Breaking Out of the Bubble

Breaking Out of the Bubble

 by Guest Blogger,
Tyler Kokjohn

A Review of
The UFO Phenomenon: Should I Believe?
by Dr. Robert Davis

Dr. Davis has taken on an extraordinarily challenging task; outlining the many and disparate elements linked to UFOs and providing a broad perspective on the issues surrounding them.  The literature of ufology is vast, but he manages to condense each area into cogent summaries.  His writing is clear and concise and he has carefully referenced his sources.  A thoughtfully crafted, thoroughly edited product, this book offers some of the background and controversies of each topic from a somewhat neutral and mostly scientific perspective.  Dr. Davis is explicit he remains agnostic as to whether currently inexplicable UFO events reveal the activities of a non-human intelligence.  Consistent with this stance, he examines the topic in a manner that will provide readers some appreciation for the controversies that plague the field.

One of the most interesting things Dr. Davis does is to combine his overviews with insightful assessments of the situations.  Convinced a fundamentally more scientific approach and formally organized governance of the new efforts are the way forward, he offers specific recommendations for future work to improve understanding.

Ufology has fallen far behind the times and bringing new-found information to the fore should be a priority effort.  Although farsighted, Dr. Davis failed to escape the bubble that has suffocated ufology.  Insular and hostile to criticism this field collapsed into scientific stasis a long time ago.  As long as investigators remain reluctant to accept the verdict of data, acknowledge the implications when it is conspicuously absent or even gauge its overall reliability, they will continue circling the same ground endlessly.  Unfortunately, Dr. Davis overlooked some critical developments such as the Innocence Project and offers readers  scant detail on revolutionary new DNA analysis technologies.  These interrelated topics pose a substantial challenge to ufology and failing to address them adequately is a major oversight.

The Innocence Project (1) has upended the justice system completely by using DNA evidence to exonerate persons convicted of serious crimes.  These efforts have forced a fundamental reconsideration of the accuracy and reliability of eyewitness testimony.  How far can such evidence be trusted?  In his book, How UFOs Conquered the World, David Clarke describes experiments which reveal eyewitnesses may produce accounts that differ from actual events (“Purple Lights and March Foolishness” chapter).  These findings – relatively new and not-so-new – pose a significant challenge to the field and have never been integrated into the canon of ufology.

A failure to exploit new scientific advances may have contributed to the persistence of hypotheses in an absence of corroborating evidence.  The prime example is alien abduction investigation which is now more akin to a literary genre than scientific research.  Several investigators have issued specific claims that are potentially verifiable through genetic testing.  Uncorroborated accounts of missing pregnancies, breeders, hybrids and more have been published and presented at meetings for years.  The means to validate the claims have existed for years and still no one can deliver the genetic evidence or simply provide samples for independent analyses to prove them.  Suggesting investigators document the validity of alien hybrid babies is a weak call-to-action that simply ignores the obvious failures and apparent refusals to conduct truly scientific investigations.  Alien abduction writers have no incentive to get off the amazing stories treadmill until their books stop selling.  Life in a bubble has been good for their business.

Scientific progress hinges on integrating new developments that open up new vistas and opportunities.  Scientists and physicians have leaped on new DNA analysis and sequencing technologies to employ them in new situations.  The pace of advancement is furious.  In contrast, ufology abduction writers have been clinging to the same clearly problematic investigation methods for decades.  This sad situation has not been appreciated within ufology although a number of investigators, authors and experiencers including Jack Brewer, Philip Klass, Kevin Randle, Carol Rainey, Jeff Ritzmann, Jim Schnabel, Jeremy Vaeni, Emma Woods and more have published devastating critiques of the methods and conclusions of abduction researchers.

Perhaps the UFO experience is like Plato’s Cave where we play the role of prisoners imputing motivations and deducing ‘facts’ from shadows cast on walls.  The ambiguous nature of the phenomena may have enabled the non-human intelligence narrative to endure in an otherwise unsympathetic environment.  Ignoring contradictory information and methodological challenges has kept unsubstantiated ideas alive far beyond their scientifically productive lifespans.  Dr. Davis has provided some background material and suggested approaches that may help some readers decide if UFOs have any deeper significance.  However, the scientific community abandoned UFO study half a century ago and nothing that has come forward since then has altered the consensus.  Unless new ideas penetrate and new ways of conducting research take hold, ufology will remain voluntarily imprisoned in a static void.

