Disambiguation
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Lost Geographies, The Destruction of History
In a previous article, I adumbrated what has recently become – for me – a key component in my quest for truth: the dire effects of ‘plausible deniability’, applied in multiple dimensions, to confuse and confound peoples’ world-view and thereby obfuscate any clandestine activities undertaken by ‘vested interests’ who would prefer that said activities remain obscure and – ideally – ignored and undetected by the wider public, who in one way or another are actually funding it all.
Time to wake up and smell the bullshit…
But first, some explanation of the term I intend to use here, for those who have not encountered it before. ‘Disambiguation’ refers to the process of separating out single meanings in situations where multiple meanings are able to apply. So for example, here in Korea, because the writing system is simplified (has only forty-four characters, and is therefore an ‘alphabet’ rather than a ‘syllabary’), a foreigner learning the language may often have to make reference to the corresponding Traditional Chinese* characters from which words are derived (in South Korea, roughly 70% of words in use in spoken Korean today are said to be of Traditional Chinese derivation) in order to separate out the correct meaning. This is because the transition from a complex syllabary to a simple alphabet leads to numerous homophones, where previously words (in this particular example) in Traditional Chinese would have been easier to distinguish because Chinese is a tonal language, and each lexeme is obviously separated from others which sound similar. Lexemes with the same sound are disambiguated by their different characters.
To bring this idea together with my current thinking, after many years of reading about UFOs and aerial phenomena generally (and this means my reading stretching back into the early 1970s, when many readers here were not yet born), a similar idea began to gnaw at me: after all, some of these, at least, must be natural, and there were hypotheses which hinted at this. But the study of apparently ‘unidentified’ aerial objects suffers from the same syndrome seen so often, where the observer’s ability (or lack thereof) to distinguish phenomena is hampered by lack of access to information – interpretations are flawed because of the limitations of knowledge imposed upon them, either by themselves (restricting the areas into which they can move for information) or by others (reading the pet theories of other individuals which are not supported by either observation or a logical framework based upon observation and existing information, or by a process of intentional and deliberate disinformation and misinformation). It is a sad fact that one of the hallmarks of a free and open system for information interchange – the Internet – is the anonymity which allows people to nurture and expound wild theories and speculation about any subject under the sun without any need – or indeed inclination – to engage critical faculties (Scott C. Waring, I’m talking about YOU). [8]
We might add to this lamentable picture our own observation that, given the requirement for gullibility on the part of their audience, there have been (and continue to be) a large number of individuals who have been profiting in the long term from the willingness of their listeners to cough up dosh to hear the same tired old mish-mash of reports and factoids which bedevil the UFO community (they know who they are, names need not be mentioned further). This is an area where much speculation results from the slightest possibility that a story might be true, despite the acknowledged fact that the only consistent aspect of the field is its inconsistency. Misinformation introduced at the right time results in long-term disorientation: satellite observations presented at the highest level of pixellation as proof of a civilisation on Mars, or the Moon, for example. Enough, already!
Observations have themselves been shown to be subject to a number of influences, one of which seems to be the curious habit of mirroring technologies with which the observers themselves might be familiar; commentators have speculated that this would allow the operators of such craft (when encountered by the observers) to pass themselves off as people like themselves, rather than obviously ‘alien’ or perhaps government operatives, a point elaborated by (among others) the late John Keel.
When investigating any phenomenon which might be described as ‘natural’ (and even if they originate on another planet, UFOs are not actually ‘unnatural’ in the sense of being ‘unreal’, but rather are ‘dislocated’ from their point of origin), we need to keep an open mind and be wary of the pitfalls of trying to fit observations into any new or pre-existing schema without good reason. This would be especially true in situations in which similar external characteristics might cause natural and unnatural (i.e., in this case, technology products) phenomena to be conflated. This is a very important point to bear in mind.
Again, this returns us to the notion of ‘plausible deniability’: being able – at least to some extent – to hide things (which ‘someone’ has decided, arbitrarily, need to be hidden) behind other phenomena which are actually natural is a very convenient form of obfuscation; the more so if they are objects which exhibit (or appear to exhibit) some advanced technology which is inexplicable in terms of conventional daily experience. We should be warned at the outset that UFOs are not the only phenomena to which this type of thinking may need to be applied. And since a ‘real’ UFO would undoubtedly be the product of technology which is both highly advanced and (perhaps) literally ‘alien’ in concept, we are faced with four or five essential classes of observable phenomena:
1: natural phenomena, possibly of an electrical nature, which persist for some time in the atmosphere and are, in fact, created by a combination of natural events. Among other things, we should refer to Paul Devereux’s ‘Earth Lights Hypothesis’ and the ‘Electric Universe Hypothesis’ to discuss these. There may also be a ‘cryptid’ involvement in these.
2: technology products of purely terrestrial origin, which probably represent exotic manned or unmanned vehicles, and which may even have quite mundane intended functions, but which look or behave strangely to the untrained and unfamiliar observer.
3: technology products of extraterrestrial origin, relatively exotic crewed or uncrewed vehicles which may have relatively mundane functions such as observation platforms, but which may be engaged in scientific or military (as we understand the terms) functions. Little of the information which becomes available to the observer during encounters would be familiar enough for them to understand the technology, the intention of the operators or the intended function of these devices. This much would remain true, whatever their actual origin may be.
4: the objects represent living entities of an unknown type, who are able to hide normally but who become visible at certain times, under certain conditions. Again, a potential ‘cryptid’ involvement which is often suggested in discussions of this topic.
5: most contentiously perhaps, and supported largely by rumour and speculation, technology products of terrestrial origin but modelled after examples of (allegedly ‘captured’) extraterrestrial equivalents, intended for various purposes but built entirely terrestrially, although possibly with the assistance of the ‘originators’. This grouping includes alleged ‘reverse-engineered’ craft, of which there seem to be many stories and typical locations where they are seen and stored when not in use. However, when considering this latter classification, we should always bear in mind the ‘alleged’ part!
It is not my purpose here to engage in an exhaustive categorisation of UFO types. Rather, my interest is to discuss the desirability of separating them out – to apply ‘disambiguation’ to them – from natural phenomena. Our first call should be to two theories which are undoubtedly closely intertwined: the ‘Earth Lights’ theory and the ‘Electric Universe’ theory, and for reasons which will become clear as we proceed, we will visit the second of these first.
One of the most bizarre aspects of so-called ‘modern science’ is the extent to which, when confronted with new data which contradict existing models, practitioners engage in a kind of ‘cognitive dissonance’ and refuse point-blank to accept the notion of falsification of their cherished hypothesis. The extent to which a practising scientist will doggedly stick to trying to ‘verify’ a theory when evidence is pointing in a completely different direction is both touching and pathetic. But there are two very important points to be borne in mind when practising science:
1: In science, the most essential part of any hypothesis is that it should be falsifiable. This is because the closer the hypothesis comes to verisimilitude – a closer and closer approximation to reality – the better able it becomes to predict previously unsuspected or unobserved phenomena. If there is an accumulation of data which are observed regularly in the course of investigation and experimentation, but which cannot be explained by the hypothesis, it must eventually be considered ‘falsified’ and replaced by another competing hypothesis which does account for these data, or ‘anomalies’ as they were called by Thomas S. Kuhn (among others). It would not be inappropriate to suggest that since verisimilitude cannot be approached directly, but rather in a prolonged and stepwise fashion due to the periodic falsification of successive hypotheses, one hypothesis has to be judged against the other in terms of accounting for a greater proportion of these ‘anomalies’ than its predecessor – but not all of them. It is the basic and essential function of a successful hypothesis to account for more of the observed phenomena than its predecessor. The succeeding hypothesis would probably be able to subsume the original observational data more accurately within its new conceptual framework.
