Non-Extraterrestrial UFO Hypotheses

a reply to: Astyanax

You bit your tongue and it's appreciated.

originally posted by: Kandinsky
a reply to: Tangerine

If there was a 'control system' or unspecified Intelligence, might it interact through the language of cultural memes and archetypal symbolism? This ties into the comparison of flying saucer sightings with older sightings of elves and suchlike. Are people encountering something that reflects their own cultural beliefs? Obviously this is a slippery old slope as some have questioned if religious 'sightings' were similarly sourced? Archetypal angels delivering gospels have some similarities to 20th Century claims of 'spiritual aliens' bringing advice for the future of humanity.

Higher on the list of explanations, for me, would be a variety of abnormal, psychological conditions; hearing voices has a chequered history after all. The psychosocial approach seems to offer more answers there.

I think it's entirely possible that an unspecified intelligence might interact with humans through the language of cultural memes and archetypal symbolism. I previously pointed out that I see UFOs becoming a religion. If you've ever attended a gathering of literalists obsessed with UFOs, the comparison with religious fundamentalism is obvious.

originally posted by: KellyPrettyBear

originally posted by: Tangerine

originally posted by: lostgirl
a reply to: wtbengineer

Yes, as I've read more and more of threads like this one, I do consider myself "lucky" not to have had (or be having) experiences with things of 'paranormal' nature...

Have you ever conjectured as to why those "haunting" things happened to you as a child?

Also, did you have any connection to the military? Because in my reading, I've found that most people who experienced 'stuff' as children either had relatives in the service or lived near military bases..

(Sorry, Mr. Tangerine, if that last question is off topic - I felt it needed to be asked, given wtb's history)

It's a legitimate question although I haven't noticed that, myself, in talking to people. Of course, I might not have been asking the right questions.

There is a list of why certain people are prone to 'experiences'.
It was put together by Keel/Vallee somewhere.. but it's all
common sense.

1) Genetic.
2) Abused as a child
3) Born on a 'hot spot'

those are the big ones.

I functionally have all 3 of those.

4) Associated with the military

is due to being saturated with EM fields from
military radars apparently. I don't have that
anymore.

We can discuss these if you like..

Kev

I don't recall Keel or Vallee saying that but, of course, that doesn't mean that they didn't. Sure, discuss them, please.

originally posted by: All Seeing Eye

originally posted by: Tangerine
a reply to: Xtrozero

....

Theories crashing together will dislodge facts and trains of thought. The best of the theories will stand while the weaker, facts, assumptions, or sometime outright lies fall from the graces of the theorist. Those bits and pieces that fall out of the theories should be examined as closely as any other part.

And as you suggest, once this has happened "cross pollination can then take place, and then maybe the big riddle can be exposed, for what it truly is.

The two major "Theories" involved here are the theories of "Extra terrestrials" and "Inner terrestrials" Either and both theories predate mankind and therefore would be quite capable of manipulating and controlling us in ways we could only imagine. In other words, they would have created the framework or game board we call reality. And, as you did with your barriers of discussion, could quite easily guide, misguide, sabotage, our collective efforts at real truth.

But, your barriers are obvious and stated, while the barriers we see in the Institutions of higher learning are "Crafty" and subversive. Who, in their right mind can go to school, and have a open mind? Its all controlled via disciplines and specialties? Where are the courses that tie all the other disciplines together??? Outside of "Secret Societies", they don't exist,as far as I know. Our educational system is not designed to further the gifted mind, its there, to control it. And since there are no courses offered in the way of "Alien Science", or "Alternative History", one must assume it is directions of learning not preferred for us to travel down.

....

The bits and pieces that don't fit the literalist hypotheses have traditionally been discarded without examination. That's one reason I wanted to exclude the primary theory (extraterrestrials) and focus on those bits and pieces. It would be nice if we didn't have to exclude anything to have a meaningful conversation in this forum but experience has shown otherwise. The literalists are laser-focused and simply can not step out of literalism to examine the bits and pieces. Those of us who can already have a grasp of the literalist view so including it in this discussion has more disadvantages than advantages.

a reply to: wtbengineer

Oh I consider Asperger's a GIFT pure and simple,
at last if a person can 'swim upstream' and not
get overwhelmed by society and/or learn to
fit in 'enough'.

Kev

originally posted by: Tangerine

originally posted by: All Seeing Eye

originally posted by: Tangerine
a reply to: Xtrozero

....

Theories crashing together will dislodge facts and trains of thought. The best of the theories will stand while the weaker, facts, assumptions, or sometime outright lies fall from the graces of the theorist. Those bits and pieces that fall out of the theories should be examined as closely as any other part.

And as you suggest, once this has happened "cross pollination can then take place, and then maybe the big riddle can be exposed, for what it truly is.

The two major "Theories" involved here are the theories of "Extra terrestrials" and "Inner terrestrials" Either and both theories predate mankind and therefore would be quite capable of manipulating and controlling us in ways we could only imagine. In other words, they would have created the framework or game board we call reality. And, as you did with your barriers of discussion, could quite easily guide, misguide, sabotage, our collective efforts at real truth.

