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

UFO Symbology and Extraterrestrial Thought

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

An attempt to decipher symbols or writings seen on UFOs in the few instances where such markings are reported is stymied by misinterpretation of markings that aren’t intelligent attempts to communicate or are hoaxed concoctions, such as the UMMO logo.



One of our obsessions has been the symbol or insignia reported by Officer Lonnie Zamora during his sighting of an egg-shaped craft in Socorro, New Mexico, April 24th, 1964.



His drawing and observation has been compromised by the allegation that the popularly known symbol is not what he really saw, but a substitution, suggested by an Air Force investigator to hoodwink possible copycat UFO witness.

(We’ve dealt with that foolishness earlier here and elsewhere, along with our views of what and where Zamora’s symbol originated; the real symbol and the contrived symbol.)

Another account of symbols allegedly observed shows up in accounts of Jesse Marcel Sr, and Jr. who reported that the debris they gathered or saw was rife with hieroglyphic-like markings.



What those markings were has been debated often and long in UFO circles, and we dismiss the Marcel reports here to avoid a rehash of the controversy.

The question for us is how could an extraterrestrial civilization or culture develop symbols or markings that are clearly recognizable or understood by Earthlings?

Sensate human writing, symbolism, and abstract mathematical renderings evolved from about 10,000 B.C. and derive from the cultural milieu that is unique to this planet and its inhabitants.



Cave paintings originated even earlier, from 40,000 B.C. but also remain unique to the human environment.



And even then, the diversity of writing and pictorial representation, acting to supplement the variety of linguistic communication, could not replicate what an alien culture would have developed to communicate within their civilization.

Ancient alien devotees will say that if there is any similarity between UFO markings and human elements of communication, the similarity derives from contact between ancient astronauts and human beings early in the history of mankind.

I won’t dismiss the AA Hypothesis out of hand, here, but will set it aside to make other points.

Mathematical symbols and mathematical processes are unique to humankind, and a quirky abstraction that could hardly be identical to concomitant extraterrestrial abstractions.



The odds of an alien culture coming up with mathematical symbols and processes like ours is beyond a statistical probability.

(Read Mathematical Thought, Volume 1, by Morris Kline, Oxford University Press, NY, 1972 to see the gist of my view.)

Either human thinking is unique or the culture subtext of imaging and writing permeates the Universe, and would have had to be generated by a prima causa – God?

Non-believers would be aghast at the suggestion that one supreme thought process infected all living, sentient things in the Universe, but that would be the only agent by which alien civilizations could have similar symbolic manifestations to those that evolved on Earth.

(Of course, one can posit that UFOs come from our future, or past, but that begs the question for some.)

Moreover, if UFOs and their markings come from inter-dimensions, alternative universes, or a realm yet to be discovered or imagined, would the mode of communication for the inhabitants of those esoteric venues be similar enough to ours to resonate?

The UFO markings gathered (or created) by Adamski and a few other UFO “witnesses” are so unesthetic and illogically represented that one can discount their authenticity out of hand.







Egyptian hieroglyphics. Sumerian clay indentations, and even cave paintings have an inherent logic and beauty to them, while markings remembered or drawn by supposed UFO witnesses are sloppy and without cryptological sense, as far as we can tell.



(Maybe extraterrestrial cultures are messy or illogical, but that would presuppose an ability to move between realities despite a lack of methodical coherency of any kind.)



If UFOs represent craft of a non-human kind, would they have insignia on them at all?

The Zamora-seen craft’s insignia is conjectured by Anthony Bragalia as a NMIT student creation as part of the activity that he writes they engaged in to prank Officer Zamora.

We see the Zamora symbol as representation by Hughes Aircraft/Toolco engineers who created the prototypical planetary lander for the military or government.

The IU engineer who remembered a hot-air balloon excursion by a paper company sees the Zamora symbol as the paper company’s logo.



Believers in the extraterrestrial explanation see the Zamora insignia as an alien symbol.