2: Human beings are very prone to try to fit information into frameworks or ‘schemas’. The problem with this is that there are many factors involved as to exactly where in any theoretical framework any phenomenon should be placed. The above example of Korean (or Japanese) simplification versus Traditional Chinese exactitude illustrates exactly the kind of pitfall waiting for us when our interpretation is wrong, and why it is so important to check. Good science has (or should have) a variety of hypotheses, competing to interpret the same data, some of which are more likely to be a closer approximation to reality than others, and which therefore have the equal and automatic right to be heard and used as tools in investigations.
We might add to these that the more extreme the individual practitioner’s professional isolation becomes, the less they are likely to be able to import ideas from other fields which might bear fruit in their own investigations – indeed, this is a process which is discouraged in many organisations, and was a hallmark of paranoid twentieth-century military thinking from the beginning of World War II onwards, with all the disastrous consequences we have seen. Prior to that time, it was considered normal for scientists and technologists working in disparate areas to discuss what they were doing and what their research had discovered, but now we seem to have a situation in which discussion only takes place within a group of professionals, and others (who might be able to contradict them, or at least promote plausible alternatives) are excluded and marginalised. In America, this process of ‘compartmentalisation’ really appears to have taken off under the oversight of Vannevar Bush in the ‘Manhattan Project’ [2].
This is the fundamental malady of modern science: the practitioner’s lack of tolerance for (and the necessary consideration of) hypothetical competition. It accounts, perhaps only in part, for why modern science is so divorced from reality and appears to see the public only as a source of income. Supported through tax dollars levied upon the wider populace, the modern scientist builds a vast paradigmatic empire, but because this is science, that empire is built upon shifting sand; no matter how successful a paradigm may prove, the accumulation of anomalous (from the paradigm’s point of view) data must eventually cause its collapse. Addiction to the group paradigm – which may be used to argue for extensive public funding, for example – will continue until that group is actually forced to admit exactly what part (or the whole) of their paradigm is incorrect. The field is then (theoretically at least) open for succession.
At the same time, practising scientists clearly see the general public as ‘ignorant’ and in need of education – their education – by inculcation into a paradigm which is probably shaky at best, but which needs a ‘critical mass’ (i.e. sufficient magnitude of quorum) of popular support to avoid being denied funding. In concert with the mass media (whose practitioners, of course, are also not specialists, and therefore depend upon science for their material, and follow it largely blindly), practitioners persistently and rabidly promulgate their ‘party line’ and often are happy to indulge in pathetic ad hominem attacks upon opponents when logic fails – a rather strange practice from those who would have us believe that science is impartial, evidence-based and can provide all the answers to our questions, and surprisingly like the kind of reaction one would expect from a True Believer when their ability or patience abandons them in the face of hostile criticism – this latter being precisely the kind of public reaction which is so useful when it swings in their favour. Practitioners should be more intellectually honest, and admit it when they cannot answer because they do not know, rather than trying to cover it up with dissemblance and misdirection.
So science as it is normally (in the Kuhnian sense) practised may be interesting, amusing or entertaining, but as an important part of science is actually to be incorrect (which allows progress by later falsification and verisimilitude), it cannot be taken one hundred percent seriously – especially when it says, for example, that it needs huge public funding to split small atoms. It simply represents one small ‘area of knowledge’, possibly false according to the particular (peculiar? remember phlogiston!) interpretation of the times, and must therefore take its place beside other sources of ‘knowledge’ and compete to be heard. The usefulness of science ends when the knowledge it produces no longer has any practical value or, worse still, leads to dangerously incorrect interpretations of the natural world because of a pathetic and petulant refusal to accept that an accumulation of experimental and observational data have proven it to be wrong. Instead, it has become a cult. No more evidence would be required to demonstrate that ‘science’ is actually a ‘religion’.
The case of UFOs shows some of the worst attitudes prevalent in science, although one could point in other directions such as – for example – ‘cryptozoology’. Here however, we begin with the ‘Electric Universe’ hypothesis. According to this, the universe is suffused with plasma, and this plasma, being highly conductive, allows huge electrical currents to traverse cosmic distances, and the behaviour of this electrical current in the cosmic medium is responsible for forming all large, observable objects. And there is plenty of laboratory-based evidence for all of it. [10]
We know that the universe is composed of 99% plasma, and this was basically confirmed by the Explorer-1 satellite [1] launched by NASA in 1958. Ironically, America’s first successful artificial satellite, lofted into orbit in response to the success of Russia’s Sputnik I, produced data which contradict the entrenched scientific notion that Earth somehow exists in splendid isolation and is somehow not connected to the rest of the universe by anything other than gravity.
Let’s take careful note of this: a universe dominated by the presence and conductivity of plasma cannot behave in a way dominated by terrestrial processes. ‘Terrestrial processes’ exist only on Earth – that is why they are called ‘terrestrial’, or has nobody noticed this? And if the universe is dominated by electricity, we should be asking ourselves what the effects of this ought to be upon our lives. We should observe direct and indirect effects of massive current flow on a regular basis; and the magnitude of the observed effects is indicative of the strength of current flow.
This means that, historically: (a) there is a variety of effects which have been recorded which relate to our small part of the galaxy, which result from a wider flow of plasma-borne current which surrounds us, and (b) the force with which these effects manifest themselves changes as a result of the localised passage of current through the solar system, in much the same way that, say, the brightness of a bulb in a building can vary because of all the switches in said building being turned on and off all the time. In the Electric Universe context, stars are born in strings (because of the gross structure of a ‘Birkeland current’) and are connected electrically by intervening plasma. Their brightness can therefore vary according to the current load, like any terrestrial light bulb or other functional resistor.
The amazing thing is that this flow of current, and the effects which follow on from it, have been completely ignored at worst, or deliberately misinterpreted (to fit the prevailing paradigms) at best by scientific practitioners. As Kuhn rightly pointed out, the problem with ‘normal science’ is that established practitioners are more concerned with ‘verifying’ the theories they espouse, rather than challenging it and getting closer to the truth. They are afraid of threatening the existence of the thing which pays their salary, afraid of losing public funding for their temporary flim-flam (as any state in science is purely temporary), and afraid of losing credibility because they got it wrong, rather than challenging the theory and proving that their new hypothesis displays greater verisimilitude than what went before. Too much money and too many reputations and institutions are at stake when they do that. If there is one thing about modern science that is truly lamentable, it is that scientists are more likely to be gladiatorial in defence than attack. That is truly shameful.
