When is absence of evidence, evidence of absence?

[stonehart]

I am skeptical of any paranormal claim, photograph, or artifact. Why? Personal experience with hoaxers, deluded thinkers, religious zealots, true-believers, and bald-faced liars. Some might say I am a skeptic with an over active imagination, as I often entertain alternative theories and put credence in things many of my skeptical brothers would not. I actively try to "believe" as little as possible, and often fail.

Damn good post!

You want to know not believe is how I read this .. my stand point as well

 

[boomerang]

Picking around the edges as usual and many here have probably already seen this. But if I had to cite one interview that I think best sums up what we can say about the UFO phenomenon, this might be it:

 

[ALPHA ROMEO UNIFORM]

This might start some interesting debate is science a funnel rather than a umbrella?
Life on Mars? Court filing demands NASA take closer look

 

[Randall]

Picking around the edges as usual and many here have probably already seen this. But if I had to cite one interview that I think best sums up what we can say about the UFO phenomenon, this might be it:

I know there are fans of Vallée here, but I have mixed feelings. That's not to say that I don't think Vallée hasn't made a valuable historical contribution to the field ( he has ), but his comments tend to range from piercingly insightful to a little more than a bit fuzzy around the edges. Perhaps those who possess a spark of brilliance also tend to suffer from equally deep regions of contrasting of darkness in which things that are obvious to others with a less magnified intelligence, but a wider dynamic range, are able to see more clearly.

For example, one of the reasons Vallée has used frequently in the past as a reason to support the idea that UFOs aren't extraterrestrial, but perhaps some sort of multidimensional craft, are the reports where they suddenly seem to appear or disappear rather than approach or depart like a typical aircraft. However this phenomena can be explained by the craft suddenly moving directly toward or away from the observer at very high speed. This possibility was obvious even before the idea of cloaking technology became widespread. So why invoke something else ( like alternate dimensions ) that requires a far more sophisticated explanation?

To answer the above, perhaps Vallée is a victim of the same subjective psychology as the rest of us. He is an intellectual elite, a notch above the crowd, and has a more sophisticated way of looking at the world. Therefore is it any surprise that he would want the explanation for UFO to reflect his own elevated wants and beliefs? I don't think so. In fact in the video posted he admits as much when he says, "I think that from my own point of view I'm going to be very disappointed if UFOs turn out to be nothing more than visitors from another planet because I think they could be something much more interesting."

From the quote above we clearly see how Vallée's subjective relationship with the UFO phenomena clearly reflects his intellectual capacity to imagine possibilities that were beyond most of us at the time. However Vallée wanting them to be what he likes to imagine they are doesn't make them what they actually are any more than the imaginings of someone who wants them to be from inside the Earth's core, or the heart of the Sun, or whatever other fantastical possibilities we might imagine.

In contrast, his keen insight led him to see how labeling these alien craft "UFOs" was going to lead to a lot of conceptual problem's and confusion. He said, "I cannot think of anything more treacherous than this word 'Unidentified'." and went on to describe how UFOs aren't unidentified in the sense that they belong to a particular class of objects that are clearly separate from the ones we're familiar with. Today we are still having debates over this issue and I'm sure I don't need to go over it all again for the regular forum readers, suffice it to say that I and the group I'm with ( USI ) have adopted a definition for UFOs that is in harmony with Vallée's analysis. The word UFO is intended to convey the idea of a particular class of objects that are best described as alien craft, not merely any vague object off in the distance that upon closer inspection might turn out to be any number of mundane things.

 

[exo_doc]

This might start some interesting debate is science a funnel rather than a umbrella?
Life on Mars? Court filing demands NASA take closer look

Hey Blowfish, I saw this too! I don't know about suing NASA, but I think those photos deserve a much more serious study of them. If you compare the two, there appears to be some impression on the ground in the first one that the supposed "rock" occupies in the second photo.
It could very well be some form of fungus or plant that grew there.

 

[ALPHA ROMEO UNIFORM]

Don't think will get past the post but very odd someone playing a marketing ploy or maybe it fell off a jelly donut drone

 

[boomerang]

I know there are fans of Vallée here, but I have mixed feelings.

Would Vallee be genuinely disappointed to find that UFOs were "merely" extraterrestrial spacecraft? I suspect not. But I have to agree with his proposition that about the only thing our science can currently say about the UFO is that we simply do not understand time and space. The UFO does not exist in an esoteric vacuum. It leaves behind it ripples of weirdness, if you will, that seem to emphasize psychological and sociological aspects of the UFO experience that it will not allow us to ignore. This is my take on Vallee's work, at any rate.

Unless, of course, there exists in some deep dark crevice of officialdom the physical evidence we seek. But I personally don't think so.

 

[Burnt State]

Absence of evidence is also evidence of our inability to record and document the source of the stimulus that is the UFO phenomenon. After excluding the mundane sources there remains a residue of something suddenly here and then gone.

