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Special Paracast Episode: ET Hypothesis Debate


Gene Steinberg

Forum Super Hero
Staff member
The question of whether UFOs are extraterrestrial has dominated one of our most active threads:

The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis : Fact and Fallacy

The ETH theory lies at the core of the UFO phenomenon. Are those objects spaceships from other planets, another dimension, another time? What is the real cause?

So we've presenting three of our active forum members, Thomas R Morrison, Burnt State and marduk, to debate the issue on an episode of The Paracast.

mike, a long-time forum member and administrator, will be a guest cohost.

This episode will be recorded on Thursday, November 30, from 2:00 PM until 4:00 PM Arizona time. Ask away.
 
Q.1 How do the human race know what unknown / "Alien" are and agree is a cultural term created by music, movies and radio ? New Technology and Deep Space, http://www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/group/west/pdf/Levin_etal_17.PDF ,https://www.amherst.edu/media/view/...ns,+futurism+and+meaning+in+popular+music.pdf
Q.2 How do we know from credible eyewitness reports of encounters with police officer, military pilots and commercial pilots in their hundreds are so called "Aliens" rather over used word. Are they all lying or suffering with some type of sleep paralysis while a wake? Also misidentification by some but surely not all.
 
Q.1 How do the human race know what unknown / "Alien" are and agree is a cultural term created by music, movies and radio ? New Technology and Deep Space, http://www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/group/west/pdf/Levin_etal_17.PDF ,https://www.amherst.edu/media/view/353992/original/McLeod+-+Space+oddities+-+aliens,+futurism+and+meaning+in+popular+music.pdf
Q.2 How do we know from credible eyewitness reports of encounters with police officer, military pilots and commercial pilots in their hundreds are so called "Aliens" rather over used word. Are they all lying or suffering with some type of sleep paralysis while a wake? Also misidentification by some but surely not all.
Q1: much of what we call the alien other is part of a rather long historic cultural paradigm. They started as gods visiting from the skies, and then faerie folk, space brothers, visitors and then space aliens thanks to the 50's explosion and that final notion of the alien is still with us today in various formats. We know still next to nothing about what they are or where they come from. But our entertainment culture has coloured them very specifically.

Q2: not too clear what is being asked here but personally I find the police witness to be the most compelling. They occupy unique roles in our society as keepers of law and order, something the UFO stands in start contrast to. For a police officer to come forward requires a lot of courage as they risk their position as moral authority in an enormous way. Time and time again they pay dearly for daring to bring forwards their sightings of craft and humanoids. If anything, their sightings should make us want to consider various aspects of the phenomenon including the role of the witness, why they are so deeply ostracized and the need to take their case reports seriously. Their cases deserve rigorous examination and far less belittlement.
 
Expanding on some ideas.

Always a popular theory is that Greys evolved from a creature similar to our dolphin. Theoretically it does make a lot of sense and out of all the ideas floating around about Greys this one is by far the most plausable. The most noticeable thing about Greys is their grey skin (hence the name, Grey Alien) and is very similar to that of a dolphin. Without an actual sample of a Grey’s skin this would impossible to verify, but there is more evidence to support the dolphin idea than just skin colour. The eyes of the Grey are always reported as big and with a black “eye shield” covering the pupil. On Earth, many water-based creatures evolve these to deal with low light levels found in the ocean, which would suggest Greys evolved in a low level light environment. Another factor that suggests Greys come from Dolphin-like creatures is their very large heads. The size and shape of the cranium infer that Greys have an enlarged rear (occipital) and frontal lobe, a feature that is common in dolphins. During many abduction cases, victims often report that they were unable to move when a Grey looked in their direction, but as soon as the Grey looked away they regained physical control. Certain species of dolphin can disable small fish using sonar, and marine biologists have found that these waves can cause significant changes at cellular level. With many years evolution, it is not that unbelievable that Greys have adapted this technique from an existing skill they gained from millions of years of evolution.

The Dolphin started out like all of us in the ocean, then it became a land mammal, then it went back to the ocean. Its a staggering thing to contemplate on the timescale. But whats to say they all went back to the ocean ? perhaps some did, and some remained. the inland offshoot of the species that just as the land animal became a sea animal once again evolved on a separate path to become the greys ?

And of course.

Troodon Sapiens - Dinosauroid Sculpture by Dale Russell and Ron Seguin, 1982 - Canadian Museum of Nature, Ottawa, Canada

Pure speculation, but whats to say a planet only spawns one sentient species, Perhaps it does so multiple times. Who knows perhaps in 10,000 years or so the sentient Ape descendants will follow the path of their fellow terrestrial sophonts and step aside and let the next species have the space it needs to climb the ladder.
Keeping ourselves as hidden as possible might be our self imposed penance for the damage and extinction we caused in our messy birth as star farers.

None of which negates the mathmatical likelyhood of the ETH, just the reverse, if thats the model here its likely the same elsewhere. a single life friendly biosphere spawning multiple space faring societys over a large timescale.

Its a fascinating universe, nothing has given me personally greater joy than to speculate on what it holds, and to share that speculation with like minded friends.

