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The UFO Paradigm Shift & the Losers of the Debunkers’ Brigade

October 11, 2022 //
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The State of the Debate Restated

Two months after ‘Oumuamua was sighted, Leslie Kean and her colleagues broke the AATIP story in the New York Times, beginning a new era in public UFO discussion in America and the world. That was five years ago.

Since then, in several disclosures to Congress, the U.S. Government has admitted that there is indeed something to some subset of UFO sightings, the objects in question behave outside the parameters of normal understandings of physics, are seen not irregularly at sea, and that metamaterials from some UFO encounters are now being studied by Pentagon contractors.

Not admitted or publicly discussed by the government? The long history of UFOs since World War II; the many documents revealed that show serious, top-level concern over the issue by the Army, Air Force, and CIA (including the infamous Twining Memo); the weirdness of the Moon and the alarming accounts of deep sea “USO” (unidentified submersibles) activity or many even stranger reports and issues; or any attempt to disambiguate between official denials and covert hoaxery by government operations.

As for ‘Oumuamua itself, a well-known Harvard astronomer, Avi Loeb, has declared that the object is likely a bit technology from a stellar system outside our Sol’s orbit, and has written a book about it . . . which I’ve not read. 

I know little about all this, really. But I have tried to suspend my sense of shame at the subject. (If you don’t believe that intellectuals have been the target of a huge shaming psy-op regarding the subject, you haven’t been paying attention.) And I have gone on to repeatedly insist that this is a huge story — arguably the greatest of our time — and that we need to unclog our minds regarding it.

Twenty years ago, despite many multiple-witness sightings from the “foo fighters” to the Belgian Wave to the Phoenix Lights, it was easy for me and my Debunkers’ Brigade to dismiss the subject as disreputable.

Now it is clearly disreputable to dismiss the subject.

Also, it seems to me, yammering about topics like the ”Fermi Paradox” without addressing UFOs is witless as well as grand examples of pathetic insularity in action.

That being said, I am by no means committed to the ET Hypothesis as an explanation for all or most or even some of these publicly unexplained sightings and their surrounding corona of lore. One need not lurch from knee-jerk debunking to credulity. Now more than ever we need to combine curiosity with a doubters’ discipline.

twv

Categories information vs misinformation vs disinformation, paranormal &tc

Mar-a-Lago Disclosure

August 13, 2022 //
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It would be funny were it true that Trump has squirreled away classified documents — if those documents related to UFOs!

I don’t see any advantage he could possibly milk from “nuclear” documents. But from documents about UFOs? Ah, that would make sense. He could be threatening to disclose a bit more truth or lie than the Deep State Secret Keepers want. And the lore about the secrets indicates it could be almost anything, and still be a doozy.

The government has admitted there’s something to UFOs. We the People just don’t know what. Trump undoubtedly was briefed on the subject to some degree far beyond what we have been told, and what he was told is undoubtedly (at the very least) interesting.

twv

Categories paranormal &tc, Politics

Trust No One

August 11, 2021 //
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One cannot logically dismiss UFO close encounter reports summarily merely because we have reason to regard the reports of the crafts’ alleged masters — variously identified as Venusians, Zeta Reticulans, inhabitants of distant galaxies or comparatively nearby stars, such as Sirius — as preposterous.

We have to consider the possibility that the beings in the “flying saucers” are liars.

Indeed, once one gives up the idea that not only is our government lying about UFOs, but so too are the ostensible “aliens” inside, the subject begins to make sense.

Encounters with Trickster beings are very, very old, and resemble UFO lore to an alarming degree.

Of course, what about you and me? We have no reason to believe any particular theory. We just have reason to disbelieve the scoffers, the “skeptics” whose idea of explaining data depends mostly upon denying data.

I find self-identified skeptics to be ultra-amusing. These are people who defend a paradigm promoted by the Pentagon and by the shady hall-walkers in the deepest corridors of the Deep State — the latter folk being self-interested/class-interested statists who have been caught already, on the record a hundred times over, in lies about UFOs, and much else.

