The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis : Fact and Fallacy

[Burnt State]

This is a deductive fallacy; namely, "beginning with a conclusion." You're indicating here that a paranormal explanation is a forgone conclusion, and thereby filtering out any explanations that don't conform to that conclusion. That's the basis, if not the definition, of a religious ideology.

I think it’s illogical to favor “paranormal” explanations of the ufo phenomenon over scientific explanations.

Look at it this way: 500+ years ago we were faced with several inexplicable phenomena in the sky; meteors, lightning, tornadoes and waterspouts, scattered reports of ball lightning, the occasional lunar and solar eclipses, and perhaps even ufos from time to time. The only explanations available at that time invoked paranormal “conscious agents” such as God, angels, devils, perhaps djinn, etc.

And in every case that we’ve solved through science – astronomy, meteorology, physics and plasma physics - none of them have turned out to be paranormal/supernatural in nature.

“Paranormal” phenomena are simply phenomena that science hasn’t conclusively explained yet.

Think about the untold thousands of mysteries that have confronted humanity, which science has very successfully and indisputably resolved so far: we now have logical, causal, and clear phenomenological explanations for at least 99.99% of our observations.

So it seems irrational to conclude that “this last .01% will be different – this time it’ll turn out that a supernatural conscious agent is at work here” rather than to expect that a perfectly sensible, logical explanation that conforms to our broader scientific understanding of the universe will ultimately prevail.

Imagine this: a clever but primitive human in the distant past, say, ancient Babylon, witnesses a modern Ferrari speeding down a dirt mule trail, stop, and then take off again over the mountains.

Would he/she be completely incapable of making any rational sense of this sighting? Having seen the chariots of that era, our witness might reason that this device is some kind of chariot; it had wheels, and somebody riding inside of it wearing strange clothes. Its propulsion mechanism would be a real mystery, and its ability to generate the enormous energy required to accelerate from a dead stop to a mind-boggling 50mph in just a few seconds – certainly the fastest mule couldn’t accelerate that fast.

Our confounded primitive observer might therefore conclude that this chariot had arrived from a more advanced civilization, and be right.

So the viewpoint that I’ve heard a lot recently - that the technology of a civilization thousands of years ahead of us would be so completely imponderable to our hapless primitive that they’d experience some kind of hallucinatory shock that would make them see something much more familiar – perhaps a chariot drawn by several mules rather than the single-mule-drawn chariots that they know about at that time, doesn’t fly with me.

Sure, our witness might call it a “chariot” because that’s the closest term within his/her experience, but I would expect the description to be fairly accurate: “it was as red as fire, rode on four wheels, moved faster than the fastest mule ever and yet could stop and start on a dime, and it exhaled a smoke-like plume from a shiny metal tube in the rear.”

It’s not even a leap of logic to consider that we’re in the same position as that primitive Babylonian – even Enrico Fermi expected us to observe the arrival of intelligent extraterrestrial life fairly regularly, when he asked the question “where is everybody?” It appears that the only error in his logic was in his dismissal of all of the eyewitness reports and radar and trace evidence cases which were all around him when he raised that question in 1950.


Indeed, but I find the premise itself to be baffling - basically some people are arguing that:

"The correct explanation x time = a proven solution. Ergo, since time has elapsed and the ETH remains unproven, then it must be an incorrect explanation."

But it doesn't work like that. The real process goes like this:

The correct explanation x rigorous scientific investigation = a proven solution.

Progress isn't a spectator sport - it's earned through a lot of dedicated scientific efforts by trained professionals utilizing the appropriate scientific instruments. And we've simply never had a proper public scientific effort into the ufo phenomenon, so it's irrational to expect the puzzle to be solved without that effort.

But I'd bet a bottle of my favorite champagne that once a genuine scientific effort is made, like Chris' ufo observatory project collecting a range of physical data, that we'll find out that the sightings of what appear to be solid technological objects performing acrobatic maneuvers in the sky, will turn out to be solid technological objects performing acrobatic maneuvers in the sky.

It's certainly not a forgone conclusion.....I said it allows the potential for paranormal experiences to be defined....yes, through science. I also think paranormal is just something we don't know the science behind it. It's not magic for goodness sake. But paranormal is simply a story that we don't understand that runs alongside that which we call normal. But normal by definition is also a very limiting thing. If in our culture we decided to accept all stories, including the paranormal ones, our levels of acceptance for such spaces would help to integrate and centre those stories so fabulous that they are usually discredited. So I am looking for practical ways to explain the paranormal experience and because the most critical of the ufo experiences, the close encounter case, is so interwoven with high strangeness and distorted experiences of reality it is best described as paranormal in nature. This helps to separate it from the normal light in the sky witness event that leaves no noticeable dramatic impact on the perceiver at the time nor does it leave the same long term lasting effects on various aspects of witness' lives.

 

[Burnt State]

Exactly,
We don't need to invoke a supernatural explanation for the high strangeness, the "paranormal" aspects that seem to come with some sightings.

And again the local model provides a template for what might be happening.

US Air Force, New World Vistas: Air and Space Power for the 21st Century – Ancillary Volume, Scientific Advisory Board (USAF), Washington, DC, Document #19960618040, 1996, pp. 89-90. EPI402.




Prior to the mid-21st century, there will be a virtual explosion of knowledge in the field of neuroscience. We will have achieved a clear understanding of how the human brain works, how it really controls the various functions of the body, and how it can be manipulated (both positively and negatively). One can envision the development of electromagnetic energy sources, the output of which can be,

• pulsed, shaped, and focused
• that can couple with the human body in a fashion that will allow one to prevent voluntary muscular movements
• control emotions (and thus actions)
• produce sleep
• transmit suggestions
• interfere with both short-term and long-term memory
• produce an experience set
• delete an experience set

There is no reason why a technological explanation wont suffice as an answer to that aspect.

Until we can prove that there is a technology interacting with our minds and that we are the passive subjects to some alien intelligence's personal enterprise I'm not prepared to lie down and surrender to the alien gods. There is something problematic for me about the ETH that regards the witness as a powerless victim being subjected to an alien power beyond our control. That has a ring of fatalism to it that then leaves us absolutely nothing to study except that which came and went leaving mostly intriguing stories in its wake and the very occasional bits of trace evidence that add up to very little.

If, however, we may be Co-creators of the UFO experience (as most/all of reality is) then we can at least study the role of the witness who has brought us all these stories and whose lives are often rearranged by the event. Perhaps we gain something of a purchase on the UFO phenomenon as Jan Harzan, when asked recently on the Paracast what we know now about the phenomenon since the beginning of MUFON, confessed that basically we are where we started. Strange things are in the sky doing things that confound our physics, that manipulate time and space, and we don't know where they came from, what they want or who they are. These are still the basic fundamental questions regarding ufo reality and investing in other options may tell us more about this baffling subject. Sure the aliens may have total control over our minds and the whole thing is a grand deception or manipulation for reasons unknown. But I'd rather take time and find out something new perhaps about the other side of the ufo phenomenon which is to more rigorously explore the role of the perceiver, how they see and remember, how they are affected by it and what may have led up to their experience.

 

[Constance]

It's important to make a distinction between perception and reality. The claim that everyone literally has a private moon in their minds eye is wrong. They literally have a private perception, The moon remains the moon, It's properties don't change.

I think it's more accurate to say that perception -- developed in and through sensory awareness in living species and grounding increasing levels of protoconsciousness and consciousness in the evolution of species -- introduces a difference between the world as scientifically imagined to be an object, or an objective process of interacting physical processes or systems, and the world as experienced by countless varieties of living beings. Like you, I cannot give up the sense that I exist in a physical world, a natural world that has somehow engendered life, consciousness, and mind out of eons of increasing physical complexity. Nor can I give up the sense that experiential being-in-the-world is a difference that makes an ontological difference once it appears, at least for those beings who exist consciously in this world and attempt to comprehend its nature. The difference that makes a difference is consciousness, which enables beings who possess it to open up the world's being from the inside in their lived experience in and of the world. The concept of 'Reality' must be redefined when/where it is subjectively experienced, consciously lived, reflected on, thought about, and studied. So I have to disagree with your next statement:

Reality does not need perception, It was what it was long before humans or any other observers came into existence .

I do sense and recognize the in-itself objective reality of the physical being of the world. But the world as subjectively lived produces another kind of reality, what phenomenological philosophers refer to as "lived reality." I think we need a concept of 'reality' -- of 'what-is'/what exists -- in which the world as experienced by embodied consciousnesses and the world as conceptualized reductively in abstract objectivist terms are understood to be commensurable aspects of being as we grope our way toward understanding who and where we are.

We don't need to invoke a supernatural explanation for the high strangeness, the "paranormal" aspects that seem to come with some sightings.

Can or must we assume that the range of paranormal experiences (and aptitudes) experienced by members of our species have a 'supernatural' origin -- an origin outside of nature? We have only limited scientific [i.e., 'objectively construed'] understanding of the extent and nature of what we refer to as 'the natural world', the world/universe described by physics. Our assumptions about what is given or present in nature are the outcome of our own historical/cultural development over the relatively brief span of our species' existence on this planet. It's possible that what we have thought of as 'the supernatural' is actually part of nature -- a part of the Being within which we have evolved that vastly exceeds the reach of our knowledge or understanding. If so, what we refer to as 'the paranormal' might be 'normal' after all; that which we categorize and dismiss as 'the supernatural' might be natural, part of nature not yet well understood.

I am looking for practical ways to explain the paranormal experience and because the most critical of the ufo experiences, the close encounter case, is so interwoven with high strangeness and distorted experiences of reality it is best described as paranormal in nature. This helps to separate it from the normal light in the sky witness event that leaves no noticeable dramatic impact on the perceiver at the time nor does it leave the same long term lasting effects on various aspects of witness' lives.

It's still not clear to me what you mean by "practical ways to explain the paranormal experience." It seems you hope that neuroscience will provide the answers, but the physicalist approaches of classical neuroscience have been critiqued by a number of prominent neuroscientists. Perhaps Hoffman's highly speculative computationalist hypothesis concerning networked 'consciousness' and 'reality' appeals to you because it seems to fit, in some ways, into the influential mechanistic, physicalist paradigm still dominant in most contemporary science. Modern physicalist science has, until very recently, barred from inquiry and investigation both 'paranormal' experience and investigations of consciousness. It is ironic that consciousness first became an issue for scientists as a result of the technological effort to produce independent artificial intelligences {minds} in machines. AI theorists realized that to produce the openness and flexibility of human minds in robotic frames they would need to simulate human consciousness. All this has stimulated increasing pressure for a paradigm change in science, but it will likely be a very long time before the presuppositions embedded in the physicalist paradigm disappear.

 

[Burnt State]

I think it's more accurate to say that perception -- developed in and through sensory awareness in living species and grounding increasing levels of protoconsciousness and consciousness in the evolution of species -- introduces a difference between the world as scientifically imagined to be an object, or an objective process of interacting physical processes or systems, and the world as experienced by countless varieties of living beings. Like you, I cannot give up the sense that I exist in a physical world, a natural world that has somehow engendered life, consciousness, and mind out of eons of increasing physical complexity. Nor can I give up the sense that experiential being-in-the-world is a difference that makes an ontological difference once it appears, at least for those beings who exist consciously in this world and attempt to comprehend its nature. The difference that makes a difference is consciousness, which enables beings who possess it to open up the world's being from the inside in their lived experience in and of the world. The concept of 'Reality' must be redefined when/where it is subjectively experienced, consciously lived, reflected on, thought about, and studied. So I have to disagree with your next statement:



I do sense and recognize the in-itself objective reality of the physical being of the world. But the world as subjectively lived produces another kind of reality, what phenomenological philosophers refer to as "lived reality." I think we need a concept of 'reality' -- of 'what-is'/what exists -- in which the world as experienced by embodied consciousnesses and the world as conceptualized reductively in abstract objectivist terms are understood to be commensurable aspects of being as we grope our way toward understanding who and where we are.




