October 20, 2013 Jerome Clark

[Gene Steinberg]

Just FYI: Defining what the debt ceiling actually is cannot be liberal, conservative or middle-of-the-road. It's just a set of facts. Saying that the truth has a "liberal leaning" is downright absurd, unless you are implying that other political persuasions are based on lies. Just FYI.

 

[withoutlimits09]

Just FYI: Defining what the debt ceiling actually is cannot be liberal, conservative or middle-of-the-road. It's just a set of facts. Saying that the truth has a "liberal leaning" is downright absurd, unless you are implying that other political persuasions are based on lies. Just FYI.

It has nothing to do with the paranormal. You went on an on about it, you constantly bash conservatives. I loved it when you had the black vault guy on and got all worked up when he wouldn't agree with you that 9/11 was an inside job done by Neo-Cons. Sorry, perhaps you don't see it, but to anyone with a half functioning brain, it is clear you often make your political positions very front and center.

 

[Randall]

I don't think you can go through an entire episode of the Paracast without 2 things happening.

1. Gene professing they don't talk about politics, right before he talks about politics and spews his liberal leanings.

2. Chris saying "It's called cultural front loading" and then complains about the state of ufology while questioning the ETH.


It really isn't worth "falling out of your seat" he pretty much makes this point every week.

That's not why I practically fell out of my seat. It's that it just hit me funny how Chris summed up one of Clarke's famous long winded rambles with just two words, and like I tried to explain, it probably had more to do with my particular frame of mind at the moment and went right by most people ( not to imply that they just don't get it or anything ), just that my particular mood at the moment was in tune with it in such a way that it manifested itself for me as humorous. I don't know how to explain it any better than that.

 

[Burnt State]

I identify much more with his thinking and don't see Clark rambling so much as explaining his thinking chain and reasoning behind current descriptions of supposed visitors. Just saying "cultural frontloading" is not enough to properly address a complicated, mutable history of the types of craft and flight personnel that have been witnessed over the years that change in step with our own technological and cultural shifts.

One strain of thinking is that the ETH is a done deal but even Clark, while being a proponent of the ETH, knows it's still just a theory. Consequently, for him, what we are seeing has some tricksterish elements to it, but more importantly, there is an intangible quality that pervades the entire history of both witness experiences and core anomalous events. We really can say very little about it that we can prove. I suppose we should be appreciative of the fact that we're not on their menu or enslaved, though Fort might say different.

When Clark says that we don't have a language or a vocabulary for whatever it is UFO's are, he's trying to explain that the history is inexplicable, incomprehensible, and entirely unpredictable. We know that there is an interaction with our consciousness as we perceive whatever it is we are perceiving but these lights and craft do things that seem to defy both logic and our own knowledge of physics. They do not seem to be playing by any rules we know of. It is like our own frame of reference is simply too limited to do more than guess and hypothesize about what UFO's could be.

We simply do not have words to define what seems to be more about paradox than anything clearly definable. More than just being a trickster, which implies it is here to teach us something, the history of UFO's is in flux, is mostly indifferent towards us - but does not hurt us, and remains entirely outside our sphere of comprehension.

 

[storge]

Chris's web(?)-cam project is really what we need more of, more hard, documented observations, since, as I said, we can't poke a UFO with a stick when the urge strikes us and we want to find out if it's sticky or fluffy or intangible.

On Clark's perceptions of good will among ufoologists and the slightly contradictory perception of vitriol and rage between ufoologists, I would suggest it might be helpful to take a cue from the culture of Science with a capital S: the need for being, attempting to be but never achieving it, disinterested, not married to one hypothesis over another, recognizing our own human fallibility as ever-present in our observations and thinking. The attempt at disinterestedness (if that's even a word) leads to tolerance of competing ideas in one's own mind, and thus tolerance of competing ideas outside one's own mind. IMHO that's the only advantage Science with a capital S has over "the field," which is muddy enough at this point to resemble the trenches of WWI.