Indeed, between the tales from close encounters and press releases by the Pentagon, we only know that we can Trust No One.

twv

Categories information vs misinformation vs disinformation, paranormal &tc

The Evasion Factor

July 16, 2021 //
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A frequent objection to UFOs as presented in anecdote, rumor, lore and scientific data is that they behave elusively, and that such evasive behavior contra-indicates intelligence. “Why don’t the ETs just contact the authorities?” This very common challenge reveals more about the assumptions of the objector than provides evidence for precluding the existence of UFOs.

1. They may not be extraterrestrials as commonly understood — that is, from “other planets.” The ET Hypothesis is only one explanation among many for the phenomena. I lean to some form of “inter-dimensional” presence.

2. If the UFOs are directed by time travelers (which is one form of inter-dimensional), evasion might be completely explicable: to avoid time paradoxes.

3. If the UFOs are directed by crypto-terrestrials, the operators may resist being discovered forfear of destruction — if they are hiding out in the oceans, lithosphere, Antarctica, or the Moon, for instance. They would be vulnerable, so evasive behavior would be utterly explicable.

4. If the UFOs are directed by beings who have a long history with our species, our knowledge of this history might ruin their experiments on us or manipulations of us.

5. If the UFOs are run by super-advanced species (as the ET hypothesis almost necessitates) their interest in collaborative interaction could be very low, since we would not be anything like our equals. I do not try to interact with local ant colonies or bother to treat the ants (or any wild species) as my equals. The very assumption is absurdly hubristic.

6. We should not rule out angels and demons here, or some near-equivalent. A history of religion suggests we might be thankful that they usually sport an elusive, as opposed to publicly interactive, form of sociality.

The objection to evasive behavior also assumes that ETs have not contacted the authorities. Why would we think the authorities not also take an elusive approach?

In fine, I find this common objection to UFOs to be kind of witless.

twv

Categories paranormal &tc

Thinking Outside the Black Box

March 22, 2021 //
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I chatted with Matt Asher a week or so ago. The podcast is up:

And as a video, too:

Matt has figured out the knowledge/trust issues of our time, and explores the problems in an interesting way. I think you may enjoy this one. You may find it even helpful.

And the UFO talk is not off-topic.

Matt Asher’s podcast is The Filter, and his most recent episode, referenced in our chat, is well worth looking up.

twv

Categories Conspiracy, information vs misinformation vs disinformation, iTunes, paranormal &tc, Podcast, Psy-op, SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube

Q, Anon

February 26, 2021 //
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People not tempted by a weird belief express their incredulity. They dismiss the belief out of hand, with a kind of contempt that gives them a feeling of being special, set above the other. They think they are superior.

Pride goeth before the abyss.

I have been fascinated by QAnon, as I occasionally mention. Not fascinated enough to research it much. But contact with Q posts online gave me an extra window into a world I know exists, but which I experience chiefly through fiction: the world of myth, legend, mania. . . .

I have oft repeated two judgments about Q:

I have no evidence against much of the lore, and that the final months of Trump’s administration would put the theories to a falsifiability test.

This last idea seemed especially important. And I was as pleased as anyone to witness QAnon lore largely falsified.

You know, because, come what may, Truth is better than lies.

But those who see in QAnon only insanity and partisan madness, and in their rejection of it see evidence mainly of their own high moral standing? Well, they tend to look at the phenomenon with less open-ended interest. For example, this question-and-answer on Quora:

How can I convince Qanon supporters that Q is a hoax?

Let me summarize Qanon for you.

There is a cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles who are running a sex-trafficking ring and are working against Donald Trump in order to ruin the world.

Think about that for a moment.

Let it sink in.

Do you really think that there is anything you can say to a person who believes in that which will change their mind? They must have armor built from the thickest, laminated slabs of fabricated lies welded together that is proof against the strongest facts or logic.

As a coworker once told me (and I’m sure it’s not an original from him):

“You cannot reason someone off of a cliff they didn’t reason themselves onto.”

