" … the mission of Cmdr. David Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight, who were in training over the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego at the time. They got a strange call from a radio operator. The military had been tracking strange aircraft in the region for about two weeks, the operator said. Sometimes, these flying objects made sudden maneuvers, dove tens of thousands of feet or even hovered, according to the reports.
Asked to investigate, Fravor and Slaight eventually spotted one. About 40 feet (12 meters) long, it was hovering 50 feet (15 m) above the ocean, the Times report says. (Fraser added that the object appeared to be causing a sort of boiling or bubbles in the ocean, as the rest of the water looked calm.)" space.com
————
Whaddaya think? Is there any significance to California having the largest number of sightings? This is it, the end of everything. Do they know that the US is EXCEPTIONAL (that was a joke.) THEY are now closing in on us. Do they "come in peace?" If they have any more good techie stuff like velcro on board, maybe they could trade it to us as a modern equivalent of frontier traders selling glass beads to Indians. Whoa! Wait a minute! Some of you think the Europeans sold the Indians blankets infected with smallpox. Maybe we should be cautious. pl
https://www.space.com/39147-navy-pilots-ufo-sightings.html
https://www.npr.org/2017/12/19/571868263/secret-program-at-the-pentagon-spent-million-to-study-ufos
The NPR piece has a better presentation of the electronics system in the FA-18. The aircraft is in a 20 degree left bank following the object as it goes around an arc. The footage was cleared for release by DoD. Maybe this reflects a change of policy in the DJT Administration. This is said to be one of three of this incident. It looks to me at the end that the object is making a turn into the path of the fighter. I can hardly wait to see what happened next. pl
“Maybe we should be cautious.” Does it even matter whether they are hostile or not? The effects can be just as drastic from “friendly” interaction with technology significantly more advanced than ours. Or life forms significantly different.
These stories remind me of degrasse Tyson’s observations about chimps vs. humans and extrapolating that to humans vs. intelligent alien life.
We’ll make great pets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ro9aebFZhM
You say “Some of you think the Europeans sold the Indians blankets infected with smallpox.”
Wondering if you have read Jack London’s South Sea Tales, specifically “YAH!YAH!YAH!”
here’s a free copy
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1208/1208-h/1208-h.htm#link2H_4_0004
outthere
So, Jack London is a fountain of truth for you? I thought he was a left wing polemicist? How about Joseph Conrad? Not so much? pl
There’s an old saying : Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. There are also many natural electromagnetic phenomenon that are not yet fully understood.
If there are visitors here, their DNA will give them away. In the next decade or so you will get a routine DNA scan as part of a checkup when you go to the doctor like you get blood work done today. It will identify cancers, diseases, and metabolic imbalances. That technology will eventually sequence every living thing on this planet. Sooner or later “something different” will show up in the resulting databases if it exists.
I wouldn’t bet on it though.
I have enjoyed both London and Conrad.
My favorite Conrad tale is “The Secret Agent”.
free copy here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/974/974-h/974-h.htm
I once read the entire Sherlock Holmes stories while trying to navigate through the Tuamotus in a huge storm that made sextant sights impossible/very difficult. Whenever the sun was visible I would jump up on deck and attempt a sight. The French charts call it “Archipel Dangereuse” and for good reason, big steel rusting hulls on every atoll, and they had radar and loran. Nowadays it’s all gps.
When I lived in Moscow there was a talk by a cosmonaut, he said he had seen all sorts of weird and wonderful things when he was in space. On his return to earth he mentioned this to the Soviet authorities, he was firmly told not to speak of such things.
Of course the whole UFO thing coincided with the introduction of the U2 spy plane, indeed the CIA’s internal history of the U-2 project claims that the high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft accounted for more than half of UFO sightings in the 1950s and 60s. Of course this was something that didn’t go unnoticed by the Soviets. At a meeting between Soviet and US meteorologists in May 1975, a Soviet delegate said that he and his colleagues were not receiving reports of UFO sightings any more and that the cessation must have been due to someone making ‘a political decision’. Those familiar with the sardonic nature of Russian humour will recognise that this was a rather pointed remark. The F117 was invented in the 70s, so God knows where they are now technologically.
Of course the whole UFO fad could never sustain itself after the invention of the phone camera, or perhaps the aliens had reached the limit as to what anal probing could tell them?
