Thanks blowfish. That was a fun John Keel talk – I laughed out loud when he complained that he would’ve rather been portrayed in
The Mothman Prophesies film by Brad Pitt, than by Richard Gere =D I’ve always been intrigued with that story – I’ll have to get around to reading his book.
Yes, it is silly. We do have a number of credible radar-visual cases. So how does the “co-creation hypothesis” explain that, if it doesn’t suppose that our minds somehow interact with something else to produce radar returns?
Modern astronomers and astrobiologists have crunched the numbers against the latest exosolar planetary discoveries, and concluded that it’s virtually certain that advanced civilizations share our universe with us:
“By applying the new exoplanet data to the universe's 2 x 10 to the 22nd power stars, Frank and Sullivan find that human civilization is likely to be unique in the cosmos only if the odds of a civilization developing on a habitable planet are less than about one in 10 billion trillion, or one part in 10 to the 22th power.
‘One in 10 billion trillion is incredibly small,’ says Frank. ‘To me, this implies that other intelligent, technology producing species very likely have evolved before us. Think of it this way. Before our result you'd be considered a pessimist if you imagined the probability of evolving a civilization on a habitable planet were, say, one in a trillion. But even that guess, one chance in a trillion, implies that what has happened here on Earth with humanity has in fact happened about a 10 billion other times over cosmic history’”
https://phys.org/news/2016-04-limits-uniqueness.html
“A New Empirical Constraint on the Prevalence of Technological Species in the Universe,” A. Frank & W. T. Sullivan III, Astrobiology, 2016
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1510/1510.08837.pdf
I’m honestly surprised that you weren’t embarrassed to share that painfully banal video that features frickin’ video game footage throughout the entire rotten thing, with some snide twit beating his chest to rhyming couplets like an “Epic Rap Battle” video. Not to mention the weird worship-like fixation on Jacques Vallée, as if he has all the answers (even though he explicitly states that he doesn’t have the answers to the UFO phenomenon).
But this raises an interesting point that I’ve been meaning to address in this thread: namely, the capabilities of technological devices originating from civilizations thousands (and more likely, millions) of years ahead of us.
An Apache helicopter over ancient Athens would’ve made the locals crap their pants in confusion and fear – and that’s just a 3000-year difference, give or take a millennium. Witnesses would’ve been convinced that either Ares or Zeus were furious and had sent some mythical beast to reign terror down on them for some imagined slight (neglecting to sacrifice a calf at their temple on the appropriate day, for example).
Similarly, we literally cannot even imagine the capabilities of a civilization 10-10,000+ millennia ahead of us. We got our first glimpse of a viable interstellar propulsion concept only about 23 years ago, and that covers all of the simple stuff like levitation and inertia-defying performance capabilities. But we can’t even imagine what a PSYOP would be like from a civilization thousands+ years ahead of us. Thought projection/manipulation, unthinkably advanced holographic capabilities, and genetic analysis and alteration capabilities vastly beyond our comprehension, would all be likely, given enough scientific advancement. But just as an ancient Greek couldn’t imagine quantum teleportation, we have no idea what the next million years of technological advancement could yield for an advanced civilization.
But let’s get back to gravitational field propulsion for a moment, because that perfectly fits most of the exotic performance characteristics that are widely reported. By definition, this involves engineering spacetime geometry. Space *and* time. At a minimum, that means that they could control the rate of time with respect to the device, to some extent – perhaps even making it slow to a crawl, or speed by, compared to an observer on the surface of the Earth. And what if they can also move backward in time as well? If they’ve figured out how to do that (and we already have compelling theoretical work that links things like warp drive and wormholes to time travel) – then we’re so far out of our league, it’s mind-boggling to consider. For example, we could occasionally be seeing the same device, separated by thousands of years or more in our time, as it collects data across our entire history, and does whatever weird stuff that a hyperadvanced interstellar civilization gets up to. Such a device could arrive at the Earth and opt to shape our entire history and/or genetic evolution however it wished, and check the results in the future until it got the outcome it wanted, within perhaps a week of its own time on board the craft. This would also allow them to erase all tangible evidence of their existence, of course: if some pivotal sighting accidentally happened that undeniably alerted us to their presence (which they seem to avoid), they could just go back in time and prevent that event from happening, nbd.
