Reframing the Debate: A Path Forward or Backward?

[Burnt State]

We might never "get a purchase on these experiences" in any case. It might be that encountering/coming into close contact with humans is just as disorienting and upsetting to the visitors as encountering them is to us -- or anyway to some of us. Not all close encounter reports I've read have been terrifying to the witnesses. I also question your reference in the above post to marduk to "the imagery that your mind supplied for you to see what you believe you saw." What convinces you that our minds as a general rule project hallucinations whenever what we see upsets us or departs from what we assume to be 'normal'?

I don't speculate on how the aliens feel as I'm not entirely certain they're even there.

However if you search the databases I'm sure that not only will you run into literature regarding how people do hallucinate in states of fear or case histories of people under duress who experience altered reality states such as time dilation, but you will find our senses trick us all the time. Reality is not as it appears.

://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/1192727/

How the Brain Stops Time

I myself experienced a complete departure from reality in the half second before the imminent car crash as I was watching the vehicle I was in accelerate towards disaster in the form of a parked cube van. In the literal half second before the crash my mind supplied me with this lovely full blown visual hallucinatory experience where our car leapt into the air and I was flying over the park of my childhood and was looking at the swing sets and slides below. The car lazily drifted in the air over trees and then touched down home in the driveway of our destination and I got out happily. And then after that hallucination I was back in the car with a voice in my head that said clearly in my ears "ok this is going to be really bad but everyone's going to survive" and then BAM! our car smashed into pieces.

That sort of stuff happens all the time. People are put in inexplicable experiences that make no sense but the brain must make sense of the inputs so it will, like any good brain would do, the same as it does in dreams, it will search the data banks and look for useful imagery for that user, it may compress or expand time, turn off other senses etc.

These are common events.

Isn't one of the first tenets of philosophy, "distrust your senses"?



Perhaps the UFO is nothing but a shadow on the wall of our perceived cave reality. Methinks there is more than meets the eye...

And forgive the ads in this one but it does supply some relevant examples of how we edit reality all the time: 5 Mind-Blowing Ways Your Senses Lie to You Every Day

And this may be more to your liking:
https://www.google.ca/urlsa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi%3Farticle%3D1394%26context%3Dbio_fac&ved=0ahUKEwj5ueCWxITYAhXF64MKHdP6Do4QFggtMAA&usg=AOvVaw1lrMI2JAvrQkeHu4pwE5-W

It explores the common limits and malfunctions of our senses. It's not like I'm making these things up and if people want to hold to the ETH and ignore the central biological component of the UFO witness and think they're getting the whole story then don't talk about Reframing and stick to that same old narrative of aliens from space, but I suspect that not only will you learn nothing new about the phenomenon but you will be missing more than half the story.

This phenomenon can not be found out by looking through the lists of data regarding sightings at a distance or radar returns. As stated many times, it's far more complex than the story, it is a highly strange experience living and breathing inside of a perceiving human and tied to all their limits and unique features. It is sociological and psychological because that's what a witness is. No two witnesses will ever see the exact same thing. UFO literature is replete with this stuff. Even the Project UFO tv series from the 70's examines these features based on blue book reports. To think only in ETH terms is to severely limit and edit the lived reality of witness experiences.

 

[Christopher O'Brien]

The only thing more pretentious and pointless than postmodernism, is postmodernists. I was giving you the benefit of the doubt by introducing a causal agent into the equation: it might make some kind of sense if something were creating these perceptions on purpose.

But without a specific causal agent acting with intent, the "co-creation hypothesis" asserts that when a human being is confronted with something that they can't cognitively process at the liminal boundaries of our conditioned experience of collective consciousness, they inexplicably all spontaneously perceive little humanoid creatures with big black eyes and solid metallic craft that hover silently and perform radical aerobatic maneuvers in the sky...regardless of whether they're a Peruvian cocoa farmer, an elementary school child in Zimbabwe, or a stock broker on Wall Street. And that's not simply incomprehensibly implausible, it's downright stupid. If such different kinds of people in completely different cultural contexts had their brains scrambled by a peek at "Ultima Thule," then why in the hell would they all see the same things, instead of very personalized icons of their own psychological expectations of mystical forces, like Quetzalcoatl, the Lord Jesus, and Buddha, instead of willowy grey aliens? And how on Earth could that ever explain the radar-visual and trace evidence cases? Oh, right: it can't.