The Air Force pilot who was one of the observers of the thing feels strongly that it was a mechanical flying craft that broke every spec he’s aware of. This coming from an expert, drug-tested, military pilot. I don’t think you can just dismiss the opinion.
Well, now here we come to a subject I used to be extremely knowledgeable about: UFOs.
I got interested in this subject way back in the 1960’s while I was in Vietnam. I had read a number of articles in men’s mags by a journalist named John A. Keel, who operated out of New York. His articles basically argued that UFOs had nothing to do with “aliens” but were likely some other sort of paranormal phenomena because the phenomena was not only “lights in the sky” but all sorts of paranormal phenomena occurring in places where UFOs were frequently seen.
I corresponded with Keel and eventually met him on my way back from Vietnam on leave to my home state of Connecticut. Keel was a very smart, rational guy who had a long time interest in strange stuff. He had seen a UFO over the Aswan Dam in Egypt while in the military himself. He subsequently traveled the world investigating odd subjects such as fake mummy forgers in Egypt and tracked a Yeti in the Himalayas and wrote a book about his adventures called Jadoo. Due to his vast geographical knowledge, he was a geography editor for an encyclopedia. He also ran a syndicated column for the North American Newspaper Alliance.
I hung out with Keel several times in the early ’70’s after leaving the Army. He eventually wrote several books on UFOs and the related phenomena he discovered occurred in areas where UFO sightings were frequent.
His most famous book was “The Mothman Prophecies” which described his investigation into a series of events in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, back in the ’60’s which involved some sort of giant flying monster which was eventually coined “Mothman” which chased some teenagers. I actually visited Point Pleasant while on leave once and talked to many of the same people described in his book – all of whom confirmed his accounts of the events – which was why I wanted to visit the sources themselves, to be sure he wasn’t making this stuff up himself.
The book was eventually made into a movie starring Richard Gere which came out in 2002. It is a particularly creepy movie which I recommend viewing because it captures the sort of things that Keel had discovered during his investigations.
Keel was a very level-headed journalist who used standard investigative journalist techniques in his investigators. He always sought the most logical explanation for what were very complicated and illogical events. He didn’t think much of most of the “UFO buffs” who were the only ones investigating UFOs at the time. Despite that, he eventually ended up being the most influential person investigating UFOs, although there were others who also thought the alien explanation was weak. His theories as to what *might* be happening caused a lot of people to second-guess the alien theory.
John died in 2009. Even though he was influential for years in questioning the alien origin of UFOs, pretty much the whole subject still remains mired in aliens.
Check out his Wikipedia entry:
John Keel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keel
I also just discovered this Web site which appears to reproduce a lot of information from Keel – cases from the 1960’s – as well as including a more complete concise biography. The site is run by Doug Skinner, a friend of John’s for many years.
http://www.johnkeel.com/?page_id=21
My own hypothesis is the phenomena is actually an intelligent species which originated on this planet perhaps hundreds of thousands of years ago, developed science and technology to the level of ubiquitous nanotechnology and subsequently, as predicted by K. Eric Drexler’s nanotechnology book, jumped a million years ahead in technology in comparison to where we are now.
I think this theory is as good as any other because 1) we know there were many different protohumans prior to humans developing, so why is it unlikely that another protohuman species developed intelligence before we did? and 2) because we know that ubiquitous nanotechnology is likely to result in exponential gains in science and technology as Drexler and Ray Kurzweil predict leading to an “intelligence singularity” (defined as a point where subsequent science and technology capabilities cannot be understood by anyone preceding that point.)
This theory also avoids problems with explaining how aliens could overcome the light speed barrier that theoretically prevents interstellar travel. It also avoids the more complicated theories some people have come up with involving alternate universe, parallel dimensions and all that sort of sci-fi stuff that no one actually understands.
Of course, one can also believe it’s all just hallucinations or some other natural phenomena. One theory that I actually give some credence to is the geomagnetic theory of Michael Persinger. See his Wikipedia entry:
Michael Persinger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Persinger
He at least has some actual experimental data to base his theory on, although his theories are disputed.
I’m glad I’m no longer following this subject because it was a frustrating thing to be involved in and subjects one to ridicule for even bringing it up, despite the fact that almost half of the US population believes in UFOs. At least I was familiar with the actual evidence whereas for most people it is an article of faith.