But, your barriers are obvious and stated, while the barriers we see in the Institutions of higher learning are "Crafty" and subversive. Who, in their right mind can go to school, and have a open mind? Its all controlled via disciplines and specialties? Where are the courses that tie all the other disciplines together??? Outside of "Secret Societies", they don't exist,as far as I know. Our educational system is not designed to further the gifted mind, its there, to control it. And since there are no courses offered in the way of "Alien Science", or "Alternative History", one must assume it is directions of learning not preferred for us to travel down.

....

The bits and pieces that don't fit the literalist hypotheses have traditionally been discarded without examination. That's one reason I wanted to exclude the primary theory (extraterrestrials) and focus on those bits and pieces. It would be nice if we didn't have to exclude anything to have a meaningful conversation in this forum but experience has shown otherwise. The literalists are laser-focused and simply can not step out of literalism to examine the bits and pieces. Those of us who can already have a grasp of the literalist view so including it in this discussion has more disadvantages than advantages.

When I use the term extraterrestrials I'm not referring to "Space Aliens", but only those who reside off planet. But my major point isnt with them, its with the "Inner-terrestrials". And that is defiantly not main stream.

I understand not focusing on the extra angle too much, but without it, there is little comparison to use. The fact of the matter is there is far more evidence to suggest what we are dealing with is a earth based ancient society that choose to maintain their "Secret Society". But using the word choose, after a second thought, might not be correct. They may, have no choice in the matter........

Its your thread, take it in the direction you wish too. It appears your preference is not up, so what does that leave you?

a reply to: All Seeing Eye

Neither 'up' nor 'down' - but 'here' is also
another option. And given how wonky
modern physics has become, 'here'
could be pretty extensive and
seemingly 'unsubstantial'.

Not to mention that 99 percent
of the Universe is plasma...and
there is tons to discuss with
that.

The ETH had been done to death
and has led nowhere.

Kev

a reply to: KellyPrettyBear

Not to mention that 99 percent
of the Universe is plasma...and
there is tons to discuss with
that.

Sure, I can go there. Plasma Aliens, extra, err, entities. Spherical, white in color, no physical body to speak of. Has been seen by hundreds of thousands over the years, called many names. The one I like best at describing them "Angel".

Point of origin? Behind the Vail of time and space. They are here, but not here.

Mission? They influence us, but do not directly intercede, for the most part. Think of them as caretakers while we eke our our living, or fulfill our dreams. They are the uninbodyment of the human spirit.

They are the Calvary to a besieged remote outpost called earth. They are watching, and they take notes.

The world we live in is a creation of illusions, and they did a pretty good job of it too. It is a wonder land of possibilities, and creativity, where now, the sky isn't even a limit.

They are a magnificent force to be reckoned with, and even mentioned about in Enoch s time.

Oh yes, we were never alone, nor will ever, be alone. The tunnel of light is not a tunnel, its a ball of white light, when they come to claim us, home.

Enjoy your version of sanity, or insanity, as it is your personal choice. Good luck to you on your quest.

a reply to: All Seeing Eye

Actually one person's "angel or demon" is simply a matter
of choice. This was made very clear after it was realized
that the "Marian apparition" fit poltergeist and UFO models
'better' than a religious explanation.

Kev

Just thinking out loud...

In 1882 Nietzsche proclaimed that "God is dead."

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Sixteen years later H. G. Wells, in his 1898 science fiction classic The War of the Worlds, popularized, perhaps for the first time, the idea of Martian visitation and invasion.

Science killed God.

Science-fiction reinvented him.

I came here to the thread but there were so many good thoughts and points and some of my favorite ATSers, I wanted to go back to the beginning for responding. It has taken me days though, and during that of course the bloody thread got longer. I better finish and post or it'll be hopeless trying to keep up. Except it will only let me post so much at once and I'm responding to a gazillion things, sigh.

Kandinsky

Possibly ironically, it doesn't matter whether the saucers were *real* or not. Their appearance in the public consciousness drove developments in science and culture.

What if that was part of their reason for existing?

through these cultural discussions were the stark warnings of the Contactees and (much later) Abductees. They consistently warned of atomic disasters, epic floods and conditional rewards if humanity didn't moderate its behaviour.

One of my theories long ago was that mankind has the ability to bring about the change he needs for survival and maybe right now the things we need are learning about compassion (we are the confused helpless lab rat) and foresight (the long-term effects of the now).

So the experiences may be self-generated not by individuals (except as accepting them on behalf of humanity perhaps) but by the species as a (consciousness) whole.

BlueMule

Lately I've been pondering something. What if some stars and planets are alive? What if they are hyper-psychic?

Earth and Ganymede are to me, I mean experientially.Dunno about anything else. Of course I may be a hallucinating lunatic, which would explain my ufo-et-al-esque experiences too. Btw they are gods-little-g.