It is ‘really coming to something’ when a famous American Bible scholar can produce videos which give a more accurate account of observations – and give appropriate credit to non-Christians who see things more clearly:
Let’s be perfectly clear about one thing: the prevailing theoretical cosmogeny is utter and contemptible rubbish. We exist at the end of a process, not at its beginning, therefore we cannot make anything but the wildest guesses at what went before unless there is some kind of written or oral record of past events, and what is available must be scrutinised and cross-checked if possible to avoid errors. But if the paradigm we use is itself false, then there cannot be any correct interpretation of what we see; it is impossible because we have tied ourselves to a particular viewpoint, and we are not willing to venture outside of that claustrophobic conceptual straitjacket. Whatever his other faults might have been, the late Dr. Isaac Asimov was quite correct when he suggested that the concepts used to interpret an observational phenomenon were more problematic than the observation itself, whatever that original observed object or phenomenon may have been.
According to the current conventional Western cosmogony, the Solar System of which we are a part is supposed to have condensed out of a cloud of hydrogen and dust. Because of the use of isotope ratios to determine age, there is an upper limit to the age of the Earth of less than 5,000,000,000 years [4]. The accretion process is supposed to have been gravitational, with smaller bodies coalescing into larger ones until we have what we see today. But common sense suggests that if the Electric Universe theory is correct, then this process is impossible because any particles in any particular area of space would have very similar electrostatic charges, and would therefore repel each other; hence gravitational coalescence is unlikely. A more powerful force is required to coalesce disparate particles of matter to form large, solid objects.
A second argument against gravitation being responsible for what we see is the thermal activity of the outer planets. Space is very cold, and as we travel further out from the sun, the available radiance per unit area on any planet decreases proportionally. Yet we can see that the outer planets have very high-speed winds and enormous storms. Conventional science cannot account for this beyond suggesting that (in the case of Jupiter, for example) this is because of heat resulting from the eternally slow gravitational contraction of the planet, or to radioactive heat emanating slowly from the core. The possibility of another source of energy than the decay of radionucleides at the core of a planetary body is apparently never voiced in official astronomical circles. Neptune, however, is the furthest of the gas giants from the Sun, yet it has the highest observed wind speeds! [5] All of them radiate more heat energy than they are known to receive from the sun. [9]:
• Jupiter: radiates 1.5 – 2 times the energy it receives from the Sun. Excess left over from formation (cooling cake model).
• Saturn: radiates 2-3 times the energy it receives from the Sun. Excess comes from frictional heating from raining liquid helium.
• Neptune: radiates 2.6 times the energy it receives from the Sun. Excess comes either from frictional heating from raining diamonds or from gravitational contraction of debris absorbed by Neptune in the early days of the Solar System.
• Uranus: radiates 1.06 times the energy it receives from the Sun. Excess left from formation.
We might additionally be tempted to ask exactly where the required quantity of radionucleides might have originated which would be required to generate the necessary internal heat within our Solar System’s ‘gas giants’. If stars and their satellites are generated by electrical mechanisms, would larger planetary bodies really need such a method of generating internal heat, or is it actually because they are functioning rather like resistors in a larger electrical circuit?
According to the Electric Universe theory, our sun is an electric node in a galactic circuit, and is variable because the magnitude of the galactic electric current flowing through it also varies with time. Similarly, the planets are affected as conductive components in a circuit, and exhibit effects such as heating (take note of this, it’s important) which result from this. One of the most basic experiments in physics is simply to pass a current through a conductor and measure its temperature; the functions of light bulbs, electric fan heaters and even simple plug fuses are based upon the effects of this. The resistance of the conductive material to the flow of current produces heat and (with higher current) light.
Here is where current cosmology seems to fall flat on its collective face. Rather than take into account the possibility that much of what they are observing relates to the flow of electrical current through the Solar System and base their interpretation of observed phenomena upon an electrical paradigm, astrophysicists, cosmologists and other space scientists have put themselves into some kind of intellectual backwater by postulating the presence of unseen, undetectable ‘Dark Matter’ which somehow permeates everything and mysteriously accounts for phenomena which would more accurately be described as ‘electrical’ in nature. So the outward flow of particles from the Sun is characterised as a ‘solar wind’ rather than an ‘electrical current’ (currents need charged particles to ‘flow’) between the electrodes of a virtual cell, where the Sun is actually one of these.
The ‘Earth Lights’ theory follows logically from the ‘Electric Universe’ theory, and surprisingly, perhaps, also complements it, at least in part. Since the Earth is under constant electrical stress, relief of that stress would result in electrical discharge, in much the same way that compressing a quartz crystal releases energy as electricity or light [3], or the charge in a thunderstorm relieves itself by large-scale lightning discharge. But here we come to one of the problems of interpretation of phenomena. Such discharges seem sometimes to give rise to a form of ball lightning which is (for some time at least) self-sustaining and can travel for some distance from its point of discharge, presumably guided by localised surface charges in its surroundings, which it finds alternately attractive and repulsive.
Balls of plasma seem at times to appear from nowhere, even emerging from the ground or from bodies of open water when conditions are apparently right for them. They are seen more easily at night, but if certain suppositions are correct and so-called ‘UFOs’ possessing a uniform grey colouration during daylight hours are the same objects, then this could explain a great deal. Most importantly, science (and even more importantly, perhaps, a lot of UFO ‘believers’) would be forced to admit that these were natural phenomena and begin investigating them properly at last rather than as an occasional curiosity. You can’t seriously suggest to this author that such a widespread phenomenon is even remotely ‘harmless’ to air traffic!
The energy of the discharge is what gives it its colour, and again, this is relevant to the ‘Electric Universe’ theory because here, the colour or brightness of a star is not related to its size or composition, but to the localised electrical stress to which it is subjected by the ambient galactic current. So higher energy input corresponds to an output of increasingly blue-wavelength light, and low energy input to an output of increasingly red-wavelength light; and we note that accounts of these objects at night (UFOs, not stars, in this particular case) cover a range of colours, whereas similar objects during the day, subjected to bright sunlight, are said to appear a metallic grey colour. This is a clear indication that we must be careful when we try to interpret any phenomena of this type. It is interesting that some night-time UFOs are often said to exhibit (a) different colours of light, and (b) colours which change correspondingly with their activity. Interestingly, there seems to be plenty of observational evidence that some UFOs, at least, have some form of electrical-gravitic propulsion system – assuming that they are guided craft rather than natural phenomena.
The beginnings of an obfuscatory system begin to arise before our eyes. Since these localised, ball-lightning phenomena have been known from antiquity, they are not in fact unfamiliar. Technology products which use a similar mechanism for levitation and aerial motion can therefore be dismissed as something else, hence plausibly denied. The point of which being that a technology product can therefore be distanced from oneself, i.e. the obfuscating party, by keeping such things obscure, mysterious and remote in technological terms from the befuddled observer. It has not escaped this author’s attention that visual observations are usually at the limit of resolution (i.e. observable distance) due either to the resolving power of the observer’s eyes or that of any recording device (such as a cell phone camera) which they happen to have to hand when the object is sighted, a situation which the gradual (and by now virtually complete) transition from light-sensitive film to CCD technology has not improved. Another problem relating to more modern technology is that, when zooming in on a distant object, the actual shape of the object is completely lost as the light passing through to the sensor is stopped down by the iris diaphragm; the result is often a diamond shape, and this is only confirming that the camera is working properly!