And that's just one of the possibilities that we
can imagine. We can't even anticipate what another 100,000 years of civilization could yield, scientifically. All we really know is that it would seem like magic to us, and that's not much.
Anyway, I found all of the arguments in this video to be either logically flawed, presumptuous, or simply myopic. So I’ve made a list of rebuttals to each point:
Scientifically rational rebuttals to Jacques Vallee’s five criteria against the ETH:
1.) “3 million landings per 20 years – we’d need only one probe to learn everything about a planet like Earth, so why so many?”
Rebuttal: A.) 3 million landings per each 20 years sounds preposterously large to me – where’s the evidence of this? I’ve only heard a handful of credible landing reports in my lifetime of interest in this subject. B.) The assumption that only one species has visited the Earth is illogical: if one civilization has visited us, then interstellar spaceflight is practical to any life form significantly more advanced than us, so millions of species could be exploring the cosmos with both occupied and artificially intelligent devices – and indeed, we do see a wide variety of craft, so that fits the ETH. C.) The presumption that one of our current probes could learn everything there is to know about our global ecosphere is ludicrous on its face; we’ve sent multiple probes to the barren wasteland of Mars and have only begun to scratch the surface of understanding it and the comparably primitive and evidently lifeless conditions there. The presence of a vibrant Earth-like biosphere would change that equation dramatically – it would take hundreds if not thousands of probes to learn everything that there is to know about; the Earth, the > 8 million species here, and we humans (who still haven’t figured ourselves out yet). D.) The assumption of motive is totally naive: why would an alien species limit its interest in this planet to collecting data? They could be doing all kinds of things that we both can imagine, and can’t imagine. Like running experiments of a biological or a psychological nature.
2. ) UFOs “move through objects,” “pop in and out of existence,” “defy physical logic and quickly change direction like a holographic projection.”
Rebuttal: Let’s take these one at a time:
* “move through objects” – where’s the evidence of this? I’m aware of these objects moving through sea, but so do submarines. I’ve never heard about a case of a UFO moving through a solid object. And if such a thing has been reported, then how can we be sure that it actually happened that way? An extremely fast-moving object could appear on the other side of a solid object (like a mountain) by going around it faster than we could see.
* “pop in and out of existence” – again, many of these devices exhibit lightning fast accelerations from a standstill. Ergo, they could also exhibit equally fast decelerations. An object doing either with sufficient speed would appear to “pop into and out of existence” to the naked eye. Also, we’re already developing and deploying various forms of cloaking & camouflage technology; a civilization that’s, say, a million years ahead of us technologically, would obviously have the ability to cloak and decloak virtually instantaneously.
* “defy physical logic and quickly change direction like a holographic projection” – first off, it’s simply wrong to say that these devices “defy physical logic.” We already have a theoretical concept for gravitational field propulsion (Alcubierre, 1994), that would explain pretty much –all- of the observed performance characteristics quite neatly. And in labs right now, physicists are learning how to engineer the quantum wavefunction of matter to create all kinds of novel effects that have never been achieved before – in time, our very understanding of what properties a “solid object” can exhibit, will change radically, and the capabilities of such devices would be incomprehensible to our current understanding of materials science. Rapid changes of direction are elegantly explained by the principle of gravitational field propulsion, where even extremely high accelerations produce zero g-forces on board the device generating such a field. Also, it’s quite possible that some of the sighting reports –do- involve holograms: holograms generated by extremely advanced interstellar devices (because we’re almost certainly not capable of generating holograms of that nature yet, which appear solid and emit light).