Or, as another coworker put it (and I suspect this is an original):

If you don’t speak crazy, don’t talk to crazy.

In short, there is nothing you can tell them. They will just assume that you are part of the cabal.

This answer seems all very knowing and savvy. I am sure its author felt very satisfied with his answer. But all of his assumed “wisdom”? It is all as fake as QAnon proved to be.

The main assumption is false. And this is important. Yet it is a falsity sanctified by the very best authorities. It was pithily stated by Jonathan Swift long ago:

Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion,
which by Reasoning he never acquired

Fisher Ames restated it:

Men are not to be reasoned out of an opinion
that they have not reasoned themselves into.

But this is more obviously untrue than the QAnon conspiracy accounts themselves. I rejected many ideas using “reason” that I had acquired in a much more careless way. In fact, most of my ideas that are of a controversial nature were so acquired. Writing before Swift, Dryden is more nearly right:

A Man is to be cheated into Passion, but to be reason’d into Truth.

Of course, “reasoning” can err; or, more precisely, reasoning man does not always find the truth. Using evidence and logic, one can conjure up a conjecture, knead it into a theory and proclaim it “verified” in proper positivist fashion and remain completely wrong. Indeed, in my experience, people who do this can be as obstinate (or more) than those who haphazardly accumulate convictions.

The Quoran’s answer was mere pride and prejudice. I would trust nothing about about that person’s epistemics. His core beliefs that he thinks define himself as a rational man bear, likely as not, all the weight of gossamer.

After all, we have seen many a QAnonster drop the more fanciful notions. You have probably even read a report or two about such a recantation: the “shaman” of January 6 has so confessed to having been fooled.

Of course many Q enthusiasts only reject select parts of the lore. And perhaps that is what is warranted. Break the Quoran’s litany into separate points:

  1. There is a cabal seeking to run (ruin?) the world.
  2. Its members worship Satan.
  3. They engage in strange anthopophagic rites.
  4. They are pedophiles.
  5. Many political insiders participate in or are blackmailed by sex-trafficking rings.
  6. One or more of these cabals worked mightily against Donald Trump.

With just the above, quite slight restatement, Q lore looks less nutty. Is there a cabal for global governance? Well, yes; more than likely more than one. Do some of these folks worship Satan? Well, have you heard of the Temple of Set and its status within the U.S. Government, courtesy of lobbying by a man who became a top NSA official? Set may or may not equal Satan. Cannibalism? Yes, it is now being openly defended as a sexual fantasy on lefty websites, and I wouldn’t be shocked to hear of worse. Pedophile sex rings among the very powerful have been uncovered in Britain and Europe, and Jeffrey Epstein may not have killed himself. Finally, Donald Trump was indeed opposed by very connected members of the FBI and CIA etc., and this is not at all controversial.

The questions for Q enthusiasts are:

how organized are the groups they oppose?

how knowingly do how many of their enemies share the negative, lurid attributes Q assigned to them?

how explicit and how extreme are their aims, or are some or all driven by a sort of memetic blindness?

how much of Q lore was hope, how much of it was a prank, and how much was disinformation by masters of psychological operations?

I heard quite a few science fictional scenarios from Q folks. You know, about Trump directing the military to engage in secret operations against underground caverns of devilish pedophile cannibals. That kind of thing. It felt like open-source sci-fi. And while it would be easy to dismiss all this out of hand, I had no trouble just setting it onto my Epoché shelf, carefully filed.

Why not just dismiss it?

Well, were the government not officially disclosing UFO information in dribs and drabs, while ignoring eight decades’ worth of leaked memos about UFOs, I probably would. But we have a huge mystery here, the government has been all over the map concealing, denying, acknowledging and ignoring the UFO lore, making it a huge matzo ball looming over our culture and over our conception of the world. I know that most intellectuals prefer to ignore this. I cannot. In my philosophy, inconvenient evidence requires explanation, not damning. (I relish every Charles Fort reference.) And I recognize what C.G. Jung recognized, that government handling of the UFO issue is driving people nuts.

Nuts enough to believe Q? Yes. But also nuts to disbelieve everything even slightly Q-adjacent.

Oh, and the nuttiest thing in Q? That Donald Trump was going to save us from the bad guys. Turns out: nope. The globalists have taken control, shamelessly engage in a concerted suppression of dissent, and have used the excuse of a contagion to marshal unconstitutional powers to rob millions of the freedoms. And they insist on doing more.

Oh, and not only was Trump unable to stop them, in the key area of COVID insanity, Trump fed the beast.

Q was obviously way off. And I do hope Q enthusiasts can reason their way out of placing inordinate hope in mythic champions who — it just so happens — deliver them to their enemies. For sacrifice.

twv

Categories A Journal of a Plague Year, Conspiracy, Epistemology, paranormal &tc, Quora

Behind the Scenes, Unacknowledged but Immense

January 20, 2021 //
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Could our political mess be the mere epiphenomenon of the UFO story?

Multiple Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts have discussed their UFO experiences while in space flight, though usually briefly and not in public. Gordon Cooper was most frank, and Edgar Mitchell impressively took up the cause, while Buzz Aldrin’s cryptic and not-so-cryptic pronouncements are often most interesting (such as his discussion of the L-shaped craft that tracked Apollo 11 for days was famous for a day, but quickly given an official public massaging). Many NASA alums have become UFO researchers. The lore on all this is vast, but NASA treats the issue as one to be kept strictly mum.

Wally Schirra is said to be the first astronaut to use “Santa Claus” as codeword for a UFO close to a capsule. You can run through NASA transcripts for discussion of that jolly ol’ elf. Medical channel communications were, multiple sources claim, how some of the Apollo astronauts on the Moon discussed the tricky matter of being observed by UFOs. Yes, this was said by several NASA employees as having occurred on all Apollo missions.

We should consider the possibility that one reason not to have gone back to the Moon is to avoid close encounters in full public view. There was a famous oops with Apollo 14 and Walter Cronkite. Too hard to manage.

Now, I am as far from NASA as we are from that mysterious sphere in our night skies, the Moon (which really is bizarre), and I know little for sure. But I do know that quite a few astronauts have been believers in UFOs, and some appear to have been scared to their core — see Neil Armstrong’s strange behavior post-11. And then there are the cosmonauts! I have mentioned before that one female cosmonaut has even written a book on the subject of UFOs … but this Polish publication has not seen print in the English language.

I watch and read debunkers on this and similar subjects, and am usually unimpressed. They seem to always be spewing bunk. Cooking up a few counter-explanations for a few claims is not a way to falsify the vast lore on the subject. But they do have something on their side: the practice of secrecy by the U.S. Government. However, we know quite a bit about that secrecy, now. And it does not really supply any epistemic weight to the debunkers’ cause. The fact that several segments of the U.S. Military have admitted that UFOs have been studied for a long time, that their telemetry data and testimony by military people are not faked, and do not point to incidents of known technologies within U.S. inventories, well, that puts the debunkers at huge disadvantage.

Like political and religious debates, the public debate over UFOs is not very rational. Because public officials and academic scientists are not allowed to discuss the issue in a straightforward manner — disallowed by cited NDAs as well as the obvious cultural taboo — the popular discussions are often dominated by religious cultism, hucksters, and bizarre political psy-ops like Q.

Trump seemed uninterested in the subject, while Hillary pushed for full UFO disclosure. This has led me to speculate that the reason Trump was allowed to win in 2016 was to punt the issue down the field for four years. Now, perhaps, the Deep State has its act together enough, and has figured out a way to lie about UFOs that will please its Democratic voting base. But that is mere speculation. Nevertheless, I expect a shift on this subject with Biden-Harris in office.

My guess is that this is one of two issues that worry our overlords most, the other being the unsustainable financial system. They may even be oddly connected — perhaps by the pandemic, which could very well have been another diversionary tactic. We may see.