The Rendlesham symbols, remembered by one of the military witnesses seems to portray script and/or images that bespeak an Earthian origination.



A true, alien visitation would hardly display a recognizable albeit inscrutable symbol that resembles a human creation….because an alien culture would not have evolved in a way that communication or identifying marks (symbols) would be so near to what humans would construct or create.

It’s an incongruity to conjecture that UFOs would mimic human endeavors or simulated symbols; that is, unless one posits that UFOs are figments of a kind that tease human beings (the Vallee hypothesis) or that UFOs distort reality to some unfathomable end, as Spanish UFO researcher Jose Caravaca believes.

(Caravaca also questions why Betty Hill’s aliens would have, on their craft wall, a map of their interplanetary routes; such a depiction so unfuturistic and prosaic seemingly, when we humans, today use GPS or Google maps on computers to find our way around our habitable planet.)

Until we get a clear depiction of a UFO symbol or mark, from a credible witness or source, whether by photography or observation, I think we can rule out the idea that extraterrestrials are using insigniae in the same way that we Earthlings do.

RR

Quantum Non-locality and UFOs

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.



Discussions here indicate a loathing, by some, to accept UFOs (and flying saucers) as tangible objects; some interpretations centering on psychical manifestations, others centering on a mental interaction between percipient and the UFO (image).

There are other hypotheses, and one that should be addressed is the possibility that UFOs are intrusions of a quantum kind from other places in the Universe or psychic ether, if you want) that appear because of quantum non-locality.

To get a grasp of the thought and theorizing about quantum non-locality, click HERE for a 1997 paper about the topic by John G. Cramer of the Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.

One paragraph focuses on what Bruce Duensing and Jose Caravaca call “observer-created reality” (which I eschew). Here’s that paragraph:

The nonlocality of the quantum mechanics formalism is a source of some difficulty for the Copenhagen interpretation. It is accommodated in the CI through Heisenberg's "knowledge interpretation" which views the quantum mechanical state vector (y) as a mathematically-encoded description of the state of observer knowledge rather than as a description of the objective state of the system observed. For example, in 1960 Heisenberg wrote, "The act of recording, on the other hand, which leads to the reduction of the state, is not a physical, but rather, so to say, a mathematical process. With the sudden change of our knowledge also the mathematical presentation of our knowledge undergoes of course a sudden change." The knowledge interpretation's account of state vector collapse and nonlocality as changes in knowledge is internally consistent, but it is rather subjective, intellectually unappealing, and the source of much of the recent misuse of the Copenhagen interpretation (e.g., "observer-created reality").

I’m asserting that UFOs may become present when an object tangentially connected to our area of the Universe is made visible because an observer here is conveniently in situ to see the non-local inspired manifestation.

The UFO may even come about by a quantum intersect across dimensions or parallel universes, ours and theirs.



The quantum possibilities strike me as more reasonable (feasible) than the psychic hypotheses.

Psychical hypotheses are prosaic and mundane for me.

The human mind is given too much credence and power in the psychical response, and we all know, intuitively and intellectually, that psychism leaves a lot to be desired in repetitive and scientific experimentation.

UFO mavens want some control over the UFO phenomenon and applying a mind/UFO interaction allows that control to remain intact, somewhat.

This is akin to the Einstein approach about quantum mechanics, and John Cramer’s paper will take you through Einstein’s caveats and the quantum renunciation.



Einstein couldn’t accept the quantum quirkiness, and those in the UFO community can’t accept the UFO quirkiness, unless they keep control of the phenomenon by saying that it’s the human mind that is needed for a manifestation of UFOs.

That view is unimaginative and errant.

The human mind is hardly able to deal with practical reality, let alone incomprehensible reality (such as that in the quantum world).

(Schizophrenics and paranoiacs display examples of what happens when the human mind accesses realities outside the norm.)

While quantum non-locality is best represented by light photons, there are indications that quantum artifacts can exceed the atomic level and are manifested macrocosmically.

(I’ve provided some of that information online here earlier and at the RRRGroup blog.)