I know this is about UFO’s–but i was interested in the basis for your description of London as a “left wing polemicist”. If so, he appears to have been a very confused one. Although London described himself as a “socialist” he also pointed to Nietzsche as having the greatest impact on his thinking. Nietzsche subscribed to a Master/Slave morality along with the concept of an ideal “Superman”, which would seem to best describe “selfish individualism”. Further, London exhibited an almost “Objectivist” orientation in his attraction to the ideas of “Social Darwinism”. These ideas would seem diametrically opposed to the equity-oriented tenets of “socialism”. I suppose London is best described as hypocritical–not at all unusual for most “socialists” of his time or ours. He died in 1916.
I was commenting in the other thread. I have no idea what to think. I can’t even keep up with which side is lying about what with mundane political issues sometimes.
I do think we, meaning humans in general, may overestimate ourselves. A lot of modern physicists seem to think we are on the verge of having a basic understanding of all the fundamental forces of nature. I wonder what our views would look like to some species where Einstein would be considered dull witted, let alone one where we just look like smart house pets. My wife and I used to have a cat ( since died) who thought we needed discipline. I was reading the newspaper while stretched on the floor — pre IPad days for me— and the cat came up and lay down on the story I was reading. I moved her and she gave me two very fast slaps ( claws sheathed) across the face. Clearly in her mind the paper was for lying on and I had been very rude. I wonder if there are ideas that alien species have that are as far beyond us as reading is beyond a cat. On the other hand, given what appears in newspapers maybe the cats are right and I need a different analogy.
Maybe we already are.
Sylvia
At one point in my youth I was interested in “manly” writers, London, Hemingway, etc. I read all of London’s oeuvre when I was in high school. I don’t find anything odd in a socialist activist motivated by Nietzsche. Such people generally think they are or should be in charge as master so that they can enforce their view of justice on the slaves. pl
DC
Navy, not Air Force. pl
IT was the North Korean or Iranians…lol
“THEY are now closing in on us.”
Colonel,
Wondering if you’ve enjoyed China’s sci-fi classic, Liu Cixin’s Dark Forest trilogy.
I would not bet on that.
jonst
Captain Segura, the Red Vulture in G. Greene’s “Our Man in Havana” told the Brit spy that he was “not of the torturable class.” As you imply, some of us are not of the domesticatable class. pl
all
https://www.npr.org/2017/12/19/571868263/secret-program-at-the-pentagon-spent-million-to-study-ufos
This NPR piece has a better presentation of the electronics system in the FA-18. The aircraft is in a 20 degree left bank following the object as it goes around an arc. The footage was cleared for release by DoD. Maybe this reflects a change of policy in the DJT Administration. This is said to be one of three of this incident. It looks to me at the end that the object is making a turn into the path of the fighter. I can hardly wait to see what happened next. pl
In the Middle Ages, it was standard practice to throw infected carcasses, waste products and contaminated clothing into besieged cities, in Europe. Even in ancient times in the Mesopotamia, it is documented that the Assyrians used hallucinogenic mushrooms , with unknown efficacy, against their enemies.
Should be presume that invading European colonists, In North-America, were more merciful, to alien Native Americans then their own kindred spirits back in the continent?
In a sense, you are right to point out that the epidemic spread of contagious diseases and dissemination of Native American population in Middle- and South America was a byproduct of the European invasion there.
However in North America, it is documented that, specifically smallpox, was introduced for the first time as an agent of biological warfare in North America, by the English. The
British forces, led by Lord Jeffrey Amherst, deliberately used smallpox as a bio-weapon against rebelling Native Americans, during one of the French Indian American wars, in Western Pennsylvania, in 1763.
In other words, it is documented that the leftist Jack London was correct in his assessment.
Amir
Yes, the perfidious English did things like that. So what. You people are easy to provoke. And, London was a leftist, likee you. pl
Why no we’ll have vpontact with something reventually if we last long enough
“Jadoo”, “Jadou” – from Persian, “sorcery”.
Physicists are wrong.
They cannot even explain why water boils at 100 Celsius scale under STP conditions.
He killed himself.
One could only hope that these star-faring aliens would help every nation, ethnic group, country or collection of countries tthat so wish it to decamp from this plant to suitable habitable planets where each and every one of them could exist in splendid isolation from all others.
turcopolier.
