The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
UFO Wars
“In the land of Languedoc, a big star and five small ones were seen in the sky. These, as it seemed, attacked and sought to fight the big one, which they followed for half an hour.” (1395 account, reproduced by Jacques Vallee, Wonders in the Sky)
Back before I started questioning the extraterrestrial hypothesis in this blog, I assumed that many UFOs represented a long-duration observation project by our interstellar neighbors—a project of “deep anthropology,” probably automated and having a very long-term security aim. I suggested that “they” aren’t particularly worried about us now, and don’t particularly care to make contact, let alone save us from ourselves; they just want to gather lots of data to enable prediction and control down the long road, when and if we ever become players on the interstellar stage. Only then would their automated defenses kick into gear if we posed any kind of threat.
One problem with this argument is that many UFOs seem way too big and visible to be information-gathering probes. Just extrapolating from our own surveillance technology, it seems far more likely that such probes would be very small and very stealthy. We’d probably never even know they were here. What purpose would be served by a huge black triangle, or a massive disk or sphere? Why do they need to be brightly lit?
There’s another possibility that makes more sense of the physical form (and size and visibility) of some of these objects, one that I had failed to consider (and am probably the last to consider—I’m not claiming originality here). It is that the UFOs witnessed by humans aren’t probes but are precisely the defensive technology I mentioned—but that they aren’t here to defend against us.
The wide variety of UFOs suggests a wide variety of origins. If our species is the object of casual interest by multiple extraterrestrial civilizations or their technology, then it makes sense they’d each establish a military presence here as part of their defensive insurance policy, each perhaps to ensure that some alliance is not ultimately struck between our advancing race and one of the other ET groups. Any emerging civilization (and there are probably gazillions) is bound to be “contested territory.” Each advanced race will send their weapons because the others have sent their weapons.
There are numerous historical accounts of UFOs seeming to skirmish with one another. If UFO waves are “maneuvers” on the part of different alien factions, staged for each others’ benefit, it would explain their visibility as well as their seeming senselessness. We are bystanders to a game that long precedes us, and whose rules we have zero clue about.
No Matter How You Slice It, It Comes Up Peanuts
They either come from here or they come from elsewhere.
Most people favor the latter view. Lately I’ve been riffing on the former. But both the cryptoterrestrial hypotheses and the extraterrestrial hypothesis have major problems—gaps in logic, on the one hand, and data on the other.
The big argument against the ETH as I see it is that, however advanced the technology we are dealing with, there is something way too “close to home” about certain aspects of the UFO phenomenon. Some UFOs are evidently piloted. Why would an advanced ET civilization need or want to personally travel here in house-sized ships? Why would they need to physically occupy bases or outposts here? Why would their ships crash (if the Roswell incident is to be believed)? If they are here for observation, they could monitor us with stealthy, even microscopic automated probes, not big, highly visible, brightly lit vessels. And the notion that they come visit as tourists or are posted here as soldiers or scientists just seems far-fetched, because it is too near-fetched. There’s just something naggingly un-cosmic about the picture of alien intelligences buzzing around our planet like gnats. Don’t they have more important things to do?
If they are instead cryptohominids, relatives of us who moved underground a few hundred thousand years ago—who knows, perhaps due to climatic change on the surface (i.e., ice age)—it would suddenly make sense of certain aspects of the UFO and abduction phenomenon. The longstanding, theatrical nature of our interactions with them, along with the assumption throughout world folklore that such “others” lived underground, suddenly fits. So does the rather human-like fallibility (again, if Roswell is to be believed) and their particular concern with our military installations. Their visibility makes perfect sense if they coexist with us, perhaps in significant numbers, on an increasingly crowded planet.
But the huge problem with the CTH is evidential: There’s zero physical evidence to back up the cryptos’ backstory. First, there’s no paleontology. As a commenter to an earlier post puts it: “Got fossils?” Now, I don’t think this is necessarily damning. It is at least conceivable that fossil remains of unknown nonhuman bipedal hominids have gone misidentified as products of normal human variation since they never fit into any existing paradigm. Witness the recent discovery of “hobbits” in Indonesia. Paleontologists might readily identify the skeleton of a “gray” as just a small human or child and not as an actual other species. The same question hovers over the curiously gray-like “Boskop” skulls found in South Africa early in the last century. Their big crania and childlike facial features were finally declared to be within the normal human range of variation, but I’m sure there are still many who would disagree with that interpretation.
