Recent State of UFO Research from MUFON

[Burnt State]

The last two MUFON guests and their general discussion has left me rather concerned about the state of critical UFO analysis. There doesn't seem to be a building upon the larger volume of UFO Reseaech over the decades and instead individuals stick to a small collection of people they favour.

I don't really see a reality where cows blood can be converted into Chlorophyll. And the resurrecting of the dead vampire that is Aztec is bizarre. How many times does a stake need to be put in that heart? The signal is definitely getting lost with a lot more noise being promoted. Sure Slime molds are incredible solutions to human problems, but we can't prove that dolphins send images to each other. Similarly we really don't know anything at all about telepathic aliens communicating to their living mothership.

I appreciate that everyone descends from mentors, and for some it's the meticulous notes of Leonard Stringfield, but then he's got a lot of second hand info and unverified assumptions in his body of work. Much like Lue Elizondo repeating the same myths - that's how Aztec keeps coming back. I'm surprised that the Maury Island Incident wan't resurrected.

However, with a single sweeping statement both the Pascagoula and Socorro cases are wiped out as apparently a lot of people don't take much stock in humanoid encounter cases?! While humanoid encounters are complicated and enter into the realm of high strange they are a major feature of the Ufologial experience. For a guest to totally dismiss humanoid encounters is to dismiss some major critical cases in the history of Ufology. And then afterwards to claim he knows what aliens actually look like was paradoxical at best.

Using Star Trek to verify hypotheses is a little more than humorous I think. And isn't Lue Elizondo just a more magnified version of Richard Doty? That he's an extension of the state of validated UFO research and information is also quite soft.

I think high strangeness is a more narrowed down aspect of a larger general phenomenon that has to have a source...there is a very specific design to it, and it has these very unique features that ranges from sightings to trace evidence, humanoid encounters and the abduction phenomena. This needs some detailed study and over the years that have gone by we should have something to say about it - no?

What's also disheartening at the end is that the final statement is that the government knows more and we all still don't know anything at all about anything. That can't be right? Hasn't there been any better thinkers in the last fifty years? Hasn't Vallee shifted? What about Kripal, Pasulka, Cuthcin, Nolan, Rutkowski, Randle and others who are still producing new ideas and persistent analysis. Where's the international recognition of research in Asia, South America, Russia, that huge library out in Norway or the more recent Archives of the Impossible in America? I only heard a brief peep about Avi Loeb.

I feel like there is a developing new discussion with a more critical look at scientific data approaches, along with the use of other parallel fields of inquiry from sociology to philosophy. I'd like to know more about the new thinking around what is behind the phenomenon, its full impact on us, its historical implications and unique features of high strangeness, or how different paranormal phenomena connect together.

There's a lot of meat on the paranormal bone out there and MUFON seems to be stuck in a narrow past. Just my 2 or 3 cents on those two episodes.

 

[Richard Hawkins]

The last two MUFON guests and their general discussion has left me rather concerned about the state of critical UFO analysis. There doesn't seem to be a building upon the larger volume of UFO Reseaech over the decades and instead individuals stick to a small collection of people they favour.

I don't really see a reality where cows blood can be converted into Chlorophyll. And the resurrecting of the dead vampire that is Aztec is bizarre. How many times does a stake need to be put in that heart? The signal is definitely getting lost with a lot more noise being promoted. Sure Slime molds are incredible solutions to human problems, but we can't prove that dolphins send images to each other. Similarly we really don't know anything at all about telepathic aliens communicating to their living mothership.

I appreciate that everyone descends from mentors, and for some it's the meticulous notes of Leonard Stringfield, but then he's got a lot of second hand info and unverified assumptions in his body of work. Much like Lue Elizondo repeating the same myths - that's how Aztec keeps coming back. I'm surprised that the Maury Island Incident wan't resurrected.

However, with a single sweeping statement both the Pascagoula and Socorro cases are wiped out as apparently a lot of people don't take much stock in humanoid encounter cases?! While humanoid encounters are complicated and enter into the realm of high strange they are a major feature of the Ufologial experience. For a guest to totally dismiss humanoid encounters is to dismiss some major critical cases in the history of Ufology. And then afterwards to claim he knows what aliens actually look like was paradoxical at best.