Is it only possible to get a multi-angle recorded series of images of mundane objects in the sky, unless of course your UFO appears in the holy land? There it has been sanctioned by the holy trinity, and this most recent pope, who's really trying to show a more welcoming approach to almost everything. But then the seats need filling.

Certainly it has to be seen as highly problematic that in the age of constant surveillance & the mass proliferation of portable recording devices we are not getting that muti-angle recording. So either they only exist in the minds of the witness as a memory or the stimulus only becomes photogenic on blue moons.

And then when the time is right a picture is captured, studied, dismissed and debated. Until our recording abilities change, or the stimulus alters, we have little to show for these lights in the sky but wild tales from the moon and beyond.

 

[manxman]

what if they are not solid, just plasma.

 

[Tony B.]

I know there are fans of Vallée here, but I have mixed feelings.

Yep, there are fans. But mixed feelings are okay, too.

That's not to say that I don't think Vallée hasn't made a valuable historical contribution to the field ( he has ), but his comments tend to range from piercingly insightful to a little more than a bit fuzzy around the edges.

Agreed. I start getting lost when he begins discussing IDH, personally. Not to say he's wrong, but to my thinking, Occam's razor favors the ETH. Your mileage may vary, though.

And then we have the 'time travel' supporters. (Aspirin, anyone?)

 

[PCarr]

Yep, there are fans. But mixed feelings are okay, too.

Agreed. I start getting lost when he begins discussing IDH, personally. Not to say he's wrong, but to my thinking, Occam's razor favors the ETH. Your mileage may vary, though.

And then we have the 'time travel' supporters. (Aspirin, anyone?)

I really don't think there's any meaningful difference between the IDH and the ETH, although in both cases the "H" is pure arrogance. I'll talk about that in the upcoming API Case Files, EPisode 2 coming out in a few days.

 

[manxman]

got an explanation for the sts80 footage posted above paul ?.

what kind of debris can come to a full stop, lower itself into an electrical storm, holding its position whilst the earth rotates away from the shuttle, at 300 miles a minute [i use the 'rotates away' in the same sense as a harbour wall rising and falling whilst observed from a boat].

and the object,[for want of a better descriptor] that pops up out of the storm, then moves off at a faster speed than the shuttle, only to slow down and just hold its position relative to the shuttle, its still obviously going the same speed as the shuttle or it would go backwards away from the shuttle, terminator line and illuminated out of focus ice crystal/debris and optical illusions, are obergs best shot, whats yours.


please include an explanation of the mechanics behind the slowing and stopping, or the popping up at speed then slowing to a treading water holding position,.

thanks in advance, for even trying, if indeed you do.

 

[trainedobserver]

"What UFOs are teaching us, is that we don't understand time and space."
- Vallee

This is a key concept. It kicks the notions that these things must be from "somewhere else" in the seat of the pants. When you realize your definitions of "here" and "over there" or "now" and "then" are relevant only within the realm of human experience all bets are off.

When I use the term "within the realm of human experience" I am referring to the resource constraints inherit in the human organism.

 

[PCarr]

"What UFOs are teaching us, is that we don't understand time and space."
- Vallee

This is a key concept. It kicks the notions that these things must be from "somewhere else" in the seat of the pants. When you realize your definitions of "here" and "over there" or "now" and "then" are relevant only within the realm of human experience all bets are off.

When I use the term "within the realm of human experience" I am referring to the resource constraints inherit in the human organism.

Vallee may well be right about that, but I think that such a broad pronouncement is premature. What UFOs may be teaching us is that we don't understand our own memories and perceptions.

 

[Jeff Davis]

"What UFOs are teaching us, is that we don't understand time and space."
- Vallee

This is a key concept. It kicks the notions that these things must be from "somewhere else" in the seat of the pants. When you realize your definitions of "here" and "over there" or "now" and "then" are relevant only within the realm of human experience all bets are off.

When I use the term "within the realm of human experience" I am referring to the resource constraints inherit in the human organism.

Why?

 

[PCarr]

got an explanation for the sts80 footage posted above paul ?.

what kind of debris can come to a full stop, lower itself into an electrical storm, holding its position whilst the earth rotates away from the shuttle, at 300 miles a minute [i use the 'rotates away' in the same sense as a harbour wall rising and falling whilst observed from a boat].

and the object,[for want of a better descriptor] that pops up out of the storm, then moves off at a faster speed than the shuttle, only to slow down and just hold its position relative to the shuttle, its still obviously going the same speed as the shuttle or it would go backwards away from the shuttle, terminator line and illuminated out of focus ice crystal/debris and optical illusions, are obergs best shot, whats yours.


please include an explanation of the mechanics behind the slowing and stopping, or the popping up at speed then slowing to a treading water holding position,.

thanks in advance, for even trying, if indeed you do.

