Again, we can imagine better. What is the optimum goal of our tools but to free us of waste and our mortality. What detectable technology would a truly advanced species have on display? Are you thinking camouflaged mining operations? My goodness, an advanced species is not going to have evidence of technology as there could be no waste, no factories, and as Mike often likes to promote, no biology. And so a post biological intelligence needs no ships to sustain their non-existant bodies. They are the ship.
For someone who balks at the simple idea of extraterrestrial life-forms visiting our planet in ships (or as artificially intelligent ships, as the case may be), you certainly seem comfortable jumping to a lot of fairly radical conclusions. This paragraph is fraught with them. For one thing, there are obviously thousands if not millions of valuable purposes for tools and technology, beyond “freeing us from waste and our mortality.” Such as transport, entertainment, edification, communication, pleasure, experimentation, destruction, construction, preservation – the list goes on and on. And as our own technology has advanced, our civilization has generated far more waste and factories and infrastructure – which are all highly visible – so this presumption that an advanced civilization and its inhabitants would be essentially invisible/undetectable is a baseless and irrational leap.
So what are all these bizarre humaoids that people keep seeing: the robots with noxious gas being emitted out of their mouths or those giant catfish with legs, the Pascagoula surreal creature, giant eyeballs, beer can shaped little bots on tripods, the giant crystal encrusted giants with heat emanating from their bodies, average looking humans climbing out of giant tanks to say hello and call us by name, or those honeycombed spider web like ships, and the green mini skin divers of Emilcin eating brittle icicle like food with their ravens floating in suspended animation on the walls.....I could go on and on.... It's not as simple as nuts and bolts ships flying from star to star to dig up some more bleepin soil samples and grope our genitals. It's much more bizarre than that, and the ETH just don't cut it.
You don’t seem to be parsing the data at all, which is strange. I have no idea if any of those examples actually happened as you described, yet you seem to assume that every wild report ever made is factually true. No wonder the ETH seems insufficient to you – if I demanded an explanation that encompassed ufos, ghosts, goblins, demons, and Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, I’d be banging my head against the wall too. The ETH only attempts to explain the class of reports that we know to be real: objects seen in the sky that vastly outperform our own technology. When you go beyond that, you have to rely on individual cases, which is a bad idea – any single case can be a hoax, or the perceptions of a lunatic, or an unrelated phenomenon, or any number of things. But when we focus on the data set involving physical devices that emit light and appear on radar and occasionally land, then we have some hope of getting somewhere without founding our conclusions on any one potentially unreliable data point.
BTW it's often the proponents of the ETH who believe their tech can manipulate our cameras, speak inside our heads, make us believe things about them.....it's a snake chasing its tail. What are the assumed limits of their magic technology? Are we also going to pose limits on their tech, or because we know x amount about space travel we're going to confidently say that they're simply at x+z and, therefore, we can easily comprehend an alien mind?
The ETH makes no assumptions about alien psychology, so no. It simply states that the best explanation for sightings of highly advanced craft in our skies that clearly defy inertia, is the arrival of devices from civilizations that have exceeded our current technological capabilities.
The level of sophistication of any individual civilization that could have achieved interstellar spaceflight will be unique to that civilization. Some will be somewhat more technologically/scientifically advanced than we are, but many will be substantially more advanced than we are. We can anticipate many of the possible advancements by examining our own physical theories, but many advancements are unforeseeable. One of the foreseeable advancements is interstellar spaceflight capability, which is why we have the ETH.
Btw Thomas I truly mean no insult to you or your person but I will attack ideas. Our ideas do not define our person. Our personhood is the totality of our real life interactions with the people in our lives that are important to us. What we do here is just banter, good discussion and throwing around ideas. I know I can be sardonic but I'm just here for the debate. It's not personal and no one should take it as a personal rhetorical attack. Different beliefs will produce different perspectives. You believe in physics as humans have discovered it so far and I believe in the limitations of human senses and what else may be possible in lieu of a distinct lack of confirmation for myself that the alien narrative exists. It appears that way but I wonder how much of that belongs to our own projections vs. what else may be happening. And I like to imagine...
Same here, Robert – I welcome a vigorous debate; in fact I insist upon it. My only objection is to purely rhetorical and dishonest debate tactics that seek to undermine the credibility of the person without any basis in reason, rather than simply debating the merit of their arguments. Phrases like “people who believe in space aliens,” which has been used here at The Paracast from time to time, clearly fall into that category of purely rhetorical and utterly vapid, dishonest debating tactic.
