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
Slartibartfast,
http://jonathanturley.org/2011/08/27/my-embarrassing-secret-belief/#comment-262686
I’m responding to the comment above that you made earlier in this discussion. I recall reading many years ago in Stephen Hawkings book “A Brief History of Time” something like the following: As an object nears the speed of light its mass increases.
If that is true, wouldn’t it be nearly impossible/impossible for any object to actually travel at the speed of light. What do you think?
Slartibartfast.
J Allen Hynek would not have agreed with you about the 5%. His conclusion was that for none of them was an explanation involving clouds, planets, aircraft, satellites, meteors, stars, falling space junk or weather balloons adequate. Your opinion has no value until you have actually read descriptions of some of the 5% of unexplainable reports yourself. When you have done so then ask yourself whether it is possible to explain the sighting with any of the explanations in the previous list without also implying that the original observers are idiots suffering from grossly distorted perceptions or bad memory which embellishes what they actually saw beyond recognition.
I recommend you read some of Hynek’s books not just because he was the author who introduced me to the UFO phenomena but because he was an admirably cautious and skeptical scientist who did not assert anything that could not be proved.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke
CM,
Think of a Venn diagram of those 5% of cases. Divide them into 3 mutually exclusive groups:
1. Things which have mundane explanations which do not involve a craft with an intelligent pilot/controller – i.e. things that have a scientific explanation that we just don’t understand.
2. Incidents involving craft/technology that is piloted or controlled by humans (any sort of secret government experiments, prototype aircraft etc.).
3. Incidents involving non-human intelligence.
I’m maintaining that all of that 5% is from (1) or (2)…
“while their”
Slartibartfast.
There is no such thing as the supernatural, there are however natural phenomena that are not yet understood. One can argue that technology is a natural phenomenon because the life forms who originated it are natural. So if you mean that the UFO phenomena is mundane in this sense you are playing with words. It is however something that we do not yet understand but that does not mean it is intrinsically incapable of being understood.
The 5% of cases that Hynek labels incapable of being explained by mundane causes are such that if the observer is describing accurately what he actually saw, aircraft, helicopters, planets, satellites and falling space junk are ruled out.
pete,
I’ve read accounts of sightings where the ships were huge (a mile plus in length).
Regarding parallel evolution, there are a couple of things to consider. One, nature favors bilateral symmetry. Two, there are only so many solutions to a problem. Consider flight for example. Mammals (bats), reptiles (pterosaurs), insects and birds all evolved to live in the air and while there solutions have structural differences in the details, the basic solution is a wing. That is not to say there cannot be “truly” alien aliens. Life based on exotic chemistry or for extreme gravitational environments might be radically different. For example, life from a silicon based ecosystem might resemble very slow moving crystalline trees. If they came from a world roughly the same size as ours that had liquid water, their forms in basic terms are likely to be not terribly different from our own.
Nal.
Your estimation of the probabilities may be biased by our current level of technology. Obviously aliens limited by a technology equivalent to ours would have a hard time reaching us but our technology is advancing quickly, why is it difficult to assume that interstellar aliens may have advanced in some areas enough to make interstellar travel possible for them. In any case assuming that whatever is behind the UFO phenomenon is from another star is assuming too much, they may actually have been here all along (ultraterrestials) or they may be from another dimension or even another universe. The other assumption you are making is that the development of life is extremely unlikely, that the jump from non-life to life is huge. However biological research has continually narrowed the gap between life and non life. Until we ourselves have decent interstellar travel and can examine a fair number of earthlike planets around other stars, we can make no estimate on how likely or unlikely the arise of life is. However, if life exists here that proves it is possible and that it certainly exists somewhere else in a very big universe.
I see the number of reports from credible individuals and conclude that not all of them can be hoaxers. As I said earlier, before I read Hynek I was of the opinion that all people who wrote about UFOs were kooks, many books later I have come to the conclusion that they are not. Their books however do mostly cover the same ground so anyone who wants a taste of the subject can safely restrict him/herself to those of Hynek and Vallee.
given the problems of distances in Einsteinian (sp?) space and that all of the ufo craft seen are generally small and that no larger craft have been seen in space (unless we haven’t been told) i would offer a slightly different scenario
the people who claim to have seen beings from the craft(s) (including Roswell in 1947), most describe humanoid beings (at least in the U.S.). the idea of parallel evolution plus the ability of interplanetary flight make more unlikely they would be from somewhere else.
so if i would have to make a guess i would be more inclined to say they were from somewhen else not somewhere else.