I'm not sure what Clark mean with his "lack of vocabulary" spiel, and Chris's odd use of "language" as a verb, but there are a few things that spring to my mind. The first is the invention of terminology among formal UFO research groups, which has never helped clarify anything for me, but perhaps it's useful to some, and certain things have carried over and carved out a place for themselves in the language of the superculture, such as MIB. I think perhaps he was touching more upon what Burnt State says above, the lack of a conceptual framework to understand the bizarre actions of the saucers as physical entities. Bob Lazar tried to talk about a secret physics involving time warps induced by breaking the strong nuclear force that holds atomic nuclei--protons and neutrons--together. Some of the mythos of ufoology does sound to me like the exotic materials being described are utilizing some sort of quantum bonding or something, and I don't remember if it was real or hoax or fiction, but someone once described an object that had two bars that weren't joined, but acted as if they were, with a void between them through which normal objects, air, etc. could pass. Maybe this was just part of the gee-whiz factor, someone dreaming up a new gee-whiz material for some saucer story, I don't remember now. Still, it's fun to speculate how that sort of material object could exist. I never made sense out of Lazar's lectures on element 115 and the strong-nuclear force, but he seems to believe it, and I haven't given it enough time and attention to either embrace or reject what he says. I'm sure there are people lined up on both sides a mouse-click away, ardent debunkers and devotees of Lazar's strange claims.

 

[smcder]

"disinterestedness" is a word and is one of the big five:

Mertonian norms - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“Hegel says somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” - Marx

 

[Burnt State]

"disinterestedness" is a word and is one of the big five:

Mertonian norms - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“Hegel says somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” - Marx

What's interesting is the counter set of terms that define SPID, which runs against those Mertonian norms. They are solitariness, particularism, interestedness, and dogmatism. That's pretty much a good definition of "ufoology," as storge mentions above.

I also love the Marx quote which makes me think of humanity as rendered in Waiting For Godot, which makes me think of people paying money to stand in a field flashing lights to dark skies in hopes that the UFO occupant flashes back.

Because UFO's are like Vladimir's comments to the boy messenger at the end of the play, who comes to tell him, once again just like the boy in Act 1 did, that Mr. Godot is not coming and to wait for him tomorrow. And so Vladinir urgently insists on having the boy relay to Godot that the boy in fact saw him. Vladimir wants it known that he is visible, that he exists, that he was seen.

I think humanity in general suffers from this desire to be seen by the UFO occupants, that we are important enough to be contacted. Why else are there so many damn conactees who all have these messages of light and love. It's part of the human profile. Perhaps it's our collective lack of care for the other and low self-esteem, that as in Beckett's play, stops us from moving forward as a planetary community. Of course Godot will never flash back, but maybe tomorrow. Or maybe we just made them up. Maybe...? Click.

 

[Randall]

I identify much more with his thinking and don't see Clark rambling so much as explaining his thinking chain and reasoning behind current descriptions of supposed visitors. Just saying "cultural frontloading" is not enough to properly address a complicated, mutable history of the types of craft and flight personnel that have been witnessed over the years that change in step with our own technological and cultural shifts.

One strain of thinking is that the ETH is a done deal but even Clark, while being a proponent of the ETH, knows it's still just a theory. Consequently, for him, what we are seeing has some tricksterish elements to it, but more importantly, there is an intangible quality that pervades the entire history of both witness experiences and core anomalous events. We really can say very little about it that we can prove. I suppose we should be appreciative of the fact that we're not on their menu or enslaved, though Fort might say different.

Don't get me wrong. For those who don't already know what Clark is talking about during his rambles it's easy to get caught up in the flow because IMO he's one of the most respectable historians on the subject and easy to listen to. In fact I found myself doing just that, nodding my way in agreement through the whole thing until Chris popped that zinger in there, and I suddenly snapped out of Clark's hypno-ramble as if Chris had thrown a bucket of cold water on my face.

I don't expect it would have the same effect on most people at all. You have to be familiar with both Chris and Clark and the subject matter. Chris could easily use the phrase "cultural frontloading" and those of us familiar with the concept would get it right away, and we could all move on to the next point or the substance of the discussion. Clarke however likes to wax eloquently in his role as the Royal Historian of ufology ( and other things ). I'm not disputing that he's earned the title. Just that the juxtaposition had that particular effect on me.