Using Star Trek to verify hypotheses is a little more than humorous I think. And isn't Lue Elizondo just a more magnified version of Richard Doty? That he's an extension of the state of validated UFO research and information is also quite soft.

I think high strangeness is a more narrowed down aspect of a larger general phenomenon that has to have a source...there is a very specific design to it, and it has these very unique features that ranges from sightings to trace evidence, humanoid encounters and the abduction phenomena. This needs some detailed study and over the years that have gone by we should have something to say about it - no?

What's also disheartening at the end is that the final statement is that the government knows more and we all still don't know anything at all about anything. That can't be right? Hasn't there been any better thinkers in the last fifty years? Hasn't Vallee shifted? What about Kripal, Pasulka, Cuthcin, Nolan, Rutkowski, Randle and others who are still producing new ideas and persistent analysis. Where's the international recognition of research in Asia, South America, Russia, that huge library out in Norway or the more recent Archives of the Impossible in America? I only heard a brief peep about Avi Loeb.

I feel like there is a developing new discussion with a more critical look at scientific data approaches, along with the use of other parallel fields of inquiry from sociology to philosophy. I'd like to know more about the new thinking around what is behind the phenomenon, its full impact on us, its historical implications and unique features of high strangeness, or how different paranormal phenomena connect together.

There's a lot of meat on the paranormal bone out there and MUFON seems to be stuck in a narrow past. Just my 2 or 3 cents on those two episodes.

The problem is with MUFON gusts that they all seem to follow the MUFON naritive and that's what keeps the money rolling in. Call me cynical but I genuinely believe that.

 

[Trajanus]

I don't really see a reality where cows blood can be converted into Chlorophyll.

I interpret such cases as ET deceptiveness. They don't really need earthly materials.

And the resurrecting of the dead vampire that is Aztec is bizarre.

Right.

However, with a single sweeping statement both the Pascagoula and Socorro cases are wiped out as apparently a lot of people don't take much stock in humanoid encounter cases?! While humanoid encounters are complicated and enter into the realm of high strange they are a major feature of the Ufologial experience. For a guest to totally dismiss humanoid encounters is to dismiss some major critical cases in the history of Ufology.

Lol, yes. If Socorro, Pascagoula and the Hill case are dismissed you might as well dump UFOlogy altogether.

And isn't Lue Elizondo just a more magnified version of Richard Doty?

Instead of the truth, all we get is an endless succession of misinformers.

I think high strangeness is a more narrowed down aspect of a larger general phenomenon that has to have a source...there is a very specific design to it, and it has these very unique features that ranges from sightings to trace evidence, humanoid encounters and the abduction phenomena. This needs some detailed study and over the years that have gone by we should have something to say about it - no?

Hynek saw it as a big problem for the ETH but I don't concur.

What's also disheartening at the end is that the final statement is that the government knows more and we all still don't know anything at all about anything. That can't be right?

An exaggeration, certainly, but the government not only has the real data or material laymen lack, it constantly misleads the latter with disinfo.

Hasn't there been any better thinkers in the last fifty years?

From the start, UFOlogy has been virtually immobilized. No publicly known, definitive answers about anything. That's the way the government and the phenomenon apparently want it.

 

[Red]

Somebody made a point on one of the podcasts that I listen to that perhaps we don't need more researchers, we need more thinkers in these spaces. This field is currently stagnating in the juices of old cases that have been distorted through the lens of witnesses (some of whom were con artists and liars) and time. Abduction cases have been horribly muddled through hypnosis. I think most of us recognize that hypnosis is not the memory retrieval tool we all thought it was back in the day. And then when you throw in the misinformation seeded into these spaces by intelligence agencies for purpose and likely for study we have a quagmire of stuff that you can't tell is real or not. I heard a lot of people say the government should investigate historic cases like Roswell. I think that would be pointless and time-consuming to have government resources chasing the facts from the fictions. The well is poisoned whether we would like to admit it or not. I also think that many people in MUFON leadership came from the woo-woo days when abductions, Serpo, and Aztec were a thing. It's not a surprise then that these guys are still buying it.