More importantly, perhaps, is the notion that UFOs may derive from intrusions, accidental or purposeful, across dimensions or between parallel universes, as string theory allows.



This would keep intact my preference for UFO tangibility, which is obvious and well-witnessed.

The psychic view of Jacques Vallee and his devotees is old-hat for me. It’s something like the hysteria of the Salem witch trials or the insanity of the Catholic Inquisitional thrusts.

More on this approach to the UFO phenomenon will be ferreted out from other sources and pertinent quantum theorizing, and will be presented here upcoming.

Meanwhile, you “UFOs as psychic phenomena” people can have at it.

RR

UFOs with little beings: France in the 1950s

In the 1950s, circa 1954 probably, a spate of flying saucers were spotted, with creatures that were thought to be Martians.

Here are some clips from a major magazine – Life, I think – that described the saucers and the beings seen near them…

Pierre Lucas of Loctudy saw an orange ball fall from the sky, from which a small, bearded figure with one eye in the middle of its forehead emerged and tapped him on the shoulder:



Serge Pochet of Marcoing was approached by two small shadows:



Gregoire Odut saw a golden disk zoom away from Wassy after a two-legged creature leaped out for a look around:



Jean Narcy saw a craft, also near Wassy, from which a little whiskered man in a fur coat and orange corset emerged:



Marius Dewilde of Quarouble is carrying a railroad tie upon which he saw a rust-colored “flying contraption” land:



Yves de Gillaboz (left) and Emile Renard saw a “Matian machine” belching puffs of smoke in the sky over Amiens:



Francois Panero and Jean Olivier draw an image of a “dumpy little space man” they saw land in a luminous sphere on a basketball court near Toulouse:



We don’t get those kinds of sightings nowadays, do we? And why not?

RR

A Confluence of Coincidences or Something Significant?

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

We are, admittedly, smitten with the 1964 Socorro UFO sighting by Lonnie Zamora.



The reasons for our “obsession” are many, as noted here, at this blog (and others) over the past few years.

But one reason centers on the knowledge that other, similar, almost identical UFO sightings took place on the same day as Officer Zamora’s sighting [4/24/1964] or in the same time-frame.

For instance, a day after Officer Zamora’s episode, witness Orlando Gallegos saw an object, in La Madera, New Mexico [a few hundred miles north of Socorro] that was virtually identical to the Socorro craft.



And Gary Wilcox, in Newark Valley, New York, on April 24th, 1964, the same day as Officer Zamora’s sighting, reported a strange encounter with an egg-shaped craft that was accompanied by two “beings” (like those seen by Zamora), dressed in white, metallic coveralls.



Farmer Wilcox, who couldn’t have known about Lonnie Zamora’s encounter – Wilcox’s incident took place at 10 a.m. in the morning; Zamora’s incident took place about 6:50 p.m.

While Lonnie Zamora had no interaction with the two beings he spotted and Gallegos saw no beings during his sighting, Wilcox had a “conversation” with the intruders on his land; they said they were from Mars, and had “spoken to people before.”

Details of the Wilcox sighting can be read HERE and you will find our May 2011 note about the Wilcox sighting HERE

What is revelatory for me, is that it is strangely coincidental that such similar sightings took place around or on the same date, with timings that don’t allow confabulation.

Anthony Bragalia and Frank Stalter discount the Socorro sighting as a bona fide UFO incident, claiming the sighting was prompted by a raft of New Mexico Institute Technology students, out to embarrass Officer Zamora ostensibly because he “harassed” them. Bragalia also dismisses the Gallegos’ sighting as there were implications, by the police at the scene, that the smell of alcohol was present.

But how do Stalter and Bragalia explain the Wilcox sighting?

And how do we slide our Hughes lunar-lander prototype into the Wilcox scenario?

The problem with the Bragalia/Stalter conjecture – although circumstantially replete – and our Hughes Aircraft hypothesis lies in the distance between Newark Valley, New York and Socorro, New Mexico, the only concrete connection being the “New” sobriquet for the states.