CM,
Hynek may not be jumping to unwarranted conclusions, but you certainly are. I’m not calling anyone an idiot – I’m just saying that some of the unexplained things (I would think most…) have a mundane explanation that we just don’t understand right now. Any theory which requires extra-terrestrial intelligence is just like Intelligent Design – long on assumptions and short on explanations – scientists tend to like things the other way around…
Slartibartfast.
You sound like me before I read Hynek.
I suggest you read one of Hynek’s books for example this one.
Hynek is an excellent example of scientific skepticism. He does not jump to any unwarranted conclusions. Read Hynek’s classification of sightings and examine the characteristics of each class and I think you will see that most of the 5% can not in fact be explained by mundane causes. Aircraft for example are constrained by Newton’s laws on mass velocity and acceleration, they cannot fly around a polygonal path with sharp corners and they cannot stop dead or accelerate from 0 to 6000kph in an instant. Also a single aircraft also cannot split apart into multiple vehicles nor can multiple aircraft combine in to one. To take an observer’s description of what he has seen and to dismiss it as being a misperception of a mundane cause is to imply that that observer is an idiot. This is why Hynek studied in detail only a subset of the Blue Book reports where there were multiple observers of high credibility, police, miltary pilots, radar operators and airline pilots.
We should not assume that because people see things that they see what they appear to see. People viewing a magician’s performance see things that do not happen, one can only speculate what kind of illusions could be created with a technology a good bit higher than ours. What we can be certain is that intelligence and high technology are involved but we should not assume they comes from outer space or that any of the apparent space vehicles are real.
OS,
Oooh, I want a pair of Tesla coil speakers!
CM,
The question is, how much of that 5% has mundane explanations that AREN’T obvious? I think it is likely closer to all of it than it is to none of it. In any case the assumption that there is unquestionably intelligence behind that 5% seems unwarranted. Admittedly, I haven’t looked at the evidence, but is there anything which really requires non-human intelligence to explain? Especially ultra-powerful beings of unguessable goals and motives? Where have I heard that sort of thing before…
I always expected that the list of authors of UFO books would contain a fair number of kooks, but after buying such books for years I have found that not to be the case. Some authors are too ready to make the assumption that what people are seeing are space vehicles but they are otherwise sober and considered.
Vallee’s idea that something is putting on a show is supported by the fact that the phenomenon sometimes mimics human technology that appears a few years later. For example in the late 19th century there was a spate of sightings of air ships in the mid west of the US. Typically an airship would land at a farm and the bearded inventor in control would ask to borrow a spanner or something to make a minor repair and would state that the airship is his new invention which he is soon going to disclose publicly. The airship would then take off to never again be seen. There was also a spate of airship sighting in New Zealand in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, I forget which and in the nineteen thirties phantom biplanes were flying among the New York skyscrapers in the midst of a blizzard when no sane aviator would have risked taking off. The typical case of UFOs causing cars to stall looks like the effects of a magnetohydrodynamic aerospace craft, something which we could build had we a power supply of sufficient power density. Such a magnetohydrodynamic craft would produce ionized air that would short out the spark plugs of a vehicle, diesels should not be affected except that their lights might dim.
Gene,
I think that the question is one that depends on the nature of the territory – something that will also determine what kind of map structure will be useful. I agree that quantum gravity would be an extremely promising map if we could learn it. Mostly, I’m just kicking my whole interest in the standard model and all that quantum down the road a few years so I can let the guys (and gals) at the LHC figure it out (I’m doing the same thing with George R.R. Martin and Stephen R. Donaldson…). I have read that some physicists think that they have discovered the Higgs boson in old data, but they’ve got a bunch of work to do before they’re sure. In any case, I think that experiment catching up to theory every once in a while is good – and probably long overdue in this case.
