Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
In the years, I’ve spent commenting here at Professor Turley’s blog, I have presented myself as an honest person, sensible and with humane beliefs. Many regulars think of me as sort of a blog “elder statesman” and one who has a rational view of the world. There are of course others, fewer in number I assert, who think me a fool and a knave, which shows you can’t please everyone. Professor Turley himself has expressed fondness related to my tendency to be honest and open about myself personally.
Yet through all of these years here, I have harbored a secret belief that I’ve avoided mentioning for fear that the esteem in which I’m held, will disappear in an avalanche of ridicule and disappointment. I have to admit that to a retired old guy on the wrong side of sixty years, my place here has provided comfort to my self-esteem and certainly the feeling that I can still find things in life to accomplish. To those who haven’t realized the obvious yet from my writings, I have my vanities and indeed my insecurities, so being a guest blogger has stroked those needy aspects of my ego. Since I’ve received much gratification from this, I have been loath to be completely honest about one of my more deeply held beliefs. I came across an article that impels me to break my silence and reveal this belief here and now. While in the eyes of some reading this blog, it might lower their opinion of me and expose me to ridicule, I must finally admit to you my dirty little secret.
Ever since the first nationwide “Flying Saucer” sensation began with the first “official” UFO sighting on June 24, 1947 by pilot Kenneth Arnold http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Arnold_UFO_sighting#Skeptical_explanations Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO’s) have been a phenomenon lasting for the past 64 years, with most governments ridiculing the people making the reports and dismissing the entire idea. This is despite the fact that many pilots have made sightings and indeed many people in large communities, such as WashingtonD.C., have seen UFO’s in their skies over a period of nights. I personally believe that UFO’s are indeed alien spacecraft and that the possibility of this being the case is narrowed by the unfathomable size of the Universe, its age and the trillions of stars that exist. I further believe that the governments have covered this up to prevent what in their minds is public panic and to deny the truth that if UFO’s do indeed exist; our technological capacity could not deal with them if necessary.
This article in Huffpost on 6/17/11confirms my belief in governments covering up the details of these sightings and ridiculing anyone claiming to have made a sighting: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/17/uk-releases-ufo-files_n_927351.html “The former Ministry of Defense (MoD) UFO Project chief [Nick Pope] is openly admitting to being part of what he claims was a U.K. policy of ridiculing UFO reports and the people who reported them.
“What’s abundantly clear from these files is that, while in public we were desperately pushing the line that this was of no defense interest,” Pope told The Huffington Post. “We couldn’t say ‘There’s something in our air space; pilots see them; they’re tracked on radar; sometimes we scramble jets to chase these things, but we can’t catch them.’ This would be an admission that we’d lost control of our own air space, and such a position would be untenable.”
My interest began in 1953, reading a book by Major Donald Keyhoe, USMC Pilot, Retired. In it he described the various documented incidents and the explanations given for them by the Department Of Defenses “Project Blue Book”, that was established seemingly to investigate the phenomenon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Keyhoe . Among others, Keyhoe had interviewed Air Force Captain Edward Ruppelt, who had been head of the Project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_J._Ruppelt
What I found so compelling was that perhaps 20% of the incidents could not be adequately explained and that distinguished observers, such as veteran pilots, were supposed to have mistaken everyday phenomenon, like weather balloons and Venus, for UFO’s. As my interest grew, it became obvious that our government would respond to any new sighting by first ridicule of the person(s) making the report of the sighting and then responding with explanations that were not credible. In the D.C., sightings in 1953 a mass of objects were not only detected by eye, but by airport radar and yet dismissed without adequate explanation.
What added to the government’s ability to ridicule were the so-called direct contact cases, first made famous by George Adamski: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Adamski and later by Betty and Barney Hill: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barney_Hill . Since the “contactees” in these cases seemed mainly to be self-serving individuals, they muddied the waters by being conflated with people who were seriously looking for explanations, or who had made direct sightings. Considering what the Huffpost article cited as details about the British Government’s policies, ridicule replaced research as a tool of institutional government investigation.
In further revealing my dirty little secret, I was for a time, in my teens, a dues paying member of The “National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena (or NICAP). It was a civilian unidentified flying object research group active in the United States from the 1950s to the 1980s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NICAP
While I never lost interest in UFO’s, my interest waned as my puberty began to assert itself and other things in life became more important. However, I have read enough about the topic to be certain in my own mind that there is much more to it than merely misidentification of known objects, moneymaking schemes, and public hysteria. In fact, an article in yesterdays Huffpost shows that the amount of UFO sightings has increased in recent years: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/26/ufos-pilots-history-channel_n_935847.html
As someone interested in ancient history some of the writings of Sitchin, Velikovsy and Von Danniken
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitchin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Velikovsky
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4niken
also, attract my interest and tie in with my feeling about UFO’s. I am keen on the possibility of Alien visits throughout human history and the possibility that they have affected our history and progress.