CirqueDeTruth

The synchronicity of the events correlated so closely - that I have little doubt my UFO experiences had everything to do with occult ritual I was at play with in group conscious energy. You get eight or nine people together to focus their energy on one goal, and stuff gets 'spooky'.

I have also seen this from both up close and onlooking in both ceremonial magick and in remote viewing. Put multiple people together with a decent focus and there is something emergent from that which seems like more than the sum of its parts. This is part of why I tend to believe that human cultures and the species as a whole are a pre-conscious-collective, because it has appeared to be true in smaller groups.

That that was what they gained - from their side working with us paltry little risk takers entrenched in the narcissism of youth. What their goal - what they were tirelessly working at - was to make what is ours - theirs too.

My inner world has a number of seemingly autonomous identities who lecture me now and then (they are as obnoxious as a big brother) and one thing they told me is, quote:

"You PAY attention. It is the currency of your soul. You rent your reality."

Attention creates "the transfer of energy" -- a level we aren't yet measuring but seems to exist -- much like the transfer of money -- and the more we pay attention, especially in group, the more we are giving away, and the more 'others' there are who seem to want it. This is my experience.

I'm in love with the romanticism of the AA theory. The idea of space brothers, our benefactors to existence out there always poised to save us. It's an attractive story. ... But it doesn't correlate with what I perceived ...

I've had a little bit of everything, which mostly makes it horribly difficult to figure out what's going on, though the 'attention' element might be worth considering. I felt blindsided by many things, but of course 'we' may be somewhat larger than our conscious mind, so may draw much to us which we don't understand but is still internally beckoned.

The Djinn or 'demons' with their anthropomorphized snake likeness (for your subconsciousness to signify danger - stay away from this being) - suddenly becomes reptilian aliens...

I think incubus/succubus sometimes come across with such symbology as our 'translations' of their vampiric tendencies (black or red eyes, sharp claws and teeth, etc.). My only encounter with things of a reptilian nature (both humanoid, radically different from one another) seemed rather more literal to me.

Somehow... I feel we're losing something here... believing these things to be apart from us...

I once asked a long-term well-studied occult friend about this, about whether these things were separate from us or a part of us. In a case study I included his response, which I'll copy here because I think it's such a good one:

[Quoting a response from Bill Heidrick (used with permission):]

On Enochian beings and modern aliens, you have hit one of my blind spots. I get a rash every time UFO's and aliens come up. My basic reaction is "Yuck!" Actually, this is the historical drift of "what does it all mean?" Long ago, people took unexplained things to be similar to ordinary people and critters. There's a nymph in that stream and a dryad in that oak -- no problem, same as Fred and Georgette down the road at the old Gridely place, just folks. Then Government got into the act with state control of religion -- some of these beings became categorized as Gods/Goddesses, Demons, Ancestral spirits, Elementals and the whole pantheon, by the book, government seal of approval and the like. In John Dee's time, Angels and Devils with neutral spirits in between, that was the fashion. Last century, it was spirits of the dead lost on their way to the other world -- rather tacky approach, if you ask me. Now it's egg heads with little green bodies from Sirius, with a dash of hobo wandering Atlantian's thrown in for leavening.

I think Aliens and UFO's amount to nothing but a Cargo Cult like that of the South Pacific after WWII -- they are all going to land here some day and either take us home or give us good stuff. All of this labeling of the entities amounts to trying to fit a current cultural understanding on an underlying phenomenon that seems to be a constant throughout human existence. There are invisible, mental or spiritual things going on. Call it by whatever name makes sense at the time. It won't change because the name changes. Names are for feeling comfortable in the present culture. As cultures change, names change. Same stuff, different pretty label. It's the same, although more subtle, on the issue of whether these matters are a part of you or apart from you. Different cultures need to see it one way or the other. What it is, nobody knows.

What I fear is that eventually that wall - separating us from them/it - there from here... eventually it's going to come tumbling down. If anything can do it - crack the code to the control system - science can do it. And then don't say the texts - all the myths and legends and ancestral knowledge passed down for thousands of years - didn't warn us - what happens when when two worlds collide.

If we are part of a larger energy structure, and each of us are many people in parallel realities, that's going to be a really "interesting" integration. :-)

Tangerine

I think it's a perfectly good idea. Might not the earth be conscious, too? Heck, messing with us psychologically might be the earth's hobby.

My limited exposure to our earth as an identity suggests it comes across as feminine, god-little-g, and inherently divine. She became aware of me a few times, and I shared the tiniest piece of her perception just slightly once, and I was as trivial as like... a single blood cell in an impossibly big body. It was the power of her 'awareness' that was even able to get to such a tiny thing as 'me.' But she perceived me as part of her. As if everything in this sphere is.

Tangerine

This response to being out of our comfort zones might explain the uneasiness some people experience during UFO-type experiences. In other words, fear, fogginess, and the dream-like, drugged-like state might not be caused directly by the experience but indirectly by our out-of-our-comfort-zones psychological response to the situation. What do you think?