Re: DoD loosing up
Mattis is an eastern Washington guy, and stories of people seeing UFO are rather strong among the people there. Here’s an interesting vid about the experiences of some of the people who man the fire lookouts around Yakima, including a remarkable interview with a woman who has done that for decades.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8RvYlA7HXQ
She doesn’t seem like someone who just makes stuff up to me, anyway.
What about the possibility that UFOs are a demonic deception ?
The infected blankets story may be true, but it is just a piece of gratuitous nastiness in a much larger event. The native populations were devastated by imported diseases from the moment of first contact. Cortez’ conquest of Mexico could not have happened without the help of smallpox. Both the Massachusetts and Jamestown seem to have followed epidemics that reduced the ability of the natives to expel them. The contrast with old-world conquests is striking. India was conquered, but it still is populated by Indians. China is still the land of Chinese; Africa is still filled with Africans. Even Ireland is still full of Irish. Population replacement was only practical where the populations were dying off much faster than a few Europeans could have killed them.
In case that NPR link goes away for some reason,
the 1:53 YouTube video embedded in it may be viewed directly at
“Gimbal: The First Official UAP Footage from the USG for Public Release”
To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science
Published on Dec 16, 2017
https://youtu.be/tf1uLwUTDA0
1,216,473 views, 647 comments as of 2017-12-19
Why isn’t this story getting more coverage? This is huge! Highly trained pilots, radar confirmation, visual confirmation, the NY Times article said the USS Princeton were following these UFOs for 2 weeks. They come in at 80,000 feet descend to 20,000 feet, and then descend below radar. I have always believed it was unlikely that there were UFO encounters that couldn’t be explained away. No longer.
One article I read made an interesting point. The pilots were told to rendezvous at a point in space 60 miles away after the encounter. The radio operator came back on and told the pilots that you won’t believe this but the UFO is at the location. This happened within a minute. Besides the technology, this indicates to me the entity is able to monitor our communication in a highly secure military environment. I just bought Leslie Kean’s book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials go on the Record (2010). She is one of the co-authors on the NY Times article.
One last thing. This reminds me of the joke when the wife walks in on the husband and the mistress. Paraphrasing. The husband says are you going to believe me or your lying eyes.
John Keel put many good hypothesis on UFO , he go against the mainstream nuts-n-bolt physical UFO crowd and like J.Vallee (passport to magonia) he subscribe to Extra dimensional hypothesis (basically saying UFO is supernatural phenomena not physical)
I would venture that Dr J Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallee are the dynamic duo in UFOLOGY history. Both are trained astronomer and both have healthy skepticism at first until they read many cases which made them a believer of the phenomena.
IMHO John Keel is the best at early years but he go to the deep end in his final works. As many classic UFOLOGIST said , having knowledge in the Occults and Paranormal helps in the research.
So far , based on case histories of UFO (from MUFON , NICAP , CUFOS) , there’s no evidence that this phenomena is physical or even materiel. The Radar+Visual cases are the best since it is confirmed by equipment and by eyeball , but the phenomena itself behaves as if it exists above physical laws (inertia defyign maneuvers , blinking/vanishing , and imprevious to man-made weapons).
One case that stands out is the Peruvian Sukhoi-22 who tried to destroy a silver sphere above their airfield , only to have the sphere rise higher and outmaneuver the sukhois until it ran out of fuel.
I think you confused real UFO research with the lunatic fringe of UFOLOGY currently ‘fad’ or ‘chic’ , like the alien abduction , roswell crash , secret underground bases etc..
real UFO research only able to amass case after case and from all the cases one can detect quite a bit of pattern but NO evidence the ‘actor’ behind the phenomena is an extra terrestrial entity
There’s only one way to understand UFO phenomena , that is to read the UFO case files taken by NICAP or MUFON or CUFOS , and follow the work of serious UFO researchers like Jacques Vallee , Claude Poher , J Allen Hynek , Michael Swords and more..
One thing stands out from all the cases , that UFO phenomena ‘obey’ the law of times.. that is majority of UFO encounters peaked sharply at 23:00 and only go down before 05:00.