When Clark says that we don't have a language or a vocabulary for whatever it is UFO's are, he's trying to explain that the history is inexplicable, incomprehensible, and entirely unpredictable. We know that there is an interaction with our consciousness as we perceive whatever it is we are perceiving but these lights and craft do things that seem to defy both logic and our own knowledge of physics. They do not seem to be playing by any rules we know of. It is like our own frame of reference is simply too limited to do more than guess and hypothesize about what UFO's could be.

We simply do not have words to define what seems to be more about paradox than anything clearly definable. More than just being a trickster, which implies it is here to teach us something, the history of UFO's is in flux, is mostly indifferent towards us - but does not hurt us, and remains entirely outside our sphere of comprehension.

Sure, I get your point, but there are times when I think that the ufology community does the same type of thing as the religious community by simply declaring the phenomenon as unknowable and incomprehensible and indescribable much the same way religious people do about God and faith. I have a natural resistance to that kind of thinking. That's why when I say that the word "alien" is a perfectly legitimate word in our vocabulary that describes the core of the subject matter, I get so ticked off when people back away as if I've just invoked the Devil. This has gotten so bad that even some people in the ufology community don't want to go there because they're afraid to be associated with the "whackos who believe in aliens". It's so much safer to say, "we just don't have the vocabulary" isn't it? I say to hell with that. Alien visitation is a reality.

I also don't think that ufology needs to absorb the lexicon of every New Age or mystical or fringe science out there. Maybe there are so-called "spiritual phenomena" associated with UFO reports, but the core subject matter isn't about "transdimensional spirit beings manifesting themselves as energy". Core ufology is about engineered alien craft, whatever is responsible for creating them, and why they're here. The rest is peripheral. So what more vocabulary do we need in order to get a grip on that? Sure it's fine to network with ghost hunters, spirit mediums, cryptozoologists, skeptics, and scientists, but let's not get lost in it all. Ufology should have well defined boundaries.

Also let's be clear. Simply because we don't have sufficient scientific evidence to prove alien craft are real to the skeptics, or that many UFO reports don't turn out to be UFOs, doesn't mean the approach isn't valid. For example, we can certainly search for lost treasure and encounter many other interesting things along the way, but not finding the treasure, or even finding out that the treasure we were looking for is something other than we had first thought, doesn't invalidate the search or the methods used, or the possibility that there is still other treasure to be found of the kind we're looking for. Ufology has a fairly decent foundation. It just needs to be recognized and used.

 

[Burnt State]

I don't expect it would have the same effect on most people at all. You have to be familiar with both Chris and Clarke and the subject matter. Chris could easily use the phrase "cultural frontloading" and those of us familiar with the concept would get it right away, and we could all move on to the next point or the substance of the discussion.

The last time Clark (why are you adding the 'e' - it's because he annoys you isn't it?) was on the Paracast he and Chris had the exact same conversation, and Clark remarked what how succinct Chris' phrase was. You'd think he'd have adopted it by now, but as you've expressed previously about shows, not everyone knows the full history, or the concept, so you always get some repetition.

I know what you're saying about the whole religiosity piece but that's not where Clark is going with his ideas. He just feels the need to qualify the ETH with the fact that, yes, he believes these are alien craft - that's the most likely explanation. You say fact. He says tomato. You haven't invoked the devil but for many this has yet to be proven at all. He's coming at things from a historian's point of view and if his version doesn't work there are always many other positions and authors to believe in.

Also let's be clear. Simply because we don't have sufficient scientific evidence to prove alien craft are real to the skeptics, or that many UFO reports don't turn out to be UFOs, doesn't mean the approach isn't valid. For example, we can certainly search for lost treasure and encounter many other interesting things along the way, but not finding the treasure, or even finding out that the treasure we were looking for is something other than we had first thought, doesn't invalidate the search or the methods used, or the possibility that there is still other treasure to be found of the kind we're looking for. Ufology has a fairly decent foundation. It just needs to be recognized and used.