Much depends upon what UFOs are. They do not constitute a uniform phenomenon. From my recent reading, and reading between the lines, the issue is not just a simple matter of “extra-terrestrials.” I suspect UFOs are far, far weirder than that, probably an admixture. But of what? Perhaps extra-solar space travelers, interdimensionals, crypto-terrestrials, recent secret space program reverse engineering projects going back to the 1950s and beyond, and even maybe time travel and Simulation interfaces. I would not wholly rule out angels and demons.

If the UFO subject is a hoax, and I am wrong on its existential reality, then — considering all the NASA involvement — it is a Deep State psy-op at base, and that could be the worst of all possibilities.

Talk about conspiracy!

twv

Categories A Journal of a Plague Year, Death Race 2020, paranormal &tc

The Story of Stories

September 1, 2020 //
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What we aren’t talking about:

A month ago, the New York Times published a major UFO story, doubling down on its previous recent efforts, with research journalist Leslie Kean serving as the driving force. The article relates that not only does the UFO/UAP constitute a real, non-natural/extra-civilizational phenomenon, and that the U.S. military admits this, but it indicates that there seems to be some reality to the ufology lore that there have been crashed UFO retrievals. And that the Deep State is studying them.

Yet almost no one talks about this.

What must we make of this? The ‘newspaper of record’ unleashes onto the world what could be the biggest story in human history, yet smart people either snicker or avert their eyes, back on to (1) the ‘pandemic’ and (2) the riots and (3) the upcoming election.

Honest inquirers should consider the possibility that while we may now be gleaning the first few data from the (4) trickling UFO disclosure, we have indeed learned something HUGE about human nature.

And what is that? 

Well, boy, do we Homo boobiens have an ability to put blinders on and let dogmas rule us, while at the same time allow ourselves to be manipulated by the contrivances of politicians and media, no matter ungainly. 

What if these linked stories are deeply linked?

We may also have been given a clue as to why the coronavirus contagion has successfully turned a whole population into willing serviles to the biggest assault on freedom in American history, for so little good reason. Ours is a decadent civilization, and the people are easy to control because they are poltroonish. Fearful of death. Manipulable.

I cannot help but wonder: are the four major stories of this year related?

It is easy to speculate that the pandemic panic and the protests/riots have been orchestrated by Democrats to regain control of the White House. But what if it . . . be . . . bigger? 

What if it is all being done to soft-pedal the most unsettling story of all time? That is, what if (1), (2), and (3) all revolve around (4)?

After all, UFO disclosure was a pet project of John Podesta and Hillary Clinton. When Trump won, within the year AATIP was revealed and the TTSA moved mightily behind the scenes to nudge the first disclosures. 

The nature of the disclosure was determined by the Trump win.

And even the Trump win could be part of the story. After all, Trump’s most significant achievement during his presidency so far has been engagement with China. The SARS-CoV-2 came from China. The Democratic Party has served for a generation as the pro-China party. And China is quickly building a powerhouse of a space program. If the world’s governments have been sitting on the biggest story in human history, but the epochal secrecy is now in jeopardy, perhaps this is why (or at least part of why) they are now are scrambling into space. Advantage. Priority. Positioning. 

The Chinese warlords/pseudo-communists want in on whatever is coming.

And the reason the least attractive and least plausible candidates for the Democratic Party’s P/VP ticket were selected over better alternatives? Both are in on parts of the secret — Biden having been Vice President and briefed; Harris being on the Senate Intelligence and briefed — and both can be trusted by the DNC or the donor billionaires (or the archons or whoever) to leverage the information and advantage “correctly.”

Further, Donald Trump, nephew of the scientist who inventoried Nikola Tesla’s many trunks after the inventor’s death, himself may be playing for another faction — also likely Deep State — to gain that UFO advantage.

He who controls the disclosure controls the world.