Can or must we assume that the range of paranormal experiences (and aptitudes) experienced by members of our species have a 'supernatural' origin -- an origin outside of nature? We have only limited scientific [i.e., 'objectively construed'] understanding of the extent and nature of what we refer to as 'the natural world', the world/universe described by physics. Our assumptions about what is given or present in nature are the outcome of our own historical/cultural development over the relatively brief span of our species' existence on this planet. It's possible that what we have thought of as 'the supernatural' is actually part of nature -- a part of the Being within which we have evolved that vastly exceeds the reach of our knowledge or understanding. If so, what we refer to as 'the paranormal' might be 'normal' after all; that which we categorize and dismiss as 'the supernatural' might be natural, part of nature not yet well understood.




It's still not clear to me what you mean by "practical ways to explain the paranormal experience." It seems you hope that neuroscience will provide the answers, but the physicalist approaches of classical neuroscience have been critiqued by a number of prominent neuroscientists. Perhaps Hoffman's highly speculative computationalist hypothesis concerning networked 'consciousness' and 'reality' appeals to you because it seems to fit, in some ways, into the influential mechanistic, physicalist paradigm still dominant in most contemporary science. Modern physicalist science has, until very recently, barred from inquiry and investigation both 'paranormal' experience and investigations of consciousness. It is ironic that consciousness first became an issue for scientists as a result of the technological effort to produce independent artificial intelligences {minds} in machines. AI theorists realized that to produce the openness and flexibility of human minds in robotic frames they would need to simulate human consciousness. All this has stimulated increasing pressure for a paradigm change in science, but it will likely be a very long time before the presuppositions embedded in the physicalist paradigm disappear.

An excellent post, Constance.

It was actually in reading Hoffman's proposition of conscious agents that he specualtes that there are conscious agents that we can not perceive and whose experience of 'reality' would be entirely alien to us. Now how physicalist that is I wouldn't speculate for he seems to leave the door open as to what other conscious agents may be swimmng around in the reality pool that we are unaware of or how we human beings may be part of a collective living inside a conscious agent beyond our ken, the way that bacteria live in colonies inside us. I am again reminded of Duensing here, "we are all just temporary guests in someone else's house."

The other part of his approach that I latch onto is his definitions of symbolic reality. Those ideas did mesh nicely for me with the history of humanity, who when moved by unique or rare experiences likes to yell stories about their experiences and sometimes even connects these stories to new ideas within the tribe to move us forward. In this way phenomenological reality holds true for me where everything is a representation of an objective reality we can not hold with absolute certainty. Instead the thing signs out what it wants and we are interpreters of the signing. We get the feel of the thing on a very personal and individual level. In a network of conscious agents the possibility for a perceiver to see something symbolic in the sky may he dependent on a combination of unique internal and external factors that give rise to the UFO event. And then we tell stories about these events and repeat these stories until the folklore of old becomes alive again in a brand new dress.

Why the close up UFO event is responsible for dream like, hallucinatory and anti-structural experiences of consciousness strikes me as one of the most significant features of the phenomenon. Perhaps we are asctually sharing something with an alien conscious agent which is very disruptive to how our minds normally process our day to day perceptions. I have no idea just how physical an experience it is in its totality, but the net effect on the close up witness is also rather significant.

Generally speaking, human beings do not experience such disruptive experiences without either an actual external agent present or without an induced fear that may be manufactured in the head as in the "panic in the woods" phenomenon. But in the latter we usually quickly get over our amygdala anxieties; whereas, the ufo event seems to last as a narrative in people's lives for a very long time. It is this chain of thinking that leads me to believe there is an actual external agent present in significant close up ufo event.

However, i still have no idea how to think on it as an actual part of materialist reality for it may simply just be the way we interpret the object that causes it to be described as a material object. Too often ships dissolve, behave like ghosts, merge, or light up the minds of perceivers and make us feel like an actual external agent is present. We may even feel like it is communicating to us in our heads. But what it is, from whence it came and what it wants is as elusive as ever. But I do believe there is something there...

 

[Constance]

Strange things are in the sky doing things that confound our physics. . .

Not according to Paul Hill in his book, Unconventional Flying Objects: A Former NASA Scientist Explains How UFOs Really Work, which I wish everyone concerned about ufo phenomena would read.

. . . that manipulate time and space.

Do you mean actually or apparently? I doubt there's evidence for this claim.

Sure the aliens may have total control over our minds and the whole thing is a grand deception or manipulation for reasons unknown.

I haven't ever seen evidence to support this speculation. Have you?

But I'd rather take time and find out something new perhaps about the other side of the ufo phenomenon which is to more rigorously explore the role of the perceiver, how they see and remember, how they are affected by it and what may have led up to their experience.

I often wonder what you think would be found if a number of ufo witnesses were 'examined' by a panel of medical and psychiatric physicians? Would you be willing to characterize what that might be, and how it would influence reception of the ETH, for example?

I have to take issue with your frequent statement that in perception we 'half-perceive and half-create' what we see. That phrase has its origin in the 19th-century poet Samuel Coleridge, if I'm remembering correctly, but I think it's clearly an overstatement, thus a misrepresentation of the nature of perception as providing access to the mutually verifiable/veritable appearances of things in our phenomenal experience of things. According to phenomenological philosophy, by multiplying our own available/accessible perspectives on things and combining these with the perspectives of others we are able to increase our understanding of objects, things, processes in the actual world. If it were the case that in perception we 'half create' what we see we could never rely on our own perceptions or those of others. We could not reach a basis for agreement on any subject matter taken up in any human discipline of research.

