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I am somewhat motivated by the arrogance of the naysayers, the superiority complex displayed by closed minded folks for whom there would never be enough proof, not even the proverbial landing on the White House lawn. I don't know what the truth is. I don't even have a favored theory. I believe something weird and wonderful is unfolding around us and that it points the way toward a more complex understanding of the universe and our world. It bothers me when I hear from small minded people who already know none of this could be true, despite having read little of the available literature, people who made their minds up long ago and who have demonstrated, time and again, a blatant intellectual dishonesty when it comes to non-prosaic subjects.
In your judgement, naysayers are arrogant, close-minded, small-minded, intellectually dishonest, and unfamiliar with the UFO "literature". Two questions I would hope you'd consider: (1) what's your proof that skeptics like me are any of these things, and (2) why doesn't your standing in judgement of the arrogance, close-mindedness and intellectual dishonesty of those you consider naysayers itself count as arrogance?
I don't believe something "weird and wonderful" is unfolding around us ... I believe these phenomena have always been around us, and there's no convincing evidence that they represent alien visitations. In the past, they were attributed to faerie folk, demons, the spirits of the dead, the gods. Now we attribute them to aliens from another place/time/whatever in the multiverse. Whatever; prove it to me.
But then, I'm just a small-minded and poorly informed naysayer who's been following the UFO phenomenon since the 1950s, so what do I know ...
In your judgement, naysayers are arrogant, close-minded, small-minded, intellectually dishonest, and unfamiliar with the UFO "literature". Two questions I would hope you'd consider: (1) what's your proof that skeptics like me are any of these things, and (2) why doesn't your standing in judgement of the arrogance, close-mindedness and intellectual dishonesty of those you consider naysayers itself count as arrogance?
I don't believe something "weird and wonderful" is unfolding around us ... I believe these phenomena have always been around us, and there's no convincing evidence that they represent alien visitations. In the past, they were attributed to faerie folk, demons, the spirits of the dead, the gods. Now we attribute them to aliens from another place/time/whatever in the multiverse. Whatever; prove it to me.
But then, I'm just a small-minded and poorly informed naysayer who's been following the UFO phenomenon since the 1950s, so what do I know ...
If you have been following the ufo phenomenon for the past 60 years, then what have you been researching that hasn't indicated that there is extraterrestrial visitations? There are many cases that stand out, that I would recommend investigating. First being the Roswell, NM case.
You are also right. I did sound arrogant in that previous post. My apologies.
As Jacques Vallee and the late John Mack have both pointed out, and as suggested by the more nonsensical aspects of Whitley Streiber's experiences, there's something nonphysical and psychological going on in close encounters. With the wide variety of entities reported: greys, reptilian, nordics etc., I have a hard time seeing these reports as encounters with physical entities. Some can be explained as pathology or due to psychological experiences misinterpreted (like sleep paralysis with accompanying hallucinations) others are likely fraud. In all the cases I've read, I haven't seen one that was utterly convincing.
Kecksburg was likely a Soviet satellite with nuclear fuel on board. Roswell (and probably Rendlesham) is a different matter. Clearly the government in the Roswell case was hiding something, but at this point most eyewitnesses are dead, and has I've pointed out elsewhere, we know memory is not as reliable as we'd like to believe it is. The other problem I have is, the government's not all that good at keeping secrets or managing conspiracies. I don't know for sure what happened at Roswell, and at this point I don't think we ever will.
As Jacques Vallee and the late John Mack have both pointed out, and as suggested by the more nonsensical aspects of Whitley Streiber's experiences, there's something nonphysical and psychological going on in close encounters. With the wide variety of entities reported: greys, reptilian, nordics etc., I have a hard time seeing these reports as encounters with physical entities. Some can be explained as pathology or due to psychological experiences misinterpreted (like sleep paralysis with accompanying hallucinations) others are likely fraud. In all the cases I've read, I haven't seen one that was utterly convincing.
Kecksburg was likely a Soviet satellite with nuclear fuel on board. Roswell (and probably Rendlesham) is a different matter. Clearly the government in the Roswell case was hiding something, but at this point most eyewitnesses are dead, and has I've pointed out elsewhere, we know memory is not as reliable as we'd like to believe it is. The other problem I have is, the government's not all that good at keeping secrets or managing conspiracies. I don't know for sure what happened at Roswell, and at this point I don't think we ever will.
