New Show Topic: Calling all Skeptics & Part-Time Skeptics

[manxman]

translate this then, its an easy one.

Ta my haagh crowal lane dy astan

i like telling people who are getting on my mammaries to fark ort!!, cos they think im telling em to feck orf, but im being polite really.

fastyr mei

 

[Burnt State]

Manxman said, "My hovercraft is full of eels in many languages."

(what a beautiful phrase btw - my toyota corolla is only full of rust in many scales)

To which I as a 33 & a fifth degree mason am compelled to reply, "When hitchhiking on a Vogon ship be sure to have your Babel fish cleanly secured in your inner ear."

 

[manxman]

"When hitchhiking on a Vogon ship be sure to have your Babel fish cleanly secured in your inner ear."

cods-whollap ?, im right are'nt i.

bet you wish ya had yer own lingo, instead of a borrowed one.

 

[Burnt State]

You don't know the half of it. I just drown my sorrows in being able to figuratively translate the images of my favourite writer Dylan Thomas, and understand how his mischievous Welsh ways weave through the English language.

Hey, what's happening at Gef's house btw?

 

[manxman]

married a ferret, and emigrated to canada.

ive actually heard the story of gef, caused quite a stir, proper paranormal stir, they came from all over the world to see her, some american offered her $50,000 dollars, thats in the 1930s ffs.

 

[Constance]

I read this archived thread yesterday and want to bring it back to the forum in the present for others who, like me, weren't here for it. There's a lengthy and detailed discussion here between @Michael Allen and @Prophet of Occam concerning the justification of the ETH as a hypothesis to account for a small but persistent 5 percent of ufo cases.

 

[Burnt State]

I read this archived thread yesterday and want to bring it back to the forum in the present for others who, like me, weren't here for it. There's a lengthy and detailed discussion here between @Michael Allen and @Prophet of Occam concerning the justification of the ETH as a hypothesis to account for a small but persistent 5 percent of ufo cases.

While I agree, this is an excellent thread that covers a lot of ground with too much semantics, but I don't see where anyone agreed on 5% of cases supporting the ETH. As a theory it remains hypothetical and there's really no tangible reason why we should even consider it as a reality. At best it's a response to tradition: the elves and faeiries come from an altered reality; the mysterious airship people are from Ireland, Scandanavia or Japan, and then the aliens come from neighboring galaxies. Do we have any basis in reality or stack of evidence, confirming what people experienced in their mind as reality, that actually points to an off-world solution? Many of the contactees make off-world claims but isn't everything else about the ETH just a guess based on what we assume is an otherworldly technology just as science fiction taught us? Outside of a handful of radar cases demonstrating the impression of sentient control of what could be a technological device the rest really boils down to a witness report of what people think they saw. Even the search for patterns in such reports only confirm the accepted narrative of the time. Give us another 100 years and we will blame it all on a newly invented culprit from a domain yet to be named.

Great turns of phrase in here though to be certain. This one idea from Michael Allen really resonated for me as I've pondered UFO reality along similar lines:

...we really should look at reports where the witness experiences something that is not known to them, but is scientifically plausible. This is where one of Vallee's points breaks down, as how would a witness apply an element of scientific understanding which is not yet known to them within the confines of their experience?

When you listen to some of the classic witness reports and interviews from Wendy O'Connors' Faded Discs recordings you run into these wonderfully complex images that the witness has great difficulty in naming but it has some basis in science. But then, this happens in dreams all the time, in fact many famous moments in science are spontaneous dream moments, so does this prove anything beyond the powers of our mind and imagination to construct implausible possibilities. Did we not also construct the ETH?

 

[Constance]

While I agree, this is an excellent thread that covers a lot of ground with too much semantics, but I don't see where anyone agreed on 5% of cases supporting the ETH.

Oh, I didn't mean to suggest that there was any agreement reached by the end of that thread, but while reading it I agreed with @Michael Allen's articulate reasoning and citing of physical evidence concerning that crucial 5% of ufos and the ETH they support.

As a theory it remains hypothetical and there's really no tangible reason why we should even consider it as a reality. At best it's a response to tradition: the elves and faeiries come from an altered reality; the mysterious airship people are from Ireland, Scandanavia or Japan, and then the aliens come from neighboring galaxies. Do we have any basis in reality or stack of evidence, confirming what people experienced in their mind as reality, that actually points to an off-world solution?