 

[Constance]

Here is an extract from a paper by Donald Hoffman, which I provide in case others reading this thread are curious about his hypothesis concerning 'consciousness' and 'reality' and the methodological basis he offers to support his speculations.

". . . Conscious realism is the hypothesis that the objective world W consists of conscious agents. The theory of conscious agents is a mathematical theory of consciousness that quantifies over qualia that it assumes really exist. So this theory does assume the existence of consciousness.

However, it does not assume incorrigibility of qualia (to believe one has a quale is to have one) or infallibility about the contents of one's consciousness. Psychophysical studies provide clear evidence against incorrigibility and infallibility [see, e.g., the literature on change blindness (Simons and Rensink, 2005)]. Nor does it assume that the mathematics of conscious agents is itself identical to consciousness; a theory is just a theory.

One might try to interpret the theory of conscious agents as describing a psychophysical monism, in which matter and consciousness are two aspects of a more abstract reality. Such an interpretation, if possible, might still be unpalatable to most physicalists since it entails that dynamical physical properties, such as position, momentum and spin, have definite values only when they are observed.

(12) One problem with section Evolution and Perception is that the authors never define either their notion of Truth, or their notion of Perception. They seem to believe that if you startle at any sound of rustling leaves (as a sort of sensitive predator avoidance system), then when you run from a real predator, you are not in any way in touch with the truth. But this is incorrect.

For sake of brevity, we omitted our definitions of truth and perception from this paper. But they are defined precisely in papers that study the evolution of perception in Monte Carlo simulations of evolutionary games and genetic algorithms (Mark et al., 2010; Hoffman et al., 2013; Marion, 2013; Mark, 2013).

Briefly, we define a perceptual strategy as a measurable function (or, more generally, a Markovian kernel) p:W → X, where W is a measurable space denoting the objective world and X is a measurable space denoting an organism's possible perceptions. If X = W and p is an isomorphism that preserves all structures on W, then p is a naïve realist perceptual strategy. If X ⊂ W and p is structure preserving on this subset, then p is a strong critical realist strategy. If X need not be a subset of W and p is structure preserving, then p is a weak critical realist strategy. If X need not be a subset of W and p need not be structure preserving, then p is an interface strategy. These strategies form a nested hierarchy: naïve realist strategies are a subset of strong critical realist, which are a subset of weak critical realist, which are a subset of interface.

Naïve realist strategies see all and only the truth. Strong critical realist strategies see some, but in general not all, of the truth. Weak critical realist strategies in general see none of the truth, but the relationships among their perceptions genuinely reflect true relationships in the structure of the objective world W. Interface strategies in general see none of the truth, and none of the true relationships in the structure of W. Thus, our mathematical formulation of perceptual strategies allows a nuanced exploration of the role of truth in perception.

We let these perceptual strategies compete in hundreds of thousands of evolutionary games in hundreds of thousands of randomly chosen worlds, and find that strategies which see some or all of the truth have a pathetic tendency to go extinct when competing against interface strategies that are tuned to fitness rather than truth. The various truth strategies don't even get a chance to compete in the genetic algorithms, because they are not fit enough even to get on the playing field.

Thus, natural selection favors interface strategies that are tuned to fitness, rather than truth. If an organism with an interface perceptual strategy perceives, say, a predatory lion, then it really does perceive a lion in the same sense that someone having a headache really does have a headache. However, this does not entail that the objective world, W, contains an observer-independent lion, any more than a blue rectangular icon on a computer desktop entails that there is a blue rectangular file in the computer. There is something in the objective world W that triggers the organism to perceive a lion, but whatever that something is, it almost surely doesn't resemble a lion. A lion is simply a species-specific adaptive symbol, not an insight into objective reality. . . ."

The whole paper can be read at this link:

Objects of consciousness

 

[Constance]

Perhaps we are asctually sharing something with an alien conscious agent which is very disruptive to how our minds normally process our day to day perceptions. I have no idea just how physical an experience it is in its totality, but the net effect on the close up witness is also rather significant.

Thanks for your comment re my post. The above extract from yours seems to refer specifically to the many reported human/alien encounters in which the alien being is able to successfully communicate telepathically (mind to mind) with a human in a face-to-face encounter. That kind of experience would indeed be very strange to most humans and thus destabilize their established sense of how living beings communicate with one another. It would also challenge their accustomed beliefs and expand their thinking about what is possible. I doubt that all these similar accounts are hallucinations. In fact, given the many instances of such encounters, I doubt that any of them involve hallucinations. I think that they occur in the actual world in which we exist, and that the alien is standing there in the actual location of the encounter. I don't think that such encounters and experiences suggest that our minds are being controlled or manipulated by an unknown, invisible, entity or entities existing in a dimension invisible to us, whose intention is to confuse us, inspire us, or play games with us.

 

[marduk]

Until we can prove that there is a technology interacting with our minds and that we are the passive subjects to some alien intelligence's personal enterprise I'm not prepared to lie down and surrender to the alien gods. There is something problematic for me about the ETH that regards the witness as a powerless victim being subjected to an alien power beyond our control. That has a ring of fatalism to it that then leaves us absolutely nothing to study except that which came and went leaving mostly intriguing stories in its wake and the very occasional bits of trace evidence that add up to very little.

