UFO Witness Testimony: True or False?

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.



The Michalak UFO encounter at Falcon Lake, Canada in 1967, noted earlier here, has dubious value for some of you.

I think it has a patina of authenticity.

Speculating about witness testimony creates all kinds of amateur opinion and brings forth shards of erroneous information from the internet.

However, witness testimony is often, or usually, all that we have when it comes to UFOs.

When someone or a few people report a strange light in the night sky or a strange object in the daytime sky, one can equate the observations with misperceptions of mundane things or one can catalog the observations for what they are: strange lights or objects seen my normal people with normal or near-normal eyesight.

And that’s it. Nothing more can be done with such observations.

Our foray into witness testimony from Roswellians always causes a ripple of contention and debate.



But Roswell’s witnesses, for the most part, didn’t see a UFO, in the sky or on the ground.

Some said they held pieces of “metal” that behaved oddly when toyed with.

Some said they saw a field of debris that was different from what they normally saw in the deserts and farms around Roswell.

Some even said they saw bodies of entities, in the desert, in hangars, and other venues.

But no one saw a UFO or flying saucer, and all the testimony about bodies and strange metal fragments came forth in the late 1970s and early 1980s after some UFO hobbyists started poking around, culling testimony that is besmirched by flawed questioning and psychological projections by the hobbyists.

So Roswell isn’t a platform from which worthwhile UFO testimony can be gotten or evaluated.

Roswell is a potpourri of maltreated memories and contrived imaginings better left to psychiatry and sociologists.

But there are many other UFO-related encounters, like that of Stefan Michalak, or Lonnie Zamora, the police officer who came across a unique craft and attending entities.



There are dozens, hundreds even, of accounts where people have seen something that has come to be defined as a flying saucer, and many of those accounts include entities that rival creatures from fiction.

UFO books and the internet are replete with such accounts.

But what are we to make of such accounts?

I think that what has been presented by those who’ve experienced encounters with craft and creatures are as they have been recounted, caveated by the personal peccadilloes of observation that plague human beings.

But those peccadilloes are minor, and the over all experiences provided are essentially as they are described.

Michalak encountered a machine that caused him some physical pain and markings.



The 1959 Father Gill sighting in Papua, New Guinea is what it is: a sighting by an Anglican priest and his mission staff and members of a object that floated above them, from which entities waved or interacted with the observers.



The sighting may be ascribed to a kind of mass hysteria, but it makes more sense to allow it to be as it was recounted, without the psychological overlay.

The following accounts are detailed in John Spencer’s World Atlas of UFOs; Sightings, Abductions, and Close Encounters [SMITHMARK Publishers, NY, 1992]

The 1979 Mindalore Quezet “abduction” was what it was: a experience of a mother (Meagan) and son (Andre) who, under hypnosis, elaborated on a sighting of this object and its occupants:



Was there an Oedipal element that explains the sighting? Perhaps. Or it was as it later was remembered. (More of this, upcoming.)

The 1970 Imjärvi, Finland encounter, in which two young fellows (Aarno Heinonen and Esko Viljo), while skiing, spotted a saucer-like craft that shot a beam of light to the ground near them, from which a short humanoid creature emerged, wearing a helmet, and glowing like “phosphorous.”



The being held a black box that emitted a light that struck the young men, creating a mist, that beclouded the creature, and the beam of light that went back up into the craft, taking the little being with it.

One of the boys, Aarno, was partially paralyzed, and both fellows had symptoms similar to radioactive poisoning.

(Aarno went on to have other sightings and encounters with space women and men. He became a kind of contactee.)

Did these young men actually have the experience they reported? Their after-event symptoms indicate that something happened, but like Mr. Michalak’s encounter, exactly what?

The 1979 Taylor encounter in Livingston, Scotland, detailed here in an much earlier blog posting,
fascinates me.

Sixty-one year-old Robert Taylor was a forester who, while inspecting some new trees, was confronted by a globular object from which emerged to spiked spheres that grabbed Mr. Taylor by the legs, dragging him toward the large, globular object.