This has been a fascinating debate, one of those that this forum should be proud to feature, but I have to jump in here. People haven't always seen the same ""little humanoid creatures with big black eyes and solid metallic craft that hover silently and perform radical aerobatic maneuvers in the sky." It was only when the North American version you've described was popularized by the media that other parts of the world began describing these beings as the archetypal "alien grey" that have now taken over a vast majority of contact/abductee accounts reported worldwide.

About ten years ago I recall someone began a research project to find out where the first description of an "alien grey" was made and by whom. (My vote was for Crowley's Alamantra Working and the alleged appearance of LAM on Long Island in 1919, but that's my bias). I seem to recall that there was much confusion as to when this description was first made and disseminated, but most of us would probably agree that Strieber's Communion resonated in western culture in a deep and highly influential way. Prior to Communion your typical alien grey was specifically a North American phenomenon. In South America through the '50s-'60s and '70s, the most common description of these beings were dark, hairy dwarves or human-looking beings. In Russia, there were many sightings of robotic-type forms along w/ human-looking beings. Elsewhere in Europe there were many sightings and encounters w/ human-like beings. Prior to Communion in North America the predominant type were the "Nordics," etc. Then, after the media spread the alien "grey" meme around the world in the late 1980s, you see this archetypal description slowly spread worldwide and begin to show up in witness descriptions on other continents. I'm generalizing a bit here, but I think you see my point. It should be obvious: the way we communicate, the descriptions we use and the personal bias contained within our experiences have tremendous influence and help create the details perceived by future experiencers. This aspect, in my opinion, is also a part of the so-called "co-creation hypothesis"

As a redux of the mentioned research project, to everyone's knowledge, when and where was the first "alien grey" encounter in the literature? I'll be interested in your responses...

 

[marduk]

Yes you are. While Greg Bishop in his essay posits that the existence of an alien as the starting point of talking about these encounters it doesn't necessarily mean that they have total control over our minds or that they even exist. To relinquish our role as a passive one where we are merely subject i reject categorically. The act of seeing is as much a biological one as it is phenomenological. How we see is wrapped up with the individual. Their prior experiences personally, sociologically, culturally, their frame of mind, if you will, is a shaped process. That is why is some shootings of black men last year turned out witness reports that ranged from he ran at the officer to he stood still with his hands in the air. There is always a bias in the act of seeing. You see the gold and white dress and I see the blue one. It's an established fact that we see things differently from person to person. While language mitigates the idea of a public object they really don't exist. The moon I see is different from the one you do. We each have our personal moon. Some can't get past this notion and would rather have external reality be what is in our heads and that it's the same in the heads of others. But when you read witness accounts it's not as clear as that. There are other factors at work - some see nothing in the sky, some see the same UFO and others recount being abducted. Memory, which is a faulty thing at best, erodes each time we retell our tale.

If I am raised in a culture that believes in sky people then my experience of the alien other may be a gift to me and my people. For others with a different front loaded cultural setting they may see monsters and be in terror from their experience. And of course the state of mind of the person prior to these experiences may also play a crucial role. If we are destabilized prior to the event then how dramatic events unfold will be different for each witness. Knowing who and what informs the witness can tell us a lot more about the experience then just looking at what the report says they saw.

We play a direct role in every act of seeing as does our background. Fear and trauma do seem to be relevant factors in these CE cases and the events that unfold afterwards further colours the initial experience and also needs more investigation. Many are afflicted following such experiences and more paranormal events are known as features of these occurrences. It's just not as simple as aliens controlling our minds. That may be the case but it entirely denies our role and our will. While solid ships may appear in the sky, as your own narrative tells us, shape shifting and physical contact are part of the event. There are a number of well known psychological experiments that cause people to have physical sensations even though none is present. I have had this happen to myself where I touched a phantom tree that I knew was not there but I felt it just the same. I detailed this on the forum last year when I first started looking at the role of the sensory processing as part of these types of cases.