If, however, we may be Co-creators of the UFO experience (as most/all of reality is) then we can at least study the role of the witness who has brought us all these stories and whose lives are often rearranged by the event. Perhaps we gain something of a purchase on the UFO phenomenon as Jan Harzan, when asked recently on the Paracast what we know now about the phenomenon since the beginning of MUFON, confessed that basically we are where we started. Strange things are in the sky doing things that confound our physics, that manipulate time and space, and we don't know where they came from, what they want or who they are. These are still the basic fundamental questions regarding ufo reality and investing in other options may tell us more about this baffling subject. Sure the aliens may have total control over our minds and the whole thing is a grand deception or manipulation for reasons unknown. But I'd rather take time and find out something new perhaps about the other side of the ufo phenomenon which is to more rigorously explore the role of the perceiver, how they see and remember, how they are affected by it and what may have led up to their experience.

I would say that one can draw some conclusions.

Number one, either they cannot impose their will on us directly or they choose not to. Rationale: we are here discussing it.

Number two, either we pose a threat to them or they choose to act like we do. Rationale: they run away when we chase them with military hardware or even view them for any length of time.

Number three, either they are very bad at communication or they are not interested in it.

Number four, either they don’t care about our social structures like government or organized science, or they choose to act like they don’t.

 

[ALPHA ROMEO UNIFORM]

marduk,
The idea of science is search for new discoveries and fact you given four examples of what might give a clue of unknown forces which make up our World and Universe (New Star War's movie coming out next month)
The twenty years to find life in our solar system or beyond ?
NASA will do better than that with funding injections or will they be pipped at the post by Brazil, China, India, EU, UK , Russia etc
Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission (HabEx)

 

[Burnt State]

I would say that one can draw some conclusions.

Number one, either they cannot impose their will on us directly or they choose not to. Rationale: we are here discussing it.

Number two, either we pose a threat to them or they choose to act like we do. Rationale: they run away when we chase them with military hardware or even view them for any length of time.

Number three, either they are very bad at communication or they are not interested in it.

Number four, either they don’t care about our social structures like government or organized science, or they choose to act like they don’t.

Re: threat
In reports they seem to like to get close to us and out centres of military operations, or wherever our advanced tech is in operation. There appears to be a curiosity there to that and then yes, they run away, hence the discussion of it as a shy phenomenon. Encounters with humanoids always seem to take place in isolated locations where there is a reasonable ability to control situations often with only a single witness or experiencer.

Re: communication
This point leaves me baffled as they also like to put on a good show for select witnesses that is often highly audacious. I'm thinking of the Dr. X case where the visual displays of craft merging and splitting were obvious communication pieces as are their many light displays and bizarre manoeuvres in the sky. For whose benefit are these displays put on if not for a human observer.

As for telepathy I have no time for it as the hearing of a voice inside one's head can never really be verified as anything other than a voice inside the head, though some of the statements reported are indeed highly curious. Who owns how much of those narratives are highly debatable.

But their physical displays definitely seem to target us and I suppose it's up to us to determine what it all means if anything. There are patterns there....

Re: social structures
Well again, given their selection of lone witnesses, or a small handful of folk in isolated spaces, this seems to indicate a consciousness of social structures and that these are to be avoided.

But then paradoxes abound in this phenomenon when it comes to their interactions with our high tech that they dwarf with their own supercapacities. We are definitely small to them. The only language they use is a visual symbolic one and our history is replete with these images of excess. Are we supposed to puzzle it all out i wonder? Their anti-structural nature does seem to provoke us to think differently maybe to inject a creative spark in the populous? The best thing I can think to do with them is to see them as agents of change in our culture or to use them as personal metaphors for individual purposes. I like Red Pill Junkie's essay in Reframing the Debate which points to the ufo as a means to engender a personal anarchy, a revolution of individual thought.

 

[marduk]

Re: threat
In reports they seem to like to get close to us and out centres of military operations, or wherever our advanced tech is in operation. There appears to be a curiosity there to that and then yes, they run away, hence the discussion of it as a shy phenomenon. Encounters with humanoids always seem to take place in isolated locations where there is a reasonable ability to control situations often with only a single witness or experiencer.

In my very small number of encounters, I got the sense of fear from whatever it is. We are bigger and stronger physically than whatever it was that I was with. Another time I felt very tightly controlled by whatever it was.

Re: communication
This point leaves me baffled as they also like to put on a good show for select witnesses that is often highly audacious. I'm thinking of the Dr. X case where the visual displays of craft merging and splitting were obvious communication pieces as are their many light displays and bizarre manoeuvres in the sky. For whose benefit are these displays put on if not for a human observer.

Again, it does feel like communication, but it's not clear. I mean, they could just come out with it if they wanted to communicate something. They don't.

And I don't buy for a second that we need to 'tease out' whatever the message is.

As for telepathy I have no time for it as the hearing of a voice inside one's head can never really be verified as anything other than a voice inside the head, though some of the statements reported are indeed highly curious. Who owns how much of those narratives are highly debatable.

But their physical displays definitely seem to target us and I suppose it's up to us to determine what it all means if anything. There are patterns there....

I think the fact that we don't know what it means is the only meaning we can ascribe to it. The medium is the message, as Mcluhan said... and the medium is one of ineptitude when it comes to communication.

Re: social structures
Well again, given their selection of lone witnesses, or a small handful of folk in isolated spaces, this seems to indicate a consciousness of social structures and that these are to be avoided.

But then paradoxes abound in this phenomenon when it comes to their interactions with our high tech that they dwarf with their own supercapacities. We are definitely small to them. The only language they use is a visual symbolic one and our history is replete with these images of excess. Are we supposed to puzzle it all out i wonder? Their anti-structural nature does seem to provoke us to think differently maybe to inject a creative spark in the populous? The best thing I can think to do with them is to see them as agents of change in our culture or to use them as personal metaphors for individual purposes. I like Red Pill Junkie's essay in Reframing the Debate which points to the ufo as a means to engender a personal anarchy, a revolution of individual thought.