Mr. Taylor lost consciousness, but awoke disheveled and unable to stand comfortably. His truck was mired in mud and he had to walk home.

He suffered a headache for some hours after the incident and had a inordinate thirst that lasted for two days.

His heavy blue serge trousers were torn, ostensibly from the spikes on the spheres that grabbed him.

Mr. Taylor had an unsullied reputation in his community and BUFORA, a British UFO investigative group, found ground traces that seemed to confirm Mr. Taylor’s account.



Did Mr. Taylor concoct his story? Why?

Like Mr. Michalak, Lonnie Zamora, Reverend Gill, and the others noted here, what would be the motive, the reason for such bizarre contrivances?

Did each of these people misperceive a mundane event? Unlikely. Misperceptions with such similarities would create a category of hallucinations that would throw psychiatry in to a dither.

Are each of these encounters, of which there are many, many more, neurological quirks? Again, a neurological etiology would force neurologists to establish a mental substrate that lies outside the sensate reality humans work within, or misconstrue.

Are such stories evidence of Jose Caravaca’s Distortion hypothesis or Jacque Vallee’s ethereal others explanation?



Perhaps. But that would mean something is intertwined with humanity to the exclusion of any other kind of rational reality; that is, something or some presence is fixated on inserting experiences in the minds of common folk, and to what end?

But does the idea that alien visitors are engaged in such foolery make any more sense?

What we are left with is the question of witness testimony.

Is it as it is recounted? I think it is. But I have no idea what it means, nor do I have any inkling of an explanation.

While memory over time fades and/or confabulates, these encounters were reported in situ and do not have the flaw of time to corrupt the descriptions.

What was said to have happened happened.

Now where does that take us I keep asking…

RR

Movies and TV have created the UFO phenomenon

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

While watching The Twilight Zone marathon on the SyFy network over New Year holiday weekend, I noticed how the idea of extraterrestrial visitors suffused the series and, as I see it, impacted or influenced the unconscious minds of viewers.

As most of you know, those who’ve had UFO experiences – (somewhat) blasé encounters, abductions, and bizarre interactions (those listed by Jose Caravaca in his Distortion hypothesis) – recount those experiences in ways that mimic scenarios that one finds in movies – Invasion of the Body Snatchers, This Island Earth, et cetera – or television programs – The Outer Limits, said Twilight Zone – and some old radio shows – The Inner Sanctum, for example.



















Colin McGinn’s 2007 Vintage book, The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact, provides a non-psychologically afflicted approach to the influence that one will find in UFO encounter accounts and reports.





Although Freud is mentioned, McGinn uses little or no psychobabble to present his views.



Serious visitors to this blog know (or should) that human kind is subliminally impacted by ads and media presentations, and now images and offerings on YouTube, Facebook, and the internet generally.

Vance Packard, in his 1957 best-seller, The Hidden Persuaders, presented his substantive views on how media (ads in particular) seeped into the societal mind and influenced buying and attitudes that marketing people and companies exploited.



A Columbo program from 1973 with Robert Culp delved in the how subliminal messages in film and TV ads could influence behavior.



While Columbo’s airing and Packard’s book insinuates that all classes of people, and in particular, intelligent folks could be influenced as easily as the mentally deficient (and I don’t mean those with inferior brains), those who have lower I.Q.s than the population generally.

But UFO aficionados know that those who’ve reported and report UFO encounters (Hickson and Parker, the Hills, and those noted by Jose Caravaca at his blog, et al.) are not at the top of the intellectually sophisticated file; the encountered are common folks, generally: persons prone to be influenced by social and cultural elements.

When has a MacArthur Grant person experienced a UFO landing, or a Hawking assistant, or one of Einstein’s associates come face to face with UFO occupants?

When has a Tolstoy, or Fitzgerald, or Pynchon type had a UFO encounter?

My point is that persons with lower mental abilities have UFO encounters – and that includes Ezekiel in the Hebrew texts; he was prone to believe in things and people from the skies.

I’m not taking about UFO sightings, per se, here. Many of us have had UFO sightings, but those sightings stop at the observation.