There is another connected phenomenon which should be mentioned. As mentioned above, a theoretical upper limit is placed upon the possible age of the Earth, based upon what can be observed, and similarly for the universe itself. In the case of the latter, one branch of ‘evidence’ is said to be the ‘cosmic microwave background’, which is supposed to be akin to an ‘echo’ of the ‘Big Bang’ (to use the late Fred Hoyle’s comical term). One thing we notice in scientific accounts generally is the tendency to try and fix some kind of ‘datum line’ to events, in much the same way as the birth of Christ was taken by Christians, so that each year thereafter was referred to as ‘in the Year of Our Lord . . .’. But history, even in the debased and conveniently sanitised version presented to us, clearly did not begin with the birth of Christ; that, however, is an issue for another discussion. We merely note here that the ‘Big Bang’ is an hypothesis resting upon very shaky (and clearly falsifiable) foundations; and that excessive expenditure upon experimental equipment cannot produce ‘facts’ when the underlying data contradict the theory. So attempts to estimate the age of the Earth can only be as good as the methodology used, and if that methodology should prove unsound . . . the data produced are nonsense. Think about that the next time you hear an expression like: “The age of X has been reliably dated to Y by carbon dating.”
The reason why the ‘cosmic microwave background’ might not be allowable is simply this: As mentioned above, according to NASA’s own measurements, the universe is 99% plasma. Plasma conducts electricity, therefore massive amounts of electricity are constantly passing through virtually every point in the cosmos. The passage of electrical current through a conductive material produces magnetic fields, and we are talking here about massive currents passing through huge conductors. High-energy magnetic fields produce radiation. So electromagnetic radiation – including microwaves – can be produced anywhere, at any time, and therefore cannot be adduced to be evidence of anything except the presence of plasma, currents and magnetic fields at the moment of observation, in the location in which it is observed. Er . . . that’s it.
So we might ask why it is that a sort of ‘artificial event horizon’ (to co-opt a term from astronomy and cosmology) could be thought so necessary? The answer is that it is a kind of mind control – an artificial temporal and psychological barrier beyond which it is not deemed necessary for the ordinary mind to go, at least in the minds of those who would control us. We become more easily controlled by being divorced from the true past, in which context we would see everything as it really is – unnatural and unreal, and . . . controlled. Remember that previously, we began to understand that history as we know it is only partly true, due to a combination of selective destruction and wilful fabrication; and the provision of an artificial datum line, as well as an artificial time line originating therefrom, is all part of this. Obfuscation, fabrication, and plausible deniability have given us the world we know today; a world in which one phenomenon is hidden behind another, and whole areas of phenomenology are frozen completely out of any scientific discussion, simply to prevent the collapse of careers and industries which are of debatable utility to general humanity, and which we probably do not need . . . and probably never did in the first place. Oh, but they do generate an awful lot of profit!
The simple fact is that once one part of the puzzle falls out of place, once one card in the dubious house of cards buckles and flips out, the rest follows. For example: What would undermine the use of radioisotope pairs in the determination of the ages of rocks? It would be if the isotopes used had an origin different from that which is assumed by conventional science. And how would that happen? It would happen if they were actually created at an earlier time, by stupendous and catastrophic electrical events, events which encompassed and bathed the entire solar system, affecting all things therein equally, but probably later in time than the dating method would seem to indicate. This would mean that the origin of those isotopes was instantaneous at some point in time, and even that the matrix in which they were formed may not have been pre-existing. This might also explain why large collections of discrete crystals are usually to be found buried in rocks.
But it would also represent an artificial ‘datum line’ of destruction; perhaps it destroyed everything on Earth that it encountered and left only broken remains and rubble behind; again, a notion we should bear in mind when we see the shattered surfaces of other planets and moons and – almost certainly – when we observe the large-scale structures of our own Earth. The destruction of visible history would lead naturally to the construction of fables in the mind of those who came afterwards. And later, some form of ‘rationalism’ would be instigated when it was realised that the survival of past events in metaphorical or legendary form could be used to obfuscate those events, using the claim that they were ‘unscientific’ and ‘mere folklore’ (or other convenient expressions to that effect). But this only serves to show us that the rise of ‘rationalism’ after the Middle Ages is an attempt to hide and disguise whatever message was being passed down to us by folklore. And that is mind control.
If so-called ‘UFOs’ are in fact natural, as some have speculated, how might we explain their sudden appearances? The origins of ‘Earth Lights’ may well be due to the release of localised geo-electrical stresses (as seen in some of the work of Dr. Michael Persinger [6]). Interestingly, a similar proposition has more recently been made regarding the so-called ‘Hessdalen Lights’, which have been the subject of ongoing research for many years (see, for example, [7]). In the context of the ‘Electric Universe’, such a release of energy on a large scale is proposed to lead to an overall decrease of electrical stresses on a larger body by forcing fission into a larger and smaller one – the charge is then spread over a greater surface area, but also this necessarily leads to the formation of a smaller body, and hence, this could be the simplest mechanism for the formation not only of planets from their parent stars, but also smaller bodies from their parent planets (think ‘the moons of Jupiter’). This illustrates the scalability of electrical phenomena, and it is also disconnected from any ‘Uniformitarian’ notion based upon the observation of purely ‘terrestrial’ phenomena; as stated previously, phenomena based upon the prevalent conditions at the Earth’s surface cannot be invoked for other known celestial bodies, many of which do not have an atmosphere or even conditions suitable for liquid water!
Since modern science is largely based upon ‘Uniformitarian’ principles, the whole enterprise is undermined when these are challenged. And since the universe is actually open to anyone who cares to observe it, when challenging observations arise, the only way to maintain the status quo is to insist that they cannot be true “because [insert mainstream scientific garbage here].” By obfuscation of the boundaries of reality and illusion, this status quo is maintained, but for how much longer, as the prevalence of both conflicting data and emerging paradigms becomes crushing?
If people were really well-educated, they would accept the possibility that there could be more than a single possible interpretation for any single observation or phenomenon; they would question things more openly because their minds were correspondingly open to new ideas. But modern ‘education’ seems to be part of a larger effort to delimit the margins of possible thinking, so that the kind of ‘disambiguation’ promulgated here is difficult, if not downright impossible; and what passes as ‘knowledge’ is merely the ability to memorise and regurgitate indoctrinated ‘factoids’ on demand. But this would imply, would it not, that so-called ‘science’ was in fact little more than ‘pseudo-science’ itself, because its practitioners were wilfully skirting and avoiding any discussion of important parts of wider reality, which anyone can see in their daily lives, and trying constantly to fob people off with pat answers just to get them off the practitioners’ backs?
So we approach the end of this diatribe by returning to the observations of UFOs. The key issue here is not whether they exist; the problem is that there is (and always has been) acknowledged to be a small percentage of observations which conventional thinking is unable (or unwilling) to separate out into ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, and my contention here has been, firstly, that this is part of a long-term arrangement to hide or otherwise disguise ‘something’ by obscurity and obfuscation, which by rights should have been ‘disambiguated’ from other phenomena long ago; and secondly, that this is preventing the progression of science at the paradigmatic level due to the steadfast but dogmatic and illogical refusal to encompass and assimilate changes which would lead naturally to a more objective view of the universe, and not just our own meagre cosmic backyard. Unknown objects observed in the sky exist, and we can be quite certain that they are not all piloted by beings from another galaxy; but all too often, agents of scientific (or other) authority are not explaining them properly. Either they don’t know because there has been insufficient publicly-funded research (and I would start to worry about this if I were a regular airline passenger), or we are being willingly misled according to some unknown ‘agenda’ which is trying to keep something secret. Whichever it may be, it is the population’s collective intelligence which is being insulted at all levels.
