And why do so in such a barbaric manner by sexually assaulting people?
Do we have any evidence that such things have actually happened? I feel like the people objecting to the ETH are taking the craziest cases that sound to me like hoaxes/lies/psychotic episodes/whatever, and leveraging them to undermine the ETH. And honestly that strikes me as dirty pool, because the ETH doesn’t say that all of these whacky stories are true, it just says that the things that we have a pretty firm basis for accepting – like anomalous devices in the sky and the credible landing cases, etc., could very well be of extraterrestrial origin.
There's no guarantee after anally raping someone you're going to get sperm from them either. That's silly talk.
Actually there’s a medical technique involving electrical stimulation of the prostate that’s pretty much guaranteed to result in ejaculation. Vets use it on animals, as I recall. So no, that’s not “silly talk.” But I’m not saying that these things are actually happening – I’m very skeptical of Whitley Strieber’s stories (where the anal probe thing first appeared in ufology, iirc). I want to see some kind of evidence for things before I accept them even tentatively.
Even all the cases of people mating with aliens is patently ridiculous. That's like an elephant and a dolphin mating but actually even more bizarre as we are talking about species from other planets.
One: who knows if such stories are true? I have no idea. But on the other hand, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if a human and an alien being had sex. Some people have sex with animals. It’s gross, but it does happen, so you can’t call it “patently ridiculous.” A lot of people, and very possibly a lot of alien beings, are effing perverts.
I find much of this discussion to be still rooted in television sci fi culture as opposed to biology. If you want some good DNA a harmless blood or tissue sample done in a non invasive manner will suffice.
Again, advanced technology can do this in our sleep invisibly without being noticed. The idea of manipulating people on board ships for medical torture, or the illustrious scoop sample, is also a B movie narrative and not one rooted in advanced science
Perhaps it would suffice to take a simple cheek swab instead of sticking a 6-inch needle into somebody's body, but you don’t get to tell alien beings how to do whatever job it is that they are or aren’t doing, as the case may or may not be. Like I said earlier, grappling with alien motivations and behaviors is a hopeless and pointless endeavor. Maybe it’s fun for them – some people are sadists, perhaps some entire species are sadists. Who knows? But dismissing the entire ETH interpretation because aliens might be acting contrary to our own sensibilities makes no sense. We should
expect alien behavior to be alien to us. Hell, much of
human behavior is alien to me.
The speculative aspects of the ETH derive from speculative fiction.
That’s a baseless blanket statement. Lots of the speculative ETH thinking is based on science and logic. Mike throws around all kinds of intriguing ideas along those lines that I’ve never heard about in fiction stories (though honestly I probably wouldn’t know because I hardly ever read fiction).
In the same way the actions of pilots on the ground appear out of 1950's sci fi movies. Recently the British ufologist that was on the Paracast retold a case of a bunch of Humanoids seen outside their ship wearing dark visors and mittens busy gathering their samples, an entirely goofy visual narrative.
Again – that could be a totally bogus case. Or, if it is true, maybe their hands were cold. Either is possible, and neither option refutes the ETH – just your personal parameters of acceptance, which seem unduly rooted in your own expectations for alien behavior and fashion sense.
And it is in almost all CE cases that supposedly are the ground evidence in an up close and personal manner of all those ETH ships in our skies that we see the cocreation hypothesis at work.
Okay so I read what follows twice, and I have some problems with it.
Firstly, I have a problem with the idea that there could be beings around us that we’re totally unaware of because of the limitations of our senses. Matter is visible to our eyes. We can’t see all of the frequencies that matter reflects and emits, but we see enough to know that it’s there. There are flowers and spider webs for example that reflect UV light – bees are attracted to the UV reflections that we can’t see. But we can still see the flowers and spider webs nevertheless. And we have all manner of technical apparatuses that permit us to observe frequencies of light far beyond our own range of perception, and to hear frequencies of sound far beyond the range of our hearing, via frequency conversion. So we’re not “blind” to much, given the enormous breadth of our present technological detection capabilities. Fortunately, Chris will be directing some of those capabilities at exotic aerial phenomena soon, so we'll probably learn a great deal from his work.
And finally, I find this Very disappointing: no sooner than we scientifically prove that the universe is absolutely chock full of warm Earth-like worlds, and that the organic molecules required for biological life as we know it are ubiquitous throughout the cosmos, than a group of contrarians hostile to science and the empirical method - from within ufology itself - go out of their way to mock/ridicule/deride the ETH and the scientific method. Seriously: for F's sake - we finally get the preponderance of scientific data to convince reputable academics to agree with us that technological civilizations populate the observable universe by the billions, and that the theoretical physics required to explain how they get here and move like greased lightning through our skies may in fact be plausible...and
now you decide to reject science and reason in favor of ghost-and-goblin folklore. There couldn't possibly be a worse time in the history of ufology to stab a dagger of infighting through the heart of this field. Seven decades of struggle to attain our first sliver of actual credibility...and suddenly half the people manning the wheel decide to navigate over a cliff into the realm of psychic/paranormal ufos and invisible tricksters. Wasn't a lifetime of public mockery and derision enough for you folks? It was plenty for me - I actually felt a pang of hope at our first sight of the light at the end of the tunnel. And now this. Crikey.