"What people experienced in their minds as reality" seems to be the major question for you, and you seem to doubt that individuals can perceive one and the same phenomenon when they encounter it. I think you're skeptical that anyone, much less most of us, is in touch with what actually appears in phenomenological experience, discerned through our perceptual senses and our minds. I can't identify with that perspective. It is a fact, though, that not all witness reports are accepted at face value by ufo researchers. Their value comes into consideration when there are multiple witnesses who describe essentially the same visible phenomenon, and moreso when they corroborate (whether from the ground or the air or both) what is recorded in radar data. Radar-visual cases are recognized by all serious ufo researchers as the strongest cases accumulated to date confirming the physical reality of some ufos, as well as confirming their anomalous speed and maneuvreability, their ability to cloak themselves and/or relocate themselves from place to place in the visible sky, and their clearly intelligent and purposeful behavior relative to terrestrial aircraft. Those witnesses in a crowd of witnesses who see purple elephants interacting with ufos we do indeed have good reason to suspect of fantasizing.

Many of the contactees make off-world claims but isn't everything else about the ETH just a guess based on what we assume is an otherworldly technology just as science fiction taught us? Outside of a handful of radar cases demonstrating the impression of sentient control of what could be a technological device the rest really boils down to a witness report of what people think they saw. Even the search for patterns in such reports only confirm the accepted narrative of the time. Give us another 100 years and we will blame it all on a newly invented culprit from a domain yet to be named.

It's been more than a handful of cases, Burnt. If John Sturrock and a range of other physicists and technical specialists take the radar evidence seriously, I'm not going to doubt them in favor of an opinion minimizing the matter to 'a handful' of cases in the attempt to blow them off.

Great turns of phrase in here though to be certain. This one idea from Michael Allen really resonated for me as I've pondered UFO reality along similar lines:

...we really should look at reports where the witness experiences something that is not known to them, but is scientifically plausible. This is where one of Vallee's points breaks down, as how would a witness apply an element of scientific understanding which is not yet known to them within the confines of their experience?

Hmm. Most ufo witnesses are confronted with "something that is not known to them," but depending on their understanding of physics some witnesses do recognize the physical implications of what they see. Paul Hill is one example; Ray Stanford is another. There are others, and ufo research has benefitted from their reports.

When you listen to some of the classic witness reports and interviews from Wendy O'Connors' Faded Discs recordings you run into these wonderfully complex images that the witness has great difficulty in naming but it has some basis in science. But then, this happens in dreams all the time, in fact many famous moments in science are spontaneous dream moments, so does this prove anything beyond the powers of our mind and imagination to construct implausible possibilities. Did we not also construct the ETH?

It's not really clear to me what point you're trying to make in this last paragraph. It seems to me that our minds and imaginations can indeed construct implausible possibilities and that both mind and imagination are also involved in our species' collectively and increasingly developed understanding of the world we live in.

 

[PCarr]

The ETH is pure epistemic hubris. It really doesn't exist, but I want it to.

 

[Constance]

The ETH is pure epistemic hubris. It really doesn't exist, but I want it to.

I think your reaction to the ETH as "pure epistemic hubris" goes a bit overboard. It's just a hypothesis, further qualified as 'the best presently available hypothesis' by COMETA and other researchers. I have a few responses to some other statements in your linked essay, which I'll quote in the following. First, I'm in total agreement with this first statement:

The kind of humility I am talking about here is “epistemic” humility: being honest with ourselves and each other about how little we reliably know, and how much what we know is overwhelmed by what we don’t know, understand, or have even imagined.

To add, I don't personally know anyone who would disagree with that.

An example of one type of failure of humility - epistemic arrogance, let us call it - is the wide range of conjectures about non-human intelligences, and our eagerness to assign anomalous experiences to their activity.

I've read a lot of ufo research since 1997 and I'm not remembering many conjectures about non-human intelligence outside of the rational speculation that, if other intelligent species can reach us before we reach them, they can be assumed to be at least more technologically advanced than we are. Early on I did read some general theoretical papers about how we could expect to communicate with an alien intelligence and whether there would be any commonalities in our conceptions of reality, our values and goals, etc. I think most speculations about the appearances, behavior, and ideas we might expect et's and et craft to demonstrate have come to us from science fiction and Hollywood movies. Re the association of off-planet beings with 'anomalous experiences', it seems to me again that this association has not been implanted by ufo researchers but rather reported by them as it has been expressed to investigators by ufo witnesses reporting anomalous appearances, temporary paralysis, loss of time, apparent telepathic reception of communication by beings encountered near landed ufos, and so forth.