When a UFO sighting triggers an “encounter,” one has to consider the Caravaca “theory” that a kind of oneirism takes place, and this is what McGinn covers in his book (see above).



We are dealing with something a little more complex than an hallucination, arguably, but something that is palpable enough to be studied or researched by those hoping to get a handle on the meaning of UFOs – those at ground level anyway.

RR

UFOs: Distortion and/or Mental Aberrations

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

Spanish UFO researcher Jose Antonio Caravaca proposes the hypothesis (which he is trying to develop into a theory) that UFO encounters are a mixture of a staged event by “others” and mental remnants of those having the encounter.

You can read his ideas at his blog by clicking HERE.

Mysteries of Mind, Space & Time: The Unexplained [Volume 1, H. S. Stuttman, Inc., Wetport Connecticut, 1991, Pages 56 and 57] present three incidents that fit Señor Caravaca’s suggestion:

Five creatures with webbed-feet alit from a UFO and examined chickens on a Puerto Rican farm on March 30, 1980:



Two teenagers, awakened by a dog espied the creatures from their bedroom window, and two men sleeping in a car nearby spotted the same creatures, at the same time.

The sleeping men saw a domed UFO; the teenagers didn’t see a UFO.

A house painter in Trowbridge, England, on January 5th, 1980, awoke a 5 a.m. and saw a yellowish-green figure, like a projected image, at the foot of his bed:



The figure said he came from a planet that, because of over crowding, eliminated portions of its population.

Further, he was visiting Earth to seal a crack in our planet, with cement, to keep it from splitting apart.

In October 1974, a couple, with their three sleeping children, were driving to their home at Aveley in Essex (England) when they saw that they were being paced by a blue light.

The light disappeared but they drove into a “well-defined bank of eerie green mist” which caused their radio to spark and crackle.

When they got home, they turned on their television set to see a program they had been rushing to see.

But the TV station was off the air and it was two hours later than they thought it should be.

Bothered by dreams related to the experience, they were placed under hypnosis and recalled being taken aboard a craft…



...where they were shown about the “ship” and underwent medical examinations by creatures described thusly:



None of the persons noted above tried to capitalize on their experiences, so we are left with a few possibilities:

Firstly; they each encountered extraterrestrials or alien visitors from outer space or inter-dimensions.

Secondly; they encountered a concomitant race of beings who reside alongside Earthlings – the Mac Tonnies’ crypto-terrestrial hypothesis.

Thirdly; all of them had a mental aberration that is yet to be defined exactly but falls into the category of hallucinatory hysteria.

Or, they were subject by “entities” yet unknown (or explained) who subjected them to a staged event (for reasons equally unknown), using their own mental remnants to create a scenario that’s weird but not so far from reality that the incidents can be dismissed out of hand: the Caravaca “Distortion” hypothesis.

Whatever occurred, the persons relating the encounters are not insane, in the usual sense, nor are they hoaxers (seemingly). They are normal individuals who’ve had a bizarre experience that is with parameters others find hard to accept or understand.

But note the “sleep factors” and the house painting connection in one of the events above.

What interests me -- there are several things that interest me -– but what stands out is that such occurrences don’t seem to be happening nowadays or are not being reported.

Your thoughts, as usual, are welcome…

RR

Is Technology the Indicator of an Advanced Civilization?

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

Revisiting Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery (about the African Dogon tribe’s alleged contact with extraterrestrials 5000 years ago), some questions came to mind.



Why would extraterrestrial visitors visit a small, primitive tribe in the isolated, at the time (and even now), heart of Africa.



Yes, the Sumerians and other cultures on the rim of the Mediterranean Sea are said by some, including Carl Sagan and I.S. Shklovskii in 1966’s Intelligent Life in the Universe, to have been contacted by extraterrestrials, that left intimations of writing, agriculture, math, and other accoutrements of civilized living.



Oannes, the being from the sea who supposedly proffered these gifts is not unlike the Dogon visitors who told those peoples about their place of origin, a planet in the Sirius star system.

Click HERE for an online precis of the Dogon story.