The much more difficult question, I think, is “Got cars?” A technological civilization will leave lots of cool shit behind, and so far as anyone knows, no advanced technology preceding our own has ever been found. We have a pretty straightforward record of linear technological advancement beginning with Australopithecus. Nowhere (unless it has been kept way secret by some archaeological arm of the CIA or NSA) is there evidence of an older lithic technology succeeded by a bronze or iron age or industrial revolution unfolding in advance of our own. If aliens are a separate technological species, they dismantled their cities and took evidence of their social and technological evolution underground with them. And while there are supposedly ancient Indian texts describing flying machines, and at least one genuinely intriguing artifact from a 200 BC tomb in Egypt that looks like a model of a glider plane, the evidence is sparse at best for any kind of breakaway technological human civilization.
As Jacques Vallee has noted, there’s no way you can parse the data and have it make sense. No matter how you slice it, some part of the UFO phenomenon remains absurd.
WWKD?
All this talk of nonhumans, transhumans, post-humans. The coming Disclosure. The Singularity. We’re all focused beyond humanity to something else, some future state of being, some other species, something that transforms us and raises us to some new quantum state.
The more I think about this stuff, the more I think about Star Trek. The constant theme in that show was: What is it to be human? And the constant message was that it is our flaws, our emotions, our vulnerabilities that not only set us apart from machines and aliens, but also redeem us, that make us better than our foes.
Captain Kirk always defeated the Others, and won in his arguments with Spock, through his humanity. He was an argument for humanity, warts and all.
I don’t think any Singularity or Disclosure or any other horizon will change our fundamental humanity. We’ll continue being the flawed and emotional beings we have always been. And crossing such a threshold that teaches us our insignificance will ultimately drive us to learn more about ourselves and love ourselves more, including all our failings and flaws and fuckups. At least I hope that’s the case.
This will be the theme of any future philosophy, any future religion: What would Kirk do?
NASA’s Low-Hanging Fruit
Bryce Zabel, coauthor of A.D.: After Disclosure
Today we heard about some microbes that can exist in the extremely salty, alkaline, arsenic-rich body of water in eastern California that’s known as Mono Lake. … Because Mono Lake is such an inhospitable environment for life, the scientists say, this means that maybe we can find life “in some places we might never have thought to look before.”
That’s low-hanging fruit. They could start by craning their necks up and opening their eyes. …
It isn’t just that NASA should be scolded for looking down when they should have been looking up, it’s the sense of importance they bring to their bacteria while ignoring so many other solid facts, witnesses and reports and that, by doing so, they allow the sense of derision the media heaps on anyone who dares believe that UFOs are sometimes physical craft from someplace that isn’t here.
Read Zabel’s post, Dear NASA… We like the Super-Tough Microbes, Yes, But….
NASA UFO footage
If you’re on the fence about UFOs, take a look at these collections of NASA photos and footage compiled by LunaCognita and see what you think. Most of the still photos aren’t particularly compelling, and the perfectly straight-moving objects in Earth orbit clearly appear to be satellites, space junk, or dust. But the footage of objects making turns is pretty astonishing (our objects in space can’t rapidly change direction). And some of the footage from the Apollo missions is very weird. Like the object in the first video casting a shadow as it zig-zags over the moon (at 4:13)–WTF is that?
Ignore the cheesy music, but don’t turn off your sound, as some footage contains interesting astronaut dialogue. In the second compilation, note the exchange between Dr. Edgar Mitchell and Alan Shepherd on the lunar surface (at 5:13 in): “We’ve had visitors again…”
What I’d like to know is where and how LunaCognita obtained this footage.