I want to emphasize that it is not a stupid question to ask whether there are other intelligences than humans in the universe -beings kind of like us in some ways - and whether we have ever been in contact with them. The arrogance comes in with connecting this naive but reasonable question with any claimed evidence or absence of evidence of alien visitation. It is arrogant to think we should somehow know what an alien visitation would look like, how they and their technology would behave, what the purposes of their visits would be, and what sort of phenomena we would detect should they be present.

It seems to me that these notions (italicized above) have primarily, among the general public, been built up inductively from the reported series of human experiences of anomalous aerial sightings and encounters that began in earnest in 1947. For the reading public, some earlier fiction works likely played a role in contextualizing experiences reported in the newspapers and broadcast media in 1947 and forward. I gather that comic book readers also were guided in how to think of the first and subsequent ufo waves in this country. I don't think that ufo researchers and investigators seeded the expectations in your list.

Not only are we safe in saying that we simply don’t know these things, but just as likely in my view, ET intelligence - if it exists - is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine - to paraphrase the famous pronouncement know as “Haldane’s Law”. We just have no idea what to look for, except that it’s unlikely to be what we expect.

Ets and their ships in the universe as a whole might indeed be 'stranger than we can imagine', unless the varieties of 'ufo' phenomena seen by pilots during WWII and by ordinary people since 1947 are a somewhat representative sample. If some ufos are et craft, we now do know more about what to expect.

I will call the notion that an ET intelligence is responsible for some UFO events the “Extraterrestrial Conjecture” , and I’d like to explain why I don’t call it the “Extraterrestrial Hypothesis.”

I think the ET Conjecture is an improvement on the ET Hypothesis and plan to use that term myself in the future, there being so much animus toward the ETH by now.

The problem with addressing this conjecture scientifically is that we have a primarily negative definition of ET: ET is not from here and is not human. ET controls some kind of technology that is not like ours. ET is the name we give to whatever is behind the data for which there is no known explanation.

I see your point. I've personally considered the possibility that the ufo phenomena might originate on our own planet, the work of another species living on or in our planet, perhaps in the oceans. I've also thought it might be likely that species of biological life evolving on other planets might be quite similar to us in a number of ways.

Also, there is problem on the other end - the data we want to explain with the ET conjecture. We might reasonably expect that any ET presence would represent a technology far more advanced than our own. Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I don’t think it’s straining that metaphor too much to note that magic is perplexing and misleading, and by its nature not understood. virtues: humility, patience, integrity, and skepticism. Of these, I think the first - humility - has been the most neglected in the UFO field.

Could be that Arthur C. set us up to expect 'magic' from ufos, well beyond what our physicists (Paul Hill is the best-known example, but there are others) can interpret about their evident advances on the physics we are thus far familiar with.

 

[Heidi Lemmer]

My comments won't add in any way to fixing Ufology, but it's a truth in the field. Science tends to show up when money shows up. When money shows up it's suddenly a credible field to conquer. This field has been propped up by honest men and women who volunteered their lives to it for nothing but the love of truth. And true, it attracts it's shenanigans but people persevere despite this. And although there's some relevance to the notion that people have used this topic to prop up fantasy worlds , it by no means is the sole subject of fantasy bound. It's very weirdness to our understanding of life brings forth the unstable. That's just an aspect of it not the sum total of it. It's widely acknowledged that governments around the world have played the issue down to it's masses and in doing so ridiculed the very people who could add to the solution. So science, as a field hides both behind this legend and shies from living a penniless lifestyle. Why are people like Chris O. having to scrounge around for money to do a camera project that might lend to more knowledge of this field?
The other aspect which I think is the underlying truth that only sounds conspiratorial when talked about is that there's a small group of people trying to figure this crap out pushing against giant well organized governments and possibly private interests. I think many aspects of this field could have been figuired out already had it not been for the fear that people couldn't handle the truth. There's data to back that up. Human nature has a way of staying in "idle" if it's not in the best interest to move it forward. So while we might like to state that science is the "only" way to figure this subject out, it really won't save the day for years to come. The field as a whole, is not motivated to. So Kudos to all the people who've busted their butts in this field to bring sunlight against the odds. Kudos to the people who've spent years detailing all the witness reports, analyzing the data, expanding to better methods and sharing this with all of us. If it were just fantasy prone people at the core of all this I'm sure mental health fields around the world would have cashed in on it by now. I also think it's kind of arrogant of us to reduce all the data down to illusions of the mind.