Colonel: I thought about your response for a long time. You are correct. History shows, at least so far, that the idealism of “socialism” always seems to get mugged by the reality of life and the changes the exercise of power brings about in people. I want to close by saying how lucky we all are to have you and this blog. There aren’t many places on the web where we can find your level of expertise, experience, and wisdom. I know it can be a hassle–but thank you for sharing.
The cultural marxist literary critics dislike London because he thought europeans had earned the right to dominate the “lesser” races and cultures. At 11 he worked in a factory but eventually became the highest paid writer in the world, rising from societies lower depths due to what he called brain power. He was a strange combination of socialist and social darwinian. He empathized with the poor but thought himself a superior man.
I still think “To Build a Fire” belongs on the topshelf of American short stories. “The Road” a compilation of stories about riding the rails has a story about a gypsy mercilesly beating his woman, while Jack London can only watch because two men hold knives on him that is forever burned in my mind.
assuming life was not seeded on earth from else where, naturally via asteroids or artificial methods, there is no reason to think alien life would be based on DNA,
and assuming they are capable of interstellar travel, and not our martian cousins who are just a few steps ahead of us, they would easily be able to fake whatever test we might be able to come up with.
Fascinating post, I hope we learn more. But my favourite was this: Turcopolier said to Amir “you people are easy to provoke”.
Thanks for the chuckle.
After the massacre at Fort William Henry and the slaughtering of whole families in frontier settlements the Indians were due retaliation.
I met Keel once; over a few drinks, he explained to me his hypothesis that the 1940s flying saucer craze had this at its root:
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/05/130527-map-video-balloon-bomb-wwii-japanese-air-current-jet-stream/
DJT takes ET to the ground and rolls out a Mission Accomplished banner.
That’s a rather crude and dismissive view of the phenomenon which ignores some very serious incidents and sighting elsewhere in the world.
Are you aware of the Japanese Airlines flight 1628 sighting?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_flight_1628_incident
Three experienced Japanese commercial aircrew sight an aircraft carrier-sized “shelled walnut” moving at unknown speeds and then trailing their 747 flight over Alaska. The object is tracked on an FAA-run radar station and also sighted later by a KC-135 crew. Several days later, another air force flight queries ATC in Alaska about the incident and receive a cryptic response that “seeing the lights” is not common in these parts. The transcripts are available. The FAA official involved in the investigation admitted that his team was debriefed by a civilian intelligence agency and the data logs from the radar station were confiscated.
Even more interesting are the detailed accounts from the JAL crew; the captain claimed that the object had smaller craft egressing from inside of it.
Perhaps a veteran Japanese ex-military aviator developed a sense of humour all of a sudden and decided to jeopardize his professional status with esoteric fantasies? He was of course demoted and told to fly a desk for the remainder of his career.
Maybe it was an F-117? Or maybe it was a pig? :3
LondonBob and FredW
My people killed of a lot of “peaux rouges” as Art Buchwald called them, and were heavily killed upon by the PR in a continuous process of social Darwinist competition that started for us in the early 17th Century. We got started early. But, I must say that the die-off of the PR from European diseases was inevitable. Hell, all you had to do was breathe on them to start an epidemic, much less fool around with the girls. My Pilgrim and Puritan ancestors landed in present MA and Connecticut in an environment in which 90% of the PR had recently died in an outbreak of some disease contracted from contact with European fisherman drying cod on the Maine coast. Karma. pl
The belief in superiority of Nordic races was as common as belief in Democracy is today. London was just like everyone else in that regard. Shoah was a result of that belief, eliminating the undesirables to bring forth a new Nordic Civilization. So was the mass murder of Cogolese by the Belg earlier.