So there you have it. I’ve exposed one of the final embarrassing secrets about myself and opened up to your possible ridicule and/or opprobrium. Since we have so many people here who are qualified to comment, given their knowledge of science and other erudition, I would enjoy your comments. In any event, I feel much better having gotten this off my chest and while I’ve exposed myself further as someone with quirky sensibilities, I feel a certain lightness and freedom in making my confession.
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
Slarti, we must always be mindful of what Arthur C. Clarke once said on the subject. He said that science, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic.
Imagine what people two hundred years ago might think of our current science. Just speculating, I like to think the only person on the planet who might not be surprised would be Ben Franklin.
lotta ^..^,
In fact, P Smith’s statement that unproven things are false shows a profound misunderstanding of logic (on the other hand, your critique of his points was right on…). Things are true or false regardless of whether or not you can prove them or whether or not you have any evidence of any kind. You can’t always determine if something is true, nor can you always prove true theorems.
Gene,
I don’t believe that we will ever be able to use wormholes for travel, although I admit that I’m no expert and could easily be wrong on that one. I would also point out that gravity effectively travels faster than light (or, more accurately, gravitons, if they exist, would seem to have to travel faster than light – the Earth is attracted to the sun, not where the sun was eight minutes ago. A curved spacetime solves this problem on the map (light travels along geodesics in spacetime which is curved by mass – no particle is required to carry gravity), but I’m not sure that anyone understands what the territory is really like. Let’s hope we find out more in 2014…
to say nothing of living in other dimensions ala string theory
Blouise-
Indeed! Actually the joke about aliens seeing a person picking up after a dog and concluding that the human was subservient came from a comedian i heard but I can’t remember who it was. Might have been Bill Maher or George Carlin.
LK,
What we think we know, we know based on the information that we have at hand. Who would have ever thought that man was supposed to fly….it only took man to put wings on something…say 500 hundred years or so….I think Michelangelo drew pictures of a man flying……. so whats a few hundred years…
To everyone saying c is the speed limit, I have one word for you and Professors Einstein, Thorne, Penrose and Hawking agree . . .
Wormholes.
There are more ways to travel than simply compounding velocity. We know it’s possible. We just don’t know how to do it yet and at the rate we’re going as a species, we never will.
That strange noise you’re hearing in the distance? Is advanced alien cultures breathing a collective sigh of relief. Relief that a primitive species whose primary occupation is tribal warfare isn’t going to be spreading their messy and ridiculous petty internal conflicts among the stars.
Karl Friedrich: “…but P. Smith beat me to it.”
But he didn’t do a very good job of it. None of his statements can be proven as factual (as negative statements) and governing the debate.
There are limitations to what any current technology we have can do though. I’m not prepared to say a hundred or so years down the road we won’t be capable of something more or that there are not others that have found solutions to the limits we see before us today. Ascribing our limitations to every other race that exists is egocentric as is denying the probability of their existence. It’s an egocentricity we have done nothing to earn and one I won’t grant merely by virtue of our existence IMO.
The vastness of space and the limits imposed by the speed of light (regarding the accrual of mass of a speeding object) are problems now and seemingly absolutes that can be universally applied. Until we are sufficiently advanced technologically to prove that and as well, that conventional propulsion is the only way to approach space travel I will, in the interim, simply send greetings and welcome our space traveling sisters when they arrive. 🙂
If it weren’t such a long time held belief I’d chalk it up to senility. But instead it must be stupidity. I was going to reiterate that it’s inconceivable that a spacecraft could travel faster than the speed of light and the enormous distances of space, millions of light years to most stars that have an earthlike planet capable of sustaining life, but P. Smith beat me to it.
HenMan,
Bobcat scat worship?
Mike Spindell,
Good on you but I won’t be following you onto the ship. I won’t deny the possibility of its existence but I’ll spend what time I have left in this body looking for the dimensions whose shadow forms I see all around me.
“Everything in any dimension is also present in the form of a shadow in all dimensions below it.” Carl Sagan
AY, regarding spontaneous combustion. There are no proven cases where spontaneous combustion has taken place with a credible witness.
There have been experiments using hog carcasses. It appears that if there is a source of ignition, such as a candle or other flame, the carcass fat can combust in a slow fashion that replicates the cases reported of alleged spontaneous combustion. The body burns, slowly, but pretty much completely. It tends to remain localized and may not set the surroundings on fire.
Seriously, though- the UFO’s are actually intergalactic passenger conveyances filled with alien senior citizens who have come to visit the Grand Canyon and to watch the bizarre Earth Servants fire projectiles at one another. They particularly enjoy watching the Earth Masters, who are small four-legged creatures with tails that oscilate from side to side as each of them pulls an Earth Servant behind it. The tourists find it very amusing when the Earth Master expells a brown substance from it’s rear aperture onto the ground and the Earth Servant immediately picks it up and saves it in a flexible transparent container, apparently to be worshiped later at another location.
