Your Paracast Newsletter — October 22, 2017

[Gene Steinberg]

THE PARACAST NEWSLETTER
October 22, 2017
www.theparacast.com

Author Nick Redfern Talks About Shapeshifters on The Paracast

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This Week's Episode: Gene and Chris present everyone's favorite author on the paranormal, Nick Redfern, who is at it again with his latest book, "Shapeshifters: Werewolves, Tricksters, Monsters, and More," From werewolves, to elementals, to the Japanese Kitsune, we'll explore a number of strange stories about creatures that can change their appearance. But it definitely won't be anything like that outrageous TV show, "True Blood." Nick Redfern is the author of dozens of books on UFOs, Bigfoot, and cryptozoology, including "Monster Files," "Memoirs of a Monster Hunter," and "The Real Men in Black."

Chris O’Brien’s Blog: Our Strange Planet

Nick Redfern's Blog: http://nickredfernfortean.blogspot.com

After The Paracast -- Available exclusively to Paracast+ subscribers on October 22: Gene and guest cohost Angelo Fiorentino (aka Angel of Ioren in The Paracast forums) discuss Tom DeLonge’s efforts to raise funds for alleged scientific projects and the failed predictions of disclosure. We also explain how Paracast+ subscribers can get special access to the premiere episodes of “Haunted,” a new reality show featuring Paul Kimball and Holly Stevens. Gene also recalls the flamewars from the forum over the years, including Michael Horn and Billy Meier, and Dr. David Jacobs and his dealings with a test subject who complained about his research methods. And what about UFO abductions? Are they, as Angelo suggests, mostly due to sleep paralysis? Gene also repeats his oft-repeated suggestion that Betty and Barney Hill were actually the victims of some sort of government experiment when they underwent their famous UFO abduction experience. And why, with a smartphone camera in almost everyone’s pocket, don’t we have compelling UFO photos nowadays?

Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums. Check out our new YouTube channel at: The Official Paracast Channel

UFOs and the Warm and Fuzzy Phenomenon
By Gene Steinberg

This is an issue I’ve argued about for a while now. Most people who believe that UFOs are real are also convinced they are advanced technological machines from other planets. That astronomers are finding more and more evidence of possible Earth-type planets revolving around other solar systems only expands the possibilities that intelligence life exists out there.

How much of a stretch is it to postulate that such life has advanced to the point where travel to the stars is possible? I mean we actually have scientists who are trying to crack the secrets of “warp drive,” the propulsion system that was used as a plot device in the Star Trek TV shows and movies to get spaceships from one place to another as quickly as possible.

After all, if it took a few decades to fly from Earth to Vulcan, or the Romulan home world, everyone would age a lot, or the crew would be stuck in suspended animation for decades on end. It would really be a messy situation dealing with the vast changes on the crew’s home planets. That’s also why they devised “subspace radio,” to allow for instantaneous communications across distances of many light years.

But the alleged spaceships people report in connection with the UFO phenomenon don’t seem so advanced. We have the craft that abducted the Hills in 1961 playing around with primitive star maps. Yet it didn’t take all that long for humans to largely give up on physical maps and embrace Google Maps and other navigation systems on their smartphones.

Of course, smartphones were themselves heavily influenced by the Star Trek communicator. But Star Trek supposedly happens in the 23rd century, so isn’t it strange that we’re capable of duplicating some of its fictional technology within the space of a few decades?

Unfortunately, it appears that the beings who pilot those UFOs are stuck with primitive technology. They can manage to travel many light years to reach Earth, and perhaps return home if we assume it wasn’t a one-way trip. But beyond the propulsion system and the advanced memory metal hulls of the craft to protect the crew against space hazards, the rest of the technology only appears to be slightly more advanced than ours. Well, at least at the time they are witnessed.

It sort of reminds me of those airships from the late 19th century. They were very much in the spirt of dirigibles, and they were usually piloted by humans rather than gray aliens. The writers of imaginary fiction at the time weren’t necessarily thinking or circular or spherical spaceships either.

Of course, it’s hard to believe that an airship would be capable of interstellar travel.

What about reports of people seeing what appeared to be television sets inside an alleged spaceship, or a grill on which to fry some really bad-tasting pancakes? Where’s the food replicator?