I think it's more than that for me at least. Both in ceremonial magick and in spontaneous experiences, running into certain energies is so powerful it nearly makes you vomit. I've had a lot of unease and even fear in my life but nothing felt like this. Far too visceral and sudden to qualify for the term unease, even at its most extreme. The only thing I ever felt a little like that, and it was far less extreme mind you, was a powerful scalar coil I was too close to and ended up yelling 'turn it off! turn it off!' at the guy running it. It wasn't the same but it's the same kind of definitely-physical-power feeling, just a bit diff in the detail.

Tangerine

I wonder why we were so receptive to his stories that they imbedded themselves in our collective psyche. ... What is it about our psyches that some stories find a permanent home and others don't stick?

I think the energy in us comes before the stories. I think the stories are the bubbles in a boiling pot. The heat comes first. Eventually some big bubble comes and Bigfoot or Harry Potter or Twilight takes over our culture, clearly a newly structured but underlying archetype or it wouldn't have the human response it gets, but that was only the symptom up top eventually showing up. It took a lot of action under the hood before things got to that point.

Tangerine

Yeah, I think Jung was onto something, too. It's very interesting that seriously delving into the paranormal over a period of time seems to produce or make us beacons for strange phenomena. I always think of John Keel investigating the mothman sightings and the weirdness he experienced. I suspect most of us would have responded by getting the hell out of Dodge. Any thoughts about why delving into the paranormal produces strange phenomena?

"You get what you focus upon. There is no other main rule." I think that's why.

DelMarvel

...but that was a major point of Jung's book: That people were mistaking spiritual reality for physical reality. For myself, I really feel like I saw "something" and there were other people who saw them, too, but I suppose everyone feels that way.

Maybe it is an error to think that spiritual reality and physical reality are truly separate all the time. I perceive this as a gradient just like a frequency bandwidth gives us a gradient of colors. I call our world the red band, the physical; the orange band the astral; the yellow band the dreamworld; the orange is a combination of the red and yellow; and so it goes.

I suspect the underlying nature of so-called archetypes is that they can literally pop into physical existence and out again, as energetic constructs; physical mass being energy too. Of course when this happens, it's worst when it happens to left-brain (sic) sorts. They go schizo trying to figure out how it can be 'obviously real' when the phenomenon is not obviously physical and usually end up manufacturing the mother of all government conspiracies to explain it. Artist personalities deal with it better, they're more able to go, "Whoa, weird, cosmic, man! I have no idea what that was!" and move on with their lives.

Logical personalities often start obsessing on figuring it out so they won't be crazy. More relaxed personalities already decided they were a little crazy a long time ago so don't sweat it, heh!

DelMarvel

So I abruptly stopped all my research, put everything out of my mind and went back to my previous life. It felt "real" but somehow I was aware that it was the result of where I was putting my attention and that I could stop it by directing my mind elsewhere.

It has been this way for me as well. Although there seem some large cycles within cycles, even within that (of tendency to be in weirdness vs. in mundania).

wtbengineer

This is exactly the approach I have taken. I have found that if I apply my mind only to day to day concerns, i.e. my job, kids etc., I don't have these interruptions in my life. It's funny, I still love reading about all these things, but I have to keep a certain distance from them.

It's probably healthier.

Tangerine

...everything vibrates and those things and beings with a slow or low vibration seem more material than those things with a rapid or high vibration. For example, a rock would have a low vibration and an apparition would have a high vibration.

The Holographic Universe explains some of this. What you're saying is possible of course, but it's also possible that technology 'applied to' something changes this. I am not talking about our kind of tech or our kind of people. I'm saying that even if all this was "the faerie realm" what law says their magic can't be a technology?

HillbillyHippy1

I think consciousness is a lot larger of a thing than anyone is prepared to accept. If everything which exists must necessarily also contain consciousness, then the universe could be a very strange and interesting place indeed.

In the 'cosmology' model my inner world keeps bringing everything back to, everything is fundamentally awareness. Individual awareness, self-awareness, autonomy, even energy as we can measure it, are all emergent properties much farther up the line. In that model it is fundamentally impossible for anything to be without at least a base of 'awareness' because that is actually the construction material of which the universe is created.

Tangerine

This brings up the question of whether individual's experiences have changed over their lifetimes.

It'd be hard to separate that from the fact that the 'translator' has changed. My experiences have changed over my life but I don't know if it's age, my attention, or what.

Tangerine

Are we, ourselves, multi-dimensional by nature or are we fixed in one dimension?

I've experienced that we 'span' a huge number of frequencies, a wide bandwidth, each one -- and many in groups -- functioning as 'realities' as we would call it. Entities we consider bigger than us span larger bandwidths and often include ours; smaller than us (elementals) the opposite. It's like a universe-sized Russian doll, except there is a lot of sharing, overlapping, merging too, all at the same time.