 

[Constance]

So very well said, Heidi.

 

[manxman]

This forum has been 'dumded' down in the 4yrs ive been reading it, regarding UFO's.

Its all new agey touchy feal'ly trickster ghia crowd now, us nutz and bolters are dinosaurs around here , its like the place has been purged of any real logic and real research.

Theres very little clarity, grey [area] is the new black.


Keep on chiseling away at the nutz and bolt'ers Constance, we are all just being drawn away to the ''its the fairy trickster'', or ''its all in the mind'' this nonsense has gone on for long enough.

Its just pure distraction.



.

 

[Wade]

This forum has been 'dumded' down in the 4yrs ive been reading it, regarding UFO's.

Its all new agey touchy feal'ly trickster ghia crowd now, us nutz and bolters are dinosaurs around here , its like the place has been purged of any real logic and real research.

Theres very little clarity, grey [area] is the new black.


Keep on chiseling away at the nutz and bolt'ers Constance, we are all just being drawn away to the ''its the fairy trickster'', or ''its all in the mind'' this nonsense has gone on for long enough.

Its just pure distraction.



.

Geez, and all this time I thought I was considering other possibilities, it turns out I'm among a bunch of disinformation agents lurking here and dumbing the place down.

A couple of years back I think it was Mike or Randal...sorry if I got those names wrong...brought up a very interesting point that maybe these touchy Feely new agey ghia tricksters synchronicity concepts we give consideration to were feelings induced by nuts and bolters occupants which up until then I never considered. I thought that very intriguing and i gave it the seal of approval. If you guys know of any researcher that has pushed this concept (aside of Vallee 's control system and even he isn't tied to it being ET) I'd be interested in knowing about it, as for me I'll consider most ideas including that possibility that our undesired visitors are extra terrestrial in the broadest terms because they very well may have been established on this planet well before we discovered fire.

 

[manxman]

Well i dont believe the nutz and bolt craft that i think have observed us, were anything more than probes wade, i dont really do 'beings' travelling lightyears, its abit of stretch [unless they were 'nomadic], technology thats a different ball game, a civilisation only has to be less than 1000yrs ahead of us for, and travelling time, there could be millions of them out there endlessly wandering.

Some may come with a box of tricks that could seem almost magical.

 

[manxman]

I think they are already sure life is out there.

NASA Scientist: Signs of Alien Life Will Be Found Soon | Watch the video - Yahoo Yahoo Canada

 

[Heidi Lemmer]

ive heard your cries,posters above.
some forums in the past,have tried to corral and deny knowledge.its a psyop trick to keep folks distracted from seeking out the real truth.
what would happen to the circus if somebody came in and showed the freaks as props and defects?
the circus would die and the money would dry up.
always question a forum that deletes anything without posting good reason.

Personally I don't think there's anything sinister to exploring all the ideas that come up in this forum. But I do think it's evolved out of boredom to the current state and a lack of new info to keep people interested.

 

[manxman]

Stevens Hawkin's heh, that knocks my jim oberg debate flat, oberg isnt a patch on Hawkins, That Gene Stienburg fella, he has talked to alot of big-shots in ufology, have you ever heard of him ?.

 

[pixelsmith]

think of it as a pie chart.the truth takes up 1%.
the rest is charlatans promoting each other to keep the fantasy going.
for those seeking the truth,its a waste of their time to stay in fantasy land.but the charlatans will then release a drop,which draws the ignorant back into the fantasy.
while the charlatan gains an income.

when a poster post a wall of text and big words.thats a sign of bs.
i have debated stephen hawkings and won the debate on blackholes.
when it comes to space physics,i will gladly debate anybody as i have no patience for carnival barkers.

Are you Leonard Susskind?

 

[manxman]

Are you gonna take him on pixel, thats a big scalp if you add it up like conkers, well he has to be two hundreder.

Its only blackhole physic's, you will wipe the floor with him.
How hard could it be, its not rocket science.