How do you feel about the strong observations made by Dr Tom Carey after his 22 years of research on the Roswell Case?
How do you feel about the strong observations made by Dr Tom Carey after his 22 years of research on the Roswell Case?
You mean, like the reported government death threats against witnesses' families? That's a believable accusation, I'd agree, but ... all of the claims in "Witness to Roswell" and the like comprises "as told by" stories, and recollections from 60+ years ago that may or not represent things as they really happen. The Walter Haut affadavit, as I understand it, was written by Carey and Schmitt, then signed by Haut. This article states, "According to Schmitt, a doctor had just reviewed the status of Haut's health and judged him to be of sound mind. " Again, this is hearsay, and twice removed from the source (why should I believe that Schmitt knew this, why should I believe his recollection of the doctor's judgement is accurate, and how do I know this particular doctor had the training to accurately assess Haut's soundness of mind?)
When I've read books like "Witness to Roswell", my reaction is, well, that would be fantastic if it were true. Unfortunately, we have no pictures, no artifacts, nothing to corroborate what these witnesses have claimed about Roswell ... and documents, photos, and videos can all be forged or manipulated. I'd like nothing better than convincing evidence that beings from Somewhere Else have visited us, but at this point all we have are stories.
One of the big problems with all this for me is, the human memory is now known to be rather labile, which means its contents can mutate and change over time. You can see this sometimes when family members or old friends get together to talk about the Old Days: person X recalls a red shirt that person Y was wearing when Y fell down the stairs, and person Y says, "No, that wasn't me, that was person Z and the shirt was orange". Person X isn't lying, but his memory is not 100% accurate. Further, it's been shown that you can suggest something happened to someone, and if convinced, they'll write this into their memories or modify existing memories to incorporate it.
So Walter Haut may have been reporting things that never happened to him, or happened to him in a different way, and sincerely believed his version of what happened. All of the witnesses' recollections may have been colored by the "UFO crash" mythology that has grown up around the event. Without a body or a hunk of spacecraft, I'll therefore remain intrigued but skeptical of these accounts.
This is all very interesting, but can you provide any hard evidence for these beliefs? I read all of Bud Hopkin's books and spoke to him over the phone one time many years ago and liked him very much. But again, show me the evidence.
Nope. I have decided that my beliefs are mine, and yours are yours. No amount of convincing will get a non-believer to believe, so I have just come to the conclusion that people who want proof will always want proof. There is enough evidence to persuade me, but some folks need little, some need more, and some never are satisfied with anything.
I dont think you need to believe in this to make your life complete, so you will have to take the hard journey and find the evidence to convince yourself. There is masses of circumstancial evidence which taken one after the next convinces me thet there is something going on. If you are a scientist type of person and need proof, then science just does not have the measuring facilities or instruments to measure this kind of thing or ghosties for that matter. They are similar subjects and science cannot get a handle at the moment on something which may be interdimensional.
Basically, I reckon those folks who always need more proof to believe, are afraid of being wrong or of being duped into believing the wrong thing. I have enough conviction to say to you that I believe it and later, if I am proved wrong, then I am confident enough to admit I made a mistake. We all make mistakes sometimes and so I reckon that it is no big deal to believe something and then find out I am wrong in the future. After all, it is not as if my everlasting life and soul depends on being right, and there is more evidence of UFOs and aliens than there is for God.
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One of the big problems with all this for me is, the human memory is now known to be rather labile, which means its contents can mutate and change over time. You can see this sometimes when family members or old friends get together to talk about the Old Days: person X recalls a red shirt that person Y was wearing when Y fell down the stairs, and person Y says, "No, that wasn't me, that was person Z and the shirt was orange". Person X isn't lying, but his memory is not 100% accurate. Further, it's been shown that you can suggest something happened to someone, and if convinced, they'll write this into their memories or modify existing memories to incorporate it.
If you believe this, then you have to believe that all memories are 'dodgy'. From memories of sexual abusement to anything else you care to name. What happens when we learn stuff at school? When we meet a childhood friend "who looks just the same" - our memories have remembered their face correctly after all these years.
Yes, I am sure that some memories are not remembered correctly, but we need to determine which kind of memories are reliable and which are not because some of our memories ARE reliable and you cannot quote the dodginess of ALL our memory as being a factor in the remembering of events. This does not mean that the experience is invalid because it has not been remembered 100% correctly.