That's true, who knows what we will eventually find? I'm not too sure that we've been applying any consistent methods yet. The foundation is a bit troubled and very underfunded but certainly loaded with opinions.

 

[Randall]

The last time Clark (why are you adding the 'e' - it's because he annoys you isn't it?) ...

Nope, it's just a typo because in my head I get it mixed up with Arthur C. Clarke and it just goes onto the end without me realizing ...

... was on the Paracast he and Chris had the exact same conversation, and Clark remarked what how succinct Chris' phrase was. You's think he'd have adopted it by now, but as you've expressed previously about shows, not everyone knows the full history, or the concept, so you always get some repetition.

I know what you're saying about the whole religiosity piece but that's not where Clark is going with his ideas. He just feels the need to qualify the ETH with the fact that, yes, he believes these are alien craft - that's the most likely explanation. You say fact. He says tomato. You haven't invoked the devil but for many this has yet to be proven at all. He's coming at things from a historian's point of view and if his version doesn't work there are always many other positions and authors to believe in.

That's true, who knows what we will eventually find? I'm not too sure that we've been applying any consistent methods yet. The foundation is a bit troubled and very underfunded but certainly loaded with opinions.

All fair points. BTW, when I speak of the foundation of ufology, I mean it's conceptual foundation in the early work of the USAF, the first civilian investigative groups, and the kind of quality historical work that people like Clark and other responsible authors and researchers have done. The problem is that this foundation is sort of like a library where everyone has borrowed the books they're most interested in, and then put them back in wherever they think fits, or worse, just haphazardly stuffed them back on the shelf. So now we have all these fringe topics and related subject matter thrown into the mix as if they're all of the same relevance, when in reality it's just made it all more confusing. Yet there is good stuff there for those who take the time to sift through it all.

 

[smcder]

"Sure, I get your point, but there are times when I think that the ufology community does the same type of thing as the religious community by simply declaring the phenomenon as unknowable and incomprehensible and indescribable much the same way religious people do about God and faith. I have a natural resistance to that kind of thinking."
The apophatic approach to Ufology - and I think the resistance probably is natural.

 

[flipper]

"Sure, I get your point, but there are times when I think that the ufology community does the same type of thing as the religious community by simply declaring the phenomenon as unknowable and incomprehensible and indescribable much the same way religious people do about God and faith. I have a natural resistance to that kind of thinking."
The apophatic approach to Ufology - and I think the resistance probably is natural.

Like religious community they divide run off and form new groups.
apophatic?
Definition of EPIPHYTOTIC
: of, relating to, or being a plant disease that tends to recur sporadically and to affect large numbers of susceptible plants

 

[Wade]

When jerome stated that the event phenomenon & experience phenomenon were two distinct events I was about to jump on my phone & then remembered the program was recorded some time ago. I recall John keel...as well as others...making the observation that in more than a few cases both phenomenons were present with John speculating that the experience part (in the forms of cryptids/high strangeness events) could be a diversionary tactic. It sounded like Jerome struggled quite a bit, o.k. a LOT, in making a distinction between the two. I think Johnny could have been on to something. If there is any distinction it may be whether any occupants feel if they are in peril. On the so called event phenomenon, where the reported craft is airborne and usually more than capable of evading contact you dont hear of any experience type symptons, perhaps out of respect for the pilots who would be in danger if they went through any reality distorting expetience, whereas the expetience phenomenon comes into play...at least from most the events I'm aware of, when the craft is landed...and perhaps venerable...and also the percipients aren''t in physical danger from undergoing a somewhat traumatic experience. These vessels may have built in some kind of energy capable if reaching us through our subconscious or msybe they are just able to "harvest" the enetgy from the surronding terrain. Many ufo reports do take place near places (surrounding minerals in the terrain, high concerations of emf fields) whete ones perception or mood could be effected. if the ufos in question ate et types they may know of these hotspots and if they need to land for whatever reason make these hot spots their pit stops and use the ever present energy field...which can effect us independently of any trigger, like a et craft... to create a distorted dream-like event for anyone that ventured too close.