But I am dubious that it can be controlled. Not really. It is too huge.

twv

Categories A Journal of a Plague Year, conspiracy, Fourth Estate, journalism, paranormal &tc, Psy-op

A Little Lunacy

August 13, 2020 //
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If you tell me the Moon is made of green cheese . . . I’m going to laugh, of course, the idea being so preposterous. I could falsify the claim without much trouble, at least with extrapolations from facts and from theories well-established — like, you know, cheese is a product made of fermented milk, and we have no reason to believe in a lactose-heavy moon, etc. In addition, I would head you off at the pass, noting that the designation of our galaxy as “the Milky Way” can in no way excuse flights of fancy.

Now, were you to tell me that the Apollo lunar missions were all faked, I would express incredulity, again. But it’s not quite so far-fetched as the cheeze biz, and call me something less than a whiz, or wiz, I would have to take some trouble to process your claim. But I have looked into it, and can shoot it down. Though I admit, some of your points may continue to hold some interest. 

But if you tell me that the Moon has a titanium crust and a much lighter, lower-mass core, and that it “rang like a bell,” seismically, when tested in the Apollo missions, and that this is recognized by scientists and NASA but not often talked about, and that our Moon is very strange all around, and, moreover, that it isn’t the only moon in our solar system to be extremely weird — Carl Sagan having speculated that Mars’s Phobos could be a space ship, its orbit being (how shall we say?) as puzzling as our moon’s, and sporting a monolith on its surface that (ahem) sticks out like a giant crystal or an intelligently-made building, and, further, that Saturn’s Iapetus turning out to look eerily like Star Wars’ Death Star — well, what do I do with all that? Not much. But the fact that we have these peculiar facts that don’t fit in easily with the Nothing-To-See-Here-Folks attitude of professional astronomers, who pooh-pooh any talk of anything paranormal as if their job were poo-pooing rather than exploring — all this does strike me as very odd, and evidence of something. I just do not know what.

Meanwhile, my experiments in writing long sentences proceed apace.

twv

Categories paranormal &tc, Random musings

The Religion Coming to Birth in Our Time

March 18, 2020 //
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In his 2009 book, Christian pollster George Barna explores the varieties of religion in America. I’ve mentioned the book before, since I found it extremely interesting. But I just noticed something: he misses the religion that is coming to birth in our time.

There is no mention of UFOs in this book.

This is a big lapse, because, whatever else may be said about the “ancient aliens/flying saucer” aficionados, they are developing their lore at breakneck speed; it is in a foment as wild and diverse as was Christianity during its first 300 years; and there is a prominent and somewhat ominous spiritual component. Further, there are parallels to the bewildering complexion of religion 2000 years ago, with Gnostic, Orthodox, agnostic, philosophical, and misotheist sub-movements.

Of course, it may be that most members of the “seven faith tribes” that Barna explores in his polling data would be (outside his book) very dismissive of the “UFO nuts,” as to be expected.

“Everyone is.”

But that “everyone” is rapidly diminishing — especially now that several branches of the U.S. Government have admitted to the existence of so-far-as-yet-unexplained aerial phenomena that irregularly-but-not-too-infrequently appear in our oceans and skies, and appear to be (in many cases) craft of some kind.

This leaves the emerging religion in a very dangerous position: it could be captured by real beings of unknown variety — or charlatans and fake-outs. (Or both.) The weirdness of it all is quite dangerous.

You may think that Ancient Aliens is just rube entertainment. You would be wrong. I am not saying it is reliable or even mostly non-nut. But I am saying it is reaching increasing numbers of non-dismissive ears and imaginations, and that this is having a spiritual impact and will have an increasing political impact. The last election was truly interesting, since one of the two major candidates explicitly and repeatedly promised this community disclosure on the subject, from the U.S. Government. What this candidate did not appreciate was that she was, from what I can tell, more deeply distrusted in this community than in most. Not a few “UFO nuts” I have encountered believe that Trump was selected by elements within the Deep State to make a big push against her cult, which is regarded as untrustworthy in the extreme. We are talking Q-Anon kinds of conspiracy. PizzaGate and much, much more — but with the arrest and putative death of Jeffrey Epstein, PizzaGate has gained new legs. And even if this particular rumor turns out (as it looks) to be buncombe, the linkages between the trafficking of youngsters for sexual exploitation by the very rich and famous remains a thing.