* It is of interest to note that after the Revolution, a process was put into practice to ‘simplify’ Chinese characters, ostensibly with the aim of increasing literacy by reducing the number and visual complexity of traditional characters, but some of us find this suspicious . . . and obfuscatory. One obvious result being, of course, the eventual inability to read an ‘older’ version of one’s own language, if one is a native Chinese speaker. Does this mean, then, that the millions of documents in their archives, which were written in Traditional Chinese, will eventually become illegible?
[1] http://www.californiasciencecenter.org/Exhibits/AirAndSpace/MissionToThePlanets/Explorer1/Explorer1.php
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush
[3] http://rockartblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/lightning-stones-and-quartz.html
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune
[6] http://persingerpublications.com/, click on links as required to see materials.
[7] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2632650/Has-mystery-glowing-Norwegian-orbs-solved-Expert-claims-underground-battery-creates-amazing-light-show.html
[8] http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com
[9] http://m.teachastronomy.com/astropedia/article/Thermal-Radiation-from-Gas-Giant-Planets
[10] https://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2008/arch08/080124bostick.htm
Clickbait Got Me Again!
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Breakfast in the Ruins, Lost Geographies, The Destruction of History
Ohhh… such pointless clickbait, made worse by dependence upon ‘establishment’ interpretations… why on Earth is it that a former culture whose records have been destroyed has of necessity to be considered ‘bizarre’?
Is it because they were not American, and it is normally amateur American commentators who feel the ‘bizarre’ need to demonstrate their craft upon a marshmallow-soft target? Is that what it is? Written also for an audience with the attention span of a goldfish?
LiveScience is a pile of scientistic clickbait and nothing more.
http://www.livescience.com/55430-bizarre-ancient-cultures.html
Lost Geographies
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Lost Geographies
When I started writing the original blog upon which this piece is based, the arrival of yet another East Asian autumn, with the falling leaves and golden Gingko berries starting to line the streets, reminded us yet again of passing time; and reminded me, yet again, that I was another year older.
In that year, there had been changes of geography, turmoil, in fact, as I have passed rapidly and destructively between jobs at a time when I would have preferred to be settled and comfortable in a new routine.
And I have been reminded, yet again, of how the passage of time dims our memories; of how, as we grow older, our recollections from the most distant parts of our lives become progressively harder to maintain among the constant barrage of information which assaults our senses daily. My life is full of lost geographies – places, people, things, even past eras – the recall of which becomes ever more difficult with the passing of the years, and yet, in those times, those places, those eras, in those moments, everything was crystal clear.
Now, there is nothing inherently unnatural in this: our peak of intellectual performance (we are told) is in our early to mid-twenties, and declines thereafter as our brains lose (allegedly) something like ten thousand neurons per day. But the types of institutions and power structures we have been discussing here previously do their very best to take advantage of this. What follows is merely a “heads up” to something which we experience each day, and which is extremely pernicious, and which partly follows on from the theme of the previous posting. In the confusion of today, how can we hold on to, or rediscover, perhaps, the lost geographies of our past?
In fact, I started writing this article a couple of years ago, and with the recent forced migration to the new blog site and the concomitant analysis of what should go where (and when), which at the time of writing this is still ongoing, was reminded of the original intention, which was to adumbrate the concept of “false starts” as a means of mass mind control. What I mean by this is the idea that certain “interested parties” would introduce an idea by providing a false beginning, suggesting that a phenomenon was never observed earlier than a particular point in time and that ergo there was not (and could not be) existence of that phenomenon prior to that start date. Originally one would have pointed to (for example) the “void” at the beginning of Genesis (of which more later), but it is troubling to note that the formerly religious/cultic tendency to try to substitute a false “Year Zero” has long since been subsumed into scientific canon. Worse, science also has other implausibles which seem to be intended to bolster the prevailing paradigm, even though common sense would suggest otherwise.
However, it is not only within the realms of science and religion that we find this phenomenon; it is very common in journalistic reportage, also. It is a frequent experience for anyone old enough to remember that most of the time, newspapers are happy to forget a lot of often quite important things that they have reported in the past, simply because their recollection in the present would be so inconvenient (like past sloppy reporting on their own part, for example, or supporting the wrong political party). In this, they form an irritating dyad with politicians, who likewise prefer to forget their past failures, misdemeanours and scandals in the present, although one should say that the former’s tendency to remind their readership of the latter’s past actions is often highly amusing.
But at the back of all of this is a pernicious control mechanism: very often, politics and journalism depend for their effectiveness upon the forgetfulness of their audiences. And since memory tends to dim with time (and let’s not forget that in a court of law, eyewitness testimony is considered the least reliable type of evidence for precisely the reasons we will discuss here), one would suspect that this would be a powerful tool in the wrong hands, whereby a combination of memory substitution and persuasiveness and persistence in the pursuit of a devious end would eventually convince less critical minds that something happened, when in fact it never did.
So, where could we possibly start with all of this? I will choose to begin with the question of flying saucers [1] (a ridiculous term if ever there was one, of journalistic origin and, as we shall see later, a completely inaccurate warping of quoted speech) and extraterrestrial life. When I was a kid, back in the 1960s and 70s, my life was filled with science fiction – Doctor Who, Gerry Anderson (Fireball XL5, Thunderbirds, Stingray, Captain Scarlet, UFO, Space: 1999), Space Patrol, Star Trek (TOS), Lost in Space, to name but a few, plus all the periodicals like DC and Marvel comics (Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Incredible Hulk, Superman, and the king of them all, Doctor Strange) . . . with all of this floating around in my head, by the time I got to the mid-70s and information about allegedly ‘real’ UFOs began to percolate through to me, mainly via the local public libraries, you could say that I was quite open to any suggestion about extraterrestrials and their presence (or otherwise) around Earth.
But as the years passed and I became more educated, knowledgeable and experienced, and indeed, reading and otherwise taking in more information about the subject, more and more implausibility tended to creep in. New ideas started to arise about what we were seeing and some of them had nothing to do with “extraterrestrials” at all, and I started to realise that we were making at least one fundamental mistake: very little attempt was being made to distinguish between the obviously artificial and anything which could be described as natural. Then there was the problem of “Well, if it’s artificial, is it really made by us or them?” – there was a necessary filtration or categorisation of observed phenomena which was missing from the field, and this is surprisingly important. And I am sure that it interdigitates quite nicely in the minds of deceivers that there should be such confusion, not least because it keeps idle minds occupied and more acute minds busy trying to figure it all out!