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Forget Nasty, Noisy Negativists: Here Is The Best Way To Dismiss Debunkers

Every now and again I say something so universally brilliant on my podcast The Experience  that I can’t afford to let it slip into audio heaven virtually unnoticed. Rather, the universe can’t afford it. Take, for example, what I said last week. I don’t remember what it was, but it was so brilliant I thought I should write about it and didn’t. Now it is lost forever. God knows I’m not listening again for it.

See?

Well, I’m not making the same mistake this week. On this week’s episode… I think… it’s a two parter–I think this happened in part 1. If not, part 2. The point is, at some time over the next two weeks listeners of The Experience will hear me say something brilliant. You get to read it now. You’re welcome. And it is this….

We live in the Stone Age of our own culture. What that means is, although we’ve advanced our knowledge since Newton of how things do and don’t work in physics, on the day-to-day level, we still live like Einstein never happened. We still think and behave mechanically in a fluid world.

That’s not the brilliant thing. In fact, it’s kind of offensive to those cultures who already had a handle on the fluidity of existence before our scientists dismissed them as savages while they “discovered” for themselves what was already well-known in different languages and with meanings our scientists cannot acknowledge because they believe in objectivity devoid of any meaning even though such a thing, they admit, does not exist.

That’s not the brilliant thing either, but it’s closer. The brilliant thing?–The thing you can use to shut up debunkers with their arrogance, their smarm, and their tiny penises (yes, including Sharon Hill) is this: There is no such thing as scientific proof.

Reality works the way it does–oh, let’s give it a number–99.99999% of the time. This means that in a fraction of a fraction of instances, it does not work that way. The laws of physics are not fixed, they are probable. Don’t take my word for it.  Allow “scientific fundamentalist” Satoshi Kanazawa to explain:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200811/common-misconceptions-about-science-i-scientific-proof

We all get that, right? I mean whether you clicked the link or not. We get that there is no such thing as scientific proof, only probabilities great and small. If we all get that then by its own logic there will be points in time when improbable things happen–and this is where paranormal, ufological, and miraculous stuff come in. Therefore, it is unscientific to exclude the impossible not because we need to keep an open mind or because anything is possible in the let’s-pretend-not-to-make-judgements New Age way, or the “See? I told ya! Evolution’s a stupid theory! Gawd made us!” way, but because by its own internal logic this is how reality works. Reality includes the unreal. The unreal we’ll define as the thing that probability dictates likely won’t happen because everything we currently know as a rule says it won’t but it does anyway at least once because… probability.

And fractally speaking, this is the way it works in paranormal data, too. Take ufo sightings, for example. We know that a high percentage of UFO reports are explainable. They are hoaxes or mistaken aerial phenomena, planets, satellites, reflections, birds, insects–go down the list of knowns. Let’s be generous and say that 99.99999% of all ufo reports have a mundane explanation. That leaves a fraction of a fraction that are not. The classic debunker answer is that the unexplained cases are just unexplained, not unexplainable. Someone will crack those cases eventually, fitting them into our known physical “laws”, unless the facts have been lost to history and it’s too late to investigate properly–but it was likely a kite or something because 99.99999% of reports are.

But they are wrong. By their own logic, there will be a fraction of a fraction of instances that are unexplainable because they originate from without our reality box. They trickle through a hole in the wall, barely perceptible unless you leave a bucket underneath and collect the instances. Which is what researchers, historians, and storytellers do. But then debunkers dismiss witness reports as anecdotal as if that dismissal is itself wholly meaningful. It’s only meaningful 99.99999% of the time.