Certainly, the illusion of a time is a control system of sorts

I once had it explained from the innerworld that time and space are the same thing in a different perceptual framework. That not having enough time and feeling the environment is cluttered are the same underlying energetic internal cause for example. That we 'weave' physical reality out of ourselves and time and space are like 2 of the geometric dimensions (there's more than 2).

Are we the controllers or are we being controlled, perhaps by inter- or intra-dimensional beings?

I've gradually come to understand that "I" am comprised of twelve autonomous identities that call themselves Aeons. (And thousands, though a few dozen major and about 8 massive, other energetic identities some call chakras. They are not swirling dinner plates in us LOL, although that is how we would perceive their primary 'doorway' in us.) These are all "interwoven."

They tell me that normally "this is supposed to be seamless." I perceive them as individuals because some part of me chooses that experience. For most people, it all feels like 'them.' Even though it's often very different, even arguing, perspectives. I might add this came about for me before I actually heard of Jung's Aion and 15 years before I stumbled on some similar stuff in gnostic writings. (I thought I was alone with it all that time, and then realized instead it was actually old hat. I can't win, lol.) A lot of issues I've had in my life began to resolve when I began to acknowledge and work with these as equals.

Anyway the ones closer to physical energy (the chakras) are part of the -- maybe I should call it planetary divine and nature fey realm of stuff. We are symbiotes but only partly woven. They have their own desires; they want energy just as we do. It can be a mutual positive thing but I think there can be competition for energy that is not perceived as positive, too.

This is frightening enough, but the notion that "they" can control us through dreams and archetypes seems even more disturbing. Perhaps the tendency to perceive these entities as literal physical beings is a coping mechanism on our part. I may be on guard or even afraid when I encounter a bear but at least I know what I'm dealing with.

Great point. Maybe so.

Kandinsky

In the light of evolutionary biology, the archetypes and mythic elements might be hard-wired into us at a genetic level.

I think there might be something to this, but that this genetic hardwiring might be a little more like it is with nutrition, where how the body handles, for example, a misshapen lipid differs depending on the genetic line. So 11% of the women get lipedema and are overly pear shaped, but another percent end up with cancer instead, and others get diabetes, but if you boil things down to first-cause of the construction materials of the body and the profound hormonal and other results all this has, the cultural input (food) is much the same, but how genes are triggered and how the body handles things has patterns related to family line (and the womb). Genetic specialists (molecular biology) say for example that the huge growth in obesity is hugely correlated with genetics; obesity is a heritable trait 2nd only to height, with which its closely correlated. But there's a cultural similarity in the input; what differs is how we handle it.

I suspect this same kind of pattern might be the case for underlying energy, just as it is for physical (e.g. lipids and aminos) energy; that we all 'process' it, and there are variances but for the most part, same species and same culture is similar; but genetic lines handle the problem elements, in particular, differently. (Probably everything; but those are the ones we notice.)

Maybe societies expand and parts of them require a 'wolf at the door?' Perhaps social animals will create a source of threat or anxiety when none exists?

I once had a meditation where instead of dealing with a threat to one of my Aeons, to help her, I 'pushed it out and away' and thought that was fine. I spent hours later that night, utterly paranoid, laying in bed in occasionally sparked terror that I thought someone was possibly trying to break into my house -- it was ridiculous. Finally my inner guide pointed out what I had done. I had not dealt with the energy; I had pushed it outside, and promptly, I felt that threatening energy was right there outside! I perceived all these 'overlaps' when I saw that, starting with politics and our national fears. Of course that doesn't mean the threats aren't real. Only that there may be underlying energies affecting the patterns of what we manifest.

I'm well aware of the absurdity of this and it's socially embarrassing on an intellectual level. Nevertheless, the idea continues that there is something undiscovered in our reality.

I'm learning to deal with the embarrassment over time, and become more open about my experiences. I felt like talking about my 'anomalous experiences' was akin to coming out of the closet, for someone so logical. Fortunately, or perhaps the opposite, I've changed a great deal over the last 25 years and my logical side is a lot more willing to kick back and relax and say, "Whatever man. Makes me laugh. Have at it."

It introduces a state of mind that's anticipatory in the sense of a question that will never have an answer. Induced uncertainty?

One of my Aeons (they function as guides/teachers) has emphasized to me the importance of novelty and literally being willing to have places in your expectation where you definitely do not have anything set. Think of it like a brick wall with a crack in it. Like it's critical to have some area of opening where the new, novel, unexpected, can manifest into your reality.

He has showed me this in dreams, where I'm in impossible situations and he helps me think through it until I have thought myself an open space and then forced a "expectation without definition" -- to "allow the unknown" -- once it's present I can be saved. Before that, it's impossible.

For example if you really 'allow' then all kinds of "luck" and synchronicity can happen, stuff you never expect. One minute the monster or bad guy nearly has you, the next the roof collapses on him or a falling meteor LOL, something else totally "improbable" you'd never expect -- it becomes probable, because you first created an opening and then you created an expectation, which "pulled something to match your active intent' in" to that perceived reality.