This Is Your Brain on UFOs
The very sound science on memory and its fallibility I discussed in the previous post is, as I argued, particularly relevant to the question of close encounters … and not, as most psychologists would hold, simply to cast doubt on their objective reality. I think that it is precisely the kind of memory research that thus far has mainly been used to discredit abductions that might also lead to some fascinating new hypotheses actually consistent with the reality of such experiences.
I suggested a while back that the range of bewildering experiences reported by contactees is surprisingly, even uncannily, consistent with the range of experiences that can be produced by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Pairs of rapidly alternating electromagnets applied to the scalp can generate weak electrical impulses in the brain that, depending on where they are applied, may produce not only sleep paralysis-type effects (paralysis and intense fear) but also distorted time, hallucinated voices that would be experienced as telepathy, light effects, a sense of religious communion, enhanced cognition or creativity, and physical sensations such as levitation.
We can’t say with any certainty what UFOs are, but there is now no doubt that some are real, that they are technological, and that they interact with humans. There is no doubt that “contact” (in some sense) occurs. As long as we accept this, we need only invoke Occam’s Razor. The most parsimonious general explanation for bewildering contact or abduction experiences is neither “they are real” nor “they are confabulated” (as Susan Clancy for example argues) but a fascinating combination of the two: They represent an interaction between a real physical encounter and some form of electromagnetic cortical stimulation that radically distorts’ contactees’ perceptions. The stimulation could be deliberately applied or it could be incidental, or both.
Were the typical abduction experience limited to bedroom visitation, then Clancy’s argument that abduction memories are just elaborated constructions based on an episode of sleep paralysis—spontaneous hiccups in sleeping/waking—would hold more weight (and I’m willing to accept that that this explanation does apply in some or even many cases—perhaps all the ones she examines in her book
This high overlap strongly suggests to me that many abduction cases do represent a close or intimate encounter with someone or something real, but that the experienced “reality” consists of perceptions and thoughts and images recruited from within the abductee’s brain, not what objectively occurred. TMS seems like the best explanation—and one that would hold whether UFOs were extraterrestrial or terrestrial in origin.
TMS effects could first of all (sometimes, at least) be incidental to a close encounter. All evidence points to UFOs using some sort of electrogravitic propulsion; they appear to generate powerful magnetic fields in their vicinity. Simple proximity to UFOs commonly causes electrical systems in automobiles, planes, and radios to go haywire or simply fail. The same thing might happen to the electrical systems in contactees’ brains through simple proximity to such an object. For an analogy, think of Roy Neary’s crazily haywire truck dashboard when he has his first run-in with a UFO in Close Encounters—all the spinning dials, radio turning on, etc. This is like what happens with TMS. This is your brain on UFOs.
Or TMS effects could be deliberately applied. Use of paralyzing and mind-altering technology is a common theme in close-encounter reports. As certain military encounters suggest, UFOs themselves can deliberately disable airplane or missile-launch systems, so some sort of remote targeted electromagnetic scrambling of witnesses’ brains is certainly plausible. UFO-nauts themselves are frequently described to use hand-held devices (such as the often-reported “flashlights”) to paralyze people. It certainly would make sense that something like TMS would be an effective tool to control and confuse a person without causing bodily harm or leaving a physical trace (as a drug would).
TMS technology is already widely used in psychology laboratories and is even being developed for use in by the military, so it is also certainly within the capability of secret groups in the military or intelligence utilizing the UFO mystery for its own purposes (such as those explored by Mark Pilkington in his recent book Mirage Men
Memory is unreliable and subject to distortion even under the best of circumstances. Often two witnesses will report different colors or models of car in a hit and run, or give completely different descriptions of an assailant, and it is easy to generate false memories even without the help of magnetic fields or drugs. If something like TMS is involved, there may be little or no “there there” to contactees’ memories, and certainly nothing recoverable through hypnosis or any sort of therapeutic “regression.” It would be as unlikely as describing objectively what happened during an LSD trip or drunken bar crawl—there’s no objective sober perceiver in the brain alongside the impaired one, nothing to record the experience as it ‘really’ happened. This black-box nature of the phenomenon would open a big door to the kinds of cultural construction and post-facto sense-making using cultural archetypes that abduction’s critics like Clancy quite reasonably point to. Not to mention the forms of deception and social control Vallee warns of.
