I found a lesser known book from Jacques Vallée, UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union: A cosmic samizdat. (New York: Ballantine, 1992). It was one of his last books before he decided to quit ufology in the mid-1990s (and he does not hide his bitterness towards ETH ufology in the book). It is a relatively short book, 212 pages, written out of a quick visit he made in the then Soviet Union in January 1990, only two years before the coup in Moscow that lead to the end of the Soviet Union. It was, therefore, during the most open period of that regime’s history. During his stay, which was arranged through the Novosti press agency, he met the most prominent scientists in the Soviet Union who studied UFOs. Again, this was possible mainly because it was during the Glasnot years of the Gorbatchov era, and because of Vallée’s reputation as a credible ufologist. Most of the book is about comparing details of observations made in the Soviet Union to ones in the West. Below are the most salient features.
Similarities in findings
The main finding by Vallée is that, indeed, the data emerging from the Soviet Union are similar to the ones in the West. The USSR experienced at least three major UFO waves: in 1966-67, between 1977 and 1979, and 1989. The Soviet government established research committees to study the question after the beginning of the second wave in 1976, and they were not able to explain the phenomenon after 10 years of research. In the end, it was officially stated that all UFO could be explained by mistakes, unusual natural phenomena, or hoaxes. However, the scientists who persevered in studying UFOs (at their own risk) did not jump to the ETH conclusion.
Sightings were varying from bright spheres to what appears to be manufactured crafts. Humanoids, like in the West, were of many different shapes and forms, however, they often tended to be taller that humans (the famous Grays of the West are actually only one type among hundreds reported in the West – ufoinfo.com has an extensive database of CE3 reports and one can see how much variety there is). Altered states of consciousness were noted in many reports. I am wondering if tall people have a particular symbolic meaning in Russian culture (Vallée did not discussed it).
Another key finding was also matching a finding that Vallée had to repeat to Western ufologists over and over (without being heard) that UFOs tend to be polymorphous. UFOs tend to change shape and form during a same event (this one of Vallée’s main arguments against the ETH). The Soviets found that 75% of sightings involve a shape change, and they identified 149 types of change or shape transition.
Another interesting point they found is about submarine UFOs following Soviet submarines. I do not know how plasma can fare in water, but this is intriguing.
Parapsychology and UFOs
Vallée observed that in the Soviet Union, scientists were more willing to entertain the idea that UFOs were somehow related to topics in parapsychological research. This was a major difference with the United States where the ETH was the only acceptable view in ufology (and still is nowadays). One of the main linkages was the use of “biolocation” or radiesthesia, which involves the “detection of hidden minerals, water, or living entities by paranormal means. Dowsers often use a pendulum, a rod, or a stick for such work” (p. 5). Through the book, Vallée is fascinated by this issue, and tries to get the Soviet scientists to explain to him why they give credence to such a technique, and why it is relevant to UFO research. He never really got his answer, except to say that according to Soviet scientists, when UFOs are landing, they leave a signature where “the bioenergy level is nil” (p. 44). In other words, UFOs appear to “suck-up” vital energy in CE2 and CE3. This is an interesting observation, although as Vallée noted, it is hard to figure out how they can make such evaluation with radiesthesia techniques.
What I found surprising, however, is how Vallée did not connect the dots. He was aware of some of the research done in parapsychology in the Soviet Union, as he mentions the book of Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain (New York: Bantam, 1970), which discusses at length the Soviet research in bioenergy fields, and about Kirlian photography. Furthermore, their book provides a drawing of a dowsing rod identical to the one Vallée provides on p. 88. Twenty additional years of research in bioenergy field (1970 to 1990) might have yield some interesting results, or at very least it is long enough to create a matter-of-factness about it that would explain the attitude of the Soviet scientists. Then, we know now that Vallée was somewhat involved with the military remote-viewing programme at the SRI (and he refers to the remote-viewing project on p. 9). He surely figured out that bioenergy fields research in the Soviet Union was similarly funded by intelligence and military agencies, and that his hosts could not speak more.
In any event, this adds some more material to connect the biological ontological level with other levels of reality. Particularly, could it be that social psi and bioenergy fields influence each other? This could be an entry point for those interested in the Gaia hypothesis.
Other linkages
Vallée mentions on p. 77 that,“During the cold war the Kremlin regarded such observations [UFO reports] as a psychological warfare ploy master-minded by the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency. Soviet officials thought that such “hysterical” rumors were deliberately planted to create unhealthy agitation and fear among socialist countries, taking the workers’ attention away from productive pursuits.”
In the light of Greg Bishop’s Project Beta, the Soviet assessment of the situation was quite accurate. Given that the Soviets were spying a lot on the US, their arch-rival, it appears reasonable to think that, indeed, they figured out the American ploy. This adds even more weight to the rejection of the Roswell-Majestic conundrum.
Vallée made another comment that I can only relate to parasociology, and to the study done by Martin Kottmeyer “UFO flaps”, The Anomalist 3: 64-89, where he found a link between difficult social and political contexts and UFO waves. Vallée wrote in discussing the changes occurring in Gorbatchov’s Soviet Union:
“Once again, history had overtaken ideology. An enormous vital change was sweeping half the planet, catching all the bureaucracies by surprise: they could take their briefing and shove it! Was the UFO wave of 1989 in the Soviet Union only a symptom, or was it a deep factor in the change? In either case, I now realized, it could not be separated from the historical events that carried it.” (p. 25).
This is overall an easy read. The book is written mostly at the first person, and it reads like a novel. Although other texts have been written since about Soviet and Russian ufology, it is the only one which was written when the researchers were still working for the Soviet Union. Although they could not be open about certain classified projects (essentially in parapsychology), on the other hand they were not contaminated by the ETH and thus were quite candid about other aspects of their research (like biolocation). It is refreshing to see that, indeed, not all roads lead to the ETH.
Copyright © 2008 Eric Ouellet
Friday, December 5, 2008
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Interim Summary and First Draft of an Analytical Model – Part 2
The ontological levels cannot be reduced to one another. For instance, physics is not of much use to study environmental ecosystems; biology is not effective to understand cultural variations; psychology is not very good at explaining social phenomena such as social classes, etc. Yet, ontological levels do interact, and at times overlap. Any attempt to provide an analytical model for the study of UFO waves, must also take into account such interactions. In fact, any scientific progress is likely to occur by exploring those interacting and overlapping dimensions of reality. So far, it is possible to envision the following linkages.
Physical and Biological ontological intersections
Following Budden here, it appears that exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMF) can cause biological hypersensitivity to EMF, as well as other diseases like cancer. EMF can also induce altered state of consciousness. Conversely, it is known that living organisms produce also their own, albeit weak, EMF. It is important to underline that the intersection works both ways, as the biological can influence the physical too. Hence, one should expect, at least in theory, that balls of light might also react to living organisms’ EMF. Although this is internal coherent with what is known, there is little empirical evidence available to support this. But this could constitute an interesting avenue for research.
Physical and Psychological ontological intersections
Following the work of Persinger, it is clear that EMF can have an impact on human perception. Research in parapsychology has also shown that the human mind can also have an impact electrical apparatuses like computers, light bulbs, and of course random number generators. Paul Devereux in his research on Earthlights (Earthlights (Wellingborough: Turnstone Press, 1982)suggested that they seem to react to human action and thought. Pierre Vieroudy came to the same conclusions while doing his empirical research on psi generated UFOs. This is certainly an important aspect of the UFO phenomena that the interaction between balls of light and the human mind can go both ways. This also opens the possibility that the actual content of UFO experience is in part objectively created by the human mind.
Another aspect of mind-over-matter, but more controversial, yet with some evidence to support it, is the issue of materialization. As the historian of science François Favre has shown, there was a lot of quality empirical research done in the early 20th century on materialization that is now almost completely forgotten. These materialization included also manufactured objects. Carl Jung in his book Flying Saucer discusses himself witnessing materialization without having any doubts about it. Research on poltergeist also discusses of cases of materialization. For instance, during the famous German poltergeist event of Rosenheim in 1967, bricks were seen coming out of a house while no bricks were found on the front lawn. As well, a police officer claimed that every time he was getting in the house he saw a bucket of water materializing in front of him.
This may appear outlandish, but it could explain the UFOs seen as having a manufactured shape and leaving geometric marks on the ground. There is some evidence to support this view, as shown above, and this would be more consistent with what is known of UFOs, if compared with proposals coming from the ETH.
Physical and Sociological ontological intersections
At a general level, it is possible to say that physical structures can create particular social forms. For instance, easy communications caused be flat terrain tend to create wider social networks of people and more complex social structure than mountainous terrain were the equivalent of insular mentality is commonly found (think of Switzerland). Conversely, people can change physical environment because it serves better it social organization. The Western way of adapting the environment is quite different from the aboriginal way in the Americas, and this difference is due to a difference in social structure and outlook.
There seems to be also an intersection in the psi realm. One can think about the Global Consciousness project lead by Dean Radin. A form of social psi (i.e., that cannot be reduced to individual psi) seems to affect random number generators. This was seen in a very spectacular way, starting 8 hours before the first attack against the World Trade Centre, on 11 September 2001. Carl Jung has also theorized about the collective unconscious, and other have speculated that it is a form of absolute knowledge that individual can access through psi-related means, but the absolute knowledge itself could only be understood as a social object. Others have speculated, but not research it, that UFOs might be a form social psi, gaining a temporary autonomy that cannot be understood in terms of individual psi effect. There is some evidence to support this, as some have noticed that UFO waves tend to occur where there are national or collective tensions, or just before (like the Iranian UFO incident of 1976 – similar to the Belgian one of 1989-1990, a few years before the Islamic Revolution). This would be also coherent with what is known.
This is one of the key contribution that parasociology can make in the study of not only UFOs, but other so-called paranormal events.
Biological and Psychological ontological intersections
At a general level, it is known that brain injury, for instance, can affect perceptions and consciousness. Conversely, it is also known that diseases and illness can be created by psychosomatic disorders. With respect to UFOs, one cannot exclude some report of strange illness and cure caused by aliens/UFOs. There has been research about psi healing, and psi-induced illnesses. Again, this would be consistent with is known.
Biological and Sociological ontological intersections
At a general level, it is known that the biological environment influences social structures. Fishing communities, for instance, are very different from hunter-gatherers’ societies. Social structures can also have an impact on biology like industrialism and environmental pollutions, but also advance capitalism causing epidemics of stress-related diseases.
There is also the Gaïa theory, which assumes that the Earth is a living organism too. By extension one can think that maybe this living organism is also producing psi effects that influence the collective unconscious. This is a popular New Age idea, but it has no supporting evidence. On the other hand, it is theoretically in line with the known interactions between the social and the biological, if it is embedded into a collective psi construct. This would be an interesting project for parasociology, but it requires firming up quite a bit the notion of collective psi. Yet, the implicit idea would be that UFOs are “psi reactions” of the biosphere to human activities. So far, the symbolic meaning attached to UFOs sightings seems pointing instead towards something internal to human affairs and not the issues of the biosphere.
Sociological and Psychological ontological intersections
At a general level, it is known that culture and socialization influence the type of personalities found in a given society. Conversely, so individual can have profound influence on social constructs (e.g., Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Picasso, etc.). The intersection is also possible in the realm of psi effect. For instance, the famous sociologist Max Weber implied that political leadership could be a form of psi (and this has not been noticed by many sociologists). Conversely, the “epidemic” of Gray alien visitations could be explained as individuals being “struck” by social psi.
There is very little research done so far on the intersections between individual and social psi beyond the groundbreaking work done by Carl Jung. But it is clearly in line with what is known. This is certainly the other key task of parasociology, with obvious application to UFO research, if successful in developing an empirical research agenda.
Interim Conclusions
When dissected as above, the UFO phenomenon is indeed complex, as not all the variables are known. Parasociology does not have all the answers, but it certainly focuses on the blind spots, the neglected areas of the UFO phenomenon. From this point of view, it is reassuring that the research agenda is indeed attempting to fill existing gaps in our knowledge, and that this gap has been identified by being as multi-disciplinary as possible.
