo cult - Wikipedia

It may be this dynamic they want to avoid.
And the example translates to this case. Had the Melanesian's developed air craft of their own, they would not have seen US technology as "magic" they would have had a frame of reference that would have given cultural and technological parity instead.

Had the Melanesian's flown to the US in planes of their own creation, the US population would not react to them as they did to the US planes. Technological parity is a key factor in the cultural contact dynamic.

 

[mike]

Nuclear power is really just a heat engine though.

Thats true, a boiling water reactor is not much different to a steam engine in operating principle.

 

[Randall]

Nuclear power is really just a heat engine though.

Okay, this is bizarre because I know I saw a video once that showed how the most modern nuclear submarines ( then ) have a system for converting nuclear energy to electrical energy without having to go through the steam turbine cycle. Same for some space probes. Now all I can find are theoretical papers. The same thing happened with SDI. There was a show that had a 747 outfitted with a laser cannon. Then when I went to look for it, it wasn't anywhere to be found. Then it showed up as a "theoretical idea" and then a few years later I found pictures of the original plane.

Same thing happened with a superconducting electromagnetic power storage facility. The thing was working excellent and proposals were to build more. Same thing seems to be happening with the immunotherapeutic cure for cancer I found when I was researching it because of my last life partner Patricia. Prime Minister Harper was supposed to have fast tracked it, but it's still "experimental" and now the video has been changed from the way it was originally, but at least it's still out there ( I think ). The guy in the video was cured ( over 5 years cancer free ). So the technology has been out there for at least around 10 years.

Has anyone else run across this sort of thing? Or am I losing my mind? It always seems to be stuff right on the cutting edge of high-tech. I'm starting to think that by the time I'm really old that the world will have reverted to the horse and buggy and everyone will think I'm totally nuts! Hey there's a kind of cool idea for a movie ... lol.

 

[mike]

Okay, this is bizarre because I know I saw a video once that showed how the most modern nuclear submarines ( then ) have a system for converting nuclear energy to electrical energy without having to go through the steam turbine cycle. Same for some space probes. Now all I can find are theoretical papers. The same thing happened with SDI. There was a show that had a 747 outfitted with a laser cannon. Then when I went to look for it, it wasn't anywhere to be found. Then it showed up as a "theoretical idea" and then a few years later I found pictures of the original plane.

Same thing happened with a superconducting electromagnetic power storage facility. The thing was working excellent and proposals were to build more. Same thing seems to be happening with the immunotherapeutic cure for cancer I found when I was researching it because of my last life partner Patricia. Prime Minister Harper was supposed to have fast tracked it, but it's still "experimental" and now the video has been changed from the way it was originally, but at least it's still out there ( I think ). The guy in the video was cured ( over 5 years cancer free ). So the technology has been out there for at least around 10 years.

Has anyone else run across this sort of thing? Or am I losing my mind? It always seems to be stuff right on the cutting edge of high-tech. I'm starting to think that by the time I'm really old that the world will have reverted to the horse and buggy and everyone will think I'm totally nuts! Hey there's a kind of cool idea for a movie ... lol.

Its called the Seebeck effect:

Radioisotope thermoelectric generator - Wikipedia

Thermoelectric effect - Wikipedia

 

[Randall]

Its called the Seebeck effect: Radioisotope thermoelectric generator - Wikipedia [URL='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_effect#Seebeck_effect']Thermoelectric effect - Wikipedia [/URL]

Thanks. Maybe I'm not losing my mind after all. Or maybe it's too late for that anyway ... lol.

 

[marduk]

Ya they all basically work because radioactive stuff is hot.

Radioactive stuff occurs in nature, we could have been using it since we learned about the steam engine. The basic mechanism isn’t actually complicated.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

Okay, this is bizarre because I know I saw a video once that showed how the most modern nuclear submarines ( then ) have a system for converting nuclear energy to electrical energy without having to go through the steam turbine cycle. Same for some space probes. Now all I can find are theoretical papers. The same thing happened with SDI. There was a show that had a 747 outfitted with a laser cannon. Then when I went to look for it, it wasn't anywhere to be found. Then it showed up as a "theoretical idea" and then a few years later I found pictures of the original plane.

