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.