1/3 of our brain is devoted to seeing
Actually it’s about 24%, but close enough for government work (80% of the human brain is cortex, and 30% of the cortex processes visual information).
but the mechanism of seeing is far more complex than the notion of a one to one experience of reality. Memory is also a mutating factor. Many different processes are at work to produce the virtual reality experience of reality we see in our heads. Both Greg Bishop's essay and my own that conclude Reframing explore in depth the nature of seeing, what informs it, what shapes it and what are its limits.
This totally reminds me of one of the finest moments in The X-Files:
Man In Black (played by Jesses Ventura): Your scientists have yet to discover how neural networks create self-consciousness, let alone how the human brain processes two-dimensional retinal images into the three-dimensional phenomenon known as perception. Yet you somehow brazenly declare “
seeing is
believing?!”
You’re not a Man In Black are you, Robert?
I do think though if you are going to critique a written work it's the obligation of the critic to read the source material first. To do so without having engaged the primary source is academically irresponsible. We all know that.
I’m not critiquing the book. I’m asking one its authors to explain what they’re talking about so we can debate it. That’s not an unreasonable request. I offer clear and detailed descriptions of my own ideas freely, and everyone else here does the same thing, which is as it should be.
Demanding that we buy your book just so we can discuss your ideas here on the forum is a terrible sales strategy: you should be eager to enthrall people with the persuasive power of your thinking – that’s how you get people to want to buy a book. When people answered direct questions on Art Bell’s radio show by saying “it’s in the book, you have to buy it to hear my answers,” he’d get really pissed and kick them off the air. I think that’s right: you’re here now, so defend your ideas like everyone else here.
The Radio Misterioso episode that is a tribute to Bruce Duensing with RPJ, Bishop and myself is an excellent look at ideas around cocreation among other spaces of Bruce's thought. Can't recommend it enough.
A Tribute To Bruce Duensing – Life Is But A Dream
I've scoured that page looking for a link or an audio player so I could hear that episode – but no dice. Frustrating.
Cocreation is very much concerned with the role of perception, memory and consciousness as essential features of the high strange experience.
Okay, so it’s “very much concerned with” all of those things – that’s fine. But I still don’t see an intelligible alternative explanation to the ETH.
If you want to find out what the book is about reviews on Amazon are readily available. One person took the time to provide a very detailed review of every single essay in the text and it's a very simple way to get to know what the book is about in a matter of a couple of clicks. Isn't that what most do when they want to decide if they want to buy a book?
Customer Review
That’s a great review, in the sense that it’s very thorough and I found myself agreeing more with the reviewer than the ideas in the book that he was describing. As I feared, a major thread among the contributors is science-bashing. You know who else bashes science? Fundamentalist religious types, New Agers, and climate change deniers. Science dragged us out of the Dark Ages – and I for one don’t want to go back.
He also pointed out a key aspect of this debate that troubles me: heaping mysteries upon mysteries. Instead of advocating a more earnest and effective scientific study of the phenomenon, many authors in the book compel us to seek answers in the invisible/undetectable world, aka Ultima Thule. That would be a fun concept for a story of fiction, but it’s 180-degrees from a responsible and sensible direction of genuine rational inquiry. Piling mythology on top of a mystery is no solution at all.
Sure – it’s good to raise new questions, and to look at things from new directions. I’m all for that. But when you ask me to abandon the Age of Enlightenment and my own sense perceptions and analytical reasoning, in favor of a mythical realm of magic and wee folk, then we part ways ideologically. I want answers, not fanciful bedtime stories.
2. Symbolic Reality: Witnessing Ultima Thule
“What the psychedelics seem to me to argue for is that reality is not reality. There may be no reality, but certainly this is not it. This is some kind of highly provisional, culturally sanctioned hallucination that we are all participating in.”
- Terrence McKenna
The world is a riot of colour. Everything emits light and depending on its vibration we perceive it as a different colour. Lava burns red with its photon emissions whereas stars emit not just red and orange but green and blue, so they combine to create white. Human beings are also made of electrically charged particles. We are made of the same stuff as stars, and so we are also creatures of light.
One third of the human brain is devoted to vision. It is important to understand then what the act of seeing entails. How does this sensory apparatus that is human perception work to take external photons of light and convert them into a workable virtual reality projected in our minds that allow us to function inside our physical environment? Each individual has their own separate virtual reality experience. Only through the medium of language or other senses can we communicate the similarity and differences of our experiences with each other. No two realities are the same. If we take time to reflect on those glowing bodies around us we do not have to look very far to see the alien among us. We, who are symbolic representations of stars and light, experience the human other from a distance. The UFO is held even further away. If we can understand better what it means to see we may be able to participate in a more productive manner with the witness who has seen something extraordinary.