Do you mean an explanation for how you possibly interpret this very ordinary object quite close to the camera it that way? No.

I think Oberg is right. Tom Jones agrees. I worked a few payload missions launched from or recovered by the shuttle back in the day (this one, for example), and I can tell you stuff floated out from the orbiter and the cargo bay all the time: gases, liquids and solids. The orbiter's attitude was actively controlled with small jets, so the environment frequently included little pulses of invisible gas at about 2000 meters per second that would push small solids around. Liquids that weren't in the sun tended to turn to ice pretty quickly.

So, I don't see anything new here that requires explanation.

 

[trainedobserver]

Why?

If you can't tell where you actually are or whether event A came before event B or after it, then you're in a pickle. If our perception of space/time is constrained by our own physical design, then we may not have the capability to grok the reality of space/time beyond it. My contention is these things don't have to be from other dimensions, planets, or times. They could be, and appear to be, to have always been here. Wherever that is.

 

[Jeff Davis]

If you can't tell where you actually are or whether event A came before event B or after it, then you're in a pickle. If our perception of space/time is constrained by our own physical design, then we may not have the capability to grok the reality of space/time beyond it. My contention is these things don't have to be from other dimensions, planets, or times. They could be, and appear to be, to have always been here. Wherever that is.

I agree with you, totally, but I need you to get crazy with me for just a moment. Don't worry, it's not lasting, it's just a temporary form of insanity known as the wild imagination.

I ask "why" because of a true fascination belonging to a hunch I have had for a very long time.

What if we are their means of navigating time and space? Think of it this way in accord with how our own environment's natural occupants present themselves to us according to perception.

What if our environment *is* the very medium of human experience known as consciousness?

What if our environment is the result of several complex interactive combinations all relative to a universal zero point constant?

Ervin László - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[PCarr]

got an explanation for the sts80 footage posted above paul ?.

what kind of debris can come to a full stop, lower itself into an electrical storm, holding its position whilst the earth rotates away from the shuttle, at 300 miles a minute [i use the 'rotates away' in the same sense as a harbour wall rising and falling whilst observed from a boat].

and the object,[for want of a better descriptor] that pops up out of the storm, then moves off at a faster speed than the shuttle, only to slow down and just hold its position relative to the shuttle, its still obviously going the same speed as the shuttle or it would go backwards away from the shuttle, terminator line and illuminated out of focus ice crystal/debris and optical illusions, are obergs best shot, whats yours.


please include an explanation of the mechanics behind the slowing and stopping, or the popping up at speed then slowing to a treading water holding position,.

thanks in advance, for even trying, if indeed you do.

Here is the complete text of what Oberg wrote:

Notes on the STS-80 UFOs" -- James Oberg January 1997

The STS-80 scenes seem to me to be identical in origin to the
infamous STS-48 scenes and to numerous others throughout the
shuttle flight program: low-light sensitive B&W cameras are
trained on the receding horizon during night passes, to observe
serendipitous lightning events for an experiment called
Mesoscale Lightning Experiment, managed out of NASA-MSFC in
Huntsville. You can see the dark horizon, the glowing 'air glow'
layer, moving stars, moving city lights below, lightning
flashes, and under moonlit conditions, dim clouds.

By the way, these low-light B&W cameras are pretty old and are
being replaced mission by mission -- the suite of cameras
carried by a shuttle (one in each corner of the payload bay, two
on the RMS, others perhaps mounted on the keel looking upwards
at target spacecraft, plus a few handheld units inside the
cabin) can be adjusted as needed, and a new color CCD camera is
much higher quality (it doesn't 'bloom' in overbright
reflections, and can't be damaged by sun exposure), but it's not
as sensitive in low light, so there are fewer opportunities to
see such views every year.

When sunrise occurs (due to the Orbiter's motion along its
orbit), even though the Orbiter is now bathed in sunlight, the
camera is still trained on the dark side of Earth. But now the
floating particles which routinely accompany every shuttle
flight (often ice particles, sometimes junk from the payload
bay, pieces of insulation blankets, a dozen or more distinctly
different sources) can become visible in the sunlight, sometimes
even moving into sunlight from the umbra of the Orbiter (and
thus "appearing suddenly"). These are close to the camera,
sometimes a few feet, at most a few hundred feet. Sometimes they
are hit by pulses of gas from the RCS jets as they automatically
fire to gently nudge the spaceship back towards a pre-set
orientation. Because of the sensitivity of the camera, moving
particles leave streaks -- even stars can be seen to do this
when the camera is being panned (usually by command from a
controller in the Mission Control Center). Tumbling particles
tend to flash. Bright particles overload the optics and appear
as "rings" or "do-nuts" with darker centers.