The two priority areas are intersection between the physical realm and the social, and between the psychological realm and the social. In both cases, “science of the extreme” (i.e., the study of psi) appears more needed than normal social science (the “Newtonian” version of it).
It appears now too early to even propose a draft model, but some questions can be put forward. For instance, should I use “socialkinesis” instead of PK to describe the possible interaction between the social and the physical? Are UFO waves “Recurrent Spontaneous Social Kinesis”? Similarly, should I use “Extra-Sensorial Socialization” to discuss informational psi effect emanating out of the collective unconscious? I am not sure. But I know there is a need to develop a terminology that will help preventing reductionist attempts of considering social psi as simply an aggregate of psychological psi (a common problem already existing in normal sociology when engaging with normal psychologists and physicists and biologists).
Copyright © 2008 Eric Ouellet
Physical and Biological ontological intersections
Following Budden here, it appears that exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMF) can cause biological hypersensitivity to EMF, as well as other diseases like cancer. EMF can also induce altered state of consciousness. Conversely, it is known that living organisms produce also their own, albeit weak, EMF. It is important to underline that the intersection works both ways, as the biological can influence the physical too. Hence, one should expect, at least in theory, that balls of light might also react to living organisms’ EMF. Although this is internal coherent with what is known, there is little empirical evidence available to support this. But this could constitute an interesting avenue for research.
Physical and Psychological ontological intersections
Following the work of Persinger, it is clear that EMF can have an impact on human perception. Research in parapsychology has also shown that the human mind can also have an impact electrical apparatuses like computers, light bulbs, and of course random number generators. Paul Devereux in his research on Earthlights (Earthlights (Wellingborough: Turnstone Press, 1982)suggested that they seem to react to human action and thought. Pierre Vieroudy came to the same conclusions while doing his empirical research on psi generated UFOs. This is certainly an important aspect of the UFO phenomena that the interaction between balls of light and the human mind can go both ways. This also opens the possibility that the actual content of UFO experience is in part objectively created by the human mind.
Another aspect of mind-over-matter, but more controversial, yet with some evidence to support it, is the issue of materialization. As the historian of science François Favre has shown, there was a lot of quality empirical research done in the early 20th century on materialization that is now almost completely forgotten. These materialization included also manufactured objects. Carl Jung in his book Flying Saucer discusses himself witnessing materialization without having any doubts about it. Research on poltergeist also discusses of cases of materialization. For instance, during the famous German poltergeist event of Rosenheim in 1967, bricks were seen coming out of a house while no bricks were found on the front lawn. As well, a police officer claimed that every time he was getting in the house he saw a bucket of water materializing in front of him.
This may appear outlandish, but it could explain the UFOs seen as having a manufactured shape and leaving geometric marks on the ground. There is some evidence to support this view, as shown above, and this would be more consistent with what is known of UFOs, if compared with proposals coming from the ETH.
Physical and Sociological ontological intersections
At a general level, it is possible to say that physical structures can create particular social forms. For instance, easy communications caused be flat terrain tend to create wider social networks of people and more complex social structure than mountainous terrain were the equivalent of insular mentality is commonly found (think of Switzerland). Conversely, people can change physical environment because it serves better it social organization. The Western way of adapting the environment is quite different from the aboriginal way in the Americas, and this difference is due to a difference in social structure and outlook.
There seems to be also an intersection in the psi realm. One can think about the Global Consciousness project lead by Dean Radin. A form of social psi (i.e., that cannot be reduced to individual psi) seems to affect random number generators. This was seen in a very spectacular way, starting 8 hours before the first attack against the World Trade Centre, on 11 September 2001. Carl Jung has also theorized about the collective unconscious, and other have speculated that it is a form of absolute knowledge that individual can access through psi-related means, but the absolute knowledge itself could only be understood as a social object. Others have speculated, but not research it, that UFOs might be a form social psi, gaining a temporary autonomy that cannot be understood in terms of individual psi effect. There is some evidence to support this, as some have noticed that UFO waves tend to occur where there are national or collective tensions, or just before (like the Iranian UFO incident of 1976 – similar to the Belgian one of 1989-1990, a few years before the Islamic Revolution). This would be also coherent with what is known.
This is one of the key contribution that parasociology can make in the study of not only UFOs, but other so-called paranormal events.
Biological and Psychological ontological intersections
At a general level, it is known that brain injury, for instance, can affect perceptions and consciousness. Conversely, it is also known that diseases and illness can be created by psychosomatic disorders. With respect to UFOs, one cannot exclude some report of strange illness and cure caused by aliens/UFOs. There has been research about psi healing, and psi-induced illnesses. Again, this would be consistent with is known.
Biological and Sociological ontological intersections
At a general level, it is known that the biological environment influences social structures. Fishing communities, for instance, are very different from hunter-gatherers’ societies. Social structures can also have an impact on biology like industrialism and environmental pollutions, but also advance capitalism causing epidemics of stress-related diseases.
There is also the Gaïa theory, which assumes that the Earth is a living organism too. By extension one can think that maybe this living organism is also producing psi effects that influence the collective unconscious. This is a popular New Age idea, but it has no supporting evidence. On the other hand, it is theoretically in line with the known interactions between the social and the biological, if it is embedded into a collective psi construct. This would be an interesting project for parasociology, but it requires firming up quite a bit the notion of collective psi. Yet, the implicit idea would be that UFOs are “psi reactions” of the biosphere to human activities. So far, the symbolic meaning attached to UFOs sightings seems pointing instead towards something internal to human affairs and not the issues of the biosphere.
Sociological and Psychological ontological intersections
At a general level, it is known that culture and socialization influence the type of personalities found in a given society. Conversely, so individual can have profound influence on social constructs (e.g., Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Picasso, etc.). The intersection is also possible in the realm of psi effect. For instance, the famous sociologist Max Weber implied that political leadership could be a form of psi (and this has not been noticed by many sociologists). Conversely, the “epidemic” of Gray alien visitations could be explained as individuals being “struck” by social psi.
There is very little research done so far on the intersections between individual and social psi beyond the groundbreaking work done by Carl Jung. But it is clearly in line with what is known. This is certainly the other key task of parasociology, with obvious application to UFO research, if successful in developing an empirical research agenda.
Interim Conclusions
When dissected as above, the UFO phenomenon is indeed complex, as not all the variables are known. Parasociology does not have all the answers, but it certainly focuses on the blind spots, the neglected areas of the UFO phenomenon. From this point of view, it is reassuring that the research agenda is indeed attempting to fill existing gaps in our knowledge, and that this gap has been identified by being as multi-disciplinary as possible.
The two priority areas are intersection between the physical realm and the social, and between the psychological realm and the social. In both cases, “science of the extreme” (i.e., the study of psi) appears more needed than normal social science (the “Newtonian” version of it).
It appears now too early to even propose a draft model, but some questions can be put forward. For instance, should I use “socialkinesis” instead of PK to describe the possible interaction between the social and the physical? Are UFO waves “Recurrent Spontaneous Social Kinesis”? Similarly, should I use “Extra-Sensorial Socialization” to discuss informational psi effect emanating out of the collective unconscious? I am not sure. But I know there is a need to develop a terminology that will help preventing reductionist attempts of considering social psi as simply an aggregate of psychological psi (a common problem already existing in normal sociology when engaging with normal psychologists and physicists and biologists).
Copyright © 2008 Eric Ouellet
Monday, December 1, 2008
Interim Summary and First Draft of an Analytical Model – Part 1
I have covered some ground in terms of what is out there. It is time to do a summary what is emerging so far. However, it is first important to underline an obvious conclusion: UFO and alien sightings might be single events, but from an analytical standpoint they are multi-level realities. Hence, to propose a meaningful summary and a first draft of an analytical model, I need to firm up this preliminary conclusion. To do so, I decided to borrow from Cornelius Castoriadis, a French philosopher of Greek origin, who was very influential in the social sciences in France, and indirectly in North America when the ideas of the post-structuralist (or postmodern) thinkers were massively “imported” to the new world during the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, etc.).
Ontological Levels
Castoriadis proposed an interesting theory of ontology (the nature of reality). For him, “being” is what can exist because we can imagine it. For an object to exist, it has to exist in our mind. To exist in our mind we have to imagine it first. Hence, for Castoriadis the human mind is constantly creating reality. This idea is in many ways similar to Immanuel Kant’s idea that our relationship with reality is always mediated by our language, culture, preconceptions, etc. Direct access to reality is not possible because we need all these mediating elements to access reality, to make distinctions between different objects so that reality is not just mass of confused stimuli; in other words, to make sense of reality we need lenses. Without language and culture we cannot name things, and if we cannot name them then we cannot understand them. An important point here, this is not to say that there is no independent or objective reality out there, it is simply that such reality cannot be grasped without our subjectivity. For both Kant and Castoriadis, a better understanding of our subjective tools to apprehend reality is therefore the key to generate better knowledge.
Castoriadis, however, adds that there are four fundamental levels of ontology that are not reducible to one another, and this constitutes an inherent characteristic of reality. These levels are: the physical, the biological, the psychological (or psyche-soma), and the social-historical. Castoriadis recognizes that this reality out there “reacts” to our gaze and our scrutiny, and that our imagination faces constraints; our creative capacities may be unlimited in theory but when it is time to understand how our environment works we have to answer to reality’s unforeseen “reactions”. The famous French anthropologist of science, Bruno Latour who borrowed a lot from Castoriadis, stated in the same spirit that “reality is what resists” our imagination. In other words, reality tends to contradict what we imagine so that we have to work harder at it.
This is a bit of a long detour, but I wanted to be sure that this distinction in four ontological levels is not perceived as being arbitrary. It is based on serious ontological and epistemological foundations. This categorization of reality in four levels will be useful to classify what I found so far, and it will be useful to establish linkages between findings. It is also useful in order to be reflexive. Reflexivity appears to me as being critical when one studies the paranormal; pseudo-scientific attitudes created out of mimicry, or out of 19th century naive scientism attitude are still transmitted in present-day high schools and universities. It is also useful to deconstruct the excesses of positivist, empiricist and reductionist attitudes found in the scientific community at large, without falling into the trap of the New Age’s extreme relativism.
The classification of the information thus far amassed will be put through two usual epistemological tests. The first one is the external validity, by asking if there are empirical evidences to support the assertion. The evidence can be directly related or indirectly related to similar situations. The second test is about internal validity. Are the findings coherent with other findings? Or is it logically consistent with what is known, or does it requires a separate special explanation? Any special explanation would then require special justification.
The Physical Reality of UFOs
The physical evidence about UFO all points towards balls of lights in their various guises, which tend to be highly charged from an electromagnetic standpoint. As the Hessdalen project has shown, balls of light can be invisible to the eye, and yet producing a radar echo. When they are visible they look like nocturnal light (NL, in the Hynek classification), and silvery discs or balls during daylight (DD, diurnal discs). If we accept the rule-of-thumb that about 95% of all UFO sightings can be explained by more mundane sources (airplanes, meteorites, satellites, optical illusions, etc.), then we have also to underline that the vast majority of the 5% remaining is made of NLs and DDs. This is true for both single UFO observations and UFO waves.
Balls of light can accelerate very quickly to reach 9,000 meters per second (32,400 km/h). They can be produced by natural sources of electro-magnetism, or by man-made ones. As they are often highly charged electro-magnetically, they tend to cause dysfunctions to electrical equipment. There are at least 3 factors involved in the creation of balls of light according to Budden, their various combinations can lead to various types of balls of light with different characteristics. They can produce high degrees of heat and leave burn marks on the ground, and cause various types of injuries to witnesses. It is also possible that square wave radio frequencies make them taking 90 degrees square turns when the conditions for such behaviour are met. They are probably also sensitive to other sources of electromagnetism, like a fighter jet locking its radar on a UFO, might just “push” the ball of light further, and give the illusion that it is engaging in evasive manoeuvres. This explanation has a basis of empirical evidence to support it, and it is coherent with Newtonian physics and what is known about UFO sightings.