For historical reasons, I’ve been following this story. FWIW, here’s a set of links to some of the articles based on it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.htm
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2017/12/16/technology/16reuters-usa-pentagon-ufos.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-flying-object-navy.html
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/12/16/pentagon-ufo-search-harry-reid-216111
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/local_coverage/2017/12/ex_navy_fighter_pilot_in_spotlight_for_in_air_ufo_encounter_claims
http://abcnews.go.com/US/navy-pilot-recalls-encounter-ufo-unlike/story
https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/nation-and-world/ex-navy-pilot-describes-encounter-with-ufo-says-it-was-real/
https://theaviationist.com/2017/12/17/u-s-department-of-defense-video-shows-unknown-object-intercepted-by-u-s-navy-super-hornet-and-we-have-no-idea-what-it-was/
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0By-yCcE3UvHcSlg0YlhyaGYyd3c/view (CVW-11 EVENT SUMMARY)
https://coi.tothestarsacademy.com/nimitz-report/ (Links to both videos)
And, as a slight downer, this look into the program and its private sector successor:
https://boingboing.net/2017/12/18/ufo-ipo-182-take-me-to-you.html
Nah! It’s Putin (again)
Dear Colonel,
Fortunately, aliens are unlikely to share DNA and hence virus’s with us. Moreover, the issue with the germ warfare was that technology levels were too close. For beings that could travel (not in an intergenerational ship) the distances of the stars, I am sure they could simple scramble all species with a certain DNA from orbit, if they wanted to remove the troublesome bipeds. Or sterilize the planet and Terraform it to their liking. Or not give a damn (I suspect the last – do we care about ants?).
Clearly, if an advanced species wanted us to know they exist, they would have already on all the TV Channels, etc… So why not?
is there a rigorously followed prime directive?
What could have happened to other planets where a matter transmitter is commonplace and money has no meaning due to there being infinite abundance at the push of a button (The Economics of Star Trek). One could imagine some real nastiness from the (current day) Borg – alluded to in several star trek episodes that suggest we have a few more world wars ahead of us – ones that make WW2 look like a picnic.
This also assumes they have a conscience, a feature that has been in short supply in humanity’s history. Maybe if you survive the threat of nuclear war armageddon, by default your species has a conscience.
I too await with a bowl of popcorn.
Thanks Pat D .. the next couple “follow-on” Tyson vids help explain both some of my ‘take that you dumbo” conclusions but maybe some of those for folks here as well. Again, thanks to both Pats for the crackerjack day start. ted
I was thinking more along the lines of a visitor eventually leaving behind microbial contamination by mistake, not a “They Live” scenario (sci-fi movie). Barring faster than light travel, an unshielded robot probe would probably get sterilized by millennia of exposure to cosmic radiation though.
I once had a neighbor who thought that Venus rising in the sky was a UFO. It was at its brightest phase and a beautiful thing to see. But still gave him and his family a mild panic until I explained that Venus had phases just like the moon. Even then they seemed dubious. I believe it took several more nights before they actually believed me.
More likely the other way round… That’s what Keel considered. There are oodles of comparisons between historical encounters with the supernatural and encounters with “aliens”. Based on that evidence, one could go either way.
Possible. But most of the sightings occurred after the war ended.
And then you had the “foo fighters” seen by the US and allied pilots over Europe.
And before that, as several people including Keel dug up, you had the “mystery airplanes” in Scandinavia and “mystery airships” in the US in the 1800’s.
Not a necessarily valid assumption: please see the book by Conway-Morris; Life’s Solution: the inevitable human in a lonely Cosmos
When you say “seen”, Richard, surely you mean “reported’? Back in the summer, I saw ball lightning over the Grand Canal in Venice. I might have reported it as a UFO. Keel’s point was that the whole narrative of round things in the sky, and then car loads of FBI guys turning up to quiz folk about them, had its genesis with the Japanese paper balloons.
The salient point lots of people miss is that the object or phenomenon are called “unidentified” – i.e. unkown. John Keel’s Operation Trojan Horse addresses the phenomenon from this angle
https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Trojan-Horse-Classic-Breakthrough/dp/1938398033
and Jim Keith produced an excellent talk on the subject which reads almost like an essay from Nagarjuna (the seminal source on Skepticism)
http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc1441.htm
My take is the phenomenon will continue to challenge our belief systems until such belief systems evolve to constitute a consensus reality with the reality(ies?) which produce the phenomenon.
Here is a rather interesting look at some of the official disinformation aspect of UFOlogy:
https://www.amazon.com/Mirage-Men-Adventure-Espionage-Psychological/dp/1602398003
Just BTW, there’s a site called NUFORC that serves as a registry for mysterious aerial settings and I think it does a credible job. Most of the reported sightings are one-offs that never get further attention, let alone resolved. But every now and then there are clusters of multiple sightings by different observers at around the same time that look interesting. A recent example is from the evening of December 9, when a bunch of folks in Colorado and adjacent states saw a line of red lights moving through the sky. Such multiple sightings are often resolved as aircraft, satellites, bolides, space debris reentries and the like, but some aren’t.
http://www.nuforc.org/
http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxe201712.html
If you read Vallee, and I did as a teenager many decades back, the UFO phenomenon is many centuries old. That is something consistent with almost any possible explanation, whether mirages, hallucinations, aliens, other dimensional, or supernatural.