I think we need to start from scratch. First is the acknowledgement that many good sightings are and probably have been military tech. Second, that some of the high strangeness cases may have an internal origin. I think we need to find out the viability and frequency of auditory and visual hallucinations in a healthy population. There is some evidence to suggest that even healthy individuals are able to experience hallucinations in their everyday lives, and it may not be as uncommon as originally thought. Perhaps the high strangeness in some cases comes from our own glitchy brains, but I've not heard one person ever suggest that. Dr. Lilienfeld called hypnosis itself a process of induction and we know that sometimes we can become hypnotized in everyday life: driving on the highway is a classic example. Gazing at the sky, walking/hiking, setting in for a watch in the woods, and the space between sleep and waking might all be circumstances that prime us for that induction process. I know a lot of people would be extremely disappointed if this were indeed the case, but we need to talk about it if we really want to get to the root of things. And just a reminder, by their very definition, hallucinations when they occur are indistinguishable from reality. But it would go some way to explain why our expectations do seem to shape these interactions.

Julian Jaynes posits that the develoopment of complex oral languages in early cultures caused our brains to glitch since the halves of our brains were not well integrated. We would hear hallucinatory commands telling us what to do from the non-dominant hemisphere. Which gave rise to things like religion and ancestor veneration (because those were the voices of gods and deceased relatives they heard). Development and mastery of complex written languages forced the two halves to integrate and gave us an awareness of the self that wasn't present in earlier iterations of human culture. The religiosity of Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt often makes me think about the often overtly religious messages given to us by channeled spirits in Spiritualism and the messages imparted by the benevolent space brothers. Jaynes also thought that hypnosis itself arises from a time when our brains were bicameral in nature which would explain perhaps why under hypnosis, the brain often defaults to things that are highly symbolic in nature.

Anywho, that's my two cents.

P.S. I'd be willing to start a gofundme for the person who permanently kills off Aztec. They would also deserve a Nobel, IMHO.

 

[Richard Hawkins]

Somebody made a point on one of the podcasts that I listen to that perhaps we don't need more researchers, we need more thinkers in these spaces. This field is currently stagnating in the juices of old cases that have been distorted through the lens of witnesses, some of whom were con artists) and time. Abduction cases have been horribly muddled through hypnosis. I think most of us recognize that hypnosis is not the memory retrieval tool we all thought it was back in the day. And then when you throw in the misinformation seeded into these spaces by intelligence agencies for purpose and likely for study we have a quagmire of stuff that you can't tell is real or not. I heard a lot of people say the government should investigate historic cases like Roswell. I think that would be pointless and time-consuming to have government resources chasing the facts from the fictions. The well is poisoned whether we would like to admit it or not. I also think that many people in MUFON leadership came from the woo-woo days when abductions, Serpo, and Aztec were a thing. It's not a surprise then that these guys are still buying it.

I think we need to start from scratch. First is the acknowledgement that many good sightings are and probably have been military tech. Second, that some of the high strangeness cases may have an internal origin. I think we need to find out the viability and frequency of auditory and visual hallucinations in a healthy population. There is some evidence to suggest that even healthy individuals are able to experience hallucinations in their everyday lives, and it may not be as uncommon as originally thought. Perhaps the high strangeness in some cases comes from our own glitchy brains, but I've not heard one person ever suggest that. Dr. Lilienfeld called hypnosis itself a process of induction and we know that sometimes we can become hypnotized in everyday life: driving on the highway is a classic example. Gazing at the sky, walking/hiking, settingly in for a watch in the woods, and the space between sleep and waking might all be circumstances that prime us for that induction process. I know a lot of people would be extremely disappointed if this were indeed the case, but we need to talk about it if we really want to get to the root of things. And just a reminder, by their very definition, hallucinations when they occur are indistinguishable from reality. But it would go some way to explain why our expectations do seem to shape these interactions.

Julian Jaynes posits that complex oral languages caused our brains to glitch since the halves of our brains were not well integrated. We would hear commands telling us what to do from the non-dominant hemisphere. Which gave rise to things like religion and ancestor veneration (because those were the voices of gods and deceased relatives). Development and mastery of complex written languages forced the two halves to integrate and gave us an awareness of the self that wasn't present in earlier iterations of human culture. The religiosity of Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt often makes me think about the often overtly religious messages given to us by channelled spirits in Spiritualism and the messages imparted by the benevolent space brothers. Jaynes also thought that hypnosis itself arises from a time when our brains were bicameral in nature which would explain perhaps why under hypnosis, the brain often defaults to things that are highly symbolic in my nature.