In a way this sounds like your phrase "induced uncertainty" though I never thought of it that way before. Uncertainty in the 'probability' model. Done properly we are forced to allow that Shroedinger's cat may actually... be a ghost, and hence both living and dead. :-) Heh, I just thought of that, kinda funny.

Kandinsky

Currently, 'seeing a UFO' is amongst the symptom list for diagnosing a constellation of mental illnesses.

Much acquaintance with psychs as friends and study of the lit assures me that the people assigning labels should be first in line on the list themselves -- people are often driven to study this because of their internal worries about figuring themselves out. Armchair intellectualism about 'everybody else's problems' is their coping mechanism. I consider a great deal of psychology and psychiatry to be the most spectacular failure in our modern culture. Every person I have ever known who was truly worth knowing would have a dozen labels stapled to their forehead -- all tossed away by the fact that they were "highly functional."

it rather renders constructive discussion moot in such cases that include more than one witness or single witnesses with no history of psychological disorders.

Right. Video cameras do not hallucinate, last I checked.

ZetaRediculian

Our brains are constantly constructing the world and filling in the gaps regardless if ET is flying around or not.

Visually that's true, we see pieces and our brain constructs the rest so it seems like a seamless reality. I once wrote that when we see anomalous stuff we are 'reading between the lines of reality.' Maybe our brains are just getting out of the way (rather than getting in the way to 'cause' it) when this occurs.

Memory and recall is another. Both perceptions and recall of perceptions are influenced by "suggestion". And all that is fueled and enhanced by brain chemistry that distort our perceptions and make us more open to suggestion and imprint our memories.

True, although some of this is overstated and all of it depends greatly on the individual.

"Mass Hysteria" is an extreme example of this

We have events officially labeled as that where dozens if not hundreds of cameras and video recorders have captured what was being hallucinated. Go figure.

where people perceive they have symptoms of illness or even perceive they are being attacked by invisible beings.

Maybe they do. Maybe they are. If physical reality is energy and the nervous system is an energetic structure, what is to say that the mind cannot literally create that reality for a person? A hypnotic subject can manifest a blood blister. Multiple personality disorder has a list of stuff that changes (including actual diseases and eye color, so I hear anyway) that reaches into the damn near paranormal.

ZetaRediculian

What would be the biological advantage of .....a hard wired delusion? Is it as simple as the best story tellers got the girl?

That's like the best line and insight of all time! Hilarious and profound.

I'm not sure if the question is even possible. It's like a koan, because our perceptual reality is individual and likely genetically affected (everything is), so technically our perception of reality is already a hard-wired delusion. We see it differently than snakes do. We are hardwired differently.

Kandinsky

Organised hunting and gathering would be more successful with communication and it’s my view that we were telling stories before we had words. How!? By mime and mimicry.

Or we just had a vastly better ability to communicate with the senses of the body that are not the mouth.

A reasonable explanation for the universality of archetypes is that they’ve been with us since we were picking up rocks on the plains.

I use the term to represent energies that are fundamentally part of our makeup. By that I mean the makeup of our solar system, our planet, our bodies.

Tangerine

Insofar as we know, the structure of story has remained unchanged for as long as stories have been recorded. The structure may well be encoded in our DNA and we, as a species, seem to have a need to tell and hear and experience stories.

Maybe we just fundamentally need a sense of closure. If someone came up to you and said 4 words out of the middle of a sentence and that's all, or an unresolving musical chord, we would naturally want the rest of it to fall into place for us. Much like we might 'see' pieces of reality and our brain fills in the rest so it's a seamless pattern for us. What is that but a visual story?

we learning that is so vital to our existence that we must experience this same story structure many thousands of times over a lifetime?

Maybe we aren't learning and that's why stories repeat. Or maybe it's like the dream that happens repeatedly the same as you try different outcomes and behaviors in it.

Astyanax

beyond the four-dimensional universe we inhabit there may well be others, which interpenetrate ours without our knowing of it, or running in parallel with ours, also unbeknownst to us.

This is my experience. Of course it may be self-generated.

Astyanax

Jung argued that myths are made up of archetypes, or somehow generated by them (he was never very easy to understand).

My perception in some meditative experiences is that the underlying energy which comes into the forms we call archetypes, are what 'hold' myths. Let me try again, english sucks: the elements of myth that are powerful enough to 'last' - to live on, to be continued - have a fundamental underlying energy (call it Truth), that is why they last when an untold billion things don't last, but those things do. I might add that several key sayings in religions fall into this category. The way they are interpreted now may be radically different (and even kinda stupid IMO) but the saying itself lasted, as if there is a certain power to it that the saying could not be corrupted or killed and would live on through and survive all the flotsam-jetsom chaos of everything else to still be with us thousands of years later.

Like little energetic black boxes that survive all the plane crashes of time and culture, and give us a clue to the reality inside.