The only exceptions are the Close Encounters (CE 1 to 3) sightings from Hynek’s descriptive classification. These sightings are actually the only portion of the UFO experience where the ETH has any possible traction. If we decompose the problem, however, the room left for the ETH becomes even narrower. Most of the CE3 (seeing an ufonaut) and all of the so-called CE4 (alien abduction) occur when the witness is in a state of altered consciousness (or facing the “Oz factor” to use Jenny Randle’s terminology). It is important to note also that someone in a state of altered consciousness is usually not be aware of it. Hence, CE3 are still not offering any tangible evidence for the ETH, as in altered state of consciousness reality and fiction tend to get mixed up (the Kantian issue discussed above). Such situations can be caused by known physical source of energy applied to the brain, as research in laboratory setting shows (particularly Persinger). The physical marks can also be explained by self-action of the experiencer when he/she is a state of altered consciousness, and he or she will have no conscious memory of having done it. They actually tend to attribute, wrongly, these marks to the action of what was seen during the event. Psychiatry has extended empirical evidence about this type of unconscious behaviour.
Most CE 2 (leaving physical traces) can also be explained by what we know about balls of light. The only exceptions are the relatively rare instances where geometric marks (square, rectangles) are found leaving an imprint in the ground. CE 1 that involve seeing a manufactured object can at times be construed as misperceptions caused by altered state of consciousness, but not always, especially when there are several witnesses reporting the same description. As one can see, the room for the ETH is rather much narrower than most people think. From the point of view of physical evidence, there is nothing to support the ETH in these instances, as no materiel, equipment or biological tissues “out of this Earth” was ever found. It still fails the external validity test. As it will be shown in the next post, other explanations with some empirical evidence supporting them and more in line with was is already known can be offered to explain these last elements. The ETH also fails the internal validity test. Hence, given these two test failures and its relatively limited applicability, there are no rational at this point to maintain a special explanation such as the ETH.
The Biological Reality of UFOs
There is a biological component to the UFO experience if we consider “mind postures” more likely to lead to altered state of consciousness as a biological issue. There is now substantial evidence to show that altered state of consciousness plays an important part in the UFO experience, but such states are likely to occur to people predisposed to have a lower threshold between the conscious mind and the unconscious. Such threshold is in part biological, although it can be trained (like a muscle) through various techniques like meditation, yoga, etc. According to Budden’s research, some people have a greater sensibility to electromagnetism due to prolonged exposure to electromagnetic fields. There are also people who neurologically developed dissociative personalities, oftentimes the result of a defence mechanism developed during a traumatic childhood. Lastly, there are people who seem to have an innate lower threshold, and they are oftentimes found in artistic and creative professions. The empirical evidence here is quite strong, and it is in line with what is known about UFO experiences, and parapsychology.
The Social-Historical Reality of UFOs
There is a social and historical component to the UFO experience in as much as its content can be traced back to sociological realities. UFOs are specific to our time, and appear to be closely related to our capacity of imagining flying machines. Some may argue that the Bible and ancient Hindu texts discusses flying machines, and this is quite true. The possibility of imagining flying machine is in itself not time bound, but “seeing” strange objects in the sky on an ongoing basis is unique to our time. The content of UFO sightings seems also to be related to social dynamics. From the Airship story of 1896, to the Kenneth Arnold’s sightings of flying objects wobbling like flying saucers, to the rash of contactees emerging after George Adamski published Flying Saucers Have Landed in 1953, one can only see that the content of UFO experience is at least partially socially constructed.
Only one unusual sighting or experience (actually alleged sighting or experience) is enough to create a series of similar sightings that can last for decades. A case in point is the Betty and Barney Hill experience with the so-called Grey ETs. It was a first, and it became publicly known in 1966 with the publication of Interrupted Journey. Then, the Becky Andreasson case occurred in 1967. But the real “epidemic” of Grey ETs abductions started in the mid 1970s, coinciding with the broadcast of a TV film entitled The UFO Incident, aired the first time on NBC in October 1975, and relating the story of Hill couples’ experience. As well, Bertrand Meheust has provided extensive analyses to show that science fiction impacts the content of UFO experiences. The evidence for a social-historical dimension to the UFO experience is very strong and it is in line what was is known about other paranormal phenomena like the apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Catholic countries or areas, the Chupacabra in Spanish speaking countries, etc.
The Psychological Reality of UFOs
Here it is at times difficult to separate the physiological aspect of altered states of consciousness, and the actual experience. However, to provide an analytical distinction, the psychological aspect of the UFO experience is understood as the intrapsychic component, and this relates to our understanding of both consciousness and the unconscious. This is, in turn, links directly to the question of imagination, as it appears to be the bridge between the two. The conscious mind creates reality through imagining, correcting the creation as it rubs itself against reality. The unconscious processes, stores and sends back the results of the imaginary process to the conscious mind in a subliminal and/or symbolic way. Hence, the distinction between imaginary realm and reality is much more subtle that most people think. An obvious example of this is when people get into an accident and feel no pain until they realized they are injured. It is on this bridge that the question of psi needs to be understood. Psi can be construed as the reverse process described above: reality is created in the unconscious mind, and the conscious mind uses imagination to make sense of it, which in turn may affect reality. Certainly, the remote viewing process appears to work that way and there is some empirical evidence to support this.
It is quite clear that there is an important psi element in the UFO experience. For instance, altered perceptions seem to be telepathically shared when there is more than one witness. There are too many similarities in the experience for a regular psychological explanation to hold. Although there is some research on the “folie à deux”, such research shows that “folie à deux” only occur when one witness is having a particularly strong psychological hold on the other, and thus influence him/her to believe in a particular perception. It is not to say that it cannot happen in UFO cases, but when there are several witnesses, physically apart and not knowing each other, the “folie à deux” cannot be invoked.
Psi research shows that believing in paranormal increases the probability of psi effects, and there is no reason to think that it is any different with the UFO experience. This actually relates directly to the question of imagination. These beliefs play an important part in establishing a bridge between the conscious and unconscious mind, although it is not a mandatory one. Some research empirically supports this statement, particularly the Anamnesis Project.
Yet, contrary to remote viewing and many other forms of psychic experiment, UFO experiences are spontaneous and not predictable. It appears as if an external psi source is involved in creating the psi experience (in one’s own unconscious). It is also contrary to RSPKs experiences, where clearly a particular type of dysfunctional personality is usually involved. Furthermore, in the case of UFO waves there seem to be multiple or no focus persons involved in the event. Certainly, it is this aspect of the UFO experience that also keeps alive the 2nd degree ETH, and the paranormal explanations (PNH) proposed by Jacques Vallée and John Keel. Unfortunately, there is no possible evidence for such approaches. If one assumes that non-human entities are involved, then it also implies that these entities can “play” with the experience at will. Thus, it is beyond the reach of any analysis. This is the analytical position taken by parapsychology, and it paid off, as our knowledge of paranormal has advanced under parapsychology while it remained stagnant with the old fashion psychical research. Following this approach for UFO, is therefore consistent with what is known.
There are a fair amount of empirical evidence to link UFOs and psi effect, and many of the UFO experience characteristics are coherent with was is known about psi effect. However, the issue of an external source of psi appears to not fit what is known in parapsychology. On the other hand, parapsychology tend to shy away from the study of paranormal phenomena that seem to have an external source to a specific individual(s) unconscious mental processes.
Part II
In the second part, in an attempt to answer provisionally some of the questions left pending in Part I, the interaction between ontological levels will be explored.
Copyright © 2008 Eric Ouellet
Ontological Levels
Castoriadis proposed an interesting theory of ontology (the nature of reality). For him, “being” is what can exist because we can imagine it. For an object to exist, it has to exist in our mind. To exist in our mind we have to imagine it first. Hence, for Castoriadis the human mind is constantly creating reality. This idea is in many ways similar to Immanuel Kant’s idea that our relationship with reality is always mediated by our language, culture, preconceptions, etc. Direct access to reality is not possible because we need all these mediating elements to access reality, to make distinctions between different objects so that reality is not just mass of confused stimuli; in other words, to make sense of reality we need lenses. Without language and culture we cannot name things, and if we cannot name them then we cannot understand them. An important point here, this is not to say that there is no independent or objective reality out there, it is simply that such reality cannot be grasped without our subjectivity. For both Kant and Castoriadis, a better understanding of our subjective tools to apprehend reality is therefore the key to generate better knowledge.
Castoriadis, however, adds that there are four fundamental levels of ontology that are not reducible to one another, and this constitutes an inherent characteristic of reality. These levels are: the physical, the biological, the psychological (or psyche-soma), and the social-historical. Castoriadis recognizes that this reality out there “reacts” to our gaze and our scrutiny, and that our imagination faces constraints; our creative capacities may be unlimited in theory but when it is time to understand how our environment works we have to answer to reality’s unforeseen “reactions”. The famous French anthropologist of science, Bruno Latour who borrowed a lot from Castoriadis, stated in the same spirit that “reality is what resists” our imagination. In other words, reality tends to contradict what we imagine so that we have to work harder at it.
This is a bit of a long detour, but I wanted to be sure that this distinction in four ontological levels is not perceived as being arbitrary. It is based on serious ontological and epistemological foundations. This categorization of reality in four levels will be useful to classify what I found so far, and it will be useful to establish linkages between findings. It is also useful in order to be reflexive. Reflexivity appears to me as being critical when one studies the paranormal; pseudo-scientific attitudes created out of mimicry, or out of 19th century naive scientism attitude are still transmitted in present-day high schools and universities. It is also useful to deconstruct the excesses of positivist, empiricist and reductionist attitudes found in the scientific community at large, without falling into the trap of the New Age’s extreme relativism.
The classification of the information thus far amassed will be put through two usual epistemological tests. The first one is the external validity, by asking if there are empirical evidences to support the assertion. The evidence can be directly related or indirectly related to similar situations. The second test is about internal validity. Are the findings coherent with other findings? Or is it logically consistent with what is known, or does it requires a separate special explanation? Any special explanation would then require special justification.
The Physical Reality of UFOs
The physical evidence about UFO all points towards balls of lights in their various guises, which tend to be highly charged from an electromagnetic standpoint. As the Hessdalen project has shown, balls of light can be invisible to the eye, and yet producing a radar echo. When they are visible they look like nocturnal light (NL, in the Hynek classification), and silvery discs or balls during daylight (DD, diurnal discs). If we accept the rule-of-thumb that about 95% of all UFO sightings can be explained by more mundane sources (airplanes, meteorites, satellites, optical illusions, etc.), then we have also to underline that the vast majority of the 5% remaining is made of NLs and DDs. This is true for both single UFO observations and UFO waves.
Balls of light can accelerate very quickly to reach 9,000 meters per second (32,400 km/h). They can be produced by natural sources of electro-magnetism, or by man-made ones. As they are often highly charged electro-magnetically, they tend to cause dysfunctions to electrical equipment. There are at least 3 factors involved in the creation of balls of light according to Budden, their various combinations can lead to various types of balls of light with different characteristics. They can produce high degrees of heat and leave burn marks on the ground, and cause various types of injuries to witnesses. It is also possible that square wave radio frequencies make them taking 90 degrees square turns when the conditions for such behaviour are met. They are probably also sensitive to other sources of electromagnetism, like a fighter jet locking its radar on a UFO, might just “push” the ball of light further, and give the illusion that it is engaging in evasive manoeuvres. This explanation has a basis of empirical evidence to support it, and it is coherent with Newtonian physics and what is known about UFO sightings.