If what you say is true, there will be no witness testimony allowed in court because the memories were 'tainted' by subsequent rememberings and modifications. Currently we do still have witness testimony, so where is science on this?
Last edited by ocpaul20; 09-23-2013 at 02:07 AM..
Reason: witness tesimony
Thanks for the reply. I respect your opinion, but still hold to my belief.
So, how did you become interested in the ufo theory? Are there any cases that still mystify you?
I became interested in UFOs as a kid in the early 1950s, when I heard about the Washington DC flap. In the early 60s (best as I can recall) there was a major wave reported in the news and I was satellite watching (this was back when seeing a satellite was still a big deal) when I saw what I thought was a satellite or plane make a 90 degree turn. Around that time period my grandmother, mother and sister ran into the house terrified and said a huge disk had just flown over the house. Also around that time, I saw a silvery oblong object over the Mississippi River that appeared to be rippling or wobbling (that was quite possibly a mirage or other atmospheric phenomenon). Several years later, my father was driving home from work late at night and saw what he thought was a "plane in trouble". He told one of my siblings that it was disk shaped and had windows around it and that he stood there for a few minutes before driving off.
All of these things my family and I experienced could be chalked up to natural phenomena, misinterpretation, or misremembering of events. Did I really see something turn a 90 degree angle ... Thinking further about it, I seem to recall it flying off at a high rate of speed after making the turn. Did this happen, or is my brain conflating a memory of something I remember with bits and pieces of things I've seen in science fiction movies or read in books?
As a consequence and in the abence of concrete data, I have to say my experiences are suggestive but hardly evidence of anything.
Are there cases that mystify me? I'd rather say there are cases that are unexplained or whose alternate explanations aren't convincing. I'd put Roswell, Rendlesham Forest, Gulf Breeze, and the Phoenix Lights in that category ... There are probably a lot of others but I'd have to give it some thought.
Nope. I have decided that my beliefs are mine, and yours are yours. No amount of convincing will get a non-believer to believe, so I have just come to the conclusion that people who want proof will always want proof. There is enough evidence to persuade me, but some folks need little, some need more, and some never are satisfied with anything.
Judging from your posts here, you've placed your faith in paranormal phenomena, and what you believe needs to support that faith. It's in essence become a religion for you, and like the Creationist, you'll find any alternate explanation you can to defend your belief against the "infidels". This paragraph could equally apply to the Christian who feels his literalist faith in the accuracy of the Bible is under attack by those evil and narrow minded scientists.
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I dont think you need to believe in this to make your life complete, so you will have to take the hard journey and find the evidence to convince yourself. There is masses of circumstancial evidence which taken one after the next convinces me thet there is something going on. If you are a scientist type of person and need proof, then science just does not have the measuring facilities or instruments to measure this kind of thing or ghosties for that matter. They are similar subjects and science cannot get a handle at the moment on something which may be interdimensional.
Or they may just be a product of our minds. The True Believer who speaks in tongues will say something like, "science just does not have the measuring facilities or instruments etc." That in spite of the fact that analysis of glossolalia recordings by linguists reveal that these utterances are not in some unknown or ancient dialect, they're quasi-linguistic utterances that aren't organized in any way. Plus, the glossolalia of the speaker of a given language resembles in its word construction the grammatical rules of the language of the speaker. Do different nationalities have different "heavenly languages"?
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Basically, I reckon those folks who always need more proof to believe, are afraid of being wrong or of being duped into believing the wrong thing. I have enough conviction to say to you that I believe it and later, if I am proved wrong, then I am confident enough to admit I made a mistake. We all make mistakes sometimes and so I reckon that it is no big deal to believe something and then find out I am wrong in the future. After all, it is not as if my everlasting life and soul depends on being right, and there is more evidence of UFOs and aliens than there is for God.
Having seen you express this kind of strong belief in UFO aliens and ghosts, is your disbelief limited to God or gods and organized religion, or are there other things that don't meet your truth criteria?
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If you believe this, then you have to believe that all memories are 'dodgy'. From memories of sexual abusement to anything else you care to name. What happens when we learn stuff at school? When we meet a childhood friend "who looks just the same" - our memories have remembered their face correctly after all these years.
If you refer back to the paragraph where I talk about the lability of memory, you'll note I said: "...the human memory is now known to be rather labile, which means its contents can mutate and change over time..." I didn't say all aspects of every memory are unreliable, or that the contents will always mutate and change over time. It's a matter of percentages. As you may or may not be aware, we forget something like 80% of the information we study in class or in a seminar. That's why people take notes and record seminars. And there's an evolutionary reason why we're hard-wired to recognize and remember faces ... it has survival value. But that's getting into "science" so I won't go there.