I will return to this in a later blog, but for now, the simple truth is that what I am adumbrating here is pervasive and is applied to all fields of human experience; it is all, to a greater or lesser extent, tainted by the desire of “interested parties” to control all of those who do not wish to belong to their pernicious little groups, for their collective benefit. Both religion and science have this, but it is at the limits or borders of those enterprises that the cracks begin to show and we begin to realise that the whole thing is a con. History is, in fact, a complete con: a fabrication written by “interested parties”, and to make sure that alternative interpretations are not possible, essential information is kept hidden (or even destroyed) by those same people, who act as the gatekeepers of the truth, whatever it may be. Time for some gatecrashing! Let’s party!!!
I suppose that when it really started to crystallise in my mind was shortly after George Carlin died. Carlin, whom I almost did not know at all (because I was from the wrong side of the Atlantic, of course) was a fantastically funny man, but his material was, at its heart, satirical: and as he was chronicling the absurdities of (mainly American) life, he was in fact admonishing his audience to have critical minds and not simply accept what we were told, like dumb sheep [2]:
I had (at that time) recently discovered the joys of YouTube, and came across another commentator of a different kind, who calls himself Jordan Maxwell [not his real name] [3]. He had brought out a new book called Sons of God, and so he was therefore making a kind of Bible commentary, but I felt at the time (and still feel now) that whatever the extent of his veracity might be, he was making some serious points which, as his countrymen might say, had always been “hidden in plain sight” but were overlooked because of their locations within the larger text. One realises, as one gets older, that very often the reason why some knowledge which is not destroyed proves difficult to uncover is that it is deliberately placed in difficult locations; a library, which is ostensibly a repository of information, is actually a perfect place to hide obscure data. But sometimes, as in this case, it was before your eyes all the time – you just have to pay more careful attention . . .
The most important points that Maxwell seemed to be making were as follows:
1: The ancient “Hebrews” were not originally monotheistic (i.e. assumed a single godhead), but were in fact henotheistic. Maxwell explains that by this, he means that they had a selection of “gods” and chose their “god” from amongst them. What started me off looking at this was the realisation that if the ancient Hebrews selected a “god” from a line-up of “gods”, then the expression “Lord God” needs to be pronounced in a certain way to make it intelligible. “Lord” needs fortis; “God” needs lenis: “The LORD God” – I suddenly realised why it was printed this way in the Bible – the other “gods” were “lesser” gods (small “g”) but he was the LORD. But the “lesser gods” did not cease to be “gods”, something I shall return to later during a similar discussion relating to Michael Tsarion and the Atonists.
So we should note in passing (as we will return to this later) that mention is made of “gods” rather than “God” in several places in the Bible. Indeed, Maxwell points out in passing (for example) that in Psalm 82, it reads:
82:1: God standeth in the congregation of the mighty;
He judgeth among the gods.
and that the term Elohim is in fact plural, not singular.
2: Genesis does not state initially that “God” “created” man in his own image. Genesis 1:26, which is part of the account of the sixth day of creation, states:
1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
Only after this does a singular reference to “his image” appear:
1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
As Maxwell expresses it, the Elohim, according to this account, took an existing indigenous Earth creature (a hominid) and remodelled it in their image.
3: Again, in Genesis 3:22, “God” speaks in the plural:
3:22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: . . .
4: “Adam” was not “created” by “God” in the “Garden of Eden”. Instead, he was created elsewhere on the sixth day of creation and then placed in the “Garden of Eden” by “God” (singular), who had also created the “Garden” for this very purpose:
2:8 And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he
put the man whom he had formed.
5: “God” sends the Great Flood to exterminate all except the eight people (Noah, his wife, and their three sons and their wives), and then instructs them to:
9:1 And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.
Here we come to an interesting recollection from the beginning of the Book of Genesis. When “God” speaks to Noah after the flood, he repeats what he said to Adam and Eve in the first chapter:
1:28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
3: The existence of an inexplicable void before the creation of man:
1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
Maxwell points to this having been a “mistranslation” by the English scholars who created the King James Bible of the term tohū vā bohū. This term, according to the annotations which Maxwell was using, means “became a waste” or “became a desolation” – in other words, the world was a wasteland at the time being discussed in the Genesis narrative, but was not a wasteland before – something happened which caused it to become a wasteland, so this was not its original state.
The term tohū vā bohū appears again later in the Book of Jeremiah, where “God” tells Jeremiah of how the world used to be before “He” created man.
In Jeremiah 4:23, it states:
4:23 I beheld the earth, and lo, it was without form, and void; and the heavens, and they had no light.
4:24: I beheld the mountains, and lo, they trembled, and all the hills moved lightly.
4:25: I beheld, and lo, there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens were fled.
4:26: I beheld, and lo, the fruitful place was a wilderness, and all the cities thereof were broken down at the presence of the Lord, and by his fierce anger.
4:27 For thus hath the LORD said, The whole land shall be desolate; yet will I not make a full end.
4:28 For this shall the earth mourn, and the heavens above be black; because I have spoken it, I have purposed it, and will not repent, neither will I turn back from it.
And the meaning of this? Before the creation of Adam and Eve, the Earth was a beautiful place, but was then destroyed (by “God”), and it was the task of the new men to replenish (reoccupy by multiplication) the vacant wasteland. Jeremiah is given a vision of this, and according to Maxwell, these are the only two occasions in the King James Bible where the term tohū vā bohū can be found.
So the account of “creation” found in Genesis is, in fact, a false start; the Earth existed before that, but when men multiplied and “God” determined that they were corrupted, he destroyed them with the Great Flood, and only Noah and his family were allowed to survive, along with (according to the story) the pairs of animals in the Ark with him. Why Noah in particular was spared is a story for another time, but it relates directly to the story of Enoch.
And again, in Jeremiah 4:28, “God” says: “yet I will not make a full end”.
It’s a false beginning, convenient for the story.
The world existed long before the story began; we know this now, because the same story tells us so!
“God” did not wish to destroy the world, only the corrupted inhabitants, so that new civilisations could be “created”.
And when they also became corrupted, “He” levelled the whole thing to the ground with a “Great Flood”, and started again.
If we look at other accounts of Creation, for example the Popol Vuh from South America, we see very similar stories. Indeed, this particular one tells how the “gods” were successively dissatisfied with their creation, and re-made it no less than three times; a new beginning each time. And in the tohū vā bohū sense, in the Bible, after one “creation and corruption”, “God” lays waste to the civilisation (which “He” presumably created), creates a new one, becomes fed up with it again, destroys his second (we assume) creation, kills off all but a select few (Noah and his family), and starts again. In fact there are more stories like this (Lot, for example), but I think the essential point is made – all of these events create a new “datum line”, beyond which (one suspects) the “official version” of history is or was meant to begin.
My central point here is that human history (as it is taught to us) is a succession of attempts to impose a new “datum line” upon our consciousness, and that within the new context, whatever went before is (or is intended to be) meaningless, irrespective of how substantial it might have been. In the Bible, from the Christian point of view, one might argue that the new “datum line” was the birth of Christ – and the Western calendar as it exists today certainly derives from this.