The only exceptions are the Close Encounters (CE 1 to 3) sightings from Hynek’s descriptive classification. These sightings are actually the only portion of the UFO experience where the ETH has any possible traction. If we decompose the problem, however, the room left for the ETH becomes even narrower. Most of the CE3 (seeing an ufonaut) and all of the so-called CE4 (alien abduction) occur when the witness is in a state of altered consciousness (or facing the “Oz factor” to use Jenny Randle’s terminology). It is important to note also that someone in a state of altered consciousness is usually not be aware of it. Hence, CE3 are still not offering any tangible evidence for the ETH, as in altered state of consciousness reality and fiction tend to get mixed up (the Kantian issue discussed above). Such situations can be caused by known physical source of energy applied to the brain, as research in laboratory setting shows (particularly Persinger). The physical marks can also be explained by self-action of the experiencer when he/she is a state of altered consciousness, and he or she will have no conscious memory of having done it. They actually tend to attribute, wrongly, these marks to the action of what was seen during the event. Psychiatry has extended empirical evidence about this type of unconscious behaviour.
Most CE 2 (leaving physical traces) can also be explained by what we know about balls of light. The only exceptions are the relatively rare instances where geometric marks (square, rectangles) are found leaving an imprint in the ground. CE 1 that involve seeing a manufactured object can at times be construed as misperceptions caused by altered state of consciousness, but not always, especially when there are several witnesses reporting the same description. As one can see, the room for the ETH is rather much narrower than most people think. From the point of view of physical evidence, there is nothing to support the ETH in these instances, as no materiel, equipment or biological tissues “out of this Earth” was ever found. It still fails the external validity test. As it will be shown in the next post, other explanations with some empirical evidence supporting them and more in line with was is already known can be offered to explain these last elements. The ETH also fails the internal validity test. Hence, given these two test failures and its relatively limited applicability, there are no rational at this point to maintain a special explanation such as the ETH.
The Biological Reality of UFOs
There is a biological component to the UFO experience if we consider “mind postures” more likely to lead to altered state of consciousness as a biological issue. There is now substantial evidence to show that altered state of consciousness plays an important part in the UFO experience, but such states are likely to occur to people predisposed to have a lower threshold between the conscious mind and the unconscious. Such threshold is in part biological, although it can be trained (like a muscle) through various techniques like meditation, yoga, etc. According to Budden’s research, some people have a greater sensibility to electromagnetism due to prolonged exposure to electromagnetic fields. There are also people who neurologically developed dissociative personalities, oftentimes the result of a defence mechanism developed during a traumatic childhood. Lastly, there are people who seem to have an innate lower threshold, and they are oftentimes found in artistic and creative professions. The empirical evidence here is quite strong, and it is in line with what is known about UFO experiences, and parapsychology.
The Social-Historical Reality of UFOs
There is a social and historical component to the UFO experience in as much as its content can be traced back to sociological realities. UFOs are specific to our time, and appear to be closely related to our capacity of imagining flying machines. Some may argue that the Bible and ancient Hindu texts discusses flying machines, and this is quite true. The possibility of imagining flying machine is in itself not time bound, but “seeing” strange objects in the sky on an ongoing basis is unique to our time. The content of UFO sightings seems also to be related to social dynamics. From the Airship story of 1896, to the Kenneth Arnold’s sightings of flying objects wobbling like flying saucers, to the rash of contactees emerging after George Adamski published Flying Saucers Have Landed in 1953, one can only see that the content of UFO experience is at least partially socially constructed.
Only one unusual sighting or experience (actually alleged sighting or experience) is enough to create a series of similar sightings that can last for decades. A case in point is the Betty and Barney Hill experience with the so-called Grey ETs. It was a first, and it became publicly known in 1966 with the publication of Interrupted Journey. Then, the Becky Andreasson case occurred in 1967. But the real “epidemic” of Grey ETs abductions started in the mid 1970s, coinciding with the broadcast of a TV film entitled The UFO Incident, aired the first time on NBC in October 1975, and relating the story of Hill couples’ experience. As well, Bertrand Meheust has provided extensive analyses to show that science fiction impacts the content of UFO experiences. The evidence for a social-historical dimension to the UFO experience is very strong and it is in line what was is known about other paranormal phenomena like the apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Catholic countries or areas, the Chupacabra in Spanish speaking countries, etc.
The Psychological Reality of UFOs
Here it is at times difficult to separate the physiological aspect of altered states of consciousness, and the actual experience. However, to provide an analytical distinction, the psychological aspect of the UFO experience is understood as the intrapsychic component, and this relates to our understanding of both consciousness and the unconscious. This is, in turn, links directly to the question of imagination, as it appears to be the bridge between the two. The conscious mind creates reality through imagining, correcting the creation as it rubs itself against reality. The unconscious processes, stores and sends back the results of the imaginary process to the conscious mind in a subliminal and/or symbolic way. Hence, the distinction between imaginary realm and reality is much more subtle that most people think. An obvious example of this is when people get into an accident and feel no pain until they realized they are injured. It is on this bridge that the question of psi needs to be understood. Psi can be construed as the reverse process described above: reality is created in the unconscious mind, and the conscious mind uses imagination to make sense of it, which in turn may affect reality. Certainly, the remote viewing process appears to work that way and there is some empirical evidence to support this.
It is quite clear that there is an important psi element in the UFO experience. For instance, altered perceptions seem to be telepathically shared when there is more than one witness. There are too many similarities in the experience for a regular psychological explanation to hold. Although there is some research on the “folie à deux”, such research shows that “folie à deux” only occur when one witness is having a particularly strong psychological hold on the other, and thus influence him/her to believe in a particular perception. It is not to say that it cannot happen in UFO cases, but when there are several witnesses, physically apart and not knowing each other, the “folie à deux” cannot be invoked.
Psi research shows that believing in paranormal increases the probability of psi effects, and there is no reason to think that it is any different with the UFO experience. This actually relates directly to the question of imagination. These beliefs play an important part in establishing a bridge between the conscious and unconscious mind, although it is not a mandatory one. Some research empirically supports this statement, particularly the Anamnesis Project.
Yet, contrary to remote viewing and many other forms of psychic experiment, UFO experiences are spontaneous and not predictable. It appears as if an external psi source is involved in creating the psi experience (in one’s own unconscious). It is also contrary to RSPKs experiences, where clearly a particular type of dysfunctional personality is usually involved. Furthermore, in the case of UFO waves there seem to be multiple or no focus persons involved in the event. Certainly, it is this aspect of the UFO experience that also keeps alive the 2nd degree ETH, and the paranormal explanations (PNH) proposed by Jacques Vallée and John Keel. Unfortunately, there is no possible evidence for such approaches. If one assumes that non-human entities are involved, then it also implies that these entities can “play” with the experience at will. Thus, it is beyond the reach of any analysis. This is the analytical position taken by parapsychology, and it paid off, as our knowledge of paranormal has advanced under parapsychology while it remained stagnant with the old fashion psychical research. Following this approach for UFO, is therefore consistent with what is known.
There are a fair amount of empirical evidence to link UFOs and psi effect, and many of the UFO experience characteristics are coherent with was is known about psi effect. However, the issue of an external source of psi appears to not fit what is known in parapsychology. On the other hand, parapsychology tend to shy away from the study of paranormal phenomena that seem to have an external source to a specific individual(s) unconscious mental processes.
Part II
In the second part, in an attempt to answer provisionally some of the questions left pending in Part I, the interaction between ontological levels will be explored.
Copyright © 2008 Eric Ouellet
Reading Notes Schnabel’s Remote Viewers
As a related topic to psi research, I read Jim Schnabel’s Remote Viewers: The secret history of America’s psychic spies (New York: Dell, 1997). Although this book is not about UFOs, it opens a window into how some portions of parapsychology has evolved over time. Hence, my comments are not some much about the spy story of the various projects that American intelligence agencies supported over the years, but rather about the background of all this.
The main organization behind the research about remote viewing was the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a scientific think-tank connected to Stanford University, near San Francisco, California. The SRI is essentially an organization doing leading edge research on a contract basis for the U.S. government and the private sector. The SRI was closely involved with the electronic and telecommunication revolution that lead to the creation of the Internet. For instance, Jacques Vallée in his day job was working with the SRI to develop the telecommunication technologies that lead to the “electronic superhighway”. (Jacques Vallée did some work with SRI in the field of remote viewing as well). The SRI is very much part, hence, of the Silicon Valley community. One more point, the famous Bell Labs, also located in the Silicon Valley is the home of another important parapsychologist, Dean Radin.
Psi and people
One of the early findings of the SRI, as part of the remote viewing project, is that they are no particular traits or characteristics attached to people who have abilities in remote viewing. The only predictor, and it was a weak one, was that people who had psychic experience before, or simply believe in the paranormal tended to have more abilities. The SRI conducted later on psychological tests on people who had remote viewing abilities, and they found these people tend to be more intuitive, emotionally sensitive and prone to altered states of consciousness than the average population. Having an easy access to one’s own unconscious mind appears to be the key. This is in line with other research in parapsychology.
The SRI also conducted some research on psychokinesis (PK), with much less success. The only event that was really worth mentioning was the strange apparitions that occurred after they did work with the famous medium Uri Geller. These were unexplained, and were not pursued further by the SRI, although it was figured out that some of those apparitions were symbolic “notifications” about mundane events in the future. The SRI people, and others, figured out quickly that Geller was bending spoons with his hands, not with his mind (although he appeared to have genuine remote viewing abilities about future events).
The apparition events give the impression that Geller, inadvertently, activated people’s psi abilities and these in turn translated into involuntary psi effects. Like with many psychics (and shamans for that matter), there is always a mix of genuine psi abilities and trickery. Such a trickery, is not only useful to increase belief in the paranormal for people around, but to self-deceive the psychic himself/herself in believing in the paranormal (i.e., as we all do to, psychics and shamans are playing “little games” with their own unconscious mind). It appears, once again, that believing in the paranormal is an important component to enable psi effects to occur.
Psi and electromagnetism
It is interesting to note that the SRI conducted remote-viewing experiments where the viewers were inside a special chamber that prevents any electromagnetic emissions to go through. This had no effect on the experiment. Clearly, the idea that psi is some sort of low frequency signal does not hold. The US military did also some research on extremely low frequencies to communicate with their submarines, and found that it could only be a one-way signal from the ground base to the submerged sub, and that it required enormous amount of energy, while telepathic experiment could be done by ordinary remote viewers going both ways. The SRI also did some experiments on the impact of the Earth’s natural magnetic field variations and on the impact of thunderstorms during remote viewing sessions. These experiments were down in the wake of Persinger’s (Laurentian University) finding about the brain and electromagnetism. It was found that they had an impact on the quality of the remote viewing abilities, but such impact was too weak to make any significant differences. These researches, and others, show that Budden in Electric UFOs overestimated the role of electromagnetism on consciousness in the UFO experience. Electromagnetism appears to be yet another enabler, but not the source of psi effects.
Psi and time
One of the problems remote-viewers had was to identify if what they were seeing was actually in the present. Many successful sessions involved seeing scenes that were either in the past or in the future. This is further confirmation that psi is not only unaffected by space, but also by time. Yet, an interesting finding was that it was difficult for remote viewers to see specific numbers or words, such as lottery numbers. One of the explanations given was that they were seeing a probable future, and that the more specific (or probabilistic) an information is, the more difficult it is to find. As well, the further away they were looking into the future the more difficult it was. From that point of view, time was acting a bit like an energy field: the further away one is from the present, the more difficult it is to detect information; and the more tenuous (or highly randomized, e.g., lottery numbers) the information is the more difficult it is to detect. This is a bit odd that psi works like an energy field when it comes to dealing with time while it seems unaffected by spatial distance (and thus appears to be non-local correlations). However, in the case of PK, psi appears to behave like an energy field too. I am just wondering if these inconsistencies are not due to profound unconscious beliefs that emerge from our interaction with reality; matter and time seem so immutable to us that we cannot imagine them otherwise, and thus preventing psi effects to occur in a fully non-local correlation way. Clearly, there is a need to develop a phenomenology of psi.
Psi and consciousness
The SRI researchers found something that the philosopher Immanuel Kant already found 200 years ago. We need the clutter of our mind (words, culture, socialization personal experience, etc) to relate to the world around us, to name things, to make sense of reality. Yet, this clutter is also what prevents us to see the world without bias. It is what is called phenomenology by philosophers. The SRI people, in good positivist, empiricist, and materialistic researchers they were, did not make the connection with Kant, but figured out that the verbal, analytical and mathematical abilities were related to a specific part of the brain, while the unconscious and intuitive faculties were in a different part of the brain. Having to pass from one to the other had the effect of “disconnecting” the psi faculty while the brain was looking for analytical information to make sense of the raw sensations coming from the psi faculties.