The complexity of human sensory experience should not be underestimated as there are a great number of factors involved. My suggestion is that in unique situations, such as your own, logic does not play a role per se and our imaginations may have a lot more to do with it. I am not saying you imagined in at all. What I'm saying is that you had an experience that was very unique; you may have encountered a life form or some kind of external stimulus that caused your mind to perceive it in the only way it could make sense of it. And so the deer became an alien. That's what made sense to your mind in that moment. But what was actually there is difficult to say.

Maybe it's not something that our senses can experience in normal situations but in certain cases we are left with something unfathomable. And we obviously play a role in that act of seeing. How much do we bring to the dance vs. how much is supplied by the external stimulus can not be determined at this point. But together the reality that you experienced was co-created, just like that internet dress meme, that demonstrates seeing is not believing. It's much more complicated than that.

To explore your case further would take many more in depth conversations and a lot of beers at the bar. What was happening in your life prior to that event? What may have helped to inform the imagery that your mind supplied for you to see what you believe you saw? If we go down the road that aliens control our minds then we passive peons will never get a purchase on these experiences. Those who like to study ships in the sky do not seem to recognize that witness reports of Humanoids and CE events are a very different animal. And they are not in the same camps or ways of thinking about these events at all. And yet they appear to be related. And that's why Vallee took on the ETH after being its number one supporter. The evidence provided by CE witnesses and its case history point towards something much stranger at work.

Well, I was 16 or thereabouts, so my life at that time was about girls, football, parties and beer. Pretty typical high school kid that was reasonably successful at all four.

 

[Burnt State]

Well, I was 16 or thereabouts, so my life at that time was about girls, football, parties and beer. Pretty typical high school kid that was reasonably successful at all four.

That sounds like a surface summary of events. And not that I'm looking for you to reveal here in public as we could all choose to narrate history that way. I know when I dig deeper that my psychology and family trauma defined much more of me and definitely played a role in the oddities, hallucinations and bouts of sleep paralysis that was also part of those times.

Of course maybe you did have a Brady Bunch childhood and you just happened to slip into the twilight zone realm of an unknown external agent that you crossed paths with once upon a time in the middle of the night.

Btw why deer? Did you grow up near the woods, or hunt them, or watch Bambi on acid too many times? Were you an unusually eclectic dreamer of odd things growing up, bouts of sleep paralysis, any experiences of childhood hospitalizations etc.? Just curious as to your impressions as to why you think you saw what you saw? Did you own any pets at the time?

 

[Christopher O'Brien]

Btw why deer? Did you grow up near the woods, or hunt them, or watch Bambi on acid too many times?

lol, good question!

 

[Burnt State]

I think of it as a very sophisticated form of the kind of consciousness control that we have over our pets - I can get my dog all riled up by playing rough but well-intentioned, or I can put him to sleep by petting him with a meditative vibe, or I can make him sad by becoming sad. It's a crude analogy, granted. But it shows that a superior consciousness can directly control the state of consciousness of a less advanced conscious being.

Do you really think we are like trained pets for aliens? Your dog, while trained, is having a shared experience and the reality you experience is a co-created one. Don't dismiss your pet's impact on you in all those moments. You have history together. The dog submits to will or will play because of a bond created together over time.



I do not see human will as such a paltry thing that we should find the answer to high strangeness and all other UFO aberrations in the utter command and total control of advanced technological beings. I find this ETH panacea to be limited at best and removes us from the equation altogether. This may very well be a philosophical difference but even on the episode we did I was rather surprised at how quick everyone was to point to the aliens as having total control over all situations and no matter how irrational it sounded the neat and pat answer to all ETH challenges was simply, "They're aliens and they can do that sort of thing." Yet we have no real proof of alien visitation.