So we know improbable aerial phenomena exist and we know it’s not enough to poo-poo all of the reports and stories in anticipation of a mundane explanation. What I’ve presented here is the mundane explanation and if we acknowledge it, we may just have that paradigm shift so many people are waiting for. The irony is, it’s been with us in our society at least since Einstein, but we refuse to evolve into what we know to be true. In fact, in the article I cited above, the author still refuses to get what he himself is saying. Let’s take a look at the last paragraph from Kanazawa’s piece:

The creationists and other critics of evolution are absolutely correct when they point out that evolution is “just a theory” and it is not “proven.”  What they neglect to mention is that everything in science is just a theory and is never proven.  Unlike the Prime Number Theorem, which will absolutely and forever be true, it is still possible, albeit very, very, very, very, very unlikely, that the theory of evolution by natural and sexual selection may one day turn out to be false.  But then again, it is also possible, albeit very, very, very, very, very unlikely, that monkeys will fly out of my ass tomorrow.  In my judgment, both events are about equally likely.

Yes, unlikely. But possible. And if you replace your ass with your bedroom closet and normal monkeys flying out of it with monkeys and/or clowns and/or aliens doing acrobatic flips, you’ve just described an improbable situation that has been reported numerous times from confused, often embarrassed people who admit such things because they happened. And based on your own logic, it’s your job as a scientist or science writer to embrace that.

In closing and to belabor the point, it is likely that every time I stub my toe it will hurt. A lot. But someone somewhere in the world has or will report their toe moving through the furniture when they should have stubbed it. They might be lying. They might be wrong. They might be delusional. Or it might have happened. That it will happen to you or me is less likely than winning the lottery, so it’s good to remain skeptical. But to those who have won lotteries, the likelihood was 100%. Debunking has no place. Not even within the debunker’s own “rational” framework, for even there the improbable situation breaking all of the rules we think we know has a probability factor. And that fact only need be pointed out to render the debunker’s input moot in any false argument. Probably.

What are the odds I wouldn’t end on that?

The Trickster Has A New Home

If you care at all about ufology or any of the other paranormal categories we entertain, you need to check out Jeff Ritzmann’s new blog The Numinous Den. In it, he breaks down and dissects George Hansen’s Trickster Theory in every situation where it rears its head. It’s superb. It’s easy to grasp. And he’s only a handful of posts in so it’s easy to start at the beginning and catch up.

In honor of Jeff’s latest accomplishment, I offer my two cents on the Trickster element at work in the psyche….

‘Trickster’, by Bill Lewis

You could easily mock people who report experiences that fall outside the range of normal awareness if they occurred only a handful of times or in a few cultures. That they happen with frequency throughout all time and in every culture means normal awareness is being mocked at every turn, and so to mock high strangeness experiences is to ignore that fact with high prejudice.

The whole feedback loop is one big knowing smirk, but those limited to normal awareness aren’t conscious of the joke. The debunkers don’t know what they’re laughing at but they know they’re being laughed at, so they guffaw as bullies and demean experiencers and anyone who takes experiencers seriously. Their arrogance is from ignorance. Not miseducation or lack of education, but ignoring. On that deeper ignored level, they understand the joke is on them. In this sense they deserve pity for they’ve not had an experience which forces them to question reality in any sustainable way past being born.*

We’re all living in a facade in which and with which we self-identify. Some of the unhealthy impulses beneath the surface are sadistic because they are psychotically detached. Some of the healthy impulses may feel sadistic because they are compassionately detached and we are not consciously equipped to tell the difference.

Perhaps there is an intelligence trying like Hell to help us tell the difference. Perhaps there is a unifying principle that shocks its way through all cultures in all times like a jagged lightning strike through clouds.

Perhaps that raw, unfiltered consciousness messing with us is also us.

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*There is a reason all children question reality and it’s not because they don’t know anything. By the time they’re able to articulate questions, they’ve been filled with knowledge. But knowledge doesn’t answer the unknowable and they haven’t yet given up on the questions, repressed, or handed them over to personal and cultural authority figures with fake answers. Really, what bigger paranormal experience have we normalized than popping into existence from out of nothing? And if the appearance of form from formlessness isn’t a fractal version of the ultimate forms-within-formlessness transcendental bubble, I don’t know what is.