Another interesting idea that emerged during that period was that psi in its ESP form seems to be quite similar to subliminal messages. Subliminal messages are flash messages (or very low volume in the case of audition), but long enough to be seen by the unconscious mind. These will be recorded by the brain, but only the key features are retained, not the details. Out of these finding about psi, the SRI developed a technique to assess and re-asses the message (while trying to avoid the analytical part of the brain to insert imaginary elements in the raw psi sensation in trying to make sense of it). This technique, however, did not seem to make any difference in the quality of the remote viewing. It appears that self-correcting intuitive processes remain the only way to depart “noise from signal” in remote viewing, and that it is relatively low success rate constitutes an absolute limitation. But the SRI people were not the first ones to have figure out this issue. René Warcollier, a French psychic researcher of the first half of the 20th century, had already written a book on the topic in 1946. Of course, our very American people at the SRI, did not read the parapsychology work done in other countries (except the Soviet Union, as it was part of a Cold War endeavour).
Other comments
The book is overall a good read, and provides a good overview of the ups and downs of the American remote viewing project. Although there are some rumours about the National Security Agency reviving the remote viewing activities, the project was formally disbanded. Many of the people who were involved went freelance, either as remote viewer for a fee, or as trainers in remote viewing (also for a fee). Some of them, like Russel Targ, gave a mystical/religious twist to remote viewing. Others work mostly with New Age oriented people or groups. From the point of view of sociology of science, it is interesting to note that the people who were involved in the field went from one extreme to the other, from the positivist, empiricist, and materialistic standpoint to a New Age outlook, where one should know, truthfulness, reality, and the like are not important issues. This is a reinforcing lesson for parasociology to ensure that it avoids both of these traps.
Copyright © 2008 Eric Ouellet
The main organization behind the research about remote viewing was the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a scientific think-tank connected to Stanford University, near San Francisco, California. The SRI is essentially an organization doing leading edge research on a contract basis for the U.S. government and the private sector. The SRI was closely involved with the electronic and telecommunication revolution that lead to the creation of the Internet. For instance, Jacques Vallée in his day job was working with the SRI to develop the telecommunication technologies that lead to the “electronic superhighway”. (Jacques Vallée did some work with SRI in the field of remote viewing as well). The SRI is very much part, hence, of the Silicon Valley community. One more point, the famous Bell Labs, also located in the Silicon Valley is the home of another important parapsychologist, Dean Radin.
Psi and people
One of the early findings of the SRI, as part of the remote viewing project, is that they are no particular traits or characteristics attached to people who have abilities in remote viewing. The only predictor, and it was a weak one, was that people who had psychic experience before, or simply believe in the paranormal tended to have more abilities. The SRI conducted later on psychological tests on people who had remote viewing abilities, and they found these people tend to be more intuitive, emotionally sensitive and prone to altered states of consciousness than the average population. Having an easy access to one’s own unconscious mind appears to be the key. This is in line with other research in parapsychology.
The SRI also conducted some research on psychokinesis (PK), with much less success. The only event that was really worth mentioning was the strange apparitions that occurred after they did work with the famous medium Uri Geller. These were unexplained, and were not pursued further by the SRI, although it was figured out that some of those apparitions were symbolic “notifications” about mundane events in the future. The SRI people, and others, figured out quickly that Geller was bending spoons with his hands, not with his mind (although he appeared to have genuine remote viewing abilities about future events).
The apparition events give the impression that Geller, inadvertently, activated people’s psi abilities and these in turn translated into involuntary psi effects. Like with many psychics (and shamans for that matter), there is always a mix of genuine psi abilities and trickery. Such a trickery, is not only useful to increase belief in the paranormal for people around, but to self-deceive the psychic himself/herself in believing in the paranormal (i.e., as we all do to, psychics and shamans are playing “little games” with their own unconscious mind). It appears, once again, that believing in the paranormal is an important component to enable psi effects to occur.
Psi and electromagnetism
It is interesting to note that the SRI conducted remote-viewing experiments where the viewers were inside a special chamber that prevents any electromagnetic emissions to go through. This had no effect on the experiment. Clearly, the idea that psi is some sort of low frequency signal does not hold. The US military did also some research on extremely low frequencies to communicate with their submarines, and found that it could only be a one-way signal from the ground base to the submerged sub, and that it required enormous amount of energy, while telepathic experiment could be done by ordinary remote viewers going both ways. The SRI also did some experiments on the impact of the Earth’s natural magnetic field variations and on the impact of thunderstorms during remote viewing sessions. These experiments were down in the wake of Persinger’s (Laurentian University) finding about the brain and electromagnetism. It was found that they had an impact on the quality of the remote viewing abilities, but such impact was too weak to make any significant differences. These researches, and others, show that Budden in Electric UFOs overestimated the role of electromagnetism on consciousness in the UFO experience. Electromagnetism appears to be yet another enabler, but not the source of psi effects.
Psi and time
One of the problems remote-viewers had was to identify if what they were seeing was actually in the present. Many successful sessions involved seeing scenes that were either in the past or in the future. This is further confirmation that psi is not only unaffected by space, but also by time. Yet, an interesting finding was that it was difficult for remote viewers to see specific numbers or words, such as lottery numbers. One of the explanations given was that they were seeing a probable future, and that the more specific (or probabilistic) an information is, the more difficult it is to find. As well, the further away they were looking into the future the more difficult it was. From that point of view, time was acting a bit like an energy field: the further away one is from the present, the more difficult it is to detect information; and the more tenuous (or highly randomized, e.g., lottery numbers) the information is the more difficult it is to detect. This is a bit odd that psi works like an energy field when it comes to dealing with time while it seems unaffected by spatial distance (and thus appears to be non-local correlations). However, in the case of PK, psi appears to behave like an energy field too. I am just wondering if these inconsistencies are not due to profound unconscious beliefs that emerge from our interaction with reality; matter and time seem so immutable to us that we cannot imagine them otherwise, and thus preventing psi effects to occur in a fully non-local correlation way. Clearly, there is a need to develop a phenomenology of psi.
Psi and consciousness
The SRI researchers found something that the philosopher Immanuel Kant already found 200 years ago. We need the clutter of our mind (words, culture, socialization personal experience, etc) to relate to the world around us, to name things, to make sense of reality. Yet, this clutter is also what prevents us to see the world without bias. It is what is called phenomenology by philosophers. The SRI people, in good positivist, empiricist, and materialistic researchers they were, did not make the connection with Kant, but figured out that the verbal, analytical and mathematical abilities were related to a specific part of the brain, while the unconscious and intuitive faculties were in a different part of the brain. Having to pass from one to the other had the effect of “disconnecting” the psi faculty while the brain was looking for analytical information to make sense of the raw sensations coming from the psi faculties.
Another interesting idea that emerged during that period was that psi in its ESP form seems to be quite similar to subliminal messages. Subliminal messages are flash messages (or very low volume in the case of audition), but long enough to be seen by the unconscious mind. These will be recorded by the brain, but only the key features are retained, not the details. Out of these finding about psi, the SRI developed a technique to assess and re-asses the message (while trying to avoid the analytical part of the brain to insert imaginary elements in the raw psi sensation in trying to make sense of it). This technique, however, did not seem to make any difference in the quality of the remote viewing. It appears that self-correcting intuitive processes remain the only way to depart “noise from signal” in remote viewing, and that it is relatively low success rate constitutes an absolute limitation. But the SRI people were not the first ones to have figure out this issue. René Warcollier, a French psychic researcher of the first half of the 20th century, had already written a book on the topic in 1946. Of course, our very American people at the SRI, did not read the parapsychology work done in other countries (except the Soviet Union, as it was part of a Cold War endeavour).
Other comments
The book is overall a good read, and provides a good overview of the ups and downs of the American remote viewing project. Although there are some rumours about the National Security Agency reviving the remote viewing activities, the project was formally disbanded. Many of the people who were involved went freelance, either as remote viewer for a fee, or as trainers in remote viewing (also for a fee). Some of them, like Russel Targ, gave a mystical/religious twist to remote viewing. Others work mostly with New Age oriented people or groups. From the point of view of sociology of science, it is interesting to note that the people who were involved in the field went from one extreme to the other, from the positivist, empiricist, and materialistic standpoint to a New Age outlook, where one should know, truthfulness, reality, and the like are not important issues. This is a reinforcing lesson for parasociology to ensure that it avoids both of these traps.
Copyright © 2008 Eric Ouellet
Friday, November 21, 2008
Reading Notes on Budden’s Electric UFOs
As discussed in a previous post, I planned to read Albert Budden’s Electric UFOs: Fireballs, electromagnetics and abnormal states (London: Blandford, 1998), and I just finished it. It is an interesting read, but the author does not deliver what he promises. He promises a unified theory that explains not only UFO sightings, but also alien sightings, ESPs, poltergeists and pretty much any other paranormal phenomena. In a nut shell, for Budden UFOs are various types highly magnetized balls of lights. Sightings of aliens, ghosts, and the like are magnetically induced hallucinations. ESPs are weak electrical signals that only the brain can capture, and poltergeists are brain-induced electro-magnetic effects. Given the grandiose tone of Budden’s book, a few remarks are needed before looking into what he can bring to the study of UFOs.
No unified theory and a lot of reductionism
Some of the fundamental assumptions of this book are, in my opinion, quite problematic. The author tries to situate his work within the greater context of UFO studies. He rejects the ETH, as there is no physical evidence to support it. Because the ETH is essentially a materialistic hypothesis, and its failure to deliver any physical evidence about extra-terrestrial presence disqualifies it. So far so good. He also rejects the so-called psychosocial hypothesis (PSH) that he defines as an:
“... approach which maintains that there are no physical stimuli behind unidentified flying objects (UFOs), alien-abduction experiences, hauntings, poltergeists, etc., but that such phenomena are created and maintained by belief systems, urban myth, rumour, group cohesion and other social constructs.” (p. 15)
He further states that: “I read sociology at university and am aware that, while these unusual consciousness effects generate sociological implications, because they involve human groups, they are not sociological in themselves, but bioelectromagnetic in nature” (p.16).
Lastly, he also mentions at a later point that he rejects approaches that are reductionist.
If I agree with him about his criticism of the PSH, because it does not take into consideration physical evidences, I must say that he is completely wrong in rejecting the existence of social constructs. As von Lucadou has shown through empirical research on RSPKs, the social environment is critical to understand what is happening. Another criticism that can be leveraged against Budden is his incapacity to explain how several individuals exposed to same electromagnetically event would have the same hallucination. In this regard, it is interesting to note that all the examples he gives in the annexes of his book are ones of single individual experiences.
As each individual has its own unique life story, images and fantasies, a high intensity electromagnetic field (EMF) would cause as many different forms of hallucinations. Without calling to his rescue some elements of psychosocial dynamics, it is impossible for Budden to stop his analysis at the physical level. Following Jacques Vallée’s work of UFO sightings, we know that the content of sightings/hallucination is culturally and era specific (e.g., the gray abduction scenario was particular to North America for quite a while; dwarfs and elves were seen in the past, aliens are seen nowadays, etc). His rejection of reductionism is very ironic, as his own approach is essentially reductionist!
No mention of parapsychology, psi or Einstein’s physics
Another problem is his statement that his approach is interdisciplinary (pp. 29-30), and that the epistemological gaps between disciplines must be bridged if one wants to understand the UFO phenomenon. In fact, the only sciences he really cares about are the physical and medical ones. Yet, his book is also about hallucinations and altered states of consciousness, which are neither in the domain of physics and biological/medical sciences. His research object requires that he bridges the real epistemological gap in science: the one dividing the natural and human sciences without reducing one to the other. Thus, in spite of putting a lot of emphasis on consciousness, he completely ignores psychology, and noetic sciences.