But extraterrestrials would have to be significantly advanced to get here from the Sirius planetary environment, and one would think that such emissaries would seek out cultures and peoples who were much more advanced than the Dogon tribe, to whom they would communicate the locale of their home planet(s).



The chatter between the Dogons and the Sirians would have had to be something beyond difficult.

Even today, the Dogons do not represent an advanced element of Earth’s global society.



Either the Sirius visitors were inept at furthering the cultural evolution of the Dogons or the Sirius visitors represent a civilization that doesn’t regard technolocial advance as a sine qua non of their existence; technology is a prosaic tool, and other considerations make up the essence of their existence.

Or the visit never occurred at all.

For the sake of rumination, I’d like to address the second option above; that is, civilizations do not need technology to be advanced.

Perhaps it’s the music, the art, or social intercourse that is the high point of “advanced” civilizations, not the attributes of the ships that transport them hither and yon.

This would explain, perhaps, why UFOs have appeared in various guises, some not so futuristic as we imagine: the airships of the 1890s for example.



This would also explain, perhaps, why flying saucers have had a propensity to crash; they are not technologically refined, nor meant to be.

They are constructed to get here from there, much as Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci did with their rudimentary, by modern standards, ships.



If visitors sought out this planet, for whatever reason, they would impart elements of culture – music, art, writing, mathematics, and the like – rather than methods with a technological bent.

Technology wasn’t and isn’t their primary incentive or objective.

The artifacts touted by Ancient Alien theorists are esthetic not technological: the pyramids of Egypt and Middle/South America, Stonehenge, the Easter Island moai, et cetera.







What the Dogon were and are mimics the alien races and beings - the alien cultures –that seem to have visited the Earth in the past and today.

UFO researchers, governments, military constructs have missed the point.

UFOs visit to impart refinement, high culture.

And that refinement or culture is so foreign to our understanding, we humans can’t grasp it, although one might find hints of it in such workings as that of the Dogons, or the Egyptians, or the Inca, the Olmecs, the Mayans.



The message of UFOs isn’t about nuts and bolts or plasmatic ships.

It’s about existence as a thing rarefied, transcendental, or, shall we say, spiritual?

RR

UFOs: Hallucinations and Delusion

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.



That strange “objects” appear and have appeared, to humans, in the sky and on the ground for millennia is a given, an observable truth, as it were.

(Ufologists should abandon their defensive posture; that is, ufologists needn’t continue to try and prove UFOs exist. UFOs are a premised reality. The evidence is palpable and has been verified beyond doubt in any number of ways, and by credible witnesses.)

But what of those “insane” perceptions that Spanish UFO researcher Jose Caravaca provides at his blog, The Caravaca Files or Jacques Vallee has documented in several books and lectures?

Sẽnor Caravaca attributes the bizarre UFO events he lists as a product of witness minds, controlled and used by an alien intrusion, yet to be explicitly defined, for purposes also not explicitly defined, but suggested by sẽnor Caravaca to be an expression of a reality that the intruders wish to display, by their staged images and activities.

Sẽnor Caravaca’s hypothesis is interesting, and defended by his observation that the “mental machinations” he documents aren’t ubiquitous, as they would be if they followed the suggestions offered by some; i.e., electromagnetic effects on the mind (Persinger) and psychic projections by elements of a concomitant spiritual reality that exists with humans (Vallee).

However, one has to consider the idea that some UFO accounts that include strange beings doing equally strange activities are hallucinatory or delusional constructs brought about by an initial event that triggers the images and perceptions recounted.

Still, the initial, triggering event – a UFO sighting or landing – is yet to be explained or understood.

But the descriptive accounts, after the initial event, may be attributable to hallucinations, hallucinations caused by a number of psychological triggers as delineated in papers about how the body and mind reacts to traumatic [sic] encounters and affects:

The Interpretation of Intrusions in Psychosis: An Integrative Cognitive Approach to Hallucinations and Delusions by Anthony P. Morrison (2001)

And, importantly, Visual Hallucinations in Psychologically Normal People: Charles Bonnet’s Syndrome by Robert J. Teunisse, Johan R. Cruysberg, Willibrord H. Hoefnagels, André L. Verbeek, and Frans G. Zitman.