In his essay,” Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem,” Donald Hoffman explains a unique approach to seeing. Hoffman believes that the sensory perception system that humans have evolved is there in a limited fashion in order for us to survive as a species. If humans had access to all frequencies of sound and light, would we be able to see anything clearly or even learn how to communicate amongst the cacophony of that kind of sensory overload? Our evolving brain has provided us with essential survival skills so that as a species we can thrive:
According to conscious realism, when I see a table, I interact with a system, or systems, of conscious agents, and represent that interaction in my conscious experience as a table icon. Admittedly, the table gives me little insight into those conscious agents and their dynamics. The table is a dumbed-down icon, adapted to my needs as a member of a species in a particular niche, but not necessarily adapted to give me insight into the true nature of the objective world that triggers my construction of the table icon. When, however, I see you, I again interact with a conscious agent, or a system of conscious agents. And here my icons give deeper insight into the objective world: they convey that I am, in fact, interacting with a conscious agent, namely you.3
This does not mean to say that Conscious Realism is Panpsychism, where all objects are conscious, but instead that they are symbols of a reality outside our own perceptual apparatus. What we see are representations of icons in how we as humans interact with reality through what Hoffman describes as a network of conscious agents all around us. When we see something we experience a conscious experience of those agents. But we only see what we need to see in order to survive and thrive.
This is why the UFO is such a unique event in the act of seeing. It appears to come from a land that is outside of normal human experience altogether, as in the maps of old where written in on the margins the warning reads, Here there be monsters! The high strange experience of the UFO close encounter event is one in which the witness is able to catch a glimpse of Ultima Thule, that place on the map beyond known borders. Here there be conscious agents, or aspects of these agents, rarely accessible by human perception.
Hoffman describes his definition of a “conscious agent” through the following implications:
A conscious agent is not necessarily a person. All persons are conscious agents, or heterarchies of conscious agents, but not all conscious agents are persons. Second, the experiences of a given conscious agent might be utterly alien to us; they may constitute a modality of experience no human has imagined, much less experienced. Third, the dynamics of conscious agents does not, in general, take place in ordinary four-dimensional space-time. It takes place in state spaces of conscious observers, and for these state spaces the notion of dimension might not even be well-defined.5
What this means is that beyond those experiences of easily visible conscious agents, swimming all around us is a reality beyond the margins of experience, networks of conscious agents who may or may not be conscious that interface with conscious observers in a very limited manner. This theory makes room for the UFO as a conscious agent, operating in a manner humans can not properly perceive at all, making the many surreal and strange witness reports of close encounter sightings better understood. Perhaps reality breaks down at the edges of our senses, having both a profound impact on the observer as well as giving them a glimpse of a conscious agent that is literally alien to us.
Researcher and podcaster Greg Bishop often cites the late abduction researcher Karla Turner’s advice that the strangest encounter cases may be the most important. In the ever probing realms of Ufology such high strange events have been compared to dreams, visions, ecstatic or religious experiences, and visits from aliens. Close encounter cases often then appear to be utterly hallucinatory and nonsensical. It is a psychedelic experience more than anything else, filled with odd distortions of familiar realities. If we are to better know the UFO then we must learn first how to disentangle ourselves from the hallucinatory nature of seeing and accept that much of what is reported in closer encounter witness events is very strange because it is beyond the borders of what can be witnessed. Greg Bishop has also advocated the concept of the witness event as being co-creative – where the interface of the external stimulus with a conscious observer work together to create a reality inside the mind of the observer. This is basically a very streamlined version of what Hoffman explains as Conscious Realism.
That was fun and bewildering, but I still can’t find a viable or cogent explanation buried in there. And this is coming from a guy who absolutely loves the late great Terence McKenna – I’ve read all of his books and listened to dozens of his talks.
But he was also something of a prankster – one time he admitted that he’d started a rumor about Russian cosmonauts having mind-blowing sex in space, because he wanted to eroticize space travel to inspire more public interest in it. And I have lots of experience in the realms he discusses, but I have never witnessed an object in front of me that wasn’t actually there.
There is a vast realm of consciousness to explore…within us. I suspect that we’ll learn a great deal once we start poking around in there. But can the mysterious forces that whisper to us from those depthless inner realms, leap out before us and manifest as metallic devices that shine navigation lights onto the ground? No. Just as our dreams are inescapably bound to the realm behind our eyelids, the chittering self-transforming elf -machines dwell only within the darkened chambers of the mind, never to leap forth before our opened eyes and stand face-to-face with us.
When we clearly see what's before us with opened eyes, that’s an altogether different form of inscrutable being – something as physical as we are, and clearly vastly more accomplished in the physical sciences than ourselves.