Why does ET seem to often be just one step ahead of us, as if to reveal the possibilities of the next stage in scientific development?

When Kenneth Arnold saw nine ellipsoid objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier in Washington State on June 24, 1947, they flew just fast enough to seem unconventional. You almost think the phenomenon showed up to put on a show for us, delight us, fascinate us, intrigue us. And yes, in some cases, frighten us.

When alleged gray aliens are administering painful physical tests to UFO abductees, you wonder why. Wouldn’t it be easier just to put the subjects to sleep so they wouldn’t have to endure the trauma. Why even make it painful? If these are truly advanced beings from the stars, surely they have ways to extract DNA, and even a fetus, in ways that don’t inflict pain on someone.

In Star Trek, Dr. McCoy just takes his tricorder and passes it over his patient’s body to get critical readings. He can administer a pill to cure kidney disease so dialysis is no longer necessary. Eyeglasses, contact lenses? Who needs them. Just a few drops of Retinax V and, unless you’re allergic to the substance, your vision will be perfect. Just perfect.

I can’t wait to ditch my visual aids, which consist of contact lenses and reading glasses. Just a few drops. Hmmm.

So I’ve often thought about the possibility that UFOs are just putting on shows for our benefit. Their spaceships appear to us in a form that’s only slightly more advanced than ours. It’s quite enough to be mysterious and all, but not something we wouldn’t be able to perfect before long.

I’m not altogether sure about abductions, since the experience appears to be subjective enough to make it difficult or impossible to know what’s really going on. Maybe that is the screen memory, and not the image of an owl. Besides, how could ET be so dumb as to allow a simple hypnotic trance to undo all of their elaborate programming to prevent their subjects from remembering what really went on?

Again, alien technology doesn’t seem so far advanced after all.

I often wonder if we’d even be capable of recognizing alien technology that’s thousands of years ahead of ours. Would they even travel here in physical spaceships and not some sort of stargate? Just enter the flowing watery field and, within seconds, you find yourself magically transported to another part of the galaxy. No fuss, no muss.

But if they use physical aircraft that we would somehow recognize in its true form, why bother? Couldn’t they just turn on a cloaking device and hide themselves from us? Why allow us to see them, unless their appearance is strictly for our benefit?

I’m only summarizing the basic illogic of the presence of UFOs. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, unless we are dealing with an intelligence that is presenting itself in a form that would seem warm and fuzzy to us, a form in keeping with our beliefs and expectations.

Maybe we aren’t ready to see them in their true form.

So I wonder: If, in a few decades, we have perfected warp drive and a transporter-type device, will we still see UFOs? And if we do, in what form would they appear? Will they still be just one step ahead of us?

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[Thomas R Morrison]

Lately I’ve noticed that the show and the forums seem to be dominated by an unduly skeptical and derisive attitude toward the ufo phenomenon – as if the prevailing views are more closely aligned with today’s CSICOP than the former NICAP.

I hope that this is an anomalous downturn rather than a long-term trend. Because if I wanted to see ufo witnesses shouted down and mocked by cynics, that kind of thing can be found on every mainstream science board on the internet.

Ironically, it’s also quite clear now that those who call themselves “science-based skeptics” don’t actually follow science – these people are still using arguments from the 1970s that are either no longer valid, or are now on life support. For example, we’ve had a formal theoretical model of gravitational field propulsion (which perfectly fits the performance characteristics described by ufo witnesses, and which also permits superluminal travel within the context of general relativity) ever since 1994, and yet we’re still hearing banal objections about the “insurmountable distances” between the stars. And modern astronomers are now saying that a pessimistic estimate for the number of technological civilizations in the observable universe would be on the order of 10 billion, and most likely many more than that.

Over the past few decades, the expansion of scientific knowledge has dramatically grown in favor of the ETH. And only the self-described “skeptics” seem to be completely oblivious to this trend. So it's disappointing to see those uninformed viewpoints dominating so many of the discussions here at The Paracast forums, of all places.

And why, with a smartphone camera in almost everyone’s pocket, don’t we have compelling UFO photos nowadays?

As I’ve suggested previously, we should take daytime photos of passing jets to see if smartphones can take good photos of them. We can’t know if the prevalence of pocket cameras should be helping us to get clear photos of anomalous aerial objects until we see if those cameras can take decent pictures of mundane aerial objects. There’s a big difference between a camera that can take great selfies, and a camera that can focus on a rapidly moving object miles away. Let’s see if they can do both.