I also thought jerome's response to chris question about any messages to the abductees in regards to the state of earth to be very reasonable, they seem to mirror the feelings of the time. I'll bet in a years time we will get warnings about the Tea Party

 

[smcder]

Like religious community they divide run off and form new groups.
apophatic?
Definition of EPIPHYTOTIC
: of, relating to, or being a plant disease that tends to recur sporadically and to affect large numbers of susceptible plants

apophatic or "negative theology" attempts to describe God by negation, in terms of what God is not - cataphatic theology attempts to describe God in positive terminology - attempting to make statements about what God is - the religious folks I know generally tend to do a bit of both -

 

[smcder]

hidden experience: Jerome Clark talks about the stranageness in UFO reporting

from Mike Clelland's blog/podcast - a 2009 lecture from Clark, it seems to give a good, condensed overview of his ideas . . .

 

[storge]

Are you kidding? Peer review is hopefully the result of applying "the scientific method."

No, I wasn't joking, Chris. You said peer-review publication is an essential part of the scientific process when there was some discussion of Melba whatshername's finding that bigfoot is part lemur, I believe.

Repeatability of experimental results isn't the same thing as peer review, although maybe in a perfect world they would be almost the same. The problem with "peer review" as part of the ACADEMIC process is when the peerage is "stacked" via government funding exclusively in one direction, to wit, funding "research" on global warming but not global cooling. You come up with a skewed peerage in that event.

Things enter the gray area when there is inquiry, research and scholarship in fields which aren't hard, physical science. Texts about texts about texts are an example. Consider the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls. There is a hard evidentiary basis, the scrolls themselves. But the scholarship isn't strictly archaeological, nor should it be. Consider these statements about the Genesis Apocryphon scroll: "There is no academic consensus on whether the Genesis Apocryphon was originally a much longer text, or whether what we have now is basically the whole enchilada;" and "While earlier scholarship posited Rabbinical material was closely related to the extrabiblical material in the Genesis Apocryphon, fuller publication more recently has shown the text was part of the general corpus of texts circulating during the Second Temple epoch, and that it is more closely related to the Book of Giants, Enoch, Jubilees, Tobit and perhaps to a no-longer extant Book of Noah, which it quotes."

On the first statement, what if consensus did exist on the length of the text? At best, that would mean that the presumably more informed members of the academic community studying the text are of that opinion, perhaps based on a set of arguments, but it doesn't mean it's true. The only way to determine if it's true is to wait for another copy of the text to be discovered in Egypt or the Crimea or wherever, and then to compare.

The second statement is an assertion of belief as well, since there is no way to know without going back and asking the authors and readers what it's all about, and determining via time travel when the thing was actually written down, and whether it incorporates earlier oral traditions and perhaps a Book of Noah to complement the material in the Torah regarding Noah.

It's not that the incomplete text is imprevious to all inquiry, it is possible to speculate on what it means, where it came from and how it was used, but that remains speculation for lack of better evidence.

Much of ufoology is textual analysis, going over sightings reports and trying out different lenses, seeing what might possibly account for all or most of the phenomenon/-a. There is also a philological contradiction in calling ufoology a science, because the U in UFO means unidentified, while science deals with things that are known, the root of the word is Latin for knowing. Knowledge of the unknown, if you see what I mean. It might be possible to make UFOlogy respectable by giving it a better name, xenology perhaps. We could have hard and soft components, the hard dealing with empirical data, sightings, nuts and bolts stuff, physics and so on, the soft with perception, psychology, parapsychological aspects, connections with Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, mylab, abductions, inducing the ET experience with magnetic resonance, etc. I think that distinction between hard and soft already exists de facto within the researcher community, with hard ufoologists leaning a little too hard towards the ETH.

 

[Burnt State]

hidden experience: Jerome Clark talks about the stranageness in UFO reporting

from Mike Clelland's blog/podcast - a 2009 lecture from Clark, it seems to give a good, condensed overview of his ideas . . .