There's nothing else to it, as far as I can tell. Everyone in
the control center knows about this visual phenomenon, everyone
has seen it numerous times, and they laugh at notions these are
anomalous, while they grimace at yet more silly stories by
people who don't seem to understand much (or do seem to
misunderstand a lot) about "ordinary" space flight.

As far as I was able to determine, these STS-80 scenes were
recorded beginning about 11:55 PM PST on December 1, 1996.
That's 07:55 GMT on December 2. Since the shuttle was launched
on Nov 19, that is 324/19:55:47, this makes it about 12 days 11
hours 59 minutes "Mission Elapsed Time", or MET. This was on rev
197, crossing Venezuela, then the West Indies. The Orbiter
attitude was bottom forward, with the vehicle yawed somewhat so
the nose was off to one side.

According to the activity plan sent up that morning, the crew
was doing some evaluation of an EVA tool associated with their
airlock problems, and the two pilots were scheduled to begin a
review of landing procedures. Lunch was to follow. When I asked
crewman Story Musgrave, who is not shy about talking about
anomalies of any kind, he assured me he saw nothing unusual on
the flight, at this point or at any other.

The camera, "B" located at the rear of the payload bay, was in a
pre-set position which was later changed by ground commands.
Judging from the star motion at the horizon, it was looking
southwest, not precisely backwards (since then the stars would
have been setting straight down across the horizon). I don't
have the exact numbers on the camera's pan/tilt and it's too
much trouble to get them.

According to a computer reconstruction of the trajectory,
sunrise occurred at GMT 07:57. That's precisely when the picture
shows a slight foggy periphery, and when the first objects
appear. They keep showing up until about 08:01, when sunlit
clouds come into the camer's field of view and the iris
automatically stops way down so that the tiny objects (and stars
too) are no longer visible. The camera view continues in
daylight for long after that.

The crew's "Earth Obs Exposures" daily plan listed ground
targets which confirm this flight path:

12/11:54:05 Caracas
12/11:55:58 Montserrat

and then

12/12:19:34 Lake Nasser
12/12:21:13 Jiddah, Saudi Arabia
12/12:21:23 Mecca

These are "opportunities" only, not assignments, and apparently
nobody was free to take the shots over Caracas and Montserrat.

Here is some trajectory data from which you can reconstruct the
flight path and lighting conditions at the interval of interest,
if you have the commonly- available software.

M50 State Vector
GMT 337:00:54:47.00
MET 012:04:59:00
Position (ft)
X 7272023.0
Y -20753260.5
Z -2137127.9
Velocity (ft/sec)
VX 20614.669694
VY 8420.434295
VZ -11894.207423

At MET 12/11:55:47 for example, position is lat 15.07N, Lon
62.06W, alt 185.4nm, inertial velocity 25245.6034 ft/sec, the
orbital range is 183.8361 to 193.8737 nm, period 91:23.435, beta
angle -34 degrees (the sun is off to the right of the orbital
plane by this angle),

The video that I saw over in the Public Affairs Office was tape
#612710. If you want to specify it to buy your own copies, give
the MET or GMT times, and order ten minutes before and after the
interval, so you can see the typical phenomena of stars leaving
trails, and auto iris control functioning, and at one point the
constellation Orion going by, and at the end a view around the
Orbiter's sunlit payload bay. All very ordinary, unspectacular,
normal space views, in my opinion.

I don't know where the impression came from that this was a
rebroadcast of daily highlights, since these programs are
invariably short (10-15 minutes), with short clips jumping from
scene to scene, usually involving views of astronauts. This
sequence, on the other hand, was continuous for at least 20
minutes from the same camera, and the geography and lighting are
consistent with the real time orbital motion. I looked at the
"Flight Day Highlights" summary for three days around this date
and that's what they consisted of, with no replay of any of
these "dancing dots" scenes (why should there have been?).

I don't expect that this will change many minds and I don't
intend to go on television to face some wild accusations that
I'm a paid liar for the grand conspiracy, and basically I don't
take anyone seriously who takes these stories seriously. Life's
too short for me to care what some people want to believe these
scenes show. I've already spent too much time, but I figured
somebody had to make a rational response, whether it was
understood and believed, or not.

___________

James Oberg
JamesOberg@aol.com>
Jim Oberg's Pioneering Space.

 

[PCarr]

If you can't tell where you actually are or whether event A came before event B or after it, then you're in a pickle. If our perception of space/time is constrained by our own physical design, then we may not have the capability to grok the reality of space/time beyond it. My contention is these things don't have to be from other dimensions, planets, or times. They could be, and appear to be, to have always been here. Wherever that is.

We've known since 1905 that simultaneity is relative. This understanding is born out very well by experiment and observation. There is a lot of really interesting work going now about what the true nature of time is, but it's not about human perception of time. We can objectively measure time, but a more nuanced view might lead us down a new path.