Whatever the case, the term “contactees” seems to represent a misplaced optimism on the part of those studying the phenomenon. Contact implies communication or sharing. But that hardly seems the character of most accounts. Misdirection, confusion, and exploitation seem to be the main themes. Whether achieved through TMS or something else, the remembered experiences of contactees are more likely compelling images and sensations and archetypes recruited from within their own brain, with the contactee as thus an unwitting participant in the deception. It is the opposite of communication. As long as we take the contact “image” literally and don’t do our best to peer behind the curtain (or break into the projection room, in Vallee’s metaphor), we are falling victim to that deception.
Breaking Astrobiology News…
Interesting news from NASA:
WASHINGTON — NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.
(from their press release)
AOL News has some speculation about what the finding might be.
Cool Old Documentary
A classic, cool UFO documentary from the 1970s, UFOs Are Here!, has just been made available online. It features Jacques Vallee, Kenneth Arnold, J. Allen Hynek, and others–even Steven Spielberg. Skip past the sorta cheesy new tacked-on preamble by Stan Deyo (first 10 minutes).
Un phenomenon psychologique
Late this past May I attended a symposium called “Alien Abduction Experiences: Normal Science or Revolutionary Science?” at a conference of scientific psychologists in Boston. The speakers included eminent abduction researcher Budd Hopkins and abduction ‘debunker’ Susan Clancy—two polar opposites in the whole abduction question.
As both a member of the psychology organization hosting the symposium and a believer (probably rare in that room) in UFOs—and one also open-minded to the particularly controversial question of abduction—I was excited to see what would transpire, but I also had a lot of trepidation. I knew that Hopkins would be walking into a lion’s den, as the audience consisted of the most “hard-science” side of psychology: those who do laboratory research that quite often discredits the less rigorous practices of therapists and those (like Hopkins) who use methods like hypnosis to supposedly recover memories of strange or traumatic experiences.
For an observer straddling both worlds, the scientific and the Fortean, the event indeed proved to be an enlightening and troubling experience. It crystallized for me exactly why ufology is so marginal to mainstream inquiry. It also reinforced my feeling that this marginalization is “our” fault (speaking now as a Fortean) as much as “theirs.” The non-openness to (and simple nonawareness of) new thinking goes both ways, to mutual detriment.
The first speaker, SUNY psychologist Stuart Appelle, sagely urged scientists to keep an open mind, citing Thomas Kuhn’s thoughts on normal versus revolutionary science and admonishing against a priori dismissal (not to mention ridicule) of ideas that don’t fit existing paradigms. Then Clancy took the floor and, after an assent to Appelle’s recommendation, passionately reiterated the argument in her book Abducted: How People Come to Think They Were Kidnapped by Aliens
Clancy’s argument is essentially what I too had long believed, having been aware of the questionableness of hypnotic regression, having studied how strange experiences like sleep paralysis are interpreted in very culture-specific ways, and having suffered sleep paralysis myself. Only more recently had I become aware of the greater richness of data not accountable in Clancy’s terms and come to think that her argument could be overly reductive (I’ll argue why in a subsequent post).
Sadly, Hopkins, author of Missing Time
The accusation is always that scientists are blind to the evidence that doesn’t fall within their narrow paradigms. But the fact is—and this episode displayed it painfully—the opposite is just as often true. Mainstream ufology is well behind the times in its awareness and understanding of scientific research, especially research in the social and behavioral sciences. In this case, whether or not the psychological scientists in attendance had already made up their minds about abductions didn’t matter. Hopkins presented the kind of data—accounts from hypnosis—whose validity has long been discredited by very sound research. His was the paradigm that had been superseded, and the burden of proof in that context was to defend the validity of his methods. He didn’t, and he didn’t even seem aware of the need to.
In other words, Hopkins had been invited to make a case that the study of abductions is revolutionary science, but he completely failed to rise to this challenge, and thus only reinforced the stereotypes of how retrograde and unrigorous ufology is.
