nourishing obscurity

WARNING, ALL:  Argumentative post below.  Nicer post follows later.

There are a lot of galaxies. At the end of the Hubble Deep Field ultimate shot, there was a swirl of many galaxies. Now you either believe that none of them support life anywhere within any solar system or you believe it possible.

You might like to look at some of this [it's a long programme]:

Getting past the first nine minutes of this and zipping past the various sightings listed, passing over the Sagan/Jacobs debate, the most interesting part, for me, was the interview with the sceptic Dr. Douglas Hall of Vanderbilt University who said:

“In the vast majority of cases, there isn’t anything to study. If intelligent life is found out there, then that will be the most important discovery in the history of mankind … period. There is no evidence that we have been visited. The evidence just isn’t there.”

He was done but the interviewer asked him: “How much study have you done on the topic? I mean, how much of the data have you looked at?”

“Ah, I myself, that’s not my, ah, actual field of expertise but I’ve read virtually all of the articles critically that have dealt with it.”

This “critical evidence” in science journals would take about five minutes to read as the topic is not deemed worthy of inclusion as “serious science”.

Stanton Friedman, nuclear physicist, answered:

“None of the scientists who study black holes have a piece of a black hole either, you might have noticed. That’s part of the problem of not dealing with the evidence. After all, we have 4400 physical trace cases from 65 countries last time I checked. Now when people tell you there’s no evidence and they ignore the physical trace cases. [Some of these are then looked at.] Leading scientists have gone out of their way to attack UFOlog.”

Dr. Brian O’Leary, astrophysicist and former astronaut, said:

“There was a reception of 300 PhD astronomers in Victoria, British Columbia and somebody announced that there was a UFO outside of the building. Ah, not one astronomer went outside to take a look. It’s too big a risk in their profession that if an astronomer, a PhD, actually saw a UFO, and I know secretly they want to, and if they reported that to an audience, they may be cut off from their grants or they may risk the judgement of their peers.”

He began with a PhD in astronomy from Cal-Berkeley and taught at Princeton and Cornell with Carl Sagan and was selected … by NASA for a manned mission to Mars but then he began to explore the topic of unidentified phenomena and was quickly ostracized and supposedly debunked by former colleague Sagan in particular.

“It’s very kind of kneejerk emotional response and it’s not befitting of a scientist,” he says, “because after all, science is supposed to be free and open enquiry into the unknown. Galileo’s colleagues refused to look through his telescope because they refused to believe he could make things look bigger.”

Dr. John Mack of Harvard Medical School, said:

“Don’t worry about the scientific community because science has become the reigion of this period of time – it’s not science any longer. It’s theology. It is what has replaced theology.”

Therefore, with the mainstream refusing to look at the field and with no funding from powerful sources, it is left to the fringe to conduct what tests it can, often with minds already made up and lacking the credibility required for anyone to take them seriously.

There is not enough room in the post to cover the phenomenon itself but one example was the Belgian sightings in the late 80s where the airforce tracked the phenomena on radar, sent out craft to chase them and launched a study. There were the interviews with the Russian scientific committees sent to study it and so on and so on and always the sightings.

The Kaikoura Lights were where:

“unidentified lights were observed by five people on the flight deck, were tracked by Wellington Air Traffic Controllers, and filmed in color by the television crew. One object reportedly followed the aircraft almost until landing. The cargo plane then took off again with the television crew still on board, heading for Blenheim. When the aircraft reached about 2000 feet, it encountered a gigantic lighted orb,[verification needed] which fell into station off the wing tip and tracked along with the cargo aircraft for almost quarter of an hour, while being filmed, watched, tracked on the aircraft radar and described on a tape recording made by the TV film crew.”

Quentin Fogerty was the Australian TV man who reported it. The data was studied at Blenheim and the scientific opinion dismissed Venus, meteors and other explanations.

And this:

“1978 December 31st – Kaikoua Coastline, South Island, New Zealand; (00:05) The pilots first noticed lights near to the Kaikoura coast. These lights projected a beam downwards and then disappeared.”

So then, what can be concluded? Simply this – they ceased to be visible. What would account for that? Someone was shining a giant spotlight and suddenly switched it off?

Wormholes

First of all, I’ll wait till you’ve finished guffawing. OK, well as you’d point out to me, this is Science Fiction, James; this is Stargate.

Then what of this:

In physics, a wormhole is a hypothetical topological feature of spacetime that is, fundamentally, a ‘shortcut’ through space and time. Simply, spacetime is a two-dimensional (2-D) surface that, when ‘folded’ over, allows the formation of a wormhole bridge. A wormhole has at least two mouths that are connected via a throat or tube. If the wormhole is traversable, then matter can ‘travel’ from one mouth to the other via the throat.

There is no observational evidence for wormholes, and, although wormholes are valid solutions in general relativity, this is only true if exotic matter can be used to stabilize them. Even if the wormhole is stabilized, even a slight fluctuation in space would collapse it. If such exotic matter — that is, matter with negative mass — does not exist, all wormhole-containing solutions to Einstein’s field equations are vacuum solutions, which require an impossible vacuum, free of all matter and energy.

The American theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler coined the term wormhole in 1957; however, in 1921, the German mathematician Hermann Weyl already had proposed the wormhole theory, in connection with mass analysis of electromagnetic field energy.

This analysis forces one to consider situations . . . where there is a net flux of lines of force, through what topologists would call ‘a handle’ of the multiply-connected space, and what physicists might perhaps be excused for more vividly terming a ‘wormhole’.

- John Wheeler in Annals of Physics

No observational evidence. No.

Have you ever seen electricity? You’ve seen the effects of it, yes. Have you ever actually observed it? I’m sure you’d appreciate where I’m headed with this. I’m not trying to convince you that wormholes exist but I am asking the question that where the realm of physics and science fiction intersect, then what is true and what is not? Do you believe there is such a things as the speed of light? Do you believe in relativity?

In everything mentioned so far there has been the same pattern – observed phenomena, eyewitness testimony, often high grade, the hushing up, the removal of the offenders, the ridiculing of the devotees and the hunting down and removal of evidence, rendering any unbiased assessment impossible.

Christmas

Tomorrow is Christmas, celebrating the birth of no ordinary baby but One immaculately conceived. The Old Testament spoke of the giants which roamed the earth. Other arcane sources include the annunaki in their scriptures. They became the rulers of the known world.

Again, I neither say yea or nay but only to consider it. How are you going to debunk it? With Dr. David Hall’s line: “Ah, I myself, that’s not my, ah, actual field of expertise but I’ve read virtually all of the articles critically that have dealt with it. There’s just no evidence”? Where is your categorical evidence debunking what all those ancients were reported to have observed?

Why couldn’t an entity which had the power to get to earth also have the power to do a relatively simple thing – mate and cause a woman to procreate?

Leaving aside scientific analysis and looking at the historical record, leaving the Old and New Testaments aside, what do you make of the Egyptian record of mating between humans and other forms? Myth, yes?

Please list your evidence in the comments why this is a myth. Or do you mean it’s impossible because your mind can’t encompass it? What sort of proof do you need that it existed? That two of them should come back from the dead and perform intercourse in front of you? Woud you believe it possible then?

Historians write of Ancient Rome and it’s as real as if you had been there. What if it was, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabrication, like the relics of the true cross, a fabrication invented in the C14th to break the power of the Church? I’d say it’s not but how do you definitively know that? On the strength of the very records which are in question?

Ah, the Colliseum, you say. You can see that, you’ve been there. Roman walls, like Hadrian’s? I’ve been standing on it, so I can assure you it exists. Who said it was Roman? Carbon dating?

The Enemy appeared in Nairobi on Saturday, June 11th, 1988 to 6000 people and changed the water. It was widely reported. Here are the choices – it never happened, it happened but has a scientific explanation or it was a stage-managed trick. Which?

Finally

There were a lot of people who not ony believed in those early days, they obviously saw and heard things from older generations who claimed to have been eyewitnesses and it was sufficient to convince them to the point of dying for it. Not proof, no but this thing has never been about proof, in the post-C18th sense of the term.

It’s been about interrelated phenomena and the likelihood of things being a certain way. That’s how the police conduct investigations and draw conclusions when there is ony circumstantial. Are they always wrong?

‘Nuff for one post.

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