Anywho, that's my two cents.

Fantastic view point more thinkers are exactly what we need. Time to look outside the box.

 

[Red]

Fantastic view point more thinkers are exactly what we need. Time to look outside the box.

Thanks. There could still be something to it all, I mean Hamlin Garland wrote a book about how he found hundreds if not thousands of buried crosses in California using a Spiritualist medium (The Mystery of the Buried Crosses), which defies logic. Interesting book, btw.

I've also edited my post a little for clarity. Dense ideas, ya know?

 

[Trajanus]

I heard a lot of people say the government should investigate historic cases like Roswell.

Lol., what need to investigate when it has had the truth for 69 years already? And by "truth" I certainly don't mean MOGUL:

I Explain Mogul one LAST Time

kevinrandle.blogspot.com

I think that would be pointless and time-consuming to have government resources chasing the facts from the fictions. The well is poisoned whether we would like to admit it or not.

Yeah, ha, and the government is largely responsible for the fictions, intended to hide real secrets.

I also think that many people in MUFON leadership came from the woo-woo days when abductions, Serpo, and Aztec were a thing. It's not a surprise then that these guys are still buying it.

Still buying it--or covertly recruited to muddy the truth or field.

I think we need to start from scratch. First is the acknowledgement that many good sightings are and probably have been military tech.

Generally, I don't buy this. The bulk of UFOs have appearances, propulsion methods and behavior totally unlike conventional craft. But let's suppose the government had experimental craft resembling UFOs. If such craft can explain cases, many probably 30-60 years old--i.e. long after the experiments were discontinued or their technology became obsolete--why the heck hasn't the government PROVEN this (via documentation) and hence eliminated the whole UFO field?? Or, if the government had already mastered UFO technology as far back as 1947, or even 40 years later, why hasn't this tech supplanted conventional gear??

Second, that some of the high strangeness cases may have an internal origin. I think we need to find out the viability and frequency of auditory and visual hallucinations in a healthy population. There is some evidence to suggest that even healthy individuals are able to experience hallucinations in their everyday lives, and it may not be as uncommon as originally thought. Perhaps the high strangeness in some cases comes from our own glitchy brains, but I've not heard one person ever suggest that.

The phenomenon can't have a purely psychological basis. It couldn't be all "inside our heads." There's a lot of physical evidence cases: radar sightings and some photos never debunked for several decades. And another thing: while I don't doubt some people hallucinate, UFO reports tend to come from credible witnesses--presumably the least likely to have such experiences. And why or how did so many "hallucinations," from '47 on, involve never-before-heard-of craft and humanoids, instead of something more familiar culturally??

 

[Burnt State]

I interpret such cases as ET deceptiveness. They don't really need earthly materials.

I think this remains one of the central planks of the UFO experience. The sheer variance of ships, creatures and thousands upon thousands of soil samples, not to mention their capacity to disappear, dissolve, and even engage in all manner of road chasing shenanigans is obviously an attack upon our senses. The comparison to leprechauns and faeries still holds as a strong theory of how long there's been a NHI agent playing about with the humans, or so our histories of mythologies and folklores tell us.

There are gods that come from the skies from across the water, bringing the good tech and the good beats, and now they abduct us, and poke and prod at us, while persistently shifting in its technological expression of aerial dynamics, human beings experimentation and Cirque du Soleil light displays.


Vallée's main ideas from Messengers of Deception hold true still: there's a control system at work that uses high strangeness to freak us the hell out and make us rethink reality, or as @Red suggests that hypnosis, our ability to have hallucinations, both audio and visual, may play a role in all or some of it. Clark says it happens in a reality apart from the one we know. Everything paranormal says that reality is not what we think.

Certainly some of these experiences humans report are happening both parallel to our reality and also physically interacting in our reality - it's really weird stuff still. WTF?! and I say that in all analytical sincerity. It has Trickster written all over it and is beyond us. Maybe everyone should go home, read George Hansen (and some Christopher O'Brien) all over again, watch some Netflix folklore and call it a night.

My son is now studying quantum algorithms - whatever the hell that means. Maybe humanity should just be happy playing with the technology we've got, work on saving the planet as the space brothers also keep telling us - that's a good message and not a deceptive one - and just ignore all of this ridiculousness. What would happen then, I wonder if we tried just ignoring it all?