I’m a bit perplexed that on one hand you seem to accept a great many reports at face value, and acknowledge the multiple independent eyewitness and radar and trace evidence cases as real, and yet you don’t seem to perceive that class of event as a reasonable, if slightly tentative, confirmation of the ETH. Usually people who object to the ETH dismiss all of the data, no matter how physical/compelling in nature. You seem to accept the data and yet dismiss the ETH anyway. I can’t really understand that. Because that data set offers more than our fleeting perceptions – it offers some actual hard data, like landing impressions and radar returns and sometimes even radiation readings.
Well hopefully we will be able to hash that out over drinks one day soon. But I do strongly feel that the phenomenon is enirely interwoven with those who are doing the perceiving and what's been perceived so far is irrational in action (how many soil samples are needed? And what kind of advanced species with interstellar travel capacities needs to send down lifeforms to bother collecting those kazillions of soil samples anyways - it's ludicrous) and in appearance (see the many examples listed above - routinely ships behave like ghosts, or may merge or divide - see the case of Dr. X) leaving a very non sensical taste in my mouth. I think they/ do defy our senses and while it may not be a direct line the way the ETH provides I do feel strongly the phenomenon is extremely complex, beyond our sensory capacities and suggest something far more bizarre is at work than aliens on a sample collection mission. Even listening to The Paracast routinely makes us aware that the ETH is insufficient. What they do makes no sense to me anyways and it seems to have stymied many of the seasoned luminaries in the field who have retreated to exploring the phenomenological aspects of ufos.
Current knowledge tells us our sensory capacities are entirely limited and it strikes me that as witnesses are at the heart of what we know about the phemomenon that the rational thing to do is spend more time studying those who have had experiences [emphasis added] instead of hanging on to a theory that has told us zilch about it. How rational is that?
If I shared my sighting experience with somebody and their response was “I need to spend more time studying you,” I’d probably either laugh in their face or punch them in the nose. Eyewitnesses are already mocked/ridiculed/marginalized by our entire society for simply reporting their experiences as accurately as possible. Turning the microscope on them. instead of the event they’re reporting, will only achieve one thing: they’ll stop reporting to you. We need to collect more and better data, not stigmatize the witnesses as some kind of lab rats. It boggles my mind when respected ufo investigators like Chris seriously make this suggestion, because it’s so obviously a terrible idea to alienate the witness by making such a suggestion. Something strange is happening in our skies, not in our heads.
By far the most difficult thing to understand about an intelligent alien being from a substantially more advanced civilization, is going to be their motives, ambitions, etc. That stuff is contextual, and since we haven’t achieved their level of technological sophistication, we have no basis for rational analysis. Imagine if we landed a helicopter near some remote tribal village that had never encountered modern technology before. They’d see us yapping away on our cell phones and sending/receiving text messages, perhaps Commander Jack would do a little break dancing for our amusement, someone else would take samples of plant life and soil to run pollution studies or to find new mold species, somebody might shoot a rabbit with a rifle and bring it back to the ship for dinner, and somebody else would release a weather balloon to monitor the wind and other atmospheric conditions. All of that stuff would sail right over their heads, and yet to us, make perfect sense. You could drive yourself crazy trying to figure out the aims and behaviors of a more advanced and totally alien civilization, but that doesn’t make those aims and behaviors irrational or "ludicrous."
All of reality is just on our heads.
No that’s not even remotely true. All of our perceptions are ultimately in our heads, but clearly reality exists independently of us.
By studying the witness I don't mean their resume. I mean long term studies of specifically those witnesses we call "repeaters" and those witnesses who experience concurrent phenomenon associated with say a ufo sighting for example that us followed by experiences of ghosts. I'm talking about a life investigation and longterm work with people regarding the impact of their experience and who they were prior to the experience.
Understanding the impact of a sighting on somebody’s mind is an interesting area, but that’s one for the psychologists to unravel, imo - we have trained professionals for that sort of thing. Witnesses want to understand what they’ve seen – they don’t want to be studied by armchair ufologist-psychologists. Shifting the focus from the event to the witness would be a ruinous long-term strategy, imo.
As for projections. ..etc. ...again you are going down the road that they can do whatever they want with their technology and if they can, then just what exactly is the limit of how they can manipulate energy and matter?