Precisely what kind of thing, I do not know.

But it is noteworthy that John Podesta and the Clintons, who feature so big in PizzaGate lore, are all proud pushers of UFO disclosure.

With some amusement I also note that I write about UFO stuff more often than any of my friends would like. It creeps them out. As a known sympathizer with Barna’s so-called Captive Christians (odd name!) while having been for years a member in good standing of Barna’s Spiritual Skeptics, my affinity for UFOs may seem a bit out-of-the-blue. So, disclosure: my reasons for often bringing up this matter are not simple, but manifold:

  1. UFOs have influenced our culture greatly, aesthetically and ethically and spiritually;
  2. UFOs appear to have some unsettling truth-value, precisely what I do not know;
  3. Honest people should feel therefore compelled to consider the issue — admittedly bizarre — in non-dismissive ways;
  4. The issue has links to what I regard as most important story of our epoch, the cataclysms at the end of the Ice Age that are pregnant with paradigm-busting potential;
  5. The subject is such an enigma and so fraught with deception and error that it provides a good challenge for nimble minds — as I hope mine can qualify for, for a while at least;
  6. The subject is intimately related to all major traditional religions and esoteric religious traditions as well as to literature (science fiction) and dreams (ask Jung);
  7. The emerging religious movement that is (just barely) contained within the UFO aficionado community almost surely will prove to have a huge impact on our social world, if we manage to survive what’s coming down the pike.

In my first paragraph, I deliberately echoed Catholic theologian John S. Dunne’s opening words in The Way of All the Earth (1972): “Is a religion coming to birth in our time? 

It could be. What seems to be occurring is a phenomenon we might call ‘passing over,’ passing over from one culture to another, from one way of life to another, from one religion to another. Passing over is a shifting of standpoint, a going over to the standpoint of another culture, another way of life, another religion. It is followed by an equal and opposite process we might call ‘coming back,’ coming back with new insight to one’s own culture, one’s own way of life, one’s own religion.’

Until the last several years, ufology was as alien to me as the religion of Ba’al or Quetzelcoatl. In investigating this sphere of inquiry, speculation, fabulation, and bold conjecture, as well as its attendant spiritual components, I am in a sense trying to do what Dunne discussed. And what a weird world it is: strangely familiar understandings of consciousness are what stand out, and stories of resurrection in new bodies (“containers”) and recirculation of souls and the like litter the UFO noösphere — including literal beliefs in the evolution of a noösphere. Notions out of Hinduism, shamanism, Christianity, Norse myth — they are quite varied. And then there are the politico-social movements, like Ubuntu, which I find quite congenial, I confess.

But there is something even bigger on the line here. The truth. There is some truth in the UFO reports. Or, truths. The UFOs are not just misidentified insect swarms, ball lightning and skunk-work test runs. But figuring out exactly what it is? Difficult. I have no intention of doing the dogmatic thing — the pretend-skeptic thing — of dismissing the subject altogether, on the basis of focusing on just a few mistakes, frauds, and confabulations of obvious lunatics. 

An old theory of mine, though, does come into recollection: when I was young, and a Christian, I conjectured that God would be so outside of comprehensibility that any intersection between God and humankind would not look normal, have a normal feel to it at all. So it would be prejudicial to expect that intercourse with actual aliens would be any more comforting or comprehensible than intercourse with gods and angels and devils and the like would seem. An encounter with a Zeta Reticulan or Mantid or what-have-you would likely seem quite different from talking to a Tuvan or trading with a Quaker, as admittedly odd as those encounters can be in themselves.

Approaching a new field of inquiry with a dismissive attitude and strong preconceptions of possibilities might be a display of Dunning-Kruger more than anything else. Some humility might be in order.

And holding ideas in Epoché should hardly be difficult for a “skeptic”!

twv

Hunched over for work. And I cannot right now find my computer glasses.
Categories paranormal &tc, religion
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