OS,
I think that a corollary to Clarke’s law is that a being possessing even more sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from divinity. I think Old Ben would have been shocked – for about a second, then he would have started trying to understand it… That would really be a treat – to watch one of the great scientists and inventors of the past learn about modern technology. I’d love to see Henri Poincaré learn about modern dynamical systems theory and computers – given how much he understood with just pencil and paper (or chalk and slate…) I think what he would be able to do with such powerful tools would be amazing.
shano,
You don’t live in other dimensions except in Buckaroo Banzai* – however many dimensions there are, they’re all around us all the time. we can’t live in just one of them any more than we could live in flatland (i.e. live in your height and width but not your breadth…)
* But we are going to Planet Ten real soon…
Since we have now invoked both Tesla and Arthur C. Clarke, and it is late on a Saturday evening, how about a little 2001 Space Odyssey theme on a Tesla coil?
Mike.
In my view the evidence of UFO appearances already publicly available from credible sources is such that it seems irrational to deny their reality. However assuming that the sightings are caused by extraterrestrial space vehicles is going too far, for one thing such an explanation may be insufficiently weird. For another it is obvious that intelligence is involved and what observers see may not be reality but visions conjured up by that intelligence for its own purposes.
I was skeptical about the existence of the UFO phenomenon until I bought one of J Allen Hynek’s books at a railway bookstall and read it on a train trip. J Allen Hynek was an astronomer at North Western University who was recruited by the US Air Force’s project Blue Book as a resident debunker of sightings as misperceptions of meterological and astronomical events. During his time at Blue Book he had access to the accumulated files which he analysed and which led him to the conclusion that although 95% of reports had obvious mundane explanations there remained 5% for which no conventional explanation sufficed. Hynek examined in detail a subset of this 5% involving multiple unrelated and separated observers of high credibility.
It may be prejudice because he was the author I read first, but my recommendation to any one interested in the subject would be to acquire one of J Allen Hynek’s UFO books. Second I would recommend “Passport To Magonia” and “Messengers of Deception by Jacques Vallee”. J Allen Hynek makes clear that he did not study UFOs, rather UFO reports. He points out that until someone actually admits having custody of a UFO, reports of sightings are all that can be studied.
Jacques Vallee started in the same way as Hynek, but eventually came to the conclusion that when a person sees a UFO it may not be an accident, but a case where someone intended him to observe a UFO, the sighting may be an illusion like the rubber inflatable tanks set up in Southern England before D Day to convince the Nazis that the invasion would be elsewhere than where it actually took place. Also Vallee does not dismiss the contactees like Adamski, he thinks they may be truthful although the tall Nordic saucer pilots with long blond hair claiming to Adamski to be from Venus are obviously not.
I think Vallee’s argument that people are seeing little playlets put on for their benefit is convincing as some of the sightings in Hynek’s books fit that pattern. In particular the Levelland Texas incident in which multiple drivers on roads radiating from Levelland one night had essentially the same experience. They each observed a dark object blocking the road in front of them and their vehicles engine and lights failed. The object then glowed, rose into the air and flew off after which their vehicles became operational again.
Vallee postulates that an intelligence is trying to introduce ideas into the human community however an alternative theory is that suggested by Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy, that it is all due to alien teenagers playing jokes on the inhabitants of primitive planets.
It is obvious that whatever is behind the phenomenon is more technologically and therefor militarily advanced than we are, that if they want to they can exterminate us in a few minutes. One has to question why they have not already done so – as I would certainly advise them to do – perhaps they don’t want to or perhaps they do not consider that we have yet reached a technological level that makes us a serious threat.
OS,
I was speaking in term of not being surprised by alien technology, but point taken.
Gene, not to nitpick, but Tesla was in his prime about 100 years ago, not 200. I think it would be easier for a turn of last century scientist to understand our modern world than one from a century earlier.
Einstein was only about 25 years Tesla’s junior, so they were contemporaries, scientifically.
Slarti,
The problem with wormholes is stabilization. I think the key to that might be understanding quantum gravity.
Or Nikola Tesla. I think he’d have been hard to surprise.