There are still weirdo UFO cults, and the whole narrative is ripe for manipulation by everyone as we continue to watch unfold in mainstream news, alt news and silly paranormal TV series. It remains, as Red Pill Junkie often quotes about the phenomenon, absurd by design.

So now we make folklore about the folklore because we are trying to come at it from other angles with as much out of the box thinking we can throw at it @Richard Hawkins . A lot of that has been going on, but nothing sticks. We certainly can describe a lot of it, and how it interacts with our consciousness, but we still don't know anything at all about the core questions: who what where when and why.

When it comes to Ufoology we are more fool than magician.

Anyways, I really like a lot of the ideas people are putting out here. I think that a lot of Fortean phenomena exists in an interior space as @Red outlined. I think that @Trajanus makes some critical points as well. There are physical traces and it is part of this reality and apart from it.

The bulk of UFOs have appearances, propulsion methods and behavior totally unlike conventional craft

This also remains true. There's something physical there, up in the skies, under the waters, taunting us with incredible displays that we can't begin to understand. They've been doing that for such a long time as well right alongside us. Is it just mocking us or trying to make us learn to think differently?

 

[Red]

Well, I've been thinking about this internal origin thing for a long time. It would explain a lot, especially the high strangeness aspects. But I have a couple of variations.
1. High strangeness is entirely internal in origin.
2. The consciousness that we experience as modern humans (the ability for metaphor, self-awareness, and introspection) is not the default setting for the universe. We end up having a communication problem with it, whatever "it" is. It's talking to us in basic symbolism, and we are far too literal a species to understand it. This one might be a little adjacent to the co-creation theory, but Jaynes and Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris" are the inspiration here.
3. Whatever is interacting with us is so far advanced that it can basically use our own brains against us, and cause us to see things that aren't really there to mask the real physiology and technology of whatever it is that is interacting with us which is probably closer to Vallee's own premise in "Messenger's of Deception."
4. Or, something or someone is testing to see if we have finally evolved past the limits of our own biology. The high strangeness is just a bug, effect or glitch of that interaction and not the main point of it.

 

[Red]

The phenomenon can't have a purely psychological basis. It couldn't be all "inside our heads." There's a lot of physical evidence cases: radar sightings and some photos never debunked for several decades. And another thing: while I don't doubt some people hallucinate, UFO reports tend to come from credible witnesses--presumably the least likely to have such experiences. And why or how did so many "hallucinations," from '47 on, involve never-before-heard-of craft and humanoids, instead of something more familiar culturally??

I'm only saying that it's possible for the high strangeness ones, ones in which there's no corresponding proof. I do not think it's possible for sightings with multiple witnesses, corresponding radar returns, and/or physical evidence. As for the hallucinations themselves, 1947 was a rational world in tech was booming, we'd come a long way from our superstitious forebears. Our brains would have been forced to find an explanation for them that was contextually rooted in the reality we knew in 1947, not in Mesopotamia or ancient Egypt.

Still buying it--or covertly recruited to muddy the truth or field.

As I've said before, the stories (that have already been planted) have been passed around enough (to infinity, really) that no agency would have to lift a finger to disinfo the clueless masses going forward.

 

[Burnt State]

1. High strangeness is entirely internal in origin.

When I think about unique individual Fortean events like walking down a hillside and seeing a hoopsnake roll down the hill past you, or seeing some little people on the path that dash away from you into the trunk of a tree I see these as potentially being purely internal, Clark describes these moments as paranormal events that are taking place internally and alive only in the minds of a witness.

2. The consciousness that we experience as modern humans (the ability for metaphor, self-awareness, and introspection) is not the default setting for the universe. We end up having a communication problem with it, whatever "it" is. It's talking to us in basic symbolism, and we are far too literal a species to understand it. This one might be a little adjacent to the co-creation theory, but Jaynes and Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris" are the inspiration here.

This kind of thinking is what led me down the Donald Hoffman path to see if neuroscience had an answer. Our senses are limited and designed to optimize our success as the apex species on the planet. So we don't have access to a lot of reality.

In Hoffman's organization of consciousness, which he describes as pantheism up and down, I found room for the possibility of conscious agents, a NHI if you will, that is beyond our sensory capacity. And as you say, our interactions with such ephemeral beings may indeed overwhelm our sensory system producing high strangeness effects.