Same thing happened with a superconducting electromagnetic power storage facility. The thing was working excellent and proposals were to build more. Same thing seems to be happening with the immunotherapeutic cure for cancer I found when I was researching it because of my last life partner Patricia. Prime Minister Harper was supposed to have fast tracked it, but it's still "experimental" and now the video has been changed from the way it was originally, but at least it's still out there ( I think ). The guy in the video was cured ( over 5 years cancer free ). So the technology has been out there for at least around 10 years.

Has anyone else run across this sort of thing? Or am I losing my mind?

Yeah I've encountered this kind of thing before, and it's very frustrating. Back in 1985 or 1986 I saw a brief article in Science News describing the successful teleportation of a rubber ball at Hughes Research Laboratories, but when I tried to find out more about it, there was nothing to be found in the literature. About a year later I met a physicist who worked at HRL, but he said that he couldn't talk about any of their work (though he did say that "anything you can imagine, we've already done" - I think he may have trying to recruit me after graduation, haha). I've never been able to find a word about that experiment since.

Then in the late 90s there was an article in the Science Times section of the New York Times about astronomers who used the polarization of light to prove that the entire universe is rotating, and it even gave the axis of the rotation from one constellation to another. This would be huge news, because in 1949 Kurt Gödel proved that travel backward in time is possible within a rotating universe. But now I can't find any mention of this discovery.

There's a similar story in the US about a girl named Emily Whitehead who in 2012 was cured of a particularly lethal form of leukemia using CAR T-cell immunotherapy, but that story never disappeared from the press. It basically cured her overnight, and she's been perfectly healthy ever since. I can't fathom why we're not spending billions on developing this technology, and using it to cure cancer patients every day.

 

[mike]

I can't fathom why we're not spending billions on developing this technology, and using it to cure cancer patients every day.

My honest answer is i don't know, But the prevailing theory I've seen is that its too cheap and too easy. That there is more money to be made in the current pharmaceutical approach.

Corporations have to intentionally manufacture things to break. They have to for the basis of this corrupt global economic system is CYCLICAL CONSUMPTION. People need to repeatedly consume things even though this economic model of consumption destroys people and the planet and is extraordinarily wasteful. Without cyclical consumption, there would be economic collapse and massive unemployment and therefore you have to have planned obsolescence or the manufacturing of things to break. This is why is it so important that people be turned into cyclical consumers like mice running up a wheel. This is also why cancer will NEVER be cured and why war, poverty, crime, terrorism, pollution, and disease are actually excellent for the "economy". Watch this clip from the profound film "Zeitgeist, Moving Forward".

Curtis Duncan: Planned Obsolescence: The Reason Why Capitalism is a Ecocidal and Genocidal Waste Factory

Planned obsolescence - Wikipedia

The theory is a one off cure for cancer is less profitable than repeated consumption of an expensive drug.

Its why i am cynical about Antigrav technology being made mainstream. There is just way too much money in the cyclical consumption that makes our current transport systems work.

 

[Randall]

Yeah I've encountered this kind of thing before, and it's very frustrating. Back in 1985 or 1986 I saw a brief article in Science News describing the successful teleportation of a rubber ball at Hughes Research Laboratories, but when I tried to find out more about it, there was nothing to be found in the literature. About a year later I met a physicist who worked at HRL, but he said that he couldn't talk about any of their work (though he did say that "anything you can imagine, we've already done" - I think he may have trying to recruit me after graduation, haha). I've never been able to find a word about that experiment since.

Then in the late 90s there was an article in the Science Times section of the New York Times about astronomers who used the polarization of light to prove that the entire universe is rotating, and it even gave the axis of the rotation from one constellation to another. This would be huge news, because in 1949 Kurt Gödel proved that travel backward in time is possible within a rotating universe.

There's a similar story in the US about a girl named Emily Whitehead who in 2012 was cured of a particularly lethal form of leukemia using CAR T-cell immunotherapy, but that story never disappeared from the press. It basically cured her overnight, and she's been perfectly healthy ever since. I can't fathom why we're not spending billions on developing this technology, and using it to cure cancer patients every day.

Thanks for your reply on this. My opinion on the cures for cancer is that they're more focused on keeping the find the cure industry alive as well as paying off the cost for old technology. Who wants to see their big ticket radiation therapy equipment suddenly relegated to the recycle bin? We still have very different perspectives on time, space, and time travel, but if you can do the math in that paper without getting a migraine, then I'm impressed, even if there's insufficient reason to assume it reflects the sort of real world possibilities that are implied. I'm not sure if we'll ever be able to come to a common understanding there, but I have appreciated the opportunity to engage the topics.