His failure to be truly interdisciplinary is even greater, as he claims to be able to explain all paranormal phenomena without mentioning a single word about research in parapsychology. Budden writes about psychic research and of “other ghost hunters” in a very critical way. But he does not seem to know that psychic research and parapsychology are quite different and that they are built on different assumptions. Scientific parapsychology actually tries to bridge the gap between physical and human sciences, and involves the work of people who understand how human consciousness works (psychological training of parapsychologists).
As well, his ignorance of the research in parapsychology brings him to a second failure when it is time to deal with the content of hallucinations. Psychosocial dynamics certainly provides the basic material for people to have similar hallucinations, but it cannot explain how people can have the same hallucination. A third component needs to be introduced, and this is the notion of psi, understood as correlating information non-locally. If he is not aware of their work, then his research skill should be questioned. If he purposefully ignored parapsychology, then his work should be considered as extremely biased.
My last criticism is about the very Newtonian approach he takes when discussing electromagnetism. Physicists and parapsychologists have shown that to understand psi effects, one really needs Einstein physics, and not so much Newton’s. Budden never envisions the possibility that some of his analyses would benefit from being reframed into a relativistic and quantum physics framework. As Budden claims that ESP are simply electrical signals received by people who are sensitive to EMF, he does not explain how the signal is coded and then decoded. The use of EMF to send signal by radio, TV, and other communication devices is only the physical support for the signal, but it is not its content. As well, as parapsychologists have found, psi does not seem to respect time barriers (observed by people acquiring knowledge of the future and of the past), and it does not respect distance (like in the case of remote viewing). An electrical signal, like any field in Newtonian physics, exists in a linear timeline and decreases by the square of the distance (e.g., a field with 16 units energy at distance of 2, will only have only 4 units of energy at a distance of 4). In Budden’s theory, premonition is impossible and long distance telepathy would be very unlikely. Yet, empirical research shows otherwise. The concept of non-locality, once more, explains much better paranormal phenomena than speculating about a weak electrical signal that would be captured by the human brain. Again, if he had read scientific parapsychology, he would know better.
In the end, one has to understand Budden’s approach as being materialistic and reductionist, in way similar to the work done by people involved in the ETH. However, I think Budden has still touched upon a number interesting point.
Useful and Interesting Points
Budden considers that UFOs and other paranormal phenomena are caused by either natural or man-made electromagnetic effects. With respect to UFOs, it is certainly coherent with what is known about the physical reality of UFOs. As well, with the work of researchers like Michael Persinger it is known that electromagnetic fields (EMF) can induce hallucinations. What Budden adds is that some people are more sensitive to EMF than others, and that they are more susceptible to have paranormal experiences. He also contributes to the discussion by identifying that some people become more sensitive to EMF by being exposed to EMF for prolonged periods (e.g., living nearby power lines, telecom towers, radio amateurs stations, etc).
Budden goes a bit further and states that people who have dissociative personalities plus sensitivity to EMF are the most likely to have paranormal experiences. Here I would add an important nuance to avoid espousing not only a reductionist approach, but also stereotyping people. Research in parapsychology tends to show it is rather people who have a lower threshold to connect with their unconscious mind that are more susceptible to experience psi effect. This includes people with dissociative personalities (which is considered as being a pathology), but also artistic, creative, and intuitive people who have no pathology at all. As well, it includes people who follow spiritual paths that can be described as “mystical” (e.g., Sufism, Shamanism, cloistered contemplative Catholic nuns, etc.).
This is an interesting idea, and this offers criteria to look into individuals who have UFO/alien experiences, but it is not sufficient to study UFO waves. Given the extended nature of some UFO waves and the wide array of people involved, it is unlikely that such criteria would provide useful explanations about waves. However, it may be useful to explain why some people would have more intense experiences than others during a wave.
The greatest contribution from Budden remains where his assumptions lies: the physical dimension of UFOs. Budden provides a detailed chapter on how balls of light and earth lights are created, whether naturally and through what he calls electromagnetic pollution. He uses the work of several authors, including the work done by the Hessdalen Project in Norway. He provides a technical analysis as to how these balls of plasma are created and concludes that three conditions are necessary to create fireballs: “1. Generate a lot of carbon or vaporized metal particles in a small region of space; 2. Create large electric fields in the same vicinity; 3. Rapidly elevate the temperature of the particles.”(p. 184).
These balls of light have different properties depending on the quantity of matter or energy involved during their creation (some will be short lived, a few seconds, others can last for hours; some will be very hot while others will be less hot; some will be highly charged electromagnetically while others will be less, etc.). The source of energy producing the EMF can be natural (e.g., geological fault) or man-made when different radio frequencies intersect at the same point. Lastly, these balls of light can be created in laboratory, and he quotes abundantly the Canadian John Hutchison. This offers some criteria to evaluate if such conditions exist in a sustained way so that it can produce a UFO wave.
Another potential contribution, but it remains implicit in his book, is a new explanation for the 90 degree turns observed in several UFO sightings, which on the surface appears to violate the laws of physics. But if UFOs are highly magnetically charged balls of plasma, and that they are created in part by radio waves at different frequencies but intersecting at the same point, then may be radio emissions can serve as temporary “rail road” for the UFOs. Some of the most common radio emissions are called square waves, very useful to send the binary signal at the heart of digital encoding. Hence, maybe those 90 degree turns are to be understood as some sort of short-lived and grand scale spectrometer “display.”
Copyright © 2008 Eric Ouellet
No unified theory and a lot of reductionism
Some of the fundamental assumptions of this book are, in my opinion, quite problematic. The author tries to situate his work within the greater context of UFO studies. He rejects the ETH, as there is no physical evidence to support it. Because the ETH is essentially a materialistic hypothesis, and its failure to deliver any physical evidence about extra-terrestrial presence disqualifies it. So far so good. He also rejects the so-called psychosocial hypothesis (PSH) that he defines as an:
“... approach which maintains that there are no physical stimuli behind unidentified flying objects (UFOs), alien-abduction experiences, hauntings, poltergeists, etc., but that such phenomena are created and maintained by belief systems, urban myth, rumour, group cohesion and other social constructs.” (p. 15)
He further states that: “I read sociology at university and am aware that, while these unusual consciousness effects generate sociological implications, because they involve human groups, they are not sociological in themselves, but bioelectromagnetic in nature” (p.16).
Lastly, he also mentions at a later point that he rejects approaches that are reductionist.
If I agree with him about his criticism of the PSH, because it does not take into consideration physical evidences, I must say that he is completely wrong in rejecting the existence of social constructs. As von Lucadou has shown through empirical research on RSPKs, the social environment is critical to understand what is happening. Another criticism that can be leveraged against Budden is his incapacity to explain how several individuals exposed to same electromagnetically event would have the same hallucination. In this regard, it is interesting to note that all the examples he gives in the annexes of his book are ones of single individual experiences.
As each individual has its own unique life story, images and fantasies, a high intensity electromagnetic field (EMF) would cause as many different forms of hallucinations. Without calling to his rescue some elements of psychosocial dynamics, it is impossible for Budden to stop his analysis at the physical level. Following Jacques Vallée’s work of UFO sightings, we know that the content of sightings/hallucination is culturally and era specific (e.g., the gray abduction scenario was particular to North America for quite a while; dwarfs and elves were seen in the past, aliens are seen nowadays, etc). His rejection of reductionism is very ironic, as his own approach is essentially reductionist!
No mention of parapsychology, psi or Einstein’s physics
Another problem is his statement that his approach is interdisciplinary (pp. 29-30), and that the epistemological gaps between disciplines must be bridged if one wants to understand the UFO phenomenon. In fact, the only sciences he really cares about are the physical and medical ones. Yet, his book is also about hallucinations and altered states of consciousness, which are neither in the domain of physics and biological/medical sciences. His research object requires that he bridges the real epistemological gap in science: the one dividing the natural and human sciences without reducing one to the other. Thus, in spite of putting a lot of emphasis on consciousness, he completely ignores psychology, and noetic sciences.
His failure to be truly interdisciplinary is even greater, as he claims to be able to explain all paranormal phenomena without mentioning a single word about research in parapsychology. Budden writes about psychic research and of “other ghost hunters” in a very critical way. But he does not seem to know that psychic research and parapsychology are quite different and that they are built on different assumptions. Scientific parapsychology actually tries to bridge the gap between physical and human sciences, and involves the work of people who understand how human consciousness works (psychological training of parapsychologists).
As well, his ignorance of the research in parapsychology brings him to a second failure when it is time to deal with the content of hallucinations. Psychosocial dynamics certainly provides the basic material for people to have similar hallucinations, but it cannot explain how people can have the same hallucination. A third component needs to be introduced, and this is the notion of psi, understood as correlating information non-locally. If he is not aware of their work, then his research skill should be questioned. If he purposefully ignored parapsychology, then his work should be considered as extremely biased.
My last criticism is about the very Newtonian approach he takes when discussing electromagnetism. Physicists and parapsychologists have shown that to understand psi effects, one really needs Einstein physics, and not so much Newton’s. Budden never envisions the possibility that some of his analyses would benefit from being reframed into a relativistic and quantum physics framework. As Budden claims that ESP are simply electrical signals received by people who are sensitive to EMF, he does not explain how the signal is coded and then decoded. The use of EMF to send signal by radio, TV, and other communication devices is only the physical support for the signal, but it is not its content. As well, as parapsychologists have found, psi does not seem to respect time barriers (observed by people acquiring knowledge of the future and of the past), and it does not respect distance (like in the case of remote viewing). An electrical signal, like any field in Newtonian physics, exists in a linear timeline and decreases by the square of the distance (e.g., a field with 16 units energy at distance of 2, will only have only 4 units of energy at a distance of 4). In Budden’s theory, premonition is impossible and long distance telepathy would be very unlikely. Yet, empirical research shows otherwise. The concept of non-locality, once more, explains much better paranormal phenomena than speculating about a weak electrical signal that would be captured by the human brain. Again, if he had read scientific parapsychology, he would know better.
In the end, one has to understand Budden’s approach as being materialistic and reductionist, in way similar to the work done by people involved in the ETH. However, I think Budden has still touched upon a number interesting point.
Useful and Interesting Points
Budden considers that UFOs and other paranormal phenomena are caused by either natural or man-made electromagnetic effects. With respect to UFOs, it is certainly coherent with what is known about the physical reality of UFOs. As well, with the work of researchers like Michael Persinger it is known that electromagnetic fields (EMF) can induce hallucinations. What Budden adds is that some people are more sensitive to EMF than others, and that they are more susceptible to have paranormal experiences. He also contributes to the discussion by identifying that some people become more sensitive to EMF by being exposed to EMF for prolonged periods (e.g., living nearby power lines, telecom towers, radio amateurs stations, etc).
Budden goes a bit further and states that people who have dissociative personalities plus sensitivity to EMF are the most likely to have paranormal experiences. Here I would add an important nuance to avoid espousing not only a reductionist approach, but also stereotyping people. Research in parapsychology tends to show it is rather people who have a lower threshold to connect with their unconscious mind that are more susceptible to experience psi effect. This includes people with dissociative personalities (which is considered as being a pathology), but also artistic, creative, and intuitive people who have no pathology at all. As well, it includes people who follow spiritual paths that can be described as “mystical” (e.g., Sufism, Shamanism, cloistered contemplative Catholic nuns, etc.).
This is an interesting idea, and this offers criteria to look into individuals who have UFO/alien experiences, but it is not sufficient to study UFO waves. Given the extended nature of some UFO waves and the wide array of people involved, it is unlikely that such criteria would provide useful explanations about waves. However, it may be useful to explain why some people would have more intense experiences than others during a wave.
The greatest contribution from Budden remains where his assumptions lies: the physical dimension of UFOs. Budden provides a detailed chapter on how balls of light and earth lights are created, whether naturally and through what he calls electromagnetic pollution. He uses the work of several authors, including the work done by the Hessdalen Project in Norway. He provides a technical analysis as to how these balls of plasma are created and concludes that three conditions are necessary to create fireballs: “1. Generate a lot of carbon or vaporized metal particles in a small region of space; 2. Create large electric fields in the same vicinity; 3. Rapidly elevate the temperature of the particles.”(p. 184).