But somehow the narrative writes itself. For me this is a fundamental flaw in the theory and completely denies the role of human beings as having any part in the UFO phenomenon except as passive subjects who saw something weird. That reduction of the human witness to ET's pet or medical experiment I find disturbing and limiting at the same time. Why even bother to talk about this phenomenon if we have no real literal role to play in it like we're Lego blocks to be manipulated. My goodness this is a human experience! We are not inert. We perceive and we feel. We were people before during and after the experience. It's the human being that is the true measure of the phenomenon not just a data report.

I appreciate that there are in fact what appears to our instrumentation to be technological objects not of our making in the skies. But these too, like the sightings of Humanoids, have gone through cultural shifts. Yes people did in fact see large dirigibles in the sky during the airship history. The actual history of the mystery is quite robust and is definitely not limited to radar returns as you often point to. It is much wider than that. So consider not limiting it to just objects in the sky that we know so very little about.....but then we start talking time travel and yet again remove us even further from the witness experience. Are you, supposed fan of Terrence McKenna, not curious about the waves of sightings that seem to be different from culture to culture and shift over time in unique phases? Because if you say that it's just different aliens visiting at different points in time or that's what they want us to believe then we have nothing to talk about at all.

 

[Randall]

I don't doubt the phenomenon is engaged in study. But HS is not about studying our behavior but confusing us.

Maybe confusing us is part of the intent so that they can see how we react to HS. It makes perfect sense to me. They create some completely foreign experience for us and then watch to see how we attempt to resolve it. We do that sort of thing all the time when studying animal behavior but on a much less sophisticated scale.

 

[Constance]

Maybe confusing us is part of the intent so that they can see how we react to HS. It makes perfect sense to me. They create some completely foreign experience for us and then watch to see how we attempt to resolve it. We do that sort of thing all the time when studying animal behavior but on a much less sophisticated scale.

Ah, just clicked: 'HS' is Hynek's term 'high strangeness'.

 

[Randall]

I've been meaning to ask what 'HS' stands for?

I'm assuming "high strangeness".

I see no reason to conclude that they have only a single purpose in coming here -- to confuse us -- and could not also be here to study our behavior as well as the character and current condition of the planetary environment that produced us. We have, after all, been blowing ourselves up and endangering all life on this planet since the beginning of the atomic/nuclear age. Among their own varying behaviors, there might be different reasons for them, and differences in attitude among different visiting species or androids. But the significance of one persistent behavior is unambiguous: their spotlight on and interference with intercontinental missiles and other nuclear weaponry here, in Canada, in Russia, and other countries.

It seems to make sense that to study us would include checking out our military capability, but at the same time I'm not as convinced as I used to be that all the cases are reliable.

 

[Angel of Ioren]

That sounds like a surface summary of events. And not that I'm looking for you to reveal here in public as we could all choose to narrate history that way. I know when I dig deeper that my psychology and family trauma defined much more of me and definitely played a role in the oddities, hallucinations and bouts of sleep paralysis that was also part of those times.

Of course maybe you did have a Brady Bunch childhood and you just happened to slip into the twilight zone realm of an unknown external agent that you crossed paths with once upon a time in the middle of the night.

Lol, nobody has a brady bunch childhood, man.

But I will say that I was a well-adjusted high school kid having the time of my life. I mean, I knew high school was mostly a bunch of stupid kids doing stupid things and life wouldn't really start until university, so I just kind of went for it, you know? Honor roll kid with good grades, enough to get a good scholarship. First string on championship football and rugby teams. Parents would routinely throw girls out of my bed on Sunday mornings. Lots of friends, lots of laughs. No angst. Then this happened.

I think you're creating a narrative where perhaps none exists. This experience happened to me. No narrative, no message, no enlightenment, no love and light messages, no 'better save the planet,' no nothing. And I just went on with my life.

It's just part of my life experience now, and one on the small pile of them that doesn't fit with the rest of my life.