We already employ all kinds of sophisticated camouflage, and a wide range of audiovisual projection technologies exist today (including the targeted remote induction of audio via microwaves) , so it’s not a leap to think that kind of thing would be in the toolkit of a more advanced technological civilization. And we’re now making progress in the field of materials engineering of the quantum wavefunction of aggregate matter to achieve new and unusual physical properties, so it’s not difficult to anticipate advancements like invisibility cloaks, and even devices that can change shape, size, and color through the application of electrical currents and so forth. Rather than balking at the formidable challenge of understanding the capabilities of a more advanced technology than our own, I would argue that conducting the most thorough scientific analyses of such aspects of these reports is likely to be the most practical and valuable work that we could ever do – because even the process of actively seeking a physical explanation for such effects can lead directly to our own ability to reproduce them.
Just where exactly do you want to draw that line that defines the capacities of an advanced, post biological, interstellar travelling species? Do you really think that aliens in suits collecting soil samples is the kinda thing an advanced species gets up to - that's a human narrative from flying saucer movies.
I think it’s wise to recall that modern humans and ancient Neanderthals both have to crap. Sure, some things that a more advanced alien species will do, will be inscrutable to us – but not everything. Taking environmental samples, for example – how else are you going to do a thorough analysis of an environment, if not by taking samples? There is no substitute for having a chunk of whatever you want to study, in the lab where you can control the analysis conditions and bring your microscopes and soforth to bear upon it. I don’t see that ever changing, because it will always be easier to analyze things in the lab, than trying to do it from space. If we go to another living planet one day, we’ll certainly collect a huge variety of samples of all kinds, and study them for decades in our laboratories. Why would an aliens species not do this also? Of course they would – they’re alien, not stupid. Imagine what we ourselves could learn by simply studying the microorganisms in an alien soil sample – one cup of dirt from another living alien world could revolutionize the fields of biology and genetics, and perhaps open up entirely new forms of medical treatment, just for starters. It's smart to bear in mind that biology is still the most advanced form of technology in the known universe - we can't even come close to engineering something as commonplace as a fruit fly. So naturally an alien species would be very interested in our biosphere.
If there's any projection going on it's human beings projecting their version of space travel onto an unknown phenomenon. The idea of coming down here on a ship to collect samples by hand is ludicrous at best. Similarly, when witnesses report these giant ships shining lights on the ground just what exactly is going on there. As Bruce Duensing well noted this is the equivalent of shining a giant flashlight onto the ground. Do you really think that is advanced technology? Just whose benefit us that for or is that the narrative that gets constructed in the wutness' head because that's how they need to make sense of reality when witnessing something surreal and paranormal?
Uhm… our helicopters and planes shine lights on the ground all the time, and every time they land. You know that, right? So why would it be perplexing for another civilization to do it also?
Again by all means continue to explore what could be happening in outer space but it all sounds like guess work about a huge unknown whereas the witness is here in front of us, unlike the ETH which is literally a construction in our heads.
I think we can learn a lot more by collecting and analyzing scientific data on anomalous advanced devices in our skies, than we can by studying Joe the Farmer just because he happened to look up and witness such a thing. Happily, it sounds like Chris is about to start collecting some great scientific data, so maybe we’ll finally get somewhere.
And the entire edifice of scientific understanding is “literally a construction in our heads." So that’s an odd objection to raise against the ETH – we wouldn’t have gotten very far if it weren’t for the ideas/theories/etc that exist in our heads. In fact, and perhaps oddly – the capacity to fashion such constructs within our minds allowed a fairly slow, weak, essentially clawless naked ape to rise to the top of the global food chain. So I’m a big fan of mental constructs, and the process of testing them and refining them, which we call “science."
Regarding trace evidence: the majority of trace evidence is an assemblage of discontinuous pieces of evidence arranged to suit a narrative. The place where I saw a light touch down on the forest is right where I find broken branches and disturbed soil the next day. I even test soil samples and they seem to have oddities. I want to say this all makes sense and build a ufo ETH narrative because that's what makes sense to me. But it really doesn't - none of that chain can be connected together: the branches was a bear the day before, soil sample readings may be due to interactions of vegetation unique to thst area....we want to make a narrative about aliens from space and the script is easy to write including talking about their propulsion. But we have proof of none of it. The really exceptional trace evidence pieces we have are very unique but we know little about the cause Everyone thinks the history of cases of radar and trace evidence is so overwhelming coming out of myriads of databases with no set rigorous approach to defining them and often when interesting cases are dug into mundanity prevails. We should not make assumptions of certainty when it comes to the history of ufo data. Even an information scientist like Vallee will say the data collected so far is mostly useless.