We should note also that the Biblical account is heavily localised. It really refers only (and exclusively) to the areas of the Fertile Crescent (Mesopotamia: Sumer, Akkad, Assyria), parts of North Africa esp. Egypt, and the Levant (Palestine and its environs); only in the New Testament does it begin to stray. Although the events related in the Bible may reflect the localisation of global events during past eras, there is a huge amount that we cannot infer from them, for example events in the Far East and Oceania, or even in northern Europe and the Americas. And yet we could hardly assert that events were not happening in those locations during the formative period of the Biblical narrative. But we can be quite certain that they were, and that what we see in the Bible hardly represents the last word in “datum lines”. One should be suspicious that a story which turned out to be so powerful over the last couple of thousand years concerns itself so specifically with such a restricted area.
When the convenience of a false start was required, in historical terms, at least, there were plenty of precedents; what we see in the Bible are only early attempts at this.
I would not say, however, that the presence of these things in the Bible makes it irrelevant, only less accurate than it claims to be. I would have no doubt that it describes real people and their affairs from past times, but their experiences (victories in battle, in particular) are partly speculative and nonverifiable by independent means, something I would certainly level in general terms at the dubious discipline of archaeology (and by extension, therefore, palaeontology and cosmology).
So . . . where would we look next?
We have already mentioned the arrival of Christ. His arrival marks the main split in what we now call the “Bible”. Similarly, we might point out that in Islam, the years are counted from the arrival of Mohammed. But what about in more modern times?
Well, somewhere at the beginning of the twentieth century, something similar seems to have happened. A new “datum line” emerged, somewhat surreptitiously, with the emergence of a new scientific paradigm, and the period seems to have been roughly 1905-1911, and began with the publication of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Why would this be important? For several reasons:
1: It represented a paradigm succession from the “mechanical universe” model of Newton, dominated by the effects of gravity and mass, into a new paradigm dominated by the bending of space-time by matter.
2: It also represented a change from the requirement to demonstrate the validity of a new hypothesis by physical experimentation to demonstration by calculation, i.e. that the calculations themselves represented proof of validity rather than a visual demonstration, and led to a kind of “truth by proclamation” (rather as in the religious context, perhaps?). This has led us, with the progression of computer technology since the end of World War II, into a situation where modern sciences are largely dominated by simulations, and where the simulation is touted as proof of the validity of both the hypothesis and the dominant paradigm. That such mechanisms often fail in predictive accuracy (and are therefore open to the accumulation of anomalies) can be seen any time at http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/daily-tpod/. No shortage of examples there!
3: In the mainstream historical account, the progression from Ptolemaic to Newtonian to Einsteinian cosmology is often presented as a purely natural progression. But what is clear is that the real progression is from practical to theoretical, from that which can at least be demonstrated from some part of physical experience to that which can only be easily explained through recourse to analogy. But the problem with this is that the recourse to reason and analogy, without recourse to physical examination, leads only one way – to abstraction. This is why a computer model is often presented nowadays as “proof” when, in fact, because of its very nature, changing any one variable in its programming is likely to produce a different result. This type of science is therefore a scam because it relies upon belief rather than rationality, and when science has become a belief system, it has also become a religion or – worse, perhaps – a cargo cult. [4]
4: By the time Einstein’s General Relativity paper was published, the Western art world had already become enamoured with the idea of “modernity” and the new atomic-level science which was emerging from physics laboratories, and the burgeoning products of technology in the new century. This was (along with other media input) creating a social psychological environment in which new ideas were easier to accept, but naïve when it came to distinguishing genuine ideas from obvious deception, and certainly not concerned with the possible future consequences of current developments. [11]
In fact, we might say that this “datum line” mechanism is rather worn-out; it has been used too many times historically and one’s patience with those who would use it has worn rather thin, especially as pointed out by Thomas S. Kuhn in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), that much of what passes for “normal science” is in fact merely trying to “verify” the theory rather than being genuinely “scientific” and challenging it with new, rival theories, the successes of which would lead eventually to a succession of new paradigm over old. Rather, those who might be able to articulate reasonable alternatives tend to be marginalised by the mainstream.
There is a whiff of something here, and it smells fishy; what we have been told constitutes “history” is nothing of the sort – at best, it can only be a “version of events” according to the narrative of the current paradigm, and if modern science is anything to go by, it is moribund (because it has little predictive power) and corrupted (because the only way to success within the current paradigm is to massage results to fit what is expected, rather than trying to interpret results with a view to paradigm succession, which ideally would lead to greater verisimilitude).
And the machinations of the priests of the current paradigm are really only to keep this ramshackle structure going as long as possible because, of course, when the time inevitably comes that the accumulation of new data overwhelmingly contradicts the current paradigm, it must fall like a house of cards; but what we must not forget is that this is entirely intentional – science is built like a castle on sand, and persists only until the sand (and therefore the castle) are washed away by the tide of new information. This is something to fear only if we are so attached to the old paradigm that we feel that its passing also triggers our own demise, so strong is the mind-control of the ramifications of its loss upon our lives. But there is no permanence in science; the progress towards verisimilitude means that although older ideas may be discarded or, at best, subsumed into the new paradigm, their influence is inevitably and irreversibly diminished and hence, also, the prestige of their former practitioners.
So we come to another example, really the one which set it all off in my mind: the Kenneth Arnold story. Kenneth who?
If you look at his Wikipedia entry [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Arnold], Kenneth Arnold was an American businessman who sold fire suppression systems, and combined his business with the eminently practical travel solution of being a private aviator. As such, he was often involved in search and rescue missions, but because his clientele were widely dispersed, flying between airfields was also a faster way of transiting between customers. However, on June 24th, 1947, he had an experience which has completely flavoured (and, one might say, “prejudiced”) the study of what came to be known as “UFOs” ever since . . .
According to his report, he was flying close to Mount Rainier in Washington state, en route from Chehalis to Yakima, hoping to get the $5,000 dollar reward offered during the search for a missing Curtiss Commando C-46 transport plane, owned by the Navy [5]. He reported (partially):
“The sky and air was clear as crystal. I hadn’t flown more than two or three minutes on my course when a bright flash reflected on my airplane. It startled me as I thought I was too close to some other aircraft. I looked every place in the sky and couldn’t find where the reflection had come from until I looked to the left and the north of Mt. Rainier where I observed a chain of nine peculiar looking aircraft flying from north to south at approximately 9,500 foot elevation and going, seemingly, in a definite direction of about 170 degrees.
They were approaching Mt. Rainier very rapidly, and I merely assumed they were jet planes. Anyhow, I discovered that this was where the reflection had come from, as two or three of them every few seconds would dip or change their course slightly, just enough for the sun to strike them at an angle that reflected brightly on my plane.
These objects being quite far away, I was unable for a few seconds to make out their shape or their formation. Very shortly they approached Mt. Rainier, and I observed their outline against the snow quite plainly.
I thought it was very peculiar that I couldn’t find their tails but assumed they were some type of jet plane. I was determined to clock their speed, as I had two definite points I could clock them by; the air was so clear that it was very easy to see objects and determine their approximate shape and size at almost fifty miles that day.
I remember distinctly that my sweep second hand on my eight day clock, which is located on my instrument panel, read one minute to 3 P.M. as the first object of this formation passed the southern edge of Mt. Rainier. I watched these objects with great interest as I had never before observed airplanes flying so close to the mountain tops, flying directly south to southeast down the hog’s back of a mountain range. I would estimate their elevation could have varied a thousand feet one way or another up or down, but they were pretty much on the horizon to me which would indicate they were near the same elevation as I was.