P Smith, With all due respect your list is predicated on the assumption that our level of development is such that what we can prove is somehow controlling on the rest of the galaxy and universe when it is not. Until the fifties it was not known that the majority of matter we can see when we look outward were galaxies and not individual stars. The actual configuration and magnitude of the matter in space has become known to us only very recently. When it comes to actual space exploration we are virtually foetal in our development. That we can’t prove something doesn’t really mean much.
Considering the sheer numbers of stars in our galaxy or local cluster your statements #1 – #3 could be couched in the obverse just as correctly: we currently haven’t the sophisticated means necessary to prove that: 1/ Life did not occurred on at least one other planet; 2/Intelligent life did not evolve on at least one other planet; 3/ Aliens are not capable of faster than light technology.
Regarding #4, “Aliens would have to detect our planet. Our radio waves have only been going out for 50 years at the speed of light,…”
Radio waves are not the only way to determine what possible conditions exist on another planet. We are now looking for planets that meet our bias of water being necessary for life as we know it and we aren’t using radio waves, radio waves are not the only method for detecting the possibility that a planet (or moon) might be suitable for life. While looking for water is a perfectly reasonable bias to have requirements wise, it may or may not be appropriate to all life. If it is, there is a lot of water in our own solar system and that is a product of the mechanics of star formation and planet building generally. We are not unique in this regard. There is a lot of water out there. Conveniently, it’s in the regions of space where it would be most useful for the evolution of life as we know it, stellar nurseries. :
“We can think of these stellar nurseries as giant chemical factories that are producing water vapor at a tremendous rate. The large amounts of water vapor present in regions of star formation will help the interstellar gas to cool, perhaps eventually triggering the birth of a future generation of stars.”
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=2431
Regarding #5, “Life occured at the EXACT SAME TIME on another planet as it did here,…”
If the evolution of life in the galaxy/universe is viewed as a continuing aspect of universal process’ and not a one time event it would seem to me that at any given time there will be many civilizations at a similar age as others give or take some number of millennia. Why is that even required? We have nothing to make a comparison against when postulating the outer limits of the effective lifespan of a species of technologically adept creatures; it could be several hundreds of thousands of years. Why should there even be an upper limit so long as hey are mobile as a race? The “exact same time” has a lot of play in it as a concept.
Mr. Spindell! Don’t get on that ship! The rest of the book- “To Serve Man”. It’s….It’s a cookbook!!!
Sorry, Steg, but you’ve confused the map with the territory.
Mike S.
This is way,way off topic,But I think you will enjoy it.
Water, Water, Everywhere, but Not a Drop of Bourbon
In Brooklyn, it’s the booze people are hoarding.
By Jessica Grose
Posted Saturday, Aug. 27, 2011, at 6:11 PM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2302635/
AY – I state with certainty that life exists outside our solar system. My reasoning is that everything is a number, and numbers are infinite. Going off of that premise, there will be endless examples endlessly beyond where our perceptions end. (this way I don’t have to cite 😛 )
Are we really that special? Are we the one and only living planet in an endless universe? It seems foolish to me to believe so.
As for THEM coming HERE, I don’t think so. I don’t know. If they were so frickin advanced maybe they OH WAIT.
I just figured it out. Tesla was an alien, he was their way of spreading their magnificent technologies- and the greedy humans snubbed it.
just like Thomas Henry Moray.
P Smith,
Um… Godel proved that there are true propositions which cannot be proven – sorry, but your statement, “All propositions are false until proven true”, is demonstrably false.
@P Smith belief in the possibillity that we have been visited by aliens is nothing like religious belief for a start there is no moral code or significant dogma associated with the belief; sure some believers are more extreme than others but believing in th possibility that aliens have pr do visit us is no different to believing there was more to the JFK assassination than a lone gunman or some other subject where there is gray areas of conjector.
Religious historical concepts are readily disproven scientifically. We cannot disprove the existance of any gods though. That said having decided what a god should be if one exists then I’ve concluded all religions are wrong because a god should be above vanity and totally secure, ergo not needing worship or even to be believed in and theist religions tend to demand both, but I digress.
A couple of times in your arguments against the idea of UFOs you use the phrase “there’s no proof” now while I instinctively side with you in not believing we have been visited I’m likely also the person who would have scoffed at the idea the world was a sphere when there was no proof it was.; okay I know it’s not perfectly spherical but you know what I mean.
Anonymously Yours:
For the same reason that people are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, or a theory isn’t accepted until it’s tested:
All propositions are false until proven true. That includes claims of alien life on other planets.
When you say “maybe it exists, maybe it doesn’t”, you’re no different than someone saying, “Maybe he’s guilty, maybe he isn’t” You cannot say “It may be true” because you want it to be or because of your preconceptions.
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