Honestly I think it’s kind of tragic that you had the rare privilege of seeing an alien device hovering right over your head, but you’ve managed to debunk all of the physical evidence, and even your own direct sensory apprehension of it. I can certainly understand that such an experience would be extremely alarming and deeply paradigm challenging – my own comparatively modest long-range sighting changed the course of my life dramatically. But your experience appears to have completely blown your mind, to the extent that you now seriously question your own sense perceptions and the basic logical foundation of your relationship to physical reality. This isn’t a personal attack by the way, simply an observation.
In any case, I do have to agree with Vallee on that point– yes, the data collected so far is *mostly* useless from a scientific standpoint. Although it does indicate the presence of physical, advanced craft of some kind, so that’s something.
However, I think that you’re completely missing the significance of the unique and consistent descriptions of the performance characteristics of the anomalous craft observed in the sky. That’s easy to do, unless you happen to be a lifelong physics addict with a remarkable sighting experience, so I’ll go over it briefly.
Every form of lift/propulsion/maneuvering capability known to physics today, operates on the principle of Newton’s third law of motion (which we all know as the law of action-reaction, aka the conservation of momentum). Except for one.
And the defining characteristic of the vast majority of sighting reports is the absence of any detectable reaction mechanism: we observe no fiery rocket propellant, or high downward winds like we see with helicopters and airplanes. These devices can hover silently right over your head without generating any wind or emitting any observable matter. But even more startlingly, they can lurch from a stationary position to a speed of thousands of miles per hour, and execute hairpin changes in direction at such speeds, without slowing down or banking in the process. These behaviors clearly and indisputably violate the law of inertia.
There is only one concept in the entire canon of physics today that not only conforms to these specific and unique performance characteristics, but explicitly predicts them. And that’s the principle of gravitational field propulsion, which was first formally described within the context of the general theory of relativity in 1994 by Miguel Alcubierre, although Robert L. Forward had made substantial theoretical strides in that direction previously. Using that principle permits a craft to execute all of the key distinctive maneuvers that we commonly find in ufo sightings reports, because a device employing that concept is always in a state of free-fall, so there are no g-forces whatsoever, regardless of the magnitude of the accelerations. And it’s rudimentary to calculate that any reaction method of producing such accelerations would be devastating, akin to a bullet from a high-power rifle reflecting off of a solid block of steel. And of course, without emitting an equal magnitude of momentum in the opposite direction, which we’ve never observed in these reports, any acceleration at all would be impossible. Unless it’s using a dipolar gravitational field as the propulsion mechanism.
But it gets even more interesting, because the same formal description of gravitational field propulsion that explains all of the observed flight characteristics of these objects, also explains why the speed of light is not a limit for such a system: by falling along a curvature of spacetime, rather than forcing the object through spacetime like we do with rockets, we bypass the constraints of the special theory of relativity. So in principle, a device that can hover silently and virtually instantaneously accelerate to a speed of thousands of miles per hour, could in theory arrive at the Earth from several light-years’ distance in an arbitrarily short time interval as measured both aboard the craft and also by Eulerian (unaccelerated) observers. One could, according to the theory, travel to Alpha Centauri and back within the span of an hour or less.
So the only theoretical explanatory model for the distinctive performance characteristics exhibited in the bulk of ufo sightings, also just happens to point to the validity of the ETH.
In science we find that these kinds of independently determined coincidences are usually highly significant. So what we have here is a physically viable working hypothesis for the operation of these craft, and their unearthly origin, derived directly from the general theory of relativity. And now that we have a concise mathematical formulation of this propulsion mechanism, it’s all but certain that if we continue to progress technologically, we too will eventually produce this type of propulsion mechanism in the lab, and ultimately within commercial industry. So one day, we humans will be the source of extraterrestrial craft operating in the skies of distant planets that have their own primitive and warmongering civilizations. And when that happens, do you think that we'll land in the center of their village and extend the hand of friendship to the ignorant and murderous savages that we find there, or do you think we'll go about our business as quietly and quickly as possible to avert any potential hostilities, fear, and confusion? I know what I'd do, and it doesn't involve a diplomatic meet-and-greet or a student exchange program.