3. Whatever is interacting with us is so far advanced that it can basically use our own brains against us, and cause us to see things that aren't really there to mask the real physiology and technology of whatever it is that is interacting with us which is probably closer to Vallee's own premise in "Messenger's of Deception."

Which is why I wonder if it is about co-creation or is something else picking through the cultural signposts in our brain and just playing with those to design a hall of mirrors of its own liking for us to reside in during contact.

I also feel that it is not only manipulating our senses, but somehow extracting us from our usual reality and playing with us inside some reality bubble it is making.

In one of my favourite Faded Discs entries from Wendy Connors a very reluctant witness, Mike, an engineer I think, who while driving down the highway suddenly entered a high strange Oz land scenario.

Traffic disappeared and descending from the sky to land on the freeway was a tank the size of a house. He had to suddenly brake to avoid hitting it. A man crawls out of the tank and looks down at him and says, "What do you think of this, Mike?!" Then he crawls back in and the tank flies back up into the sky. Then he continues driving and slowly the sounds of traffic came back and then the cars were back and he continued on his way.

This could be a momentary collapse of reason and was just an internal hallucination, but all the mechanical and physical components of the event suggest that's not what it was. The witness was entirely befuddled by the whole experience.

4. Or, something or someone is testing to see if we have finally evolved past the limits of our own biology. The high strangeness is just a bug, effect or glitch of that interaction and not the main point of it.

There is something of a test there, and other times purposefully creating scenarios of total derangement and inexplicable realities as just a pure display of irrationality.

The trickster does work as a barometer, and a kimd of control system to bring order or disorder into society

 

[Burnt State]

I'm only saying that it's possible for the high strangeness ones, ones in which there's no corresponding proof. I do not think it's possible for sightings with multiple witnesses,

In a long conversation with Greg Bishop and Susan Demeter I brought up the critical feature of multiple witnesses accounts. I feel that these are very important and must point to either the capacity to manipulate reality for multiple witnesses ,or for NHI to invade our reality physically and mess with us on a more direct level. Pascagoula is a good example of this, as are all close encounter cases that involve multiple witnesses like Ruwa, Zimbabwe, or Kelly-Hopkinsville.

What are these moments about? When we look at such multiple witness case events as a whole are we supposed to think that out there a circus of various aliens are visiting us from all over the galaxy, or that whatever the NHI is that is behind all these events enjoys deceiving us and is trying to shift human direction, expectation and perception. To what end?!

 

[Red]

In a long conversation with Greg Bishop and Susan Demeter I brought up the critical feature of multiple witnesses accounts. I feel that these are very important and must point to either the capacity to manipulate reality for multiple witnesses ,or for NHI to invade our reality physically and mess with us on a more direct level. Pascagoula is a good example of this, as are all close encounter cases that involve multiple witnesses like Ruwa, Zimbabwe, or Kelly-Hopkinsville.

What are these moments about? When we look at such multiple witness case events as a whole are we supposed to think that out there a circus of various aliens are visiting us from all over the galaxy, or that whatever the NHI is that is behind all these events enjoys deceiving us and is trying to shift human direction, expectation and perception. To what end?!

Yeah, I dunno. It's one of those cases that defies logic for me, too.

 

[Red]

When I think about unique individual Fortean events like walking down a hillside and seeing a hoopsnake roll down the hill past you, or seeing some little people on the path that dash away from you into the trunk of a tree I see these as potentially being purely internal, Clark describes these moments as paranormal events that are taking place internally and alive only in the minds of a witness.

Yeah, the whole hallucination/hypnosis theory would definitely be viable. If I ever see a hoop snake out in the wild, I'll let you know.

This kind of thinking is what led me down the Donald Hoffman path to see if neuroscience had an answer. Our senses are limited and designed to optimize our success as the apex species on the planet. So we don't have access to a lot of reality.

In Hoffman's organization of consciousness, which he describes as pantheism up and down, I found room for the possibility of conscious agents, a NHI if you will, that is beyond our sensory capacity. And as you say, our interactions with such ephemeral beings may indeed overwhelm our sensory system producing high strangeness effects.

Which is why I wonder if it is about co-creation or is something else picking through the cultural signposts in our brain and just playing with those to design a hall of mirrors of its own liking for us to reside in during contact.