Btw why deer? Did you grow up near the woods, or hunt them, or watch Bambi on acid too many times? Were you an unusually eclectic dreamer of odd things growing up, bouts of sleep paralysis, any experiences of childhood hospitalizations etc.? Just curious as to your impressions as to why you think you saw what you saw? Did you own any pets at the time?

No idea. Grew up in rural Alberta, camping quite a bit. Saw lots of wildlife including deer, but not limited to them.

If I had to hazard a possibility, they either resembled them in both color and size (although very small, smaller even then some fawns), or they didn't pose a threat. Deer are prey animals, you know? Maybe that's it. I don't know.

Not an especially vivid dreamer, no hallucinations until I started doing mushrooms occasionally - but that was more than five years down the road. Did have sleep paralysis a few times, but not until after this experience. Carried on until I was 30 or so, don't think I've had one since.

Got pneumonia bad as a kid from survival camping in the winter and being socked in by a snow storm, and my tonsils out. That's it for hospital visits pretty much.

We had a cat growing up. I remember bringing her into my room afterward, and she seemed unsettled. But that could be anything.

 

[Burnt State]

Lol, nobody has a brady bunch childhood, man.

But I will say that I was a well-adjusted high school kid having the time of my life. I mean, I knew high school was mostly a bunch of stupid kids doing stupid things and life wouldn't really start until university, so I just kind of went for it, you know? Honor roll kid with good grades, enough to get a good scholarship. First string on championship football and rugby teams. Parents would routinely throw girls out of my bed on Sunday mornings. Lots of friends, lots of laughs. No angst. Then this happened.

I think you're creating a narrative where perhaps none exists. This experience happened to me. No narrative, no message, no enlightenment, no love and light messages, no 'better save the planet,' no nothing. And I just went on with my life.

It's just part of my life experience now, and one on the small pile of them that doesn't fit with the rest of my life.



No idea. Grew up in rural Alberta, camping quite a bit. Saw lots of wildlife including deer, but not limited to them.

If I had to hazard a possibility, they either resembled them in both color and size (although very small, smaller even then some fawns), or they didn't pose a threat. Deer are prey animals, you know? Maybe that's it. I don't know.

Not an especially vivid dreamer, no hallucinations until I started doing mushrooms occasionally - but that was more than five years down the road. Did have sleep paralysis a few times, but not until after this experience. Carried on until I was 30 or so, don't think I've had one since.

Got pneumonia bad as a kid from survival camping in the winter and being socked in by a snow storm, and my tonsils out. That's it for hospital visits pretty much.

We had a cat growing up. I remember bringing her into my room afterward, and she seemed unsettled. But that could be anything.

Did you suddenly become Marduk when I was looking the other way?

I'm not looking for narratives and don't believe in space brother messages. And I know some experiences just happen out of the blue. Unexpected and inexplicable.

Agreed on the Brady Bunch but I know Marduk well enough that he would recognize that as me being sardonic.

But I'm still very confused about this identity shift. Am I in a David Lynch movie? Are you? Where did Marduk go? Oh wait....I see a strange woman singing inside a radiator (Eraserhead) now it all makes sense..... we're all just travelling on a Lost Highway together and Trent Reznor is blaring through the radio as the kaleidescope of existence starts rotating around me and there are electric creatures of light swimming all around me. It's ok...I've been here before.

 

[marduk]

Lol, nobody has a brady bunch childhood, man.

But I will say that I was a well-adjusted high school kid having the time of my life. I mean, I knew high school was mostly a bunch of stupid kids doing stupid things and life wouldn't really start until university, so I just kind of went for it, you know? Honor roll kid with good grades, enough to get a good scholarship. First string on championship football and rugby teams. Parents would routinely throw girls out of my bed on Sunday mornings. Lots of friends, lots of laughs. No angst. Then this happened.

I think you're creating a narrative where perhaps none exists. This experience happened to me. No narrative, no message, no enlightenment, no love and light messages, no 'better save the planet,' no nothing. And I just went on with my life.