Thanks again for an enjoyable discussion ppl.
 
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Thats something i wanted to expand on today but didn't get a chance. Are we being "led" to that idea, or it just a case of it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck ?
It feels to me like we are being led there in a really big way and because we are also an absurd species as you pointed out, living theatrically, we seem to be happily and not so happily playing our part in the drama. It bothers me to think what's underneath the first level reading of it. Sure it could just be a duck but does it really add up to that or do we have to bend the ETH too much to make that duck swim? More thinking is needed on it....more thoughtful conversation without trying to defend anything but just for the sake of exploring ideas. Maybe we find a duck or maybe a platypus. Or maybe something else we haven't thought of yet...
 
This was the most dynamic and fascinating conversation that I've participated in for years - thank you gentlemen! I keep remebering interesting points that would've been fun to debate, but just got lost in the whirlwind of all the intriguing ideas and anecdotes that everyone had to share.

I'm especially haunted by marduk's mention of his discussions with Ray Stanford about a magnetically confined plasma around a ufo - that sounds like a hand-in-glove fit with the concept of magnetohydrodynamic propulsion (sometimes called "magnetoaerodynamic propulsion" in discussions limited to aerial propulsion) that Stanton Friedman has mentioned - he found that most of the military research in that direction is classified. That would certainly be a viable way to propel a craft through the atmosphere. But I doubt it would be useful in the tenuous plasma of the interstellar medium, and it doesn't explain the silent hovering right over people's heads without any noticeable downward wind (it's still an aerodynamic system, it just uses field effects to move ionized air, instead of mechanical blades), and it wouldn't explain the crushing internal g-forces of the high accelerations that these devices routinely exhibit either. So perhaps the outward similarity is only incidental, and the plasma and the magnetic field are simply by-products of some kind of gravitational field propulsion system, or even some as-yet-unimagined form of field propulsion.

We also touched on the "Island of Stability" in our discussion of the Bob Lazar story and "element 115" (now named "Moscovium"), and episode 24 of the Physics Frontiers podcast that I co-host with a physics professor friend of mine will be all about that, if anyone wants to hear more about that intriguing topic in nuclear physics. We just published episode 17, "The Physics of Time Travel," so it'll be another 2-3 months before it's out though.

It feels to me like we are being led there in a really big way and because we are also an absurd species as you pointed out, living theatrically, we seem to be happily and not so happily playing our part in the drama. It bothers me to think what's underneath the first level reading of it. Sure it could just be a duck but does it really add up to that or do we have to bend the ETH too much to make that duck swim? More thinking is needed on it....more thoughtful conversation without trying to defend anything but just for the sake of exploring ideas. Maybe we find a duck or maybe a platypus. Or maybe something else we haven't thought of yet...
This is one of the points that I meant to circle back to in our discussion, but got lost in the fray: there are definitely some "high strange" reports that may be totally unrelated to the ETH, and which seem to call for new modes of investigation (I'm thinking of the "men in black" and the "black-eyed children" and the "dog men" and other fascinating reports like those that we've heard about from the Skinwalker Ranch). Hopefully nobody who advocates for the ETH is convinced that the extraterrestial hypothesis can explain everything - I certainly don't. And clearly, the kinds of scientific investigation that would likely yield new insights in the ufo phenomenon, would be useless for making progress in those kinds of directions. Devising a sensible methodology for resolving those mysteries poses a very unique challenge - honestly I don't even know what to suggest, but it's interesting to consider.

But I have been thinking about this idea of "investigating the witness" a lot lately, and it strikes me that this technique would be *ideal* for gathering data on paranormal phenomena like ghosts/hauntings. In this scenario, the ghost investigators could be fitted with a portable EEG and perhaps other biological sensors to record the investigator's status as they explored an area with high paranormal activity. The human body/brain system is extremely sensitive, and probably has more senses than we're conscious of, so this technique would give us indirect data about the brain and bodily responses before, during, and after paranormal experiences. And who knows what we might find? Perhaps there are "early warning" responses within the brain/body system prior to a paranormal event. Perhaps there's a clear neurological signal induced in the witnesses during such events. Heck, we might even detect some form of communication happening in the brainwaves themselves, induced by unseen forces or entities - perhaps they only "lash out" and throw things around the room after they've tried to communicate in some as-yet undetected manner, and we fail to respond "on their wavelength," so to speak. It's fun to think about, and frankly I'm surprised that nobody has tried it yet.
 
... More thinking is needed on it....more thoughtful conversation without trying to defend anything ...
As you might guess, I have a problem with that notion because if one is going to have a "thoughtful conversation" how do they know it's thoughtful unless those thoughts are defensible? If we're going to separate the signal from the noise we need more defensible ideas, not less, and certainly not a truckload of added nonsense that we're supposed to assume carries equal weight when it doesn't. But okay, maybe if we could see all the Blue Book files that went straight into the trash, there might be something interesting in there someplace. So maybe even those should be catalogued for those who like sifting through trash.
 