These balls of light have different properties depending on the quantity of matter or energy involved during their creation (some will be short lived, a few seconds, others can last for hours; some will be very hot while others will be less hot; some will be highly charged electromagnetically while others will be less, etc.). The source of energy producing the EMF can be natural (e.g., geological fault) or man-made when different radio frequencies intersect at the same point. Lastly, these balls of light can be created in laboratory, and he quotes abundantly the Canadian John Hutchison. This offers some criteria to evaluate if such conditions exist in a sustained way so that it can produce a UFO wave.
Another potential contribution, but it remains implicit in his book, is a new explanation for the 90 degree turns observed in several UFO sightings, which on the surface appears to violate the laws of physics. But if UFOs are highly magnetically charged balls of plasma, and that they are created in part by radio waves at different frequencies but intersecting at the same point, then may be radio emissions can serve as temporary “rail road” for the UFOs. Some of the most common radio emissions are called square waves, very useful to send the binary signal at the heart of digital encoding. Hence, maybe those 90 degree turns are to be understood as some sort of short-lived and grand scale spectrometer “display.”
Copyright © 2008 Eric Ouellet
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Reading Notes - various
I read an interesting book by Greg Bishop. (2005) Project Beta : The story of Paul Bennewitz, national security, and the creation of a modern UFO myth. New York: Paraview. If people still have a few hopes that maybe Roswell and the Majestic documents could be true, they will completely abandon the Roswell/Majestic conspiracy bandwagon after reading this book.
Believing as part of an objective phenomenon
Greg Bishop, in a journalistic type of book, tells the story of Paul Bennewitz who was victim of an influence operation by the US Air Force counter- intelligence in the early 1980s. Bennewitz unknowingly was getting too close to classified military research. Yet, even before the US Air Force got involved, he was convinced that he was tapping into alien signals used to exert mind control over humanity. In reality, he simply recorded signals from a research centre working on various projects in the context of the late Cold War. In a patriotic way, he approached the Air Force with his findings about alien signals, which in turn got the Air Force very worried; but not because of an alleged alien plot, but because there was a potential serious security breach about much more mundane research projects.
As Bennewitz could not be forcibly removed from his house near the base, and the counter-intelligence did not want Soviet agents to use Bennewitz as an involuntary spy, they organized a complex disinformation scheme to distract both Bennewitz and any potential Soviet handlers. The Majestic documents were released in part during this operation, and the story linking UFOs and alien nocturnal visitations was firmly established through the bogus signals sent to Bennewitz. It is also the story of Bill Moore who worked actively with the US Air Force to disseminate false information to the ufology community. Most of that disinformation was easy to uncover, or it was pure rumours without any verifiable references. The ETH ufological community was very much victim of itself by being so uncritical, so ready to believe anything that fits its worldview. For having worked within the defence establishment, and knowing people in the world of intelligence, I must say that Bishop’s book is very credible and plausible.
It is also interesting to note that Bishop, through interviewing the main people involved in that story almost 20 years after the facts, found a few instances where magnetized balls of light were noticed. Apparently, the US Air Force counter-intelligence and other intelligence agencies did not know what to make of these balls of light. Assuming this is not something added to spice up the story (hardly a first in journalist accounts of paranormal-related phenomena), this adds some more data to my project.
What is more interesting is that it tells how a bogus story can become a modern legend. Only one source, one receiver, a few distributors, and a story that feeds into what people are ready to believe, that’s all that is needed. The social dynamics of rumours, as Bishop’s book shows can be very powerful. As psi effects are more likely to occur if people believe in the paranormal in an uncritical way, and that socio-cultural contents tend to provide the basic material for many psi effects, I would say in a qualified way that Jung was right in choosing the title of his famous book: Flying Saucers: A modern myth of things seen in the skies.
The Bennewitz story certainly raises a number of ethical questions. Was all this necessary to protect sensitive military research in the context of the Cold War? Was there other more ethical ways to distract Bennewitz without revealing that top secret research was conducted? This hard to say, as each situation is unique. Certainly if Bennewitz would have been in the Soviet Union doing the same thing, he would have been arrested and sent to psychiatric hospital without explanations. The other question is: was it necessary to disinform the entire ufological community? This one is more problematic. I think that the counter-intelligence agencies were a bit too paranoid about possible infiltration of the ufological community by Soviet agents, and use it as a cover to spy on military research. It is true that Bennewitz with very limited means was able to uncover easily a lot of stuff (even if he did not interpret the information correctly – which a Soviet agent could have done by relaying the information to Moscow). In the end, I think that the counter-intelligence made things worse, as the distrust towards the US Air Force is such that the ufological community was able to get some politicians on the bandwagon, and forcing a few expansive investigations (e.g., GAO search for the Roswell documents, US Air Force own investigation on Roswell, repeated FOI requests).
As one can see, it is not possible to talk about “psychotronic” attempts to manipulate masses here, as Jacques Vallée and others have suggested. These events can be explained by a normal sociological analysis. In fact, if one needs a metaphor to describe this story, I would suggest the Greek tragedy: Bennewitz was victim of his own belief, the ufological community was victim of its own naivety, counter-intelligence agencies were victim of their own paranoia, and the tax payers had to foot the bill once again for little return on the investment.
Psi as the Fifth Dimension
Another interesting book I read recently is Karl Brunstein”s Beyond the Four Dimensions: Reconciling physics, parapsychology and UFOs (New York: Walker and Co., 1979). In spite of the title, however, this book is not really about UFOs. It is more in line with philosophy of science and sociology of science than with paranormal studies.
The author provides a very accessible description of the evolution of Newtonian physics into the Einstein’s physics. From this point of view, it is an excellent vulgarization book. Complex concepts such as non-locality, reversibility of time, relativity can be understood by people having little background in physics and mathematics. Also, the author is not naive and understands that science is a social construct and its evolution is intimately linked to social conditions. This is quite refreshing, as it comes from a physicist.
His book, therefore, is really an attempt to establish linkages between Einstein’s physics and parapsychology that is both cognizant of existing knowledge in both realms and of the social conditions necessary to make such a linkage. His main thesis is that psi effects are the observable, but extreme, outcome of the fifth dimension. What he proposes is essentially an analogy between physical sciences and parapsychology. In the normal physical world, we live in the four dimensions (the 3 physical plus time) of the Newtonian physics. But when we go to the extremes, the ultra small (e.g., sub-atomic particles, photons) or the ultra big (e.g., stars, black holes), then we need Einstein’s physics to explain the strange things happening. The analogy, then, would be that in the normal world of human affairs, regular psychology (and social sciences) are good enough to explain what is happening, but when we reach the extremes, different approaches are needed to explain the strange things happening. Brunstein sees parapsychology fitting such a role. I would add that the collective dimension of human affairs needs to be included, and that parasociology is therefore needed as well.
Brunstein goes a little bit further in stating that human consciousness constitutes the fifth dimension, interacting with the four others, and thus tries to provide an unified understanding of the universe. In the normal world, human consciousness interacts with the physical world by the application of human intent to the physical world (or to other human beings through the physical world – speaking is sound vibrations, gesture and writing are photons in movement, touch is physical force and electrical signals along the nerves, reproduction is bio-chemical reactions, etc), and this can be described by Newton’s physics, Jung/Freund’s psychology, Durkheim/Marx (and many others)’s sociology, etc. It is in the extreme world that we need to better understand how intent interacts with the physical world (and others’ consciousness). Brunstein proposes that psi is what can be measured when there are interactions in the extreme. From that point, he proposes that UFOs are psi “devices” of extra-terrestrial origin used to interact with us.
I am not so sure about UFO as “psi devices,” but he raises an interesting point about the extremes of human consciousness. I would propose that it is, indeed, the unconscious, where psi phenomena seem to originate according to most parapsychologists. The collective dimension of the extreme part of human consciousness would then be what is called the collective unconscious. This in turn provides further justification for a “special” discipline within sociology (or social sciences) to study the collective dimension of psi effects.
Brunstein’s book is very speculative, particularly the second part where he goes beyond scientific vulgarization. But it is an interesting read, and it can certainly provide some food for thought for those espousing the so-called “2nd degree ETH” (ETs are behind the phenomena but it is essentially a psi technology). I do not agree with the 2nd degree ETH, but it is in my view a step forward compared to the standard ETH.
Copyright © 2008 Eric Ouellet
Believing as part of an objective phenomenon
Greg Bishop, in a journalistic type of book, tells the story of Paul Bennewitz who was victim of an influence operation by the US Air Force counter- intelligence in the early 1980s. Bennewitz unknowingly was getting too close to classified military research. Yet, even before the US Air Force got involved, he was convinced that he was tapping into alien signals used to exert mind control over humanity. In reality, he simply recorded signals from a research centre working on various projects in the context of the late Cold War. In a patriotic way, he approached the Air Force with his findings about alien signals, which in turn got the Air Force very worried; but not because of an alleged alien plot, but because there was a potential serious security breach about much more mundane research projects.
As Bennewitz could not be forcibly removed from his house near the base, and the counter-intelligence did not want Soviet agents to use Bennewitz as an involuntary spy, they organized a complex disinformation scheme to distract both Bennewitz and any potential Soviet handlers. The Majestic documents were released in part during this operation, and the story linking UFOs and alien nocturnal visitations was firmly established through the bogus signals sent to Bennewitz. It is also the story of Bill Moore who worked actively with the US Air Force to disseminate false information to the ufology community. Most of that disinformation was easy to uncover, or it was pure rumours without any verifiable references. The ETH ufological community was very much victim of itself by being so uncritical, so ready to believe anything that fits its worldview. For having worked within the defence establishment, and knowing people in the world of intelligence, I must say that Bishop’s book is very credible and plausible.
It is also interesting to note that Bishop, through interviewing the main people involved in that story almost 20 years after the facts, found a few instances where magnetized balls of light were noticed. Apparently, the US Air Force counter-intelligence and other intelligence agencies did not know what to make of these balls of light. Assuming this is not something added to spice up the story (hardly a first in journalist accounts of paranormal-related phenomena), this adds some more data to my project.
What is more interesting is that it tells how a bogus story can become a modern legend. Only one source, one receiver, a few distributors, and a story that feeds into what people are ready to believe, that’s all that is needed. The social dynamics of rumours, as Bishop’s book shows can be very powerful. As psi effects are more likely to occur if people believe in the paranormal in an uncritical way, and that socio-cultural contents tend to provide the basic material for many psi effects, I would say in a qualified way that Jung was right in choosing the title of his famous book: Flying Saucers: A modern myth of things seen in the skies.
The Bennewitz story certainly raises a number of ethical questions. Was all this necessary to protect sensitive military research in the context of the Cold War? Was there other more ethical ways to distract Bennewitz without revealing that top secret research was conducted? This hard to say, as each situation is unique. Certainly if Bennewitz would have been in the Soviet Union doing the same thing, he would have been arrested and sent to psychiatric hospital without explanations. The other question is: was it necessary to disinform the entire ufological community? This one is more problematic. I think that the counter-intelligence agencies were a bit too paranoid about possible infiltration of the ufological community by Soviet agents, and use it as a cover to spy on military research. It is true that Bennewitz with very limited means was able to uncover easily a lot of stuff (even if he did not interpret the information correctly – which a Soviet agent could have done by relaying the information to Moscow). In the end, I think that the counter-intelligence made things worse, as the distrust towards the US Air Force is such that the ufological community was able to get some politicians on the bandwagon, and forcing a few expansive investigations (e.g., GAO search for the Roswell documents, US Air Force own investigation on Roswell, repeated FOI requests).
As one can see, it is not possible to talk about “psychotronic” attempts to manipulate masses here, as Jacques Vallée and others have suggested. These events can be explained by a normal sociological analysis. In fact, if one needs a metaphor to describe this story, I would suggest the Greek tragedy: Bennewitz was victim of his own belief, the ufological community was victim of its own naivety, counter-intelligence agencies were victim of their own paranoia, and the tax payers had to foot the bill once again for little return on the investment.