And:



The Charles Bonnet Syndrome (CBS) can account for the descriptive renditions that witnesses have provided over the years for what they experienced.

Such descriptions as those of Betty and Barney Hill, Father Gill in Papua (New Guinea), which represents a “mass hullucination” example, the Hickson/Parker Pascagoula incident, and others that you’re familiar with can all be attributable to the “CBS.”

Click HERE for a table of when and during what activity the Bonnet Syndrome takes place.

Applying what we know about psychopathological pathogens helps winnow many UFO events, but not all, unfortunately.

Some UFO experiences can be traced to psychological operations by various rogue constructs in governments and the military as recounted by me in Nick Redfern’s book, Contactees [Chapter 20] and actual “alien” encounters of a still unexplained kind.

(The word “alien” is used here in its psychological context.)

But looking for more exotic explanations for obvious human mental configurations is stretching human fact into contrived fiction which has, as its downside, a loss of premise stability and subsequent logic – resulting in a wayward search for what UFOs are.

Again, UFOs are real, some strange UFO encounters are actual encounters; it’s the descriptive aftermath that has thrown the topic into a disarray that dissuades science from pursuing UFOs as a topic for scrutiny.

Once the psychological parameters are outlined and clarified, science might be able to tackle the phenomenon itself.

One can only hope…

RR

A resource for UFO sightings. overlooked by aficionados of the phenomenon

Intellectually scourged “academic” Immanuel Velikovsky developed a theory about how our planetary (solar) system and Earth were formed and subject to catastrophes that were recorded by humans in many histories and works, such as The Bible, (Asian) Indian hymns and stories, Greek myths, Egyptian hieroglyphic remnants, Homer, and many, many more ancient accounts.

His theory may be found in two works, Worlds in Collision [1950] and Earth in Upheaval [1955].



Science has eschewed Velikovsky’s theory, but his insights keep popping up as NASA and cosmologists scrutinize the planets in our system.

While Velikovsky insisted that cosmological events were what humans saw and recorded, one can look pass his interpretations to find what could be UFO sightings.

For instance, this…

In The City of God by Augustine it is written:

“From the book of Marcus Varro, entitled Of the Race of the Roman People, I cite word for word the following instance: ‘There occurred a remarkable celestial portent; for Castor records that in the brilliant star Venus, called Vesperugo by Plautus, and the lovely Hesperus by Homer, there occurred so strange a prodigy, that it changed its color, size, form, course, which never happened before nor since. Adrastus of Cyzicus and Dion of Naples, famous mathematicians, said this occurred in the reign of Ogyges’” [Worlds in Collision, A Delta Book, 1965, Page 158]

Velikovsky supplemented his theory in later books, Oedipus and Akhnaton [1960], Peoples of the Sea, Ages in Chaos, Ramses II and his Time, and Human Amnesia.







Astronomers made it a point to suppress Velikovsky’s views and have been rather successful.

But that’s not what we should be concerned with.

Our interest is in the cited works and accounts that seem to be sightings of UFOs.

Velikovsky’s books provide sources that resonate in ways that might – might! – support Ancient Astronaut theories.

The difference is that Velikovsky’s “catastrophic” intrusions don’t interfere with or interact with humans; his events remain observational, not intercessional.

Also, many of Velikovsky’s cited events were eschewed, it seems, by the Vallee/Aubeck book, Wonders in the Sky, probably because Chris Aubeck’s resource venue (Yahoo Magonia X) for many of the sightings in his and Vallee’s book was controlled by the machinations of UFO stalwarts such as Jerry Clark, who held sightings and input hostage to his (Clark’s) view of the UFO phenomenon.

I suggest you get your hands on Velikovsky’s books. Overlook the catastrophic theory if you like – a mistake, as I see it – and cull the events that bespeak UFOs in days of old.

If UFOs were as prominent as they appear to have been, their appearance belies current hypotheses about military misidentifications, mental aberrations, or trickery by entities out to flummox modern humanity.

The brilliance and edification of Dr. Velikovsky will enlighten you, in a number of ways; that is certain.

RR