But myths, as I said, are supposed to be made of archetypes. Hardcore Jungians will insist that all culture is; I'm not so sure, though I believe they play their role in all human creations.

Every time I try to read something Jungian I feel the same way I feel when I read stuff about the Qabala: like I have stumbled into some armchair meeting of the Dead Intellectuals. I don't even understand most of what the hell they're talking about, and this despite that as I gradually read pieces of Jung I realize that many of my experiences are so overlapping with some of his stuff it's just mind boggling.

Before aliens abducted people, fairies did.

Right, but the bright people were still oversized obnoxious blondes, sometimes kind and sometimes not at all, and that hasn't changed in the Nordics; so maybe the identities didn't change much at all, only the labels.

the question to be asked would be, 'What evolutionary advantage is conferred by the complex of instinctive behaviour that generates or projects the archetype?' Sadly, I don't feel qualified to answer it.

Maybe the evolution of human bodies is not, actually, the center of all that is, or even the most important thing.

bybyots

We are in a way able to "couple" with the protagonist of a story neurologically and learn from experiencing their story wioth them.

Modeling. Yeah, I think there's something to that. But at that level, how do stories differ from anything else? We learn to walk and we find our way to the airport, we learn to make love and we root for the hero, and all of these things came to us through patterns we modeled around us.

combatmaster

Into which category does 'divinity' fall? ET or non-ET? Maybe its more on the multidimensional side...

In my experience it is infinitely gradient and pervasively part of all things. So the question to me is a non-sequitur. But there are denser-collections-of-autonomous-awareness-we-call-identities (e.g. Angels, real beings in my experience) that we would call 'entities' and I suppose they would then just be part of the pantheon of everything-else.

Tangerine

Patrick Harpur also argues that the daimonic realm is trying to get our attention. In the modern world, that pretty much requires a slap in the face.

Thanks for the ref, I found some books by that name at amazon, I'm going to read one.

Tangerine

Divinity is a designation and, as such, I suppose we could designate anything divine. I lean toward multi-dimensional hypotheses in general so I'm happy to put it there.

Run into a strong dose of it, just once, and you realize it is not a label, but an ISness. There is no way to explain that which would make sense to anybody who hadn't had the experience I guess. Meet an angel and it's simply an obvious thing that this-divine-energy is what-my-people-call-angels. The fundamental nature of the energy (being divine) is a given.

Tangerine

This phenomena is ideoplastic in that it is shaped by our ideas about it and responses to it. This makes it very difficult to study because we seem ill-equipped to understand even ourselves. We have bizarre notions about our abilities to recognize truth or even define what that means. We are easily deceived by others. We lie to ourselves. Experiences with unbounded phenomena shatters or morphs our probably illusory boundaries and discombobulates us. Perhaps our need for stories is a mechanism by which we constantly reset our boundaries. Thoughts?

I think that's a good point. No other comments.

Astyanax

Stepping slightly outside of Jung, archetypes don't exist. They're his (conceptual) invention.

He used the word in his new way; like synchronicity which I think he actually coined; but the underlying energy is present, regardless of what we choose to call it. Jung was kind enough to find a model for it that could be packaged in a term and transferred in language.

Speaking for myself, I don't believe they have any objective existence

According to physics and perception, nothing has any objective existence. Trees are vibrating particles that our brains delude us into giving various charming properties that are entirely subjective to our biology and sometimes personality, until of course you hit them with your car at high speed and then trees seem unusually objective. But they didn't change.

Could something be manipulating these drives and tropes? Of course it could. In such cases the prime suspects would be (1) parasites and (2) other human beings. Logically, one would have to eliminate these two possibilities before considering a third.

Unless parasites are energetic in nature like everything else; in which case the manipulation may be coming from within us on many levels.

kandinsky

Several authors have noticed a 'Buck Rogers' element to UFO reports in the sense that they sometimes appeared to reproduce images from science-fiction comics.

My daughter is interested in fashion design and japanese. She often points out things or remembers things in some model that actually calls from one of those. I have no interest in either, so it always seems very foreign to me. But the things she is referring to are ordinary things in life, in movies -- certainly there is no question about their 'reality.' So maybe it is simply a matter of taking a fundamental energy and our brains trying to model it into something we know. How variant would the energy of a tree have to be before we no longer saw it as a tree or plant or light post of some kind?

It raises an interesting question of whether UFO sightings reflected cultural icons known to the percipient.

I once had an experience that was very sound-based, vibrato sound that literally affected the physical environment I was in and my body, and at one point as it went up the scale, it suddenly went incredibly high and started sliding around. In my head at the time, I was laughing in awe, over how it sounded like something out of some old 1950s science fiction show, and how my friend George would surely laugh his head off when I would later try to tell him of this. I wondered, at the time, if the people making such shows had ever had such an experience, even unremembered, that might have led to them associating this crazy sound with such an experience in the first place. Because consciously at least I certainly wouldn't have predicted any of it -- the experience, let alone the sound.