How much of a stretch is it to postulate that such life has advanced to the point where travel to the stars is possible?

I don’t think it’s a stretch at all, for these reasons:

1.) We already have a theoretical formula for faster-than-light “warp field propulsion” that’s consistent with the general theory of relativity which, to date, has proven to be an absolutely stunning success. The recent gravitational wave detections have validated this theory with a precision that even Einstein thought would be impossible within the foreseeable human future – and here only a century later, gravitational waves are on the front page of the newspaper.

2.) The only fundamental technical objection to the equation for warp field propulsion, has been the issue of negative energy. But science has confirmed two known examples in nature where the requisite effect for warp field propulsion is clearly evident: the inflationary epoch of the early universe, and the dark energy phenomenon. Both of these examples prove that, under certain conditions that we’re still trying to model properly, spacetime expands.

3.) The history of science shows us again and again that any effect that we observe in nature is eventually understood and technologically exploited for human purposes. So it’s only a matter of time before we understand the physical conditions required to technologically produce an expansion of the spacetime metric. Any civilization more advanced than we are now, has likely already understood this mechanism, and harnessed it to produce warp field propulsion. In fact the behaviors of the anomalous objects in our skies 100% conform to that propulsion mechanism.

But the alleged spaceships people report in connection with the UFO phenomenon don’t seem so advanced.

That’s just not true. Propelling a craft by engineering a specific geometry of spacetime curvature is an *extremely advanced* technological capability. We finally have a rudimentary understanding of how such a thing could be possible, but that’s a far cry from actually having the capability to build such a thing. A rough analogy of the situation might be an ancient Egyptian priest somehow figuring out the principle of nuclear fission – he might be able to calculate the requirements for building an atom bomb, but it would take thousands of years for human technology to advance far enough to exploit his theory to manufacture a nuclear warhead.

We have the craft that abducted the Hills in 1961 playing around with primitive star maps.

What’s “primitive” about a star map? Maps are an intuitive and timeless method for showing the relationship between points in space, which is why we’re still using them thousands of years after we humans drew the first map into sand with a stick. I can’t imagine a future where maps are obsolete, because they’ll always be useful.

Yet it didn’t take all that long for humans to largely give up on physical maps and embrace Google Maps and other navigation systems on their smartphones.

And yet we still print out copies of these maps for convenience. Go figure.

But Star Trek supposedly happens in the 23rd century, so isn’t it strange that we’re capable of duplicating some of its fictional technology within the space of a few decades?

Not really. Smartphones are essentially just a very advanced form of walkie talkie. It would be strange if that technology from the 60s hadn’t advanced substantially over half a century. Note that Star Trek didn’t actually happen in the 23rd Century – it was written in the 60s. There are limits to how clearly we can anticipate future advancements; some ideas that are easier, like fancy communication devices, are easy to anticipate. Other things like warp drive and teleportation may not be available for thousands of years.

Unfortunately, it appears that the beings who pilot those UFOs are stuck with primitive technology.

“Primitive,” really? The ability to levitate silently and instantaneously accelerate to thousands of mile per hour, takes the most bleeding edge theoretical physics model to explain. And the engineering capability to exploit that realm of physics appears to be thousands of years (or more) ahead of us. I don’t know how you can call that “primitive technology” – it’s roughly equivalent to the wormhole technology of Stargate.

But beyond the propulsion system and the advanced memory metal hulls of the craft to protect the crew against space hazards, the rest of the technology only appears to be slightly more advanced than ours.

I don’t know what you mean by “the rest of the technology,” but I reckon that things like controls and visual displays will never go out of style because they’re useful. How they work, on the other hand, could be unrecognizably advanced in comparison with modern electronics. We’d have to study such a thing in the lab to know for sure.

It sort of reminds me of those airships from the late 19th century. They were very much in the spirit of dirigibles, and they were usually piloted by humans rather than gray aliens.

I’ve heard about reports of airships, but I haven’t heard about human pilot cases involving them. Though to be fair, we still hear reports of alien beings that are essentially indistinguishable from humans (perhaps a few humans were integrated into an alien culture eons ago and they take an interest in us because of our shared heritage…just spit-balling here).