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Yes, I am sure that some memories are not remembered correctly, but we need to determine which kind of memories are reliable and which are not because some of our memories ARE reliable and you cannot quote the dodginess of ALL our memory as being a factor in the remembering of events. This does not mean that the experience is invalid because it has not been remembered 100% correctly.
We know for one thing that the encoding of memory can be faulty in highly emotional or stressful situations, due in part to the action of the cortisol released in these situations. Guess what? That's exactly the kind of experience we're talking about when someone thinks they've had a close encounter or seen a spirit or demon. Or someone who has been sexually or physically abused.
Here's an article on the effects of cortisol on memory:
For those who want a recent book on so-called repressed memories, see: "The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse" by Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketchum. Another good one is: "Searching For Memory: The Brain, The Mind, And The Past", by Daniel Schachter.
Bottom line: our brains do not work like a computer, and our memories do not store information the same way as a hard disk or video camera do. And we know for sure that stress interferes with the storage and processing of memories. That's what PTSD is all about.
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If what you say is true, there will be no witness testimony allowed in court because the memories were 'tainted' by subsequent rememberings and modifications. Currently we do still have witness testimony, so where is science on this?
The court process involves the defense attempting to call into question the memories of the witnesses, and the prosecution attempting to shoot down their questioning and eliminate all possibilities of reasonable doubt. Law students are taught about the unreliability of memory ... and how to deal with that in questioning witnesses in the courtroom. The fact that eyewitness testimony is allowed in court is a courtroom strategy; the legal field is well aware of the dodginess of eyewitness testimony, and they're trained as I say to deal with that in court.
Judging from your posts here, you've placed your faith in paranormal phenomena, and what you believe needs to support that faith. It's in essence become a religion for you, and like the Creationist, you'll find any alternate explanation you can to defend your belief against the "infidels". This paragraph could equally apply to the Christian who feels his literalist faith in the accuracy of the Bible is under attack by those evil and narrow minded scientists.
Of course. We all have belief systems which work for us. Yours may be based on science, or you may believe in a God of some kind. Of course we look for 'evidence' to support our beliefs, otherwise we would not have them. Ask any religious person if you are not one yourself. I dont classify myself as a religious person, however I do have (as we all do) beliefs which I run my life on. If yours run on science, then you must acknowledge that there are grey areas which we as a society do not understand yet, and as such, there are areas where your beliefs are as 'dodgy' as mine are.
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That in spite of the fact that analysis of glossolalia recordings by linguists reveal that these utterances are not in some unknown or ancient dialect, they're quasi-linguistic utterances that aren't organized in any way. Plus, the glossolalia of the speaker of a given language resembles in its word construction the grammatical rules of the language of the speaker. Do different nationalities have different "heavenly languages"?
This on the surface seems to make sense. However, it is quite possible that some parts of our normally untapped mind can remember long forgotten languages and these are some of the areas where science cannot really help us. As an example, there are kids who remember past lives, which suggests there is some part which survives the death experience, so it is quite possible that there is information which travels with us through lifetimes and into the next.
Yes, you can say that some memories are mis-remembered . That is rather all-encompassing reason why we should believe that these things are mis-remembered rather than some other explanation which does not make sense to you or science at the moment. Personally, I think that there is a lot more energy involved in our lives than science will acknowledge. As an example of this, the Chinese have been using energy medicine in various forms for thousands of years and have not died out as a result of it not working. If it was all unscientific mumbo-jumbo, then I would have expected a very poor recovery rate - which is not the case. I happen to believe that some if not all of our memory is stored at a cellular/energetic level which accounts for many instances of people being able to access the Universal Mind and yes, of course this is dependent on chemical and hormonal processes of our body.
By explaining these things in terms of physical bodily processes it just may only account for half or less of the total way we as humans work.
If science could really show once and for all that memory is that dodgy, then no court (judge) would allow remembered facts to be brought into court. Regardless if attorneys of both sides argue for their case - if the underlying 'evidence' is fundementally flawed, then it should not be used in court.
Attorneys may be trained to argue their case but no amount of arguing will make flawed evidence, unflawed. It either is or is not, a reliable method of supporting other evidence and if not, should not be allowed by judges.
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