Maybe these things are not nearly as separable as we think, though. I mean separate human experiences and our fiction and lore about it. Maybe we distribute these things throughout time and population, but it is really all part of the same overall dynamic. Like we are all just part of the pot of gradually boiling water, that seems separate in both space and time to its contents perhaps, but is really all one, seemingly distributed event.

Astyanax

In my view, we are automatons to a far greater degree than we normally suppose; perhaps even completely, though I would hesitate, myself, to go as far as that.

Or alternatively, our physical bodies and their interaction 'here' are more like a meta-data than a data, because there is an immense amount within/underneath going on of which our seeming experience is the cumulative result. That is probably a way farther-out theory than most people can wrap around and steps a bit far outside the alt-ET model (although it fundamentally addresses it, it sure gets complicated in language at that point).

LiveForever8

Science killed God.

Science-fiction reinvented him.

Thank you for that!!

RC

What about an explanation through physics? I only have a beginner's understanding of this but hopefully someone smarter could explain or add to my point

I have long thought that phenomena deemed to be extraterrestrial UFOs could be some sort of natural energy force/field that we haven't yet discovered.

It could explain the genuine unidentified crop circles ( as in non-man made) that have evidence of radioactivity, scorch marks of the wheat shafts, and are perfectly symmetrical; maybe it is the energy 'bubble' hitting the ground like some sort of soundwave and this happens all the time but we can only notice it when it falls somewhere able to absorbe and record the impression such as a wheat crop etc

what do you think?

a reply to: Kalixi

Seems to be somewhat true.

The book by Budden in my signature line
addresses this theory in great detail.

Kev

a reply to: RedCairo

Visually that's true, we see pieces and our brain constructs the rest so it seems like a seemless reality.

I believe this is true with pretty much all perceptions. Amputees feel things in their missing limbs, I hear my wife yelling while I am in the shower....Here, all we see is text and we perceive all sorts of things regarding the folks responsible for the text. Dreams seem to be random images strung together with an internal narrative that makes sense of it all. And then there is that dreaded memory recall under hypnosis to remember what happened during that missing time

I once wrote that when we see anomalous stuff we are 'reading between the lines of reality.' Maybe our brains are just getting out of the way (rather than gett ing in it) when this occurs.

I sometimes have this feeling of "reality" and its rather disturbing and difficult to explain but it does feel like my mind lets its guard down for a second. Usually this will happen in the middle of the night but I used to summon this feeling at will. Quite literally, I believe the mind has to "get a grip". That's its function. Otherwise, I would get in my car and just start driving somewhere.

We have events officially labeled as that where dozens if not hundreds of cameras and video recorders have captured what was being hallucinated. Go figure.

Which events are you thinking of? very curious. "mass hysteria" is probably an overused explanation for UFO sightings. I have no idea what "mass hallucinations" are. I was referring to instances of actual mass hysteria which seem to be well documented. In the cases of UFOs, I rarely see any that could be labeled as mass hysteria.

If physical reality is energy and the nervous system is an energetic structure, what is to say that the mind cannot literally create that reality for a person?

Absolutely nothing.

a reply to: ZetaRediculian

The thing I was trying to get at was why would people see these UFOs and beings and believe them to be real? ... Culturally we consider these folks "delusional" (though I argue that that is incorrect). Is there any advantage in that or is this the psychological equivalent of our little toe? A vestigial feature of sorts. More like a useless byproduct of our complex brain physiology. Just a thought and not really what I believe.

My reply to Agnost covers this.

There's something else that needs to be said, though: not all UFOs need be mental or 'psychic' phenomena. Sometimes, the strange things people see in the sky really are there. They may be ordinary things viewed under unusual conditions or they may be genuinely mysterious objects, like Kandinsky's red zigzag UFO (I certainly can't think of any explanation for that one), but they're physically real, and they don't support a psychological explanation.

Mostly, in this thead, we've been discussing manifestations of UFO culture rather than specific sightings. I think that's valid: the UFO culture, with its folklore, its ideas and beliefs, is certainly a rich field of inquiry for psychologists, anthropologists and biologists, to name a few.

Then we've had the disciples of Jacques Vallée and John Keel, who believe these phenomena are liminal, and straddle the physical and mental or 'psychic' realms. The idea is fascinating, but as Kandinsky points out, the very nature of such phenomena, if they exist, makes them impervious to scientific investigation. Faced with something like that, my own reaction is to shrug and get on with my life. As far as I can see, the burden of proof lies with those who are claiming these psychic effects and distortions of physical reality. Until they can show us that there really is something mysterious going on, I regard the case as 'not proven'. There is ample mystery, beauty and excitement in the real, physical, phenomenal world to keep my attention engaged round the clock. This is where Carl Jung and I parted company; on his insistence that, absent a physical link to them, 'psychic' events could still have physical consequences. I'm no Freudian, but I'm 100% with Freud in this.

But we should never forget that there are, indeed, strange things seen in the sky from time to time. We should never lose sight of the physical possibility, though there's no need to discuss it on this particular thread.