3.) “They usually look like humans and breathe our air etc” – the cases we know of that fit this description, like the Adamski case, usually turn out to be frauds. Those that aren’t frauds, could be psychological/perceptual manipulation of some kind using technology unknown to us. And of course it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that since Earth-like conditions are ubiquitous throughout the universe, some of those planets would yield similar evolutionary patterns that could produce bipedal primates like ourselves. There are evolutionary reasons that we have two forward-facing eyes, and stand upright, and have the size and body mass that we have, for example. Given a large enough sample size, some extraterrestrial life forms will resemble us, and of course, those are likely to take an interest in us because we’d belong to their own class of bipedal humanoid species.
4.) “what are the abductions for? Thousands of cases all over the planet – what kind of experiment requires that much activity?” “And why is their [surgical] technique so primitive?”
Rebuttal: Who says that abductions aren’t entirely psychological in nature? The evidence of abductions is even thinner than the evidence for UFO sightings – perhaps it’s just some kind of sleep paralysis nightmare. But even if they are real, then how the heck can we determine how many abductions would be required, if we don’t know the intention behind them? Consider this: we say that science has “mapped the human genome,” but in reality, every person possesses a unique complete genome, each with different strengths and weaknesses and idiosyncrasies and unique sets of mutations. If a race wanted to 100% understand the potentials and limitations of a species like ours, they’d quite possibly have to study every single man, woman, and child on the planet, because the same genetic profile never occurs twice. As far as their surgical techniques, who knows? Maybe there’s a psychological component to their program to gauge our fear and pain responses. Or maybe it’s easier to stick a needle into somebody to get a deep tissue sample, than any other method available. In any case, recovery seems to be complete in nearly every case, so gauging by “patient outcomes” they seem to be doing far better than our own hospital procedures, which frequently kill people (and sometimes kill them horribly).
5.) “Why does it seem like they’ve always been here, and been described so differently throughout thousands of years of history?”
Rebuttal: The fact that “they” have been visiting the Earth for thousands of years makes absolute sense if the cosmos is teeming with alien civilizations. In that case, most civilizations would be millions or more years ahead of us, so they could’ve been visiting us from the age of the dinosaurs or earlier, perhaps to observe the trajectory of our evolution. And of course we would’ve described them in religious terms before science provided us with the notion of “flying machines” only about 100 years ago. Language evolves: today’s “antigravitational metallic spacecraft” would by necessity be described differently by, say, the ancients Greeks – they’d only have concepts like “a chariot of the gods” to describe a luminous aerial object maneuvering in dramatic ways. Similarly, some uneducated peasant in feudal Europe might witness some glowing object lurching around against the background of stars as a “angel” or a “devil.”
I’ll close by citing a couple of key points that are usually overlooked.
1.) Nobody’s saying that the ETH explains –all- anomalous sightings reports. It’s a big weird universe and we’re only beginning to map the terrain of possibilities for life, consciousness, energy, physics, biology, etc. So lots of freaky things are probably going on all over the place but with sufficient rarity that we haven’t understood them yet.
But the ETH certainly appears to explain some, if not most, of the anomalous reports extremely well. It’s all but certain that –some- sightings are extraterrestrial in origin.
2.) There’s no viable alternative hypothesis, that I’ve seen anyway. It seems to come down to: 1.) the ETH, and/or 2.) an empty and hand-wavy argument that goes a bit like this “something extremely nonspecific about consciousness,” and/or 3.) "they’re extradimensional, whatever that means – and don’t bother me by explaining how extra physical dimensions don’t mean what I think they mean or that we’ve never seen a whisper of physical evidence to suggest that such a thing exists,” and/or 4.) “we have no idea what the heck is going on.”
Note that the ETH is the only concept which actually rises to the status of a hypothesis; none of the other options even achieve the level of a cogent thought.
So the most rational position is this: the ETH explains many sighting reports, and the rest we have no explanation for yet. That works for me.