I think that's being overly generous. If they're agents of change, they suck at it. We aren't changing much - if at all - because of whatever it is that they are. They don't provoke much except a few of us cranks.

This whole field isn't anything more than a meme to most. A topic to make fun of with funny pictures and quotes on instagram.

 

[Trajanus]

Number one, either they cannot impose their will on us directly or they choose not to. Rationale: we are here discussing it.

But for how much longer? They can impose their will on a few individuals, but gaining control over the whole world may be a gradual and rather subtle process.

Number two, either we pose a threat to them or they choose to act like we do. Rationale: they run away when we chase them with military hardware or even view them for any length of time.

I don't think they're really afraid; they just want to remain as covert as possible.

Number three, either they are very bad at communication or they are not interested in it.

For the most part, definitely the latter.

Number four, either they don’t care about our social structures like government or organized science, or they choose to act like they don’t.

They don't care about our government or to the extent they do, they're opposed. Look at Moncla, and Malmstrom.

 

[marduk]

But for how much longer? They can impose their will on a few individuals, but gaining control over the whole world may be a gradual and rather subtle process.

So subtle that they've been reported for perhaps hundreds or thousands of years and they still run away when we chase them?

There's subtle and then there's just ineffective.

I don't think they're really afraid; they just want to remain as covert as possible.

If they wanted to be covert then we wouldn't know they were there at all.

For the most part, definitely the latter.

They don't care about our government or to the extent they do, they're opposed. Look at Moncla, and Malmstrom.

Yup. Our power structures clearly disinterest them.

 

[mike]

As for telepathy I have no time for it as the hearing of a voice inside one's head can never really be verified as anything other than a voice inside the head

Unless we are talking technology based "telepathy"

US military could soon IMPLANT memories into other people in Star Trek-style 'mind melds' | Daily Mail Online

Matrix-style memory prosthesis set to supercharge human brain

Now right now we are talking physical prosthesis, But when i first started in computers they were the size of 6 top loading washing machines joined together, if you wanted to talk to a computer in another country you needed a standard telephone and an acoustic coupler

The DEC PDP-11 i used had 8 k of memory.
As technology progressed i remember upgrading the memory of a Compaq "luggable" from 256k to 512k, Huge memory increase.
Yesterday i installed a new gaming rig with 6 gigabytes on the video card alone.

"Wireless" technology is now here, Wifi hotspots are in many places no longer talked about, dead spots are the rarity so great is the coverage.

The technology in the links above is the equivalent of my old 8k PDP-11 mainframe and its acoustic coupler.

Apply the same progress path we've seen here with computers to the technology in the links above.............

Human memory is about to get supercharged. A memory prosthesis being trialled next year could not only restore long-term recall but may eventually be used to upload new skills directly to the brain – just like in the film The Matrix.
A similar approach could eventually be used to implant new memories into the brain. Berger’s team recorded brain activity in a rat that had been trained to perform a specific task. The memory prosthesis then replicated that activity in a rat that hadn’t been trained. The second rat was able to learn the task much faster than the first rat – as if it already had some memory of the task.

“There is good reason to believe that the sharing of memory can happen,” says Berger.

 

[mike]

The Army has given a team of University of California researchers a $4 million grant to study the foundations of "synthetic telepathy." But unlike old-school mind-melds, this seemingly psychic communication would be computer-mediated. The University of California, Irvine explains:

*The brain-computer interface would use a noninvasive brain imaging technology like electroencephalography to let people communicate thoughts to each other. For example, a soldier would "think" a message to be transmitted and a computer-based speech recognition system would decode the EEG signals. The decoded thoughts, in essence translated brain waves, are transmitted using a system that points in the direction of the intended target. *

All across the military, there's interest in translating thoughts into computer code, and vice versa. Darpa-funded researchers have taught monkeys how to control robotic limbs with their thoughts. Defense contractor Northrop Grumman is building binoculars that tap the unconscious mind. Honeywell has built a system that monitors pre-conscious nueral firings, to help pick out targets in satellite imagery. The JASONs, the Pentagon's premiere scientific advisory board, has warned of the dangers of enemies implanted with brain-computer interfaces. And the Defense Intelligence Agency just released a report, saying the military needs to spend more on neuroscience - up to and including "mak[ing] the enemy obey our commands."

Army Funds 'Synthetic Telepathy' Research

 

[Burnt State]

Again, it does feel like communication, but it's not clear. I mean, they could just come out with it if they wanted to communicate something. They don't.

And I don't buy for a second that we need to 'tease out' whatever the message is.

I think the fact that we don't know what it means is the only meaning we can ascribe to it. The medium is the message, as Mcluhan said... and the medium is one of ineptitude when it comes to communication.

I think that's being overly generous. If they're agents of change, they suck at it. We aren't changing much - if at all - because of whatever it is that they are. They don't provoke much except a few of us cranks.

If language is a species specific event shaped by the planet the species evolved on then perhaps it may be literally impossible to have any sort of meaningful exchange of dialogue. Films like Arrival may simply be a grand act of wishful thinking on our part.

I don't side with the idea of ineptitude on their part. Anyone with the kind of tech capacity they demonstrate can not be inept. There appears to be a distinct disinterest for large public displays but very selective acts of communication via symbol are favored instead. If the medium is the message then their message to us is your physics sucks, take a look at what we can do with our advanced Kung Fu.

Traditionally visionary experiences were exactly what the tribe needed in order to stimulate change in society. Unfortunately, consumer culture has left us without dreams or creativity and so now we mock the visionary experience and label people kooks instead. But perhaps the stories told by witnesses that come from Ultima Thule, that take place at the margins of human experience, are more valuable than we think.

Unfortunately the tribe is too busy consuming memes, watching reality TV and ufos are merely a part of pop culture. So the communication problem might not be on their end but on ours.

Because they could be seen instead as vital prompts for what we could be engaging in as a collective, to discover new ways of travel and new ways of understanding natural laws.