Maybe less picking through our mental space, and more triggering a mental state in which the symbolic comes to the forefront and rationality fades.

I also feel that it is not only manipulating our senses, but somehow extracting us from our usual reality and playing with us inside some reality bubble it is making.

In one of my favourite Faded Discs entries from Wendy Connors a very reluctant witness, Mike, an engineer I think, who while driving down the highway suddenly entered a high strange Oz land scenario.

Traffic disappeared and descending from the sky to land on the freeway was a tank the size of a house. He had to suddenly brake to avoid hitting it. A man crawls out of the tank and looks down at him and says, "What do you think of this, Mike?!" Then he crawls back in and the tank flies back up into the sky. Then he continues driving and slowly the sounds of traffic came back and then the cars were back and he continued on his way.

This could be a momentary collapse of reason and was just an internal hallucination, but all the mechanical and physical components of the event suggest that's not what it was. The witness was entirely befuddled by the whole experience.

There is something of a test there, and other times purposefully creating scenarios of total derangement and inexplicable realities as just a pure display of irrationality.

The trickster does work as a barometer, and a kimd of control system to bring order or disorder into society

I'm torn, still could be a completely internal event with a combination of auditory and visual hallucinations. But if it's hallucination, it's a heckuva one.

 

[Red]

Lol., what need to investigate when it has had the truth for 69 years already? And by "truth" I certainly don't mean MOGUL:

I Explain Mogul one LAST Time

kevinrandle.blogspot.com

I'm talking more the about the narratives surrounding alien bodies from Roswell which some people are still 100% invested in today. I know Randle would disagree, but it could have been a disinfo campaign to sniff out communist spies. I think we can agree something crashed, but I don't really think that an advanced interstellar society would have such finicky tech that their ship would just happen to crash on our planet. An unmanned probe might, but not a manned spacecraft. The people who are screaming loudest for government disclosure are the ones who believe the very worst and false stories in this space. Aztec, the bodies, etc., ad nauseam.

 

[JamesT]

I think this remains one of the central planks of the UFO experience. The sheer variance of ships, creatures and thousands upon thousands of soil samples, not to mention their capacity to disappear, dissolve, and even engage in all manner of road chasing shenanigans is obviously an attack upon our senses. The comparison to leprechauns and faeries still holds as a strong theory of how long there's been a NHI agent playing about with the humans, or so our histories of mythologies and folklores tell us.

There are gods that come from the skies from across the water, bringing the good tech and the good beats, and now they abduct us, and poke and prod at us, while persistently shifting in its technological expression of aerial dynamics, human beings experimentation and Cirque du Soleil light displays.


Vallée's main ideas from Messengers of Deception hold true still: there's a control system at work that uses high strangeness to freak us the hell out and make us rethink reality, or as @Red suggests that hypnosis, our ability to have hallucinations, both audio and visual, may play a role in all or some of it. Clark says it happens in a reality apart from the one we know. Everything paranormal says that reality is not what we think.

Certainly some of these experiences humans report are happening both parallel to our reality and also physically interacting in our reality - it's really weird stuff still. WTF?! and I say that in all analytical sincerity. It has Trickster written all over it and is beyond us. Maybe everyone should go home, read George Hansen (and some Christopher O'Brien) all over again, watch some Netflix folklore and call it a night.

My son is now studying quantum algorithms - whatever the hell that means. Maybe humanity should just be happy playing with the technology we've got, work on saving the planet as the space brothers also keep telling us - that's a good message and not a deceptive one - and just ignore all of this ridiculousness. What would happen then, I wonder if we tried just ignoring it all?

There are still weirdo UFO cults, and the whole narrative is ripe for manipulation by everyone as we continue to watch unfold in mainstream news, alt news and silly paranormal TV series. It remains, as Red Pill Junkie often quotes about the phenomenon, absurd by design.

So now we make folklore about the folklore because we are trying to come at it from other angles with as much out of the box thinking we can throw at it @Richard Hawkins . A lot of that has been going on, but nothing sticks. We certainly can describe a lot of it, and how it interacts with our consciousness, but we still don't know anything at all about the core questions: who what where when and why.

When it comes to Ufoology we are more fool than magician.

Anyways, I really like a lot of the ideas people are putting out here. I think that a lot of Fortean phenomena exists in an interior space as @Red outlined. I think that @Trajanus makes some critical points as well. There are physical traces and it is part of this reality and apart from it.