I hate to have to side with debunkers on this isssue, but ufologists should get with the times on the hypnosis question. Although her tone was dismissive, Clancy’s argument is grounded in a very compelling and fascinating body of research, one that ufologists should familiarize themselves with. I’m thinking particularly of the pioneering false memory research of University of California-Irvine psychologist Elizabeth Loftus. Loftus, who was seated right across the aisle from me in this symposium, is actually something of a hero of mine. She had been instrumental in discrediting the tragic 1990s therapeutic fad of “recovering” memories of childhood sexual abuse—memories that generally prove to be false. That fad still is a blot on the reputation of clinical psychology, and it highlights some persistent popular misconceptions about how memory operates.
Memory is now known to be a malleable and pliant thing. The brain doesn’t record experiences like a camcorder. It is constantly reshuffling images and impressions, distilling our experiences to the gist and discarding insignificant details. When we do “remember” an event, the memory is actually a reconstruction using a few salient details but mostly a lot of schematic filler. Memory is also very susceptible to manipulation. In the laboratory, Loftus and her students have shown how easy it is to generate false memories in subjects—from pseudomemories of trivial childhood experiences like getting lost in a mall on up to traumatic pseudomemories of abuse. Such distortions readily occur in human interactions such as therapy and hypnosis as well as in larger group contexts like cults.
Despite persisting popular belief to contrary, abundant research has shown that traumatic experiences do not lead to memories being “repressed.” People avoid thinking about experiences that are painful, but they do not have ‘amnesia’ for them that requires extraordinary tactics like a hypnotic trance (or intense therapy sessions) to uncover. It is common that an individual will lack a context for making sense of a traumatic experience when it occurs, and this lack of context may contribute to it essentially getting avoided and “forgotten”—not lost, but just not revisited until later experiences may shed some new light and lead to a spontaneous recall. This is quite often how real sexual abuse victims remember their experiences after a long duration.
Children may be upset by abuse experiences, but they likely don’t really understand what is happening to them or necessarily grasp that it is wrong at the time. It may only be decades later that, say, reading a magazine article about the subject or talking about their childhood with a sibling might remind them of a long-forgotten episode that then suddenly “makes sense” in terms of new, adult knowledge—leading them at that point to report the experience or seek therapy to deal with it. Abuse episodes that are spontaneously remembered in this way are much more likely to also be corroborated by other evidence or the testimony of other individuals, and thus be genuine. Sexual abuse memories “recovered” in therapy or hypnosis seldom are. Child sexual abuse probably ought to be taken as a model for how to evaluate memories of abduction experiences too.
Abduction researchers would counterargue my child abuse analogy by saying that the memory suppression could be a product of technology or drugs administered by the abductors and not simply the trauma of the experience. But consider: By the same logic, it would be just as likely that such deliberate technology would scramble and distort their perceptions, not only their memory, and thus render any subsequent recollection unreliable. That such perceptual (rather than memory) intervention is occurring in authentic close encounters actually seems to me a highly plausible hypothesis, one that could make the most parsimonious sense of all the data. (I’ll develop this argument also in a subsequent post.)
As Lacombe puts it in Close Encounters (and as the real-life Lacombe, Jacques Vallee, would agree), UFO encounters are “un phenomenon sociologique.” They are also un phenomenon psychologique. And ufologists have a responsibility to know the science in both cases; they need to be able to critically evaluate their own evidence. Unfortunately, the key abduction cases that ufologists continue to cite—the Betty and Barney Hill case, for example, and many others—are tainted by the hypnosis factor. That data simply can’t be accepted anymore, and for the sake of making their case to the scientific community as well as advancing the rigorous study of UFOs and abductions, ufologists need to bring their own methods and standards up to date. It shouldn’t be hard: There is plenty of data that is not tainted by the hypnosis factor: experiences not recovered in therapy or through any kind of “regression” but that are remembered spontaneously—just as in authentic child abuse cases—or experiences for which no forgetting has occurred.
It doesn’t help anyone to cling to outworn theories or bad science. We should be secure enough to trust that good science will only help the ufological case—it just needs to be brought to bear on the subject more fully, and in a more informed manner, than it has been.