It's just part of my life experience now, and one on the small pile of them that doesn't fit with the rest of my life.



No idea. Grew up in rural Alberta, camping quite a bit. Saw lots of wildlife including deer, but not limited to them.

If I had to hazard a possibility, they either resembled them in both color and size (although very small, smaller even then some fawns), or they didn't pose a threat. Deer are prey animals, you know? Maybe that's it. I don't know.

Not an especially vivid dreamer, no hallucinations until I started doing mushrooms occasionally - but that was more than five years down the road. Did have sleep paralysis a few times, but not until after this experience. Carried on until I was 30 or so, don't think I've had one since.

Got pneumonia bad as a kid from survival camping in the winter and being socked in by a snow storm, and my tonsils out. That's it for hospital visits pretty much.

We had a cat growing up. I remember bringing her into my room afterward, and she seemed unsettled. But that could be anything.

Lol that was me!

Somehow I became Angelo for a second.

Maybe we co-created that post.

 

[Angel of Ioren]

What is HAPPENING??? Did you have moderator powers while you were me?

 

[Linton]

Trickster among us! Must be getting too close to the truth.

 

[marduk]

What is HAPPENING??? Did you have moderator powers while you were me?

I tried to ban Chris but it didn’t work.

 

[Angel of Ioren]

We've been seeing this bug from time to time. Hopefully it gets sorted out soon. But Marduk, there's no better forum member to be than me, right? I have the coolest avatar.

 

[Angel of Ioren]

Hey, I'm still Angelo!

Well, I'd like to get a few things straight. First of all, I've decided to give up all Apple products and no longer worship at the altar of Jobs.

That's right, I'll be giving up my iPhone, iPad, and every other iThing for a Google Pixel, a Microsoft Surface, and a no-name PC. I've decided that expensive high-end quality devices are no longer the way to go - I'd prefer to be hacked, get viruses, and to enjoy a sizeable fraction of my life rebooting and installing updates.

I'll also be giving up all nintendo video games, and getting a xbox instead.

On the topic of the paranormal, I'm also going to reverse my prior thinking and skepticism, and declare that Billy Mier photographed real beamships, the MJ-12 documents are real, and I've received blessings of love and light from Altair 7.

Cough, cough.

Sorry, I couldn't help myself. I'll be logging out as you right now, feel free to delete this post.

 

[Burnt State]

Maybe confusing us is part of the intent so that they can see how we react to HS. It makes perfect sense to me. They create some completely foreign experience for us and then watch to see how we attempt to resolve it. We do that sort of thing all the time when studying animal behavior but on a much less sophisticated scale.

So now we're also helpless and confused in the face of it all. Why give over all power to an unproven entity? Why not start with us first as we are the ones seeing things? Wouldn't that be the first step as opposed to just taking things as they are and identifying us as utterly submissive to our all powerful alien overlords?

 

[Angel of Ioren]

This is amazing!

 

[Angel of Ioren]

Hey, I'm still Angelo!

Well, I'd like to get a few things straight. First of all, I've decided to give up all Apple products and no longer worship at the altar of Jobs.

That's right, I'll be giving up my iPhone, iPad, and every other iThing for a Google Pixel, a Microsoft Surface, and a no-name PC. I've decided that expensive high-end quality devices are no longer the way to go - I'd prefer to be hacked, get viruses, and to enjoy a sizeable fraction of my life rebooting and installing updates.

I'll also be giving up all nintendo video games, and getting a xbox instead.

On the topic of the paranormal, I'm also going to reverse my prior thinking and skepticism, and declare that Billy Mier photographed real beamships, the MJ-12 documents are real, and I've received blessings of love and light from Altair 7.

Cough, cough.

Sorry, I couldn't help myself. I'll be logging out as you right now, feel free to delete this post.

Not deleting this - I think it's hilarious. Great job taking advantage of the bug to make it fun!

Thanks for the laugh this morning.

Sent from my Zune.