(Of course, one can make a claim that the “New” in New York and New Mexico has meaning, paranormally, but that for another time.)

My point is that the prank explanation for Socorro and the Hughes testing hypothesis are tangential (and errant) when one takes into account the strange Wilcox tale, and also, somewhat, the Gallegos sighting.

Something bizarre happened in late April 1964, something that hasn’t been duplicated since.

Of course a lack of recidivism works against Socorro, La Madera, and the Newark valley incidents being relevant to the UFO phenomenon, in toto, but such similar incidents can provide a clue, as transient as hat clue may be, to what UFOs are or were.

That said (or, rather, written), the three sightings noted here allow us to downplay or even dismiss the prank theory for Socorro, along with our Hughes prototype conjecture….if we are being ufologically objective.

RR

Quirky 1947: Roswell, Rhodes, Arnold, and Solar Flares?

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.



Looking for a perturbation in the “force” for 1947, I stumbled upon an internet item by The Wanderling at the site of Anna Jones that states the Roswell “crash” was caused by solar flares:

Click HERE for that site and “article.”

It seems to me that solar flares are as good of an explanation as any for the 1947 upshot in flying saucer incidents, actual and fraudulent.



But it is only one explanation for the epidemic of flying saucer sightings and hoaxes.

What I am proposing is that the electrically charged bursts from the Sun caused some persons to conflate their observations of mundane things in the sky for concrete objects of an esoteric kind.

This is what happened to Kenneth Arnold; he saw a flight of pelicans, a flight of prototypical Navy jets, or a mirage and thought it was a bevy of “saucer skipping aircraft.”



The Maury Island episode was either a product of a misperception or the creation of addled minds that were afflicted by the 1947 solar flare anomaly. I prefer the latter.



William Rhodes (or Rhoades) either saw and photographed a strange object in the sky over his Phoenix house in 1947 or he contrived a photo because he was made mentally disturbed by the influx of electrical impulses caused by the excessive solar flare activity of 1947.



Ah, you scoff, but here are two passages on the affect of sun spots and solar flares on the mental capacity of humans:

International Journal of Biometeorology
Volume 43, Number 1, 31-37, DOI: 10.1007/s004840050113
ORIGINAL ARTICLE

The effects of extra-low-frequency atmospheric pressure oscillations on human mental activity
A. A. Delyukov and L. Didyk

Slight atmospheric pressure oscillations (APO) in the extra-low-frequency range below 0.1 Hz, which frequently occur naturally, can influence human mental activity. This phenomenon has been observed in experiments with a group of 12 healthy volunteers exposed to experimentally created APO with amplitudes 30–50 Pa in the frequency band 0.011–0.17 Hz. Exposure of the subjects to APO for 15–30 min caused significant changes in attention and short-term memory functions, performance rate, and mental processing flexibility. The character of the response depended on the APO frequency and coherence. Periodic APO promoted purposeful mental activity, accompanied by an increase in breath-holding duration and a slower heart rate. On the other hand, quasi-chaotic APO, similar to the natural perturbations of atmospheric pressure, disrupted mental activity. These observations suggest that APO could be partly responsible for meteorosensitivity in humans.

Chaotic solar cycles modulate the incidence and severity of mental illness
George E Davis Jr.a, , , Walter E Lowellb, 1,

Purchase a Augusta Mental Health Institute, Hospital Street, P.O. Box 724, Augusta, ME 04332, USA
b State of Maine, Department of Behavioral and Developmental Services, Augusta, ME 04332, USA

Received 18 August 2003; Accepted 10 November 2003. Available online 21 January 2004.
------------------------------
Abstract:

This paper hypothesizes that the intensity of ultraviolet radiation (UVR) from the Sun predisposes humans to polygenic mutation fostering major mental illness (MMI) and other disorders of neurodevelopment. In addition, the variation in the intensity of this radiation acts to stress immune systems, possibly mediated by cytokines, resulting in variable clinical expressions of mental illness and autoimmune disorders. Organisms can adapt to chronic high-intensity UVR by producing melanin and by retaining various pigments. We found that 28% of 11-year solar cycles produce particularly severe solar flares during which UVR is 300% more intense and hence more damaging than normal. Out of a total of six severe cycles in the past 250 years, four have occurred in the past 55 years, possibly explaining the apparent increase in the incidence of MMI in recent decades. UVR is 10 times more mutagenic than ionizing radiation to nuclear DNA, and especially damaging to mitochondrial DNA. However, variable light as manifested by seasons stresses adaptability to UVR, possibly through an immune mechanism. We show that the region of the Earth having the most UVR, relative to the most variation in that light, is at 54±~10° (N or S) latitude. Therefore, the most potential damage from sunlight occurs between the Equator and the Poles, not at the Equator itself. The human brain, our most important organ of adaptability, must be able to survive environmental variation, with successful matching to the environment resulting in adaptation. Unsuccessful adaptation to UVR (and possibly other types of radiation) results in mutation, which can produce neuro-chemical abnormalities manifested by MMI. We postulate that the combination of intensity and variation in UVR serves as a global modulator of MMI.

Copyright © 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Medical Hypotheses
Volume 62, Issue 2, February 2004, Pages 207-214
-------------------------
As for Roswell, it seems that something happened near that town in 1947, something not other-worldly necessarily, but something concrete – a military accident of some kind – or a confluence of mental disturbances caused by solar flare activity, mental disturbances that caused some Roswellians to act out and act upon the mental constructs and aberrations that were created by solar flare activity supported by the backdrop of an almost prosaic accident of some kind.



That is, some Roswell witness, overly stimulated by solar flare activity, ended up doing things and experiencing things that were not real in any objective sense. That, along with the mass hysteria or “group hallucinatory” possibilities, can account for the extrapolation that is now known as The Roswell Incident – a mythical meme based wholly on aberrant mental configurations and disturbances, underscored by a military incident that had nothing to do with an extraterrestrial intrusion or crashed flying disk.

One can take the data of solar flare activity for 1947 and other time-frames to see if solar flares or sun-busts might account for other hallucinated UFO episodes: The Hill abduction, the Pascagoula event, or the Travis Walton kidnapping.



Also, intrusions of hoaxed materials or confabulated videos, photographs, and stories might be traced to an influx of solar flare activity during the time such contrivances are conceived.

Two recommended reports/books on solar flares and two papers on solar flares:





Click here for Paper One – a PDF

Click here for Paper Two – also a PDF

RR

Early Airships that are now called UFOs

Photos of airships, from the turn of the 20th century and 1915, indicate flying machines that were mistaken in some quarters, by some people, for other-worldly craft or advanced human-created aircraft.


Here are some German Zeppelins that show the kind of light rays that Anthony Bragalia found in his research of the 1966 Wanaque UFO sightings. (Everything old is new again, apparently.)

And sights of balloons, such as this one, guarding the English coastline, surely provoked awe among the general population of Britain, causing speculation that the flying contraptions were something other than what they really were.

The human imagination has a tendency to run away with itself. as a mechanism against the reality and/or boredom of everyday life.

Such fevered imaginings may also account for many flying saucer sightings of the late 1940s and 1950s, and some even today, rooted in the need for people to be part of something beyond the routine of daily living.

UFO researchers would do well to separate the wheat from the chaff; that is, they (ufologists, to use that coined epithet) have to search out truly unique UFO events, those that represent something more than a light in the sky.

We'll concentrate more and more, here, on sightings, new and old, that speak to something truly unusual, including those sightings that appear to be induced by psychopathology or hallucinatory elements. (Such bizarre sightings have been eschewed, pretty much, by some early flying saucer/UFO investigators, such as the eminent Donald Keyhoe and the NICAP crowd, while others, such as John Keel and Brad Steiger, got sidetracked by paranormal aspects of sightings that had nothing to do with the UFO sightings themselves, but were merely appurtanances that their personalities were attraced to or attracted.)

RR