Maybe people reported “airships” back in the 19th Century because that was the most advanced concept they could think of to describe what they saw at the time. Perhaps they were seeing the same type of craft that we’re seeing now. The same may apply to ancient civilizations when they reported “chariots of the gods” in the sky, because they didn’t have the language to describe a gravitational field propulsion mechanism.

Why does ET seem to often be just one step ahead of us, as if to reveal the possibilities of the next stage in scientific development?

I’d say that warp field propulsion is quite a lot more than “one step” ahead of us. And if you think about the other implications for that caliber of technology, it’s safe to say that human civilization will be radically transformed by such technologies.

When Kenneth Arnold saw nine ellipsoid objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier in Washington State on June 24, 1947, they flew just fast enough to seem unconventional.

Speed isn’t a very useful indication of technological sophistication, because we only know the speed that he witnessed (roughly 1700mph – about Mach 2.5 – which is three times faster than the fastest jet we had at the time). We have no idea about the *top speed* of those craft, which is the real indication of their sophistication.

A more telling detail is the fact that they flew with no visible means of propulsion. And in many other cases we’ve heard about dramatic instantaneous accelerations, which are still far beyond human capability, as far as we know (we can’t know what’s been achieved in the most secret military research programs, but it’s probably safe to assume that metric engineering is still a concept far beyond human capability).

So I’ve often thought about the possibility that UFOs are just putting on shows for our benefit.

I also think that’s possible/reasonable. But I tend to assume that it’s a combination of purposes: they need to get somewhere to do something, but they turn off the cloaking device to let us see them. Why they’d do this is an open question. They could be sending a message like “don’t even try to resist us because as you can see we’re vastly more advanced than you are,” or they could be sending a message like “look what we can do – now you try” to spur us forward. Perhaps they’d like us to become more technologically advanced so that one day we could have some service stations on the Earth to do maintenance on their craft, or, so we can finally have a sufficiently advanced civilization to make their conquest of our planet worth the trouble.

Again, alien technology doesn’t seem so far advanced after all.

I often wonder if we’d even be capable of recognizing alien technology that’s thousands of years ahead of ours. Would they even travel here in physical spaceships and not some sort of stargate?

The most interesting cases definitely involve a technology that’s vastly superior to our own.

But I don’t understand why anyone would think that an advanced technology would be unrecognizable. The first boats date back what, 10,000 years or so? And yet today’s boats are still obviously boats. Many are much larger of course, and we now use plastics and metals instead of wood, mostly – but even so, a boat is still a boat. Vehicles for retrieving information and collecting samples will probably always be useful. And perhaps it’ll always be easier and cheaper to send a drone to some distant planet, than it would be to focus a tractor beam across the galaxy to collect a sample of soil, for example.

In any case, I think it’s illogical to expect an advanced technology to be completely inscrutable to us. Our own advancements are generally just improvements on old ideas: the gun replaces the spear, the skyscraper replaces the mud hut, the interactive LCD display replaces the map drawn in sand. A primitive human would be amazed by these advancements, but they could still understand that a boat is a boat, a weapon is a weapon, and a map is a map.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

I don’t have time to cover all of this. But a smartphone is not just a fancy walkie talkie. It’s a mobile personal computer with amazing power.

About the skepticism: We need to eliminate the bad cases and focus more on the good ones.

 

[Lou_Sheehan]

I don’t have time to cover all of this. But a smartphone is not just a fancy walkie talkie. It’s a mobile personal computer with amazing power.

About the skepticism: We need to eliminate the bad cases and focus more on the good ones.

Well, Sir, identify some 'good ones'.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

You mean like the ones that Paul Kimball still likes from “Best Evidence”?

 

[Lou_Sheehan]

As I recall -- and will check when time permits -- you had on Jan Harzan (sp?) from Mufon who described what he considered a contemporary 'good one'; wasn't it a Canadian wilderness case? Why didn't the Paracast -- or the Forums -- follow up on that?
And doesn't that example make a point of showing how Mufon hasn't been totally hijacked by the Corey Goode clan?

 

[Lou_Sheehan]

You mean like the ones that Paul Kimball still likes from “Best Evidence”?