They flew like many times I have observed geese to fly in a rather diagonal chain-like line as if they were linked together. They seemed to hold a definite direction but rather swerved in and out of the high mountain peaks. Their speed at the time did not impress me particularly, because I knew that our army and air forces had planes that went very fast.
What kept bothering me as I watched them flip and flash in the sun right along their path was the fact that I couldn’t make out any tail on them, and I am sure that any pilot would justify more than a second look at such a plane.
. . . As I was flying in the direction of this particular ridge, I measured it and found it to be approximately five miles so I could safely assume that the chain of these saucer like objects were at least five miles long. I could quite accurately determine their pathway due to the fact that there were several high peaks that were a little this side of them as well as higher peaks on the other side of their pathway.” [6], [8]
As can also be seen at Wikipedia [7], although Arnold used terms like “saucer” and “saucer-like objects” when addressing the press, he also used other terms: “like a fish flipping in the sun”, “like the tail of a [Chinese] kite” and “half-moon shaped”. However, it was through the press that the term “flying saucer” came into coinage, and Arnold himself probably did not help matters when he stated his belief that they might originate off-world:
In an Associated Press story from July 19, Arnold reiterated his belief that if they weren’t Army, then they were extraterrestrial:
“The ex-University of Minnesota swimmer and footballer says he now believes:
1. The disks are not from any foreign country.
2. The Army could give the answer if it would — ‘if they don’t have the explanation now they certainly could do something to find out.’
3. If the Army has no explanation the disks must be — ‘and I know this sounds crazy’ — from another planet.” [9]
How Arnold’s story becomes one of misrepresentation lies in the fact that 1947 was later to be regarded as a seminal year in the UFO canon: less than two weeks later came the alleged crashes at Roswell and Aztec (both in New Mexico), of which the former, upon its later rediscovery by Stanton Friedman, would become little short of a legend. But what came to be known as “UFOs” had been well-characterised long before 1947, and as Dr. Chuck Missler points out in Return of the Nephilim, many books had made mention of sky objects before the twentieth century [12].
Personally, very soon after his first encounter, Arnold was to become involved in the Maury Island case, bankrolled by Ray Palmer, publisher at that time of “Amazing Stories”, and a good coverage of which can be found here: http://ufocon.blogspot.kr/2010/07/maury-island-no-longer-mystery-ufo-hoax.html [13].
However, from his own account it seems that Arnold thought at the beginning that they must be jets of some kind (as jet aircraft were new, having originated at the end of WWII), despite their apparent slow speed. But the perception of “flying saucers” mushroomed out of control in the media until level-headed discussion was impossible – a situation not helped by the likes of so-called “contactees” such as the obviously fraudulent (and alleged CIA operative) George Adamski, who became so prevalent during the 1950s.
Speaking of Adamski, I came across a very interesting opinion piece by Marc Hallet at Skeptic Report [10], interesting not least because of a paragraph which partly encapsulates what I am adumbrating here:
“On that day [see original article], Adamski did exactly the same as he had done in the Desert in 1952: he asked his friends to stay where they were and wait for him, went into the distance, disappeared, then came back again later saying that something very important had taken place. This method is based upon the same psychological method used by conjurors who give their audience the impression that something extraordinary is taking place when, in fact, something very ordinary actually happens.”
That matter is that, far from being purveyors of the truth, mass media are purveyors of deception. What we see or hear or read is subject to editorial discretion, a process during which it is easy to alter or even remove anything which is not deemed to fit into the larger picture the audience is meant to receive. And far from being “independent”, many editors are required to dance to the tune of their paymasters, or at least to lean towards their requirements in plausible fashion, and the more one tends towards the lower-quality, “tabloidy” end of the publishing spectrum, the more the editors are interested in momentary spectacle and sensation with a view to the bottom line. This is not a reliable source of information of any kind.
A wider assertion of principle might be that since no source of information is completely reliable or without fault, it is unreasonable to assume complete accuracy, and this means that the most essential part of the educational process is the inculcation of a judgemental process which allows the individual to more easily determine and filter out sources of non-information (or, worse, misinformation or disinformation). An implication of this is that since no source of information is completely reliable, it is unwise to make oneself dependent upon single information sources, whether they be personal, historical, philosophical, religious or scientific. There are no undeniably reliable sources of information, so don’t take any of them one hundred percent seriously. And the more noise they make, the more certain you can be that they are seeking your attention for a reason.
These two cases we have examined cursorily here have showed two kinds of deception. The first is lack of attention: not seeing the glaringly obvious due to not examining the source closely enough, although in fairness, we should remind ourselves that the source in this case passed through a number of languages and even incarnations before we could see it in the form in which it appears today (which is truly a story in itself); and the second is deliberate sensationalism, distraction and contradiction, a problem which continues to worsen in the mass media. Kenneth Arnold was an experienced pilot and a keen observer of detail, but the effect of the Mount Rainier and Maury Island affairs has been to cast doubt upon him as a reliable witness and investigator, which is surely unfair.
The end result is that the physical and psychological geography that we had in the past becomes an increasingly dim memory; the hallmark of modern media communication is a plenitude of confusion which blights our recollection of those things which we used to think were so certain. The sadness of the Internet age is not that there is a shortage of information; it is that so much of it is completely uncorroborated, unverifiable or just outright bogus.
When confronted by this maelstrom of contradictory information, the best that we can do – perhaps – is to restrict the input and filter out the extraneous distractions which have been added with the intention of deliberate obfuscation. Then we establish facts between events which have been verified to our satisfaction, and proceed to build our own, personal schema of the situation from there. Perhaps, then, we can work backwards, as best as possible, to reconstruct those lost geographies of our past without the pointless diversions of the present, the better to understand what lies in our future.
“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” – Lenin
References:
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Arnold
2: George Carlin – 10 Commandments: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE8ooMBIyC8
3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7KBw1W8ABw
4: http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html
5: http://www.saturdaynightuforia.com/html/articles/articlehtml/positivelytruestoryofkennetharnold1.html
6: http://www.project1947.com/fig/ka.htm
7: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Arnold_UFO_sighting#Publicity_and_origins_of_term_.22flying_saucer.22
8: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Arnold_AAF_drawing.jpg
9: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Arnold_UFO_sighting
10: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Arnold_UFO_sighting
11: See Jacob Bronowski’s “The Ascent of Man: World Within World”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV9WE-k-y3M
12: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0gZMFD34Vc
13: http://ufocon.blogspot.kr/2010/07/maury-island-no-longer-mystery-ufo-hoax.html
Great Quote . . .
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Lost Geographies
Tags: education, effects, foreigner, hagwon, Korea, public school, school, Stalin, teacher, teaching, weapon
Dumber Than a Second Coat of Paint
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Lost Geographies
Tags: cosmology, disambiguate, education, elementary, English, falsify, foreigner, hagwon, hoyle, hypothesis, Korea, lavoisier, margulis and sagan, mendeleev, nasa, normal science, paradigm, perception, phenomena, power, priestley, public school, science, sir arthur eddington, South Korea, star, teacher, teaching english, theory, UFO