Agreed. I read a wonderful book a few years ago called “Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld” by Patrick Harpur. https://www.amazon.com/Daimonic-Reality-Field-Guide-Otherworld/dp/0937663093/
Reviewer Tricky Widget has this to say about the book (much better than I could off the cuff)
“This tragically under-known gem is the most brilliant book on the deeper nature of the world that I’ve ever encountered (and I’ve met a *lot* of such books). On the surface it appears to be a book about UFOs, angels, ghosts, and crop circles. But once you get into it you discover that it’s actually a book about an entirely different way of understanding reality in which all of those things and so much more not only make sense but are inevitable, profound, and important.
Harpur is Cambridge educated and it shows. *Daimonic Reality* is brimming with classical sensibility and academic rigor. Yet he blends his myriad references to Western arts and sciences into an approachable alchemy that is easily grasped. Yet what is grasped is so radical and elusive that it may take several readings over several years for it to fully permeate one’s consciousness.
—————
Positing UFOs as a vehicle of Mythos, rather than Logos. A gateway to the collective unconscious. UFO phenomena as archetype. Evidence of UFO’s as a “spiritual” phenomena is very clear over the centuries (including ‘visitors’ as ancestors from the stars). But, as a long term science fiction fan I really really want those UFO’s to be mechanically real. That’s where more evidence is needed. Until then it remains an intriguing Mystery.
O.K.call me a tin foil hatter but I saw a UFO decades ago in the 50’s…maybe someone can say what it was now but no one back then could say.
It was as usually described, a round or oblong shaped silver disc that hovered about 200 ft over the water on bouge banks sound and then in a nano second disappeared. It was seen by us youngsters and the adults who were out on the pier behind our house.
Now and then one of my cousins who was there will mention it but it remains a mystery. Never saw anything like it since.
“You were hoping for a different answer.But this is beyond our comprehension. What answer would a lab rat understand from a scientist in a white coat putting electrodes in its brain, giving it cancer?”- dark skies
What is it? Experimental drone, California is where the X45 and others were developed, also early noughties is the right time period.
I think these space aliens might come in peace “to serve man”. Like in the Twilight Zone episode.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zone)
The Navy pilot was interviewed by Tucker Carlson last night. Seemed very credible, matter of fact about it all. Here’s the 4-minute fascinating interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEpBZkyf3NM&sns=em
Tab G
I saw it. Very detailed. He said that the incident occurred 13 years ago. pl
London Bob
2004 pl
Old news. Why push it now? It couldn’t possibly be that some subject is being changed, could it?
It was the NYT (All the News We See Fit to Print) story that provoked the question.
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An optical phenomenon, I suspect. A physical object disappearing that quickly, ought to have caused an audible sound as air rushed in to fill the vacuum created by its departure. You should have heard a whoosing sound…
> A recent example is from the evening of December 9, when a bunch of folks in Colorado and adjacent states saw a line of red lights moving through the sky.
Well, this has been resolved in an interesting current-eventish sort of way:
http://www.amc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/1398050/jb-charleston-supports-usaf-weapons-school-capstone-exercise/
“JOINT BASE CHARLESTON, S.C. — The 437th Airlift Wing launched 17 C-17 Globemaster IIIs in support of the largest U.S. Air Force Weapons School Integration Phase Joint Forcible Entry event in its history, Dec. 9, 2017…”
“Mobility Air Forces aircraft, launching from 12 bases, participated in the capstone event, with an objective to deliver 120 U.S. Army paratroopers to a target area.
“We flew in with 37 C-17s and 21 C-130s Hercules, pressed into contested air space, and fought our way in,” said U.S. Air Force Maj. J.R. Wendler, 437th Operations Group director of staff. “It requires a lot of integration with other assets, F-16s, and F-15s for example, to clear the lane for the MAF to get to the objective area, air drop and put in our joint partners, in this case the Army, to start building up combat power.”
Korea, maybe?
Was thinking that as well. No booms. No turbulence.