This also remains true. There's something physical there, up in the skies, under the waters, taunting us with incredible displays that we can't begin to understand. They've been doing that for such a long time as well right alongside us. Is it just mocking us or trying to make us learn to think differently?

 

[Burnt State]

Yeah, the whole hallucination/hypnosis theory would definitely be viable. If I ever see a hoop snake out in the wild, I'll let you know.

Maybe less picking through our mental space, and more triggering a mental state in which the symbolic comes to the forefront and rationality fades.

I'm torn, still could be a completely internal event with a combination of auditory and visual hallucinations. But if it's hallucination, it's a heckuva one.

Well I know that time compression inside the brain is a phenomenal thing. I've personally experienced what felt like one to two minutes of a full hallucinatory visual narrative during a split second moment before a car accident. So perhaps it's possible for similar visual narratives to play out during micro sleeps while driving, and the tuning in and out of sound is just our consciousness coming in and out of that micro sleep?

However, that Oz factor effect that happens while people are walking in the woods, and not feeling tired at all, or being lulled by the afternoon sun during a long drive, may give us pause. How can you have a full blown hallucination while walking and being very active and aware of your surroundings?



Suddenly you notice everything goes quiet. Dead silence. No wind. No insects or birds. Nothing. And then your paranormal moment occurs. You see a strange creature. You see a UFO. Satan comes up to you and offers you a record deal. Sea mines start tumbling out of a transparent flying saucer, that moves in and out of your visual field.They rumble towards you and are trying to hook your pants. They drag you back to the shimmering ship in the distance...and then you remember passing out and coming too in the field of Dechmont Woods afterwards. The ship is gone. Nothing is there except for a bunch of holes in the ground.

Certainly sounds like physical reality. The torn pants prove he was attacked and it was the first time ever that Scottish police investigated a UFO event.

Some of them just can't be hallucinations. They belong to some other reality that we become a part of every now and then as it becomes a part of ours.

 

[Red]

Well I know that time compression inside the brain is a phenomenal thing. I've personally experienced what felt like one to two minutes of a full hallucinatory visual narrative during a split second moment before a car accident. So perhaps it's possible for similar visual narratives to play out during micro sleeps while driving, and the tuning in and out of sound is just our consciousness coming in and out of that micro sleep?

However, that Oz factor effect that happens while people are walking in the woods, and not feeling tired at all, or being lulled by the afternoon sun during a long drive, may give us pause. How can you have a full blown hallucination while walking and being very active and aware of your surroundings?

I'm not sure, I've been tweaking this in my own head since I read Jaynes the second time. I need to do some research into hallucinations. It's a feature of Jaynes book, but only to the extent that he uses them in specific ways to support his hypothesis. There is a 6-15% cohort of the population that experience hallucinations to varying degrees. I have questions like how big, how complex can hallucinations be? I know modern shamanism uses various paths to altered states; so there might be some insights there, or in the research of psychedelics. Oliver Sacks has written a book on the topic, it's now on the top of the TBR pile because I finally put forth my mental meanderings in a public forum. I'm still kicking the tires on this thing.
And I welcome the feedback.

Suddenly you notice everything goes quiet. Dead silence. No wind. No insects or birds. Nothing. And then your paranormal moment occurs. You see a strange creature. You see a UFO. Satan comes up to you and offers you a record deal. Sea mines start tumbling out of a transparent flying saucer, that moves in and out of your visual field.They rumble towards you and are trying to hook your pants. They drag you back to the shimmering ship in the distance...and then you remember passing out and coming too in the field of Dechmont Woods afterwards. The ship is gone. Nothing is there except for a bunch of holes in the ground.

Certainly sounds like physical reality. The torn pants prove he was attacked and it was the first time ever that Scottish police investigated a UFO event.

Some of them just can't be hallucinations. They belong to some other reality that we become a part of every now and then as it becomes a part of ours.

Again, I'm not saying every UFO encounter has to be a hallucination. I'm saying some of them may be. Also consider that hallucinations aren't just audio and visual. There are indeed tactile and olfactory hallucinations. Honestly, though, it would kind of suck if eveything could be explained by a hallucinating public at large. And that is definitely not my premise. I'm saying some of it may be, not of all it.