 

[marduk]

If language is a species specific event shaped by the planet the species evolved on then perhaps it may be literally impossible to have any sort of meaningful exchange of dialogue. Films like Arrival may simply be a grand act of wishful thinking on our part.

I don't side with the idea of ineptitude on their part. Anyone with the kind of tech capacity they demonstrate can not be inept. There appears to be a distinct disinterest for large public displays but very selective acts of communication via symbol are favored instead. If the medium is the message then their message to us is your physics sucks, take a look at what we can do with our advanced Kung Fu.

Traditionally visionary experiences were exactly what the tribe needed in order to stimulate change in society. Unfortunately, consumer culture has left us without dreams or creativity and so now we mock the visionary experience and label people kooks instead. But perhaps the stories told by witnesses that come from Ultima Thule, that take place at the margins of human experience, are more valuable than we think.

Unfortunately the tribe is too busy consuming memes, watching reality TV and ufos are merely a part of pop culture. So the communication problem might not be on their end but on ours.

Because they could be seen instead as vital prompts for what we could be engaging in as a collective, to discover new ways of travel and new ways of understanding natural laws.

Some of the smartest people I know are also some of the most inept people I know.

They may be great at building spaceships, but for all we know they would fall on the autism scale as far as interpersonal skills go.

I cannot conceive of a possibility where they are here for purely altruistic reasons. Besides, if that were true, humanity would be better off by now. We are not. Therefore either they’re bad at it, or if that’s not the reason they’re here.

 

[Burnt State]

Not according to Paul Hill in his book, Unconventional Flying Objects: A Former NASA Scientist Explains How UFOs Really Work, which I wish everyone concerned about ufo phenomena would read.

A great book indeed. But Hill's book is concerned primarily with maneuvres of ships and their lighting. It's an excellent pro- ETH book as it maps out through our physics how these features are possible for an actual extraterrestrial craft. However that's not all that ufos do and he stays away, from what I remember, from discourse around ships fading and dissolving, ships moving through objects and ships merging or splitting apart. He leaves the high strange aspects alone and sticks to conventional sightings so to speak. His examinations of psi phenomenon are also intriguing in how it plays out an anecdotal truth. Many who first begin to dabble in this realm have strange early success and then the skill disappears. ...just what is that about?

Do you mean actually or apparently? I doubt there's evidence for this claim.

I was referencing Harzan's statement from the episode and he may be referencing similar high strange ship capacities that appear to be doing things that far exceed our capacities. My favourite is a school sighting from America where students witnessed a large ufo zoom away from them, shrink in size and them dissolve into a tree.

I haven't ever seen evidence to support this speculation. Have you?

Not really, but I notice that one strain of ETH thinking promotes the notion that the reason why we see such strange aspects of the phenomenon is because they are manipulating our minds. I don't subscribe to that myself though I don't doubt that fields (EM radiation for example) emanating from these strange UAP'S may in fact have distinct effects on our brain that may play a significant role in CE cases that appear to unfold in a dream like or anti-structural manner.

I often wonder what you think would be found if a number of ufo witnesses were 'examined' by a panel of medical and psychiatric physicians? Would you be willing to characterize what that might be, and how it would influence reception of the ETH, for example?

I think the long term study of witnesses where possible is essential to understanding more about the phenomenon. Unfortunately there are very limited examinations of this cohort beyond Project Core which found a pattern of creativity and the fact that many were synesthetes, which I found rather fascinating. My personal interest is the role of trauma in people's lives as a precursor to paranormal events and experiences. In abductees I can only say anecdotally that this bears itself out from talking with them - their experiences of childhood trauma seem to be a significant factor. But also found in the abductee cohort from both Rutkowski's work with clinicians and the Toronto psychiatrist who ran Ratchet Press discovered two essential features: many were suffering from serious mental health disorders and that the abductee needs as much serious care from professional clinicians as anyone would after having experienced the extreme medical invasions and abduction experience. It needs to be treated seriously and professionally the same way we would do so with compassion for a sexual assault survivor.

I'm also interested in long term effects as well as other unique phenomenal experiences they have. Some see ghosts after or experience strange psi phenomenon or have odd marks appear and reappear on their bodies, have other inexplicable biological effects, sink into depression etc. while others become repeaters and witness further grand events and some even take on contactee status following their experience or perhaps become more spiritual as if touched by god. So no, I can't characterize them in any specific way but there are significant effects worth examining among those who have CE events.

I do not see an ETH connection to this part of the discussion at all. Perhaps, through long term studies we might actually discover patterns in the cohort, and further, this might provide some kind of insight into why people see what they see, but how it may connect to source or point of origin I'm not sure. It may connect to ideas of purpose but that's about it as far as the ETH is concerned.

I have to take issue with your frequent statement that in perception we 'half-perceive and half-create' what we see. That phrase has its origin in the 19th-century poet Samuel Coleridge, if I'm remembering correctly, but I think it's clearly an overstatement, thus a misrepresentation of the nature of perception as providing access to the mutually verifiable/veritable appearances of things in our phenomenal experience of things. According to phenomenological philosophy, by multiplying our own available/accessible perspectives on things and combining these with the perspectives of others we are able to increase our understanding of objects, things, processes in the actual world. If it were the case that in perception we 'half create' what we see we could never rely on our own perceptions or those of others. We could not reach a basis for agreement on any subject matter taken up in any human discipline of research.

I agree with most of what you are saying here especially as it applies to mundane everyday experiences. 90% of what we see is a pre-recorded event in our brains and so the common patterns of everyday reality is something we certainly agree on. What I talk about when I talk about reality as a co-creation is that there is still always both a limited experience of external objective reality because our sensory capacity is limited and there is also variations from person to person and culture to culture regarding how an individual interprets what they see. Whether it's not having language for certain colours, being a synesthete and experiencing colour or sound in a much more visceral and varied extra-sensory manner or the biases you may have been trained in that cause your interpretations to vary.