Psi as the Fifth Dimension
Another interesting book I read recently is Karl Brunstein”s Beyond the Four Dimensions: Reconciling physics, parapsychology and UFOs (New York: Walker and Co., 1979). In spite of the title, however, this book is not really about UFOs. It is more in line with philosophy of science and sociology of science than with paranormal studies.
The author provides a very accessible description of the evolution of Newtonian physics into the Einstein’s physics. From this point of view, it is an excellent vulgarization book. Complex concepts such as non-locality, reversibility of time, relativity can be understood by people having little background in physics and mathematics. Also, the author is not naive and understands that science is a social construct and its evolution is intimately linked to social conditions. This is quite refreshing, as it comes from a physicist.
His book, therefore, is really an attempt to establish linkages between Einstein’s physics and parapsychology that is both cognizant of existing knowledge in both realms and of the social conditions necessary to make such a linkage. His main thesis is that psi effects are the observable, but extreme, outcome of the fifth dimension. What he proposes is essentially an analogy between physical sciences and parapsychology. In the normal physical world, we live in the four dimensions (the 3 physical plus time) of the Newtonian physics. But when we go to the extremes, the ultra small (e.g., sub-atomic particles, photons) or the ultra big (e.g., stars, black holes), then we need Einstein’s physics to explain the strange things happening. The analogy, then, would be that in the normal world of human affairs, regular psychology (and social sciences) are good enough to explain what is happening, but when we reach the extremes, different approaches are needed to explain the strange things happening. Brunstein sees parapsychology fitting such a role. I would add that the collective dimension of human affairs needs to be included, and that parasociology is therefore needed as well.
Brunstein goes a little bit further in stating that human consciousness constitutes the fifth dimension, interacting with the four others, and thus tries to provide an unified understanding of the universe. In the normal world, human consciousness interacts with the physical world by the application of human intent to the physical world (or to other human beings through the physical world – speaking is sound vibrations, gesture and writing are photons in movement, touch is physical force and electrical signals along the nerves, reproduction is bio-chemical reactions, etc), and this can be described by Newton’s physics, Jung/Freund’s psychology, Durkheim/Marx (and many others)’s sociology, etc. It is in the extreme world that we need to better understand how intent interacts with the physical world (and others’ consciousness). Brunstein proposes that psi is what can be measured when there are interactions in the extreme. From that point, he proposes that UFOs are psi “devices” of extra-terrestrial origin used to interact with us.
I am not so sure about UFO as “psi devices,” but he raises an interesting point about the extremes of human consciousness. I would propose that it is, indeed, the unconscious, where psi phenomena seem to originate according to most parapsychologists. The collective dimension of the extreme part of human consciousness would then be what is called the collective unconscious. This in turn provides further justification for a “special” discipline within sociology (or social sciences) to study the collective dimension of psi effects.
Brunstein’s book is very speculative, particularly the second part where he goes beyond scientific vulgarization. But it is an interesting read, and it can certainly provide some food for thought for those espousing the so-called “2nd degree ETH” (ETs are behind the phenomena but it is essentially a psi technology). I do not agree with the 2nd degree ETH, but it is in my view a step forward compared to the standard ETH.
Copyright © 2008 Eric Ouellet
Friday, November 7, 2008
Reading Notes on Roll’s The Poltergeist
One of the classic parapsychology books on poltergeists (or RSPK) is Roll, William G. (2004) The Poltergeist. New York: Paraview (originally published in 1972). Roll investigated personally a number of RSPK, as well as analyzed several cases provided by others. He came to propose a number of tentative conclusions about RSPK.
Field Energy?
Roll proposed that RSPK could be have the form of psi field, and that the actual distance between the central person and the moving objects matters. There was an outer limit of about 40 feet where there was not RSPK noticed, while the majority of them were within 10 feet from the central person. When he looked at the famous 1967 case of Julio the warehouse worker, he also noticed that objects were moving faster when they were away from the central person, implying the psi field seems to work as a vortex (speed being faster as it is further away from the centre). This idea is interesting, although it is based on only a few cases. However, this could be an additional argument about the importance of geography in the case of UFO wave. This idea can also be linked to some research on UFO waves conducted by Ahmad Jamaludin. He found that UFO waves are following a double circle pattern, a small one around Europe, and a wider one encompassing Earth's continental masses with the center being either in Africa or in the Indian Ocean (i.e., the circle is not in the Pacific Ocean itself, although it can touch some parts of it). It is an interesting theory, although he did not take into consideration the 1973 wave in the US Midwest, as it does not fit the pattern. If one combines uncritically Roll’s finding about poltergeists psi field and Jamaludin’s one about UFO wave, it would be tempting to say that the central person is somewhere in Northern Europe...
Personality that suppresses feelings of agression
Another idea proposed by Roll, is the common psychological features that central persons share in RSPK. He quotes a psychiatrist who observed Julio, warehouse worker as: “the most notable are the many examples of aggressive feelings and impulses which are disturbing and unacceptable to him. He prevents the direct expression of these feelings. Indeed, he not only controls the expression of aggressive impulses which at base could be sadistic and quite destructive, but he also feels it necessary to even control impulses of a more assertive, as distinct from aggressive nature. [...] There is little self-understanding in relation to these feelings and there may very likely be a sense of personal detachment from them. Since they cannot be expressed or acted upon in any direct way, they are a source of difficulty to him. The feelings themselves remain internal and diffuse.” (pp. 171-172).
I found, in a completely unrelated source, something similar about the collective unconscious, peace and war in: Senghaas-Knobloch, Eva and Birgit Volmerg. (1988). “Towards a Social Psychology of Peace.” Journal of Peace Research 25(3): 245-256. The authors propose an analysis of the nuclear arms race during the Cold War and maintain that their “findings support the thesis that suppressed subjectivity feeds a collective unconscious process of seeking compensation in the realm of national armament and security policy” (p. 245). In other words, the nuclear arms race is an outcome of an unconscious collective identity that shows pathological signs. These signs include the incomprehensibility of the arms race as the superpowers had enough bombs to destroy humanity several time over while feeling completely powerless about it. There was a profound disconnect between the feelings and the capacity to express them. Another theme they found was the over-rationalized role of people in charge of the nuclear arms race, who in a way were suppressing the rivalry if not animosity towards their enemy by being “rational”. The collective unconscious as describe by these two authors reminds me a lot of Julio’s mental state of ongoing repressed feelings of aggressivity combined with a poor awareness of his own feelings. This can be one more argument in favour of using the collective unconscious to study UFO waves as a social psi effect (rather focussing on individual psi effects).
Neutralizing the consciousness
The last key finding from Roll I want to emphasize is that RSPK tend to occur while the central person is actually busy. It is as if the unconscious processes behind the psi effect are “freed” from the control of the consciousness, i.e., when the latter cannot restraint the unconscious. It is a bit counter-intuitive as most other psi effects like telepathy tend to occur more easily when the consciousness is “neutralized” by being in an altered state of consciousness. I guess poltergeist are actually the outcome of a long unconscious build up of frustration and alienation, and where such build up could only be possible by the active action of one’s consciousness to prevent the unconscious conflict to surface. The poltergeist is therefore construed as a spill over of unconscious processes that the consciousness can no longer hold back. In such case, being busy with mundane tasks is what “neutralizes” the consciousness.
This can be an argument in favour of having some other events that keep the attention away from the real issue, in the case of a UFO wave. In the case of the Bucks County wave, the financial and economic crisis could certainly constitute an effective diversion from other problems. Similarly, the 1973 UFO wave in the US Midwest had its peak in October, which coincided with the Yom Kippur war in the Middle East. This war worried many that it could ignite a conflict between the two superpowers. Again, the diversion would be effective in such a case.
Copyright © 2008 Eric Ouellet
Field Energy?
Roll proposed that RSPK could be have the form of psi field, and that the actual distance between the central person and the moving objects matters. There was an outer limit of about 40 feet where there was not RSPK noticed, while the majority of them were within 10 feet from the central person. When he looked at the famous 1967 case of Julio the warehouse worker, he also noticed that objects were moving faster when they were away from the central person, implying the psi field seems to work as a vortex (speed being faster as it is further away from the centre). This idea is interesting, although it is based on only a few cases. However, this could be an additional argument about the importance of geography in the case of UFO wave. This idea can also be linked to some research on UFO waves conducted by Ahmad Jamaludin. He found that UFO waves are following a double circle pattern, a small one around Europe, and a wider one encompassing Earth's continental masses with the center being either in Africa or in the Indian Ocean (i.e., the circle is not in the Pacific Ocean itself, although it can touch some parts of it). It is an interesting theory, although he did not take into consideration the 1973 wave in the US Midwest, as it does not fit the pattern. If one combines uncritically Roll’s finding about poltergeists psi field and Jamaludin’s one about UFO wave, it would be tempting to say that the central person is somewhere in Northern Europe...
Personality that suppresses feelings of agression
Another idea proposed by Roll, is the common psychological features that central persons share in RSPK. He quotes a psychiatrist who observed Julio, warehouse worker as: “the most notable are the many examples of aggressive feelings and impulses which are disturbing and unacceptable to him. He prevents the direct expression of these feelings. Indeed, he not only controls the expression of aggressive impulses which at base could be sadistic and quite destructive, but he also feels it necessary to even control impulses of a more assertive, as distinct from aggressive nature. [...] There is little self-understanding in relation to these feelings and there may very likely be a sense of personal detachment from them. Since they cannot be expressed or acted upon in any direct way, they are a source of difficulty to him. The feelings themselves remain internal and diffuse.” (pp. 171-172).
I found, in a completely unrelated source, something similar about the collective unconscious, peace and war in: Senghaas-Knobloch, Eva and Birgit Volmerg. (1988). “Towards a Social Psychology of Peace.” Journal of Peace Research 25(3): 245-256. The authors propose an analysis of the nuclear arms race during the Cold War and maintain that their “findings support the thesis that suppressed subjectivity feeds a collective unconscious process of seeking compensation in the realm of national armament and security policy” (p. 245). In other words, the nuclear arms race is an outcome of an unconscious collective identity that shows pathological signs. These signs include the incomprehensibility of the arms race as the superpowers had enough bombs to destroy humanity several time over while feeling completely powerless about it. There was a profound disconnect between the feelings and the capacity to express them. Another theme they found was the over-rationalized role of people in charge of the nuclear arms race, who in a way were suppressing the rivalry if not animosity towards their enemy by being “rational”. The collective unconscious as describe by these two authors reminds me a lot of Julio’s mental state of ongoing repressed feelings of aggressivity combined with a poor awareness of his own feelings. This can be one more argument in favour of using the collective unconscious to study UFO waves as a social psi effect (rather focussing on individual psi effects).
Neutralizing the consciousness
The last key finding from Roll I want to emphasize is that RSPK tend to occur while the central person is actually busy. It is as if the unconscious processes behind the psi effect are “freed” from the control of the consciousness, i.e., when the latter cannot restraint the unconscious. It is a bit counter-intuitive as most other psi effects like telepathy tend to occur more easily when the consciousness is “neutralized” by being in an altered state of consciousness. I guess poltergeist are actually the outcome of a long unconscious build up of frustration and alienation, and where such build up could only be possible by the active action of one’s consciousness to prevent the unconscious conflict to surface. The poltergeist is therefore construed as a spill over of unconscious processes that the consciousness can no longer hold back. In such case, being busy with mundane tasks is what “neutralizes” the consciousness.
This can be an argument in favour of having some other events that keep the attention away from the real issue, in the case of a UFO wave. In the case of the Bucks County wave, the financial and economic crisis could certainly constitute an effective diversion from other problems. Similarly, the 1973 UFO wave in the US Midwest had its peak in October, which coincided with the Yom Kippur war in the Middle East. This war worried many that it could ignite a conflict between the two superpowers. Again, the diversion would be effective in such a case.
Copyright © 2008 Eric Ouellet
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