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As i mentioned in show, the Cometa report concluded that about 5% of the UFO cases they studied were utterly inexplicable and the best hypothesis to explain them was the extraterrestrial hypothesis.

COMETA - RationalWiki

So a lot of the square pegs that dont seem to fit the round hole may have nothing to do with the ETs.

And that 5 percent, again as mentioned cant be attributed to a single species or motivation, In fact the ETH should be spelt ETsH. The use of the singular noun is part of the problem imo.

All observation is Theatre.

"Theatre" as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον (théatron, "a place for viewing"), itself from θεάομαι (theáomai, "to see", "to watch", "to observe").

It just so happens that in a close encounter experience the event is so strange the sense of theatre is magnified.
 
As you might guess, I have a problem with that notion because if one is going to have a "thoughtful conversation" how do they know it's thoughtful unless those thoughts are defensible? If we're going to separate the signal from the noise we need more defensible ideas, not less, and certainly not a truckload of added nonsense that we're supposed to assume carries equal weight when it doesn't. But okay, maybe if we could see all the Blue Book files that went straight into the trash, there might be something interesting in there someplace. So maybe even those should be catalogued for those who like sifting through trash.
I'm just saying that the most productive, illuminating and creative conversations I've had about the subject comes from participating in groups of non-judgemental, agnostic doubters who have nothing to defend or fight for including their egos or beliefs. Instead the conversation begins with "what if.....?" and ideas can be thrashed about without anyone getting perturbed. Everyone brings informed positions and their lateral thinking to the table along with new ideas to see what else gels. I have learned far more through those kind of environments than in debating the ETH tbh. I prefer new idea spaces simply because the other theorems all have their limits and it's nice when you can see other possibilities or to start thinking about categorizing different aspects of the phenomena...

However, that being said I did enjoy a lot of this episode's convo as everyone brought their own unique perspectives despite all having had their own very significant experiences. It would be interesting to see what we could come up with if we weren't focussed on ETH vs. Anti-ETH and just started asking more what if questions.
 
As i mentioned in show, the Cometa report concluded that about 5% of the UFO cases they studied were utterly inexplicable and the best hypothesis to explain them was the extraterrestrial hypothesis.

COMETA - RationalWiki

So a lot of the square pegs that dont seem to fit the round hole may have nothing to do with the ETs.

And that 5 percent, again as mentioned cant be attributed to a single species or motivation, In fact the ETH should be spelt ETsH. The use of the singular noun is part of the problem imo.

All observation is Theatre.

"Theatre" as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον (théatron, "a place for viewing"), itself from θεάομαι (theáomai, "to see", "to watch", "to observe").

It just so happens that in a close encounter experience the event is so strange the sense of theatre is magnified.
And as you know also that theatre is about construction and design. In any theatrical event there is a collaboration between the designs of external reality and the observer. One-third of the human mind was designed for sight...we are built to engage theatre and be participants in it through the limits of our sensory capacities and how our brain helps to construct external reality in our minds. I think inside such a paradigm there is a lot of wiggle room for many possibilities regarding why external reality may appear the way it does inside different UFO, humanoid and paranormal experiences. So for me it makes sense to investigate that entire theatrical process to see what may shake loose from that and see if it gives us a new purchase to hold onto for any aspect of the phenomenon.

Why is it that in the CE experience not only is it magnified but it is utterly profound. It's not at all like seeing a light in the sky do strange things. The impact on the person and other attendant phenomena that often unfold almost speaks to something being opened up inside the observer. It's as if we've been primed for something and then there's the whole repeater phenomenon....it should make us ask different questions.
 
And as you know also that theatre is about construction and design

Not always.

"Theatre" as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον (théatron, "a place for viewing"), itself from θεάομαι (theáomai, "to see", "to watch", "to observe").


Just walking into the national park and sitting on a rock and observing a beautiful sunset is Theater.
Observation doesn't always require construction and design.

The degree of Theater is related to the novelty of that which is being observed.
Watching a man walk past your table as you sit at an alfresco cafe is Theater, mundane but Theater none the less. If hes dressed in a clown costume that sense of Theater is heightened because its not mundane.

I posit that the idea that there is an overwhelming sense of theater associated with CE's is simply because its so far outside the usual day to day experience. Its created entirely in the eye of the beholder.
 
Expanding on another idea we explored. That the the technology behind their propulsion may be very simple.

The ancient greeks didnt have the technological manufacturing base to make one of these.

1200px-OliverCromwell.JPG


Indeed the idea this machine could take you from Glasgow to london in 16 hours would have seem incredible.

But they would have understood the means by which it worked. It simply takes fire and boils water. The machine would seem fantastic, but the actual way in which it creates its propulsion is so simple.

Even decades later we use the same principle in these.

caracteristicas_tecnicas_dsc04853_thumbnail.jpg

The Cofrentes Nuclear Power Plant (Cofrentes NPP) is equipped with a Boiling Water Reactor

So when i see alleged systems like this

UFO+Propulsion.jpg


I think about the steam train, it looks like a complex machine and it is, but the system that drives it is so simple its almost unbelievable that an oversized tea kettle could take you so far so quickly.
 
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