No likely an optical phenomenon. It caused churn in the water and was seen on radar.
As I said, that is possible. However, that doesn’t explain everything in 1940’s or after. Since I never discussed this theory with Keel, I have no idea whether what you’re saying is correct or not. I do know it’s irrelevant either way to the overall issue or what Keel thought.
Then a more complex manifestation of electromagnetism: something akin to ball lightening – being largely insubstantial, having a radar bounce and being able to influence water with ionized salts content. This would explain how it could disappear in a puff, so to speak.
Babak,
I’ve wondered if the key to space travel isn’t distance and speed, it’s time. If time itself could be manipulated it would enable those maneuvers which would otherwise create steel-crushing gees. Only explanation I can dream up, if these things aren’t illusions.
The risk of a disease capable of fooling our immune systems coming from from another planet seems small to me. They evolved to get through those of a completely different world. The bugs that get us have developed highly specialized systems to get by ours. Our bodies have evolved incredibly sophisticated systems for stopping anything “weird” at the micro level. And if they have bugs that could do both then they have as much to fear from us as we from them.
War for the Earth? Seems to me any species that could master interstellar flight would view fighting for any planet silly. It’s a fair guess the odds of finding one of the oxygen/nitrogen/H2O planets in the small portion of their existence in which intelligent life exists on it very small. Nearly all such discoveries will be “unoccupied”, or perhaps rated as “mostly harmless”. The few having critters capable of making fire, stone tools, and fried chicken? Exceedingly rare precious objects of study.
Keel, in rejecting a nuts-and-bolts ET explanation, of UFOs, pushed the “ultra terrestrial” theme that was also popularised by Vallee et al. I am open-minded about the possibility that some ancient cities ( e.g Balkh) generated forms of science that antedate the modern form, and which in some way run parallel to it. However, there is a parsimonious explanation for the reports of fairies, goblins—and other “supernatural” entities that Keel and others found associated with UFOs. That explanation takes note of the very high incidence of schizophrenic illness in the west of Ireland–a place which also is steeped in fairy traditions (even up to the present day). Another factor in those rural beliefs may be to do with phyto-hygiene i.e the infections which afflict cereals and other plants. A notorious example of the latter is ergot–a fungi that if ingested by humans gives rise to visions (i.e hallucinations), the intensity and durability of which may vary according to genetic and cultural factors. A narrative that accommodates such experience, in this modern world, is ufology.
More details at
https://fightersweep.com/1460/x-files-edition/
As described, the event(s) involved multiple people, platforms and sensors.
Not too many people in the US sucking down ergot these days…
I’d prefer the geomagnetic explanation over anything that suggests most witnesses are either high or crazy. Although one problem with that theory is how geomagnetism would affect pilots at 30,000 feet…I suppose it’s possible.
Keel many times did directly suggest that a lot of the phenomena was occurring in people’s minds through one possible mechanism or another – especially in the case of contactees. But the scale and nature of the events – including his discovery that there were places you could go and see UFOs repeatedly, as well as actual physical evidence – suggests a “non-natural” explanation.
The pattern reminds me of wind patterns over North America – http://hint.fm/wind/
‘Not too many people in the US sucking down ergot these days’
Micro dosing with the ergot derivative LSD continues to grow in popularity.
https://www.popsci.com/lsd-gets-stuck-in-brains-receptors-serotonin
It is now thought that the LSD molecule binds to serotonin receptors and stays active in the brain long after ingestion. The chemical is easily available on the dark web. Yet, that illegal recourse is not the only route to dreaming with the eyes wide open. As II mentioned previously, contaminated rye–eaten in a sandwich, perhaps—can also allow an hallucinatory molecule to take up residence in one’s brain. That possibility was far greater, and the consequences more severe, in pre-modern times. The Italian historian Carlos Ginsburg , iin books such as The Night Battles studied some ramifications of that.
I think we agree though that the modern UFO discourse has an heterogeneous construction: a dog’s breakfast of delusion, military deception, persisting folklore, geomagnetic effects, poorly understood natural phenomena.
I should reiterate that I do not discount the possibility of ultraterrestial or even extraterrestrial manifestations. My strongly held view, however, is that any such entities will be the products of biological evolutionary processes i.e. not products of intoxication and imagination (demons, etc).