I was going to link to this lecture as well for formerly Spookymulder, and now @Wade Ridsdale to listen to as he gives a good detailed look at the difference between the event and the experience phenomenon, an important distinction if we are going to start to begin to think about reports in a way that we can begin to pull information out of this puzzle.

 

[stonehart]

I was going to link to this lecture as well for formerly Spookymulder, and now @Wade Ridsdale to listen to as he gives a good detailed look at the difference between the event and the experience phenomenon, an important distinction if we are going to start to begin to think about reports in a way that we can begin to pull information out of this puzzle.

Just an idea and I am sure others here smarter than myself have looked at the experience phenomenon in a similar way.

I know this idea was touched on in the radio show that the witnesses and people experiencing UFO related phenomena such as abductions etc may not in fact be experiencing what they think they are at all.
You all know what I mean, that they may be experiencing something but the situation is an "Out of Context Problem" and as such the mind interprets it through cultural means. In our current time the interpretation is Aliens and at other times Fairy's would have been how people saw this.

Chris called it "Cultural front loading" and I really do feel that the importance of this in UFO related phenomenon is not stressed enough as the mind has to be able to process the information/input it is receiving in some way.

We are after all all the products of socialization if we like it or not and to a greater or lesser degree we can only begin to understand things through this frame work.

So here is the question.... What are these people really seeing or experiencing? because it may very well be not what they think they are or anything in any context that we can understand.

I am sure this has all been said before but I felt I needed to get it out as this concept has been bouncing around in my head making an awful noise since the last podcast

 

[technomage]

I don't see the purpose of making a distinction between event and experience phenomena. Events are also experienced, just by more than one person in many cases. Events have physical evidence, but then abduction experiencers point to alien implants as physical evidence.

I think it's a scale of ever increasing evidence, from purely experiential on one end to experiential by multiple observers with different types of high quality physical evidence on the other end.

This experience/event dichotomy also implies that there are two types of phenonema, which is not necessarily the case. Abductions may be ET related. Just those particularly ETs didn't leave physical evidence and happened to cover their tracks. The beings in the UFOs may be the same ones in abduction experiences and the same ones screwing with peoples' minds in places like the Skinwalker ranch. They could also be multi-dimensional tricksterish forces in all of these cases as well, making people believe UFOs are spaceships and people are being abducted by aliens.

In my opinion, the only relevant question is: What is the evidence for the event (which includes experiences) and how good is this evidence?

Once we have a certain amount of evidence, we may be able to come to some conclusion as to the nature of that event. After enough data is collected and analyzed, we may be able to come to some conclusion as to the nature of the phenomena and determine if they're related or not (or some combination of the two).

 

[Burnt State]

I would encourage giving Clark's lecture a listen. The experience is the mutable phenomena, where maybe a group of people witness the same object but it might appear different to them all. It is something that is alive in memory only and has no corresponding proof of its existence. All that you have is an exceptionally strange story from the liminal zone, a twice-told tale, something Rod Serling would celebrate.

The event phenomena leaves trace evidence, has confirmed radar, visual sightings, multipe witnesses etc.. It is something that has logged itself in the annals of history. That's the core phenomenon. There is absolutely no question about the fact that a technological craft was operating in our atmosphere for a period of time. That's way different than speculations about supposed implants that have absolutely no proof to support such notions. If there was then it would have been front page news long ago.

The culturally front loaded experiences involving airships, leprechauns, robot-faced, giant insect aliens and orbs floating over the fields are strange experiences told by many. What else can be said about these trips to lotus land except that an awful lot of people seem to have shared such experiences over many decades and beyond? What's it all about is guesswork. Too bad Mac Tonnies isn't around to develop a few more possibilities for us to consider.

Either way these are two different categories that allow us talk about the phenomena in a more focussed manner. They may be related, and sometimes appear to be. We can make more reasonable statements, comments and suppositions about events and draw conclusions about the indifference of the occupants that appear not to be violent, and could be mostly peaceful.

Abductions are an experiential story that only offers opportunities for wild speculation, as we have seen in the literature.