However, the part I've been stressing is that in the high strange close encounter cases it appears that external reality is being distorted in a very unique way. Whether this is because of the brain chemistry taking place, or personal deconstruction in that witness' life, EM fields, fear responses or reasons unknown, it appears that the event is best described as dream like or hallucinatory. Sometimes there is the sensation of not being in control of one's body, having lost volition, time distortions etc. Whatever is taking place I'm suggesting that the effects of these conscious agents at play in such scenarios may be so "alien" to the perceiver that how that witness' brain is making sense of what is being seen may very well being a collaboration between external agent and perceiver. As Greg Bishop often likes to say, how much is each bringing to the dance? I mean why do people see ghosts wearing clothes?

Let's say for example that the life form being witnessed, or the ship itself which may also be a life form, is simply so strange and unique that it completely confounds our own sensory system and it must cobble together very quickly something the mind can make sense of in terms of what it is seeing.

In the Emilcin abduction the abductee, a rural farmer with no education or exposure to televsion, described the ship as having a series of propellers on the rotating screw shafts of the ship that used a simple pulley system to take him up on a platform to the ship. It made no sense whatsoever and appears to be a collaboration of his brain trying to describe something that it did not understand but needed to provide something for him to see to understand what was happening around him. So what I'm saying is that in these extreme situations something very strange is happening to our sensory capacities.

However, every day we don't see a lot happening around us that may be there all the time because this human body doesn't need that info to survive. In talking with one witness who has had strange experiences of psi phenomenon during unique moments of her life it was explained to me how the circumstances surrounding the birth of her first child were fraught with great fears, trauma, and mental health experiences of other family members. ....she kept seeing gold imagery and patterns in external reality that no one else could witness. Just before birth she watched a thread of gold filaments that connected from her pregnant belly up to and through the ceiling. For her this was the spirit chain of her unborn child. Perhaps such threading gold filaments are always present but it requires the combination of a unique set of circumstances (setting), and a unique mind/body space (set) to make these visible to a unique perceiver.

And not to do the whole book promotional thing but the two essays that go into these ideas in depth are Greg Bishop's and mine at the end of UFO's Reframing the Debate. The co-creation hypotheses is explored in depth there and Greg's essay alone is worth the price of the book as he provides one of the best holistic and historic looks at the phenomenon along with new directions to explore that I've ever read. He is greatly underestimated in the field and is really quite an excellent and flexible thinker. His text, It Defies Language, is also well worth reading. I suspect in the next year or two he will publish a more definitive look at the co-creation hypothesis and actually integrate the high strange cases in a more meaningful way into Ufological history. Too often they are ignored and yet they are such a significant chunk of what happens during the up close encounters which really does provide the meat on the bone no, compared to seeing lights in the sky?

 

[Burnt State]

Some of the smartest people I know are also some of the most inept people I know.

They may be great at building spaceships, but for all we know they would fall on the autism scale as far as interpersonal skills go.

I cannot conceive of a possibility where they are here for purely altruistic reasons. Besides, if that were true, humanity would be better off by now. We are not. Therefore either they’re bad at it, or if that’s not the reason they’re here.

Your humour helps this forum along immensely.

They seem indifferent at best to our plights, and they also like to show off a lot. Maybe that's how we appear to butterflies or birds as we catch them in our nets? They don't seem interested in stealing or blowing the place up, nor do they save us from poisoning the planet with radioacrive waste and plastic. So indifference works for me. And maybe you can't stop yourself from being rather enigmatic to a limited life form still stuck abusing oil based energy. So just for kicks they play cat and mouse and celestial theatre with us for their own amusement. Maybe the message is so simple and complex at once that they are completely befuddled as to why we haven't figured it all out yet?

 

[Burnt State]

The Army has given a team of University of California researchers a $4 million grant to study the foundations of "synthetic telepathy." But unlike old-school mind-melds, this seemingly psychic communication would be computer-mediated. The University of California, Irvine explains:

*The brain-computer interface would use a noninvasive brain imaging technology like electroencephalography to let people communicate thoughts to each other. For example, a soldier would "think" a message to be transmitted and a computer-based speech recognition system would decode the EEG signals. The decoded thoughts, in essence translated brain waves, are transmitted using a system that points in the direction of the intended target. *

All across the military, there's interest in translating thoughts into computer code, and vice versa. Darpa-funded researchers have taught monkeys how to control robotic limbs with their thoughts. Defense contractor Northrop Grumman is building binoculars that tap the unconscious mind. Honeywell has built a system that monitors pre-conscious nueral firings, to help pick out targets in satellite imagery. The JASONs, the Pentagon's premiere scientific advisory board, has warned of the dangers of enemies implanted with brain-computer interfaces. And the Defense Intelligence Agency just released a report, saying the military needs to spend more on neuroscience - up to and including "mak[ing] the enemy obey our commands."

Army Funds 'Synthetic Telepathy' Research

mike, not to get all Babblefish on you, but do you think that the conversion of language into code and back again would be able to apply to any unknown language or is this the sort of thing that requires the rules of language first in order to write the code?

I don't deny we can place things in the minds of humans and make them believe it's coming from inside or outside or wherever but wouldn't the capacity to know a language be the first order of business for alien telepathy to really work. I doubt it's like the Babblefish or the universal translator.

If we can start having legitimate conversations with whales where they finally give us proper hell for fucking up the oceans and slaughtering their families then I'll believe it's possible for alien species to communicate with each other and place actual messages in our heads.

My favourite telepathic message is the one where a woman sees a humanoid around the corner of her house going after her dog I think, and she hears in her head, "leave me alone as I could squash you like a bug." Talk about having a bad day at the office.