Notice, however, Paul still continues to broadly pooh-pooh the entire filed without specifically saying he does, in fact, think there ARE good cases out there.
And with which of the remaining cases Paul didn't demote reverberate with you? Might we not get some guests on to discuss those (very few) GOOD cases? [Note I use the word 'we'? I like to think of the Paracast as belonging to the Community. ]

 

[Lou_Sheehan]

I did listen to Paul on the Paracast where he expresses some disappointment with Leslie. I agree with Paul that it is a human weakness that people gravitate toward those with the money (hence my attention to the Paracast: I suspect Gene has a machine given to him from the aliens which can turn coal into gold). But what, exactly, has Leslie said and done vs-a-vis the Bud Hopkins work? Has she endorsed it? Or was she ... simply ... romantically involved with Bud?

 

[Gene Steinberg]

We have highlighted lots of cases on The Paracast through the years. That’s why I enjoy the theories.

As to whether we’d recognize examples of far future technology: It’s healthy for our egos to assume we will. But that doesn’t mean we can. And we don’t know if what we see is deliberately tailored to our expectations.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

I did listen to Paul on the Paracast where he expresses some disappointment with Leslie. I agree with Paul that it is a human weakness that people gravitate toward those with the money (hence my attention to the Paracast: I suspect Gene has a machine given to him from the aliens which can turn coal into gold). But what, exactly, has Leslie said and done vs-a-vis the Bud Hopkins work? Has she endorsed it? Or was she ... simply ... romantically involved with Bud?

My machine probably turns gold into coal. Or into empty promises.

 

[Lou_Sheehan]

We have highlighted lots of cases on The Paracast through the years. That’s why I enjoy the theories.

As to whether we’d recognize examples of far future technology: It’s healthy for our egos to assume we will. But that doesn’t mean we can. And we don’t know if what we see is deliberately tailored to our expectations.

You remember the old story about how the Americans spent lots of money to invent a pen that would write in low gravity environments and even upside down in same (I think Chris mentioned it on a show)? Whereas the Soviets went with a pencil? Maybe the aliens are content with pencils? Maybe what spurs them to innovate is much different than that which motivates us?

 

[Lou_Sheehan]

So, which one of Paul's non-demoted cases seems credible to you?

Just asking the 'hard question(s),' Gene. C'mon. Spill the beans. Let it all hang out. Share.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

You remember the old story about how the Americans spent lots of money to invent a pen that would write in low gravity environments and even upside down in same (I think Chris mentioned it on a show)? Whereas the Soviets went with a pencil?

That's a myth. Here's the full story; it's pretty interesting: Fact or Fiction?: NASA Spent Millions to Develop a Pen that Would Write in Space, whereas the Soviet Cosmonauts Used a Pencil

 

[Lou_Sheehan]

Fun read. So the example/story doesn't hold up. But the point does. Maybe the aliens developed better non-flaking, non-flammable and much less expensive pencils?

Heck, if they can give Gene a machine that turns coal into gold, what can't they do?

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

We have highlighted lots of cases on The Paracast through the years. That’s why I enjoy the theories.

As to whether we’d recognize examples of far future technology: It’s healthy for our egos to assume we will.

I don't think the examples I've provided have anything to do with ego: a boat is a boat, and a map is a map. As long as it's useful for a civilization to employ craft that go from one place to another (which is probably "always"), I see no reason to believe that we'll fail to identify the fact that it's a craft.

But that doesn’t mean we can. And we don’t know if what we see is deliberately tailored to our expectations.

If we were seeing things that were "deliberately tailored to our expectations," wouldn't most people have seen rocket-propelled devices? We didn't even know that interstellar field propulsion was a theoretical possibility until 1994 - it's hard to imagine that in 1950 Billy Bob the farmer would expect to see a craft with no visible means of propulsion, which could execute hairpin accelerations in complete defiance of the laws of inertia as we know them. This idea that some unfathomably bizarre and ostensibly intangible form of consciousness is projecting artificial experiences into our brains, sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbo to me, frankly.

 

[Lou_Sheehan]

Paracast Nov. 20, 2016 at about minute 3:50 introduces Mufon Case 74282. Why no follow-up episode(s)?
Mufon Case 74282 - Google Search

 

[Lou_Sheehan]

I always understood the Hill's 'starmap' to have been a piece of artwork in the craft, not a functional entity.