Spaceman spiff
Noble
Pretty recent and very scathing thoughts, from his blog:
An indispensable book yet to be written
Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos
This note is somehow connected to my own conception and personal early work in ufology: the absolute requirement to collect all scientific intelligence on UFOs, dismissing the unacceptable and pushing progress on what was well-founded. To this purpose, I published a number of preliminary themed bibliographies. More recently, I have published in the French GEIPAN website a comprehensive bibliography on work performed on UFO waves. Others, professional bibliographers, released massive compilations of UFO-related essays and investigation.
But I saw this only as a first phase of what should be done. I always envisaged an academic continuation to preparing bibliographies strictly oriented to scientific-minded work on UFO reports: the analysis of the best literature by proficient personnel. The following reflection outlines this thinking. Don´t get me wrong: it is far from wishing to debunk people’s pet theories. Everybody is free to believe anything. But, from my perspective, something emerges clear as crystal. I have reached the conviction, sustained by the facts, that there does not exist any material phenomenon in the flow of UFO reports which is new to science, nothing extraordinary or paraphysical has emerged. It is unreal in the physical sense. It only exists as a sociological, anthropological, historical, cultural construct. Physically speaking, UFOs are but a mirage. Seven decades of reports and testimonies and events prove that there are no unidentifiable flying machines, it is a “phenomenon” devoid of any material proof.
The history of ufology is the narration of 70 plus years of scientific failures. Since the early times when flying saucers, then UFOs, later on UAPs rose into our cultural space, academics as well as scientifically oriented amateurs decided to apply scientific knowledge in an attempt to decipher the nature of the phenomenon, how these alleged spacecraft could fly, where they came from, how they could be detected, how they interacted with the Earth, how their activity fluctuated in an intelligent way, hard data that could be extracted from soft eyewitness testimony, patterns hidden in the mass of reports, constant features of UFO shapes and behaviors, and a long etcetera.
The bottom line in all this well-intentioned work has been to prove that UFOs were alien in origin, showing a technology or laws of physics foreign to our planet.
After millions of so-called UFO claims produced all over the world (as many cases as different descriptions), not a single material trace of the actual presence of extraterrestrial navigators in our airspace and on the ground has been delivered. On the other hand, nevertheless, it has been made abundantly obvious that the vast majority of the human and automated sightings are soluble in basically traditional terms. No exotic realm needs to be postulated to explain the raw case reports. Therefore, a psychosocial model (a popular, media-stimulated myth in progress) emerges as a fundamental, empirical solution to the UFO matrix.
Then, what to do with all the proposals made public in recent UFO history? A real encyclopedia of bad science can be erected upon books and articles and papers (some of them published in scientific journals) exhibiting remarkable errors in formulation, methodology, and twisted manipulation of certain theories, hypotheses, techniques, or approaches.
Miscalculations, flawed statistics (GIGO), false assumptions and worse development, wild hypotheses on motion, flight patterns and capabilities, fantasized propulsion theories, etc. Ufology has created all sorts of scientific monsters in the form of factual errors and wrong application of mathematical, statistical, physics, engineering, electrical, magnetic, or gravitational principles, when not plainly pseudoscience.
Universal culture needs a critical thinker (mainly a physicist) who is able to make a synthesis of all those works disregarded by the history of science, never to be recognized by the mainstream scientific establishment. Not disregarded for being too audacious for an epoch, but for being misguided, lost and off base. I can imagine an annotated catalog of scientific falsehoods in ufology, placed in a historical context of vogues and trends and waves, disclosing how personal belief spoiled potential discoveries, not as sensational as those promised but much more realistic and down to Earth.
So, basically hes going the way of debunkers, saying we have wasted our time and its all in our minds...
I posted this because i think his conclusions are somewhat unusual among the known veteran UFO researchers. Most of them to my knowledge havent given up and still pretty much think there is something to it, despite the decades of lacking conclusive physical evidence(at least in the public realm). Including the researchers in my own country. And i think theyre right, as long as a single possibility exists, it is worth it to turn over every rock.
Thoughts?
An indispensable book yet to be written
Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos
This note is somehow connected to my own conception and personal early work in ufology: the absolute requirement to collect all scientific intelligence on UFOs, dismissing the unacceptable and pushing progress on what was well-founded. To this purpose, I published a number of preliminary themed bibliographies. More recently, I have published in the French GEIPAN website a comprehensive bibliography on work performed on UFO waves. Others, professional bibliographers, released massive compilations of UFO-related essays and investigation.
But I saw this only as a first phase of what should be done. I always envisaged an academic continuation to preparing bibliographies strictly oriented to scientific-minded work on UFO reports: the analysis of the best literature by proficient personnel. The following reflection outlines this thinking. Don´t get me wrong: it is far from wishing to debunk people’s pet theories. Everybody is free to believe anything. But, from my perspective, something emerges clear as crystal. I have reached the conviction, sustained by the facts, that there does not exist any material phenomenon in the flow of UFO reports which is new to science, nothing extraordinary or paraphysical has emerged. It is unreal in the physical sense. It only exists as a sociological, anthropological, historical, cultural construct. Physically speaking, UFOs are but a mirage. Seven decades of reports and testimonies and events prove that there are no unidentifiable flying machines, it is a “phenomenon” devoid of any material proof.
The history of ufology is the narration of 70 plus years of scientific failures. Since the early times when flying saucers, then UFOs, later on UAPs rose into our cultural space, academics as well as scientifically oriented amateurs decided to apply scientific knowledge in an attempt to decipher the nature of the phenomenon, how these alleged spacecraft could fly, where they came from, how they could be detected, how they interacted with the Earth, how their activity fluctuated in an intelligent way, hard data that could be extracted from soft eyewitness testimony, patterns hidden in the mass of reports, constant features of UFO shapes and behaviors, and a long etcetera.
The bottom line in all this well-intentioned work has been to prove that UFOs were alien in origin, showing a technology or laws of physics foreign to our planet.
After millions of so-called UFO claims produced all over the world (as many cases as different descriptions), not a single material trace of the actual presence of extraterrestrial navigators in our airspace and on the ground has been delivered. On the other hand, nevertheless, it has been made abundantly obvious that the vast majority of the human and automated sightings are soluble in basically traditional terms. No exotic realm needs to be postulated to explain the raw case reports. Therefore, a psychosocial model (a popular, media-stimulated myth in progress) emerges as a fundamental, empirical solution to the UFO matrix.
Then, