aliens – Cubilone's Dimension

REVIEW: THE UFO PHENOMENON: FACT, FANTASY AND DISINFORMATION

The UFO Phenomenon: Fact, Fantasy and Disinformation by John Michael Greer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Discovered this while eBrowsing for John Michael Greer eBooks.

It never ceases to amaze me how wide Mr. Greer’s education is. Not only can he write books like The Ecotechnic Future, The Long Descent and Not The Future We Ordered, all about what the future of humanity in the mid-collapse and post-collapse world will probably at least resemble: he can juggle between rationally arguing pro and against science, “conspiracy theory”, apparitions, aliens… He’s remarkably open-minded but somehow managing to avoid the negative traits the New Age or or other spiritual movements are associated with, e.g. naivety, or confusion of science and “pseudoscience”, a term I despise but which can be used to describe a lot of what New Agers say to portray their beliefs as valid and/or worthy of so-called mainstream scientific investigation.

To cut a long story short, Mr. Greer doesn’t believe that UFOs are actual spaceships piloted by alien intelligent life; his main argument is that most UFO sightings (Unidentified Flying Objects, remember?) have been the result of a shifting public consciousness: in over 70 years, people have learned to interpret mysterious lights in the sky in very specific ways, mostly because of science fiction and popular culture that goes back to the first half of the 20th century, in turn a particularly American cultural phenomenon that for geopolitical and social reasons went global.

“I want to believe” goes part and parcel with the clumsy moves involved in the change from a world dominated by religion to one were religion has been replaced by overwhelming materialism: when there’s nothing to believe in any more, something to believe in has to be invented.

In a recurring theme for Mr. Greer, he makes the point that it’s not just the “believers” that are looking for something to latch onto: scientism, materialism and positivism are the skeptics’ pacifier, and both believers and skeptics use flawed reasoning to win over the other side. The former states that UFOs exist but fails to imagine that there can be other answers to “what is that thing flying over there?” apart from “aliens, of course!”; the skeptics, on the other hand, fail because they restrict themselves to debunking the believers: either the believers are right or they are not, which somehow gets warped to “UFOs are alien or they do not exist”, which is a false dichotomy. They of course proceed to give all the reasons why any sighting must either be a hoax, or a hallucination, or “swamp gas”; Mr. Greer is right to ask “what if a UFO sighting is legit, that is to say, not a hallucination or a hoax, there really was a strange light in the sky, but it simply was not alien?”

Before listing his own attempts at explaining UFOs, he goes over how a hypothesis has to be disprovable in order to be scientific—in fact, that’s the very basis of the scientific method. He mostly leans towards American or Soviet secret/black budget projects, as of yet unexplained natural phenomena and aethereal/immaterial encounters, reports of which have been appearing in cultures all over the world for millennia.

For me the most interesting was the chapter on the black budget projects (think Area 51) and the secret aircraft: it would actually make sense that the US government through its denial and refusal of disclosure would fuel the fires of suspicion that what its Cold War secret military projects really were were alien spacecraft and in this way muddy the waters. Get your population as well as the Ruskies to believe that UFOs are a thing and you can fly any superweapon around and draw little suspicion as to what you’re actually doing.

Mr. Greer discusses these conspiracy theories with so much data and references to draw from and paints such an easy-to-follow picture, always within context, it’s just insulting to claim the material discussed is merely conspiracies at this point. Of course, each case is unique and some are still shrouded in true mystery, but that’s precisely what Mysterious Universe is for!

Great book, amazing and inspiring man. Couldn’t stop flicking my phone’s screen running PDF Reader.

Just one thing: for all that’s good in this world, do try and find a better cover artist!

View all my reviews

BLOOD SPACE METASTASIS

Last night was the now famous supermoon eclipse. I woke up early to go outside and have a look. Quickly, like a lot of Greeks, my enthusiasm was quenched because of the cloudy sky. These September nights have been warm but cloudy and rainy. Switching from a Mediterranean climate to a tropical one? Check. At least it’s better than turning into Sahara, I suppose.

To my credit, I didn’t immediately give up, either. I sat there for 40 minutes or so, reading and underlining my morning pages from earlier in 2015. Alas, the clouds won that hopeless staring contest. I went back to bed and thought it would be a good idea taking advantage of waking up that early to take a shot at entering a WILD. Instead, I was welcomed with a bout of the worst sleep paralysis I can recall: when my body fell asleep, my consciousness didn’t, and I had hallucinations of a person walking in the apartment, into my room and around my bed. It was pitch black, so the hallucination was consistent, in that I couldn’t see him/her/it, only hear the footsteps. I had to endure this while unable to move any part of my body apart from my eyelids and their contents. All the while, the blood moon was setting behind the cloud cover. During sleep paralysis, no-one can hear you scream. You can’t scream….

Take a deep breath.

It could have been me who took this .gif. It’s a consoling thought.

Nevertheless, for all its photogenic glory, it has to be said that September 28th 2015 will not be remembered for its supermoon eclipse. It will go down as a small footnote in history that on the day NASA announced they found flowing water on Mars there had been a supermoon lunar eclipse less than twelve hours prior. It is a veritable milestone that would have me leaping for joy—if I was any proper kind of science/sci-fi/astronomy nerd to begin with. Instead, all I can think of, perhaps especially after almost half a year of constantly dealing with water as a human right and the current global state of affairs, is how we should be sorting out our shit on Earth first before starting to even think about colonizing other worlds.

Don’t get me wrong, I too get terribly annoyed when other people generally show this kind of flamboyant lack of interest in the vastness of the Universe and the amazing advances in our apparent knowledge of the world. It’s usually such people who shun video games because they’re capitalist toys and refuse to see how they can work wonderfully to promote education or cultural awareness. Similarly, they show open contempt for science fiction as a genre, no matter how eye-opening, poetic or important it might be. They’re not interested to know that Dune, for example, was one of the first books bar none to speak about ecology and sustainability when it was published 50 years ago. No, it’s science fiction. “We have real problems on Earth. Sci-fi is for comfortable middle-class white nerds”, they say, or seem to imply. My very own father told me off when I tried to explain to him the virtues of The Dispossessed. As I was saying, under normal circumstances I get borderline offended by these reactions; at this very moment, I can sort of see where they’re coming from.

What if Arrakis, Dune, Desert Planet is Mars in the distant future?

A lot of the excitement surrounding the discovery of flowing water on Mars has to do with the fantasy of modernity, the wet dream of boundless progress, the Promethean achievement of humankind founding an extraterrestrial colony. While science fiction wouldn’t have you believe it, especially with the likes of Interstellar framing the popular imagination, we’re far, far from thinking about humanity as a separate entity from our home planet. There’s no reason to believe that without Earth we could survive for any length of time. I don’t think we would want to, either. But we’re obviously not taking care of our planet as one would take care of their home. In fact, we couldn’t do much worse if we were actively trying to destroy it.

Colonising Mars as our last hope for survival after we’ve made Earth unfit for humans and broad swaths of other types of life, too, is not something I’m going to support. We’ve been making our bed, we should be honourable enough to sleep in it too—once and for all, if it comes to that. If we can’t live as part of the great ecosystem, we don’t deserve to survive. I would use the cancer analogy, namely that us out-surviving the Earth would be like cancer cells out-surviving the cancer patient who died because of them, but on second thought the analogy wouldn’t be exactly right, as it’s not really possible to kill the Earth the same way a human can die of cancer. Still, if not kill it, we just might see our Earth wither away into a wasteland where it will take many thousands or millions of years for new forms of life to take advantage of the mess we’ll have left behind—if we don’t end up like Venus, that is.

I know you might say that some ideas born out of past science fiction turned out to be possible. After all, “we” (i.e. well-funded Americans) did go to the Moon (don’t take my word for it though) and that was just four years after Dune was released and a single year after 2001: A Space Odyssey did. Back then, people were saying that we’d definitely have at least a couple of bases up there by the turn of the millennium. But here we are, the turn of the millennium’s already fifteen years behind us and I’m not seeing any bright lights up there. So what happened? Could it be that there are some hard limits to our malignant growth? I would argue that yes, and plenty of them, as much as we like to pretend they don’t matter.

Next to all this, I’m secretly hoping for disclosure of long-standing alien contact, that moment that will change everything, like Naomi Klein says, only for real. Maybe in that scenario we will be taught how to build a viable multi-planetary civilization together with them and cross the stars that way. But on our own? Now? We’d probably destroy the colony the moment they were unable to pay off their debts to Earth, or make them privatise their water company, like many people were quick to joke about with today’s discovery on Twitter and Facebook.

Riding Light from Alphonse Swinehart on Vimeo.

But all said and done, I see videos like the one above, where you get to do a to-scale virtual tour of our solar system at the speed of light, and go right back to marvelling at how far we’ve come. Suddenly it hits me how difficult, how amazing it is sending missions to moist rocks or giant chewy-cored balloons so far away from here, redefining what is possible.

What vocabulary would a space-faring civilization like in Stellaris develop to describe the vastness of space?

I want this game very bad. Very very bad.

REVIEW: THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED

The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(It’s already been almost three months since I finished this one… just for you to get an idea of how slowly things are making the passover from my life to the ‘mension these days.)

Reading the Book of the Damned on the book-damning device.

Below you will find an assortment of highlights from The Book of the Damned pulled from the clipping file of my Kindle. Convenient, that. You can find the same super-version of the book as the one I read for free on Amazon. I’m still not sure if it’s a best-of, Charles Fort’s collected works, or what… There seems to be at least some content which doesn’t match up with the text found on his four books as found separately.

Anyway, back to the quotes:

The data of the damned. I have gone into the outer darkness of scientific and philosophical transactions and proceedings, ultra-respectable, but covered with the dust of disregard. I have descended into journalism. I have come back with the quasi-souls of lost data. They will march.

—

The power that has said to all these things that they are damned, is Dogmatic Science.

—

All sciences begin with attempts to define. Nothing ever has been defined. Because there is nothing to define. Darwin wrote The Origin of Species. He was never able to tell what he meant by a “species.” It is not possible to define. Nothing has ever been finally found out. Because there is nothing final to find out. It’s like looking for a needle that no one ever lost in a haystack that never was—

—

The novel is a challenge to vulgarization: write something that looks new to you: someone will point out that the thrice-accursed Greeks said it long ago.

—

It may be that in the whole nineteenth century no event more important than this occurred. In La Nature, 1887, and in L’Année Scientifique, 1887, this occurrence is noted. It is mentioned in one of the summer numbers of Nature, 1887. Fassig lists a paper upon it in the Annuaire de Soc. Met., 1887. Not a word of discussion. Not a subsequent mention can I find. Our own expression: What matters it how we, the French Academy, or the Salvation Army may explain? A disk of worked stone fell from the sky, at Tarbes, France, June 20, 1887.

—

My notion of astronomic accuracy: Who could not be a prize marksman, if only his hits be recorded?

—

But what would a deep-sea fish learn even if a steel plate of a wrecked vessel above him should drop and bump him on the nose? Our submergence in a sea of conventionality of almost impenetrable density. Sometimes I’m a savage who has found something on the beach of his island. Sometimes I’m a deep-sea fish with a sore nose.

Charles Fort was a trailblazer. What we call today paranormal or occult, together with all the relevant scientific investigations, in a few words what we’d expect from Mulder and Scully, to a large extent we owe to him. Here’s a guy who lived in the ’20s and researched old copies of Scientific American, Nature and other such periodicals and magazines, looking for the damned, the unexplainable, the excluded. For what good is science, if it only chooses to include to its dogma what it can explain, sweeping under the carpet all that can be used to challenge its grand theories?

Giant, village-sized wheels submerged in the middle of the ocean; periodic rains of fish, frogs in various states of decay and of a gelatinous mass of unknown origin; falling stone discs, as in the quote above; meteors; lights in the sky moving in formation (reported in the 19th century); footprints of impossible creatures; giant hailstones; cannonballs entombed in solid rock, and that’s just a sample.

Reading about these mysterious exclusions was a delight. I love everything that challenges my way of seeing the world and allows me to contemplate alternative explanations for life, the universe and everything. To be fair, some of Fort’s favourite theories were down-right bizarre, such as his insistence on imagining a realm above our own from which all the falling creatures and materials originated – what our own surface world would be, conceptually, for the “deep-sea fish with the sore nose”, as in the last extract I quoted above. The existence of such a place sounds no less ridiculous now than it did in the 1920s, but I think Fort’s point was that his arbitrary explanations were just as good as the official ones offered by the scientific dogma of the time, which our present, widely-accepted, matter-of-fact world theories of today mirror. To be sure, a part – I don’t know how significant – of the excluded, would be possible to include today, but I’m sure that many of the phenomena Fort goes through in his Book of the Damned would be just as inexplicable today as they were in the centuries past.

There are two reasons this book isn’t getting five stars from me. The first one is that it’s twice as long as I think it should have been. I felt that Fort at certain points was simply repeating himself. It’s also possible he was just saying the same thing in a different, more difficult to understand way, and this is precisely the second reason this isn’t getting five stars. Fort’s language and style was very hit or miss. To give you an idea, the quotes I’ve included in this review are some of the easiest parts to understand from the whole book. Others love it. Myself, I can’t say I hate it, but I’m not sure it’s as successful a writing technique as Fort must have hoped for it to be.

The same hit-or-miss-ness is applicable to the book as a whole. I thought it was tremendously interesting and a significant publication that should be studied further and give inspiration to present-day Charles Forts, but I don’t believe the style is for everyone. Why don’t you find out for yourself if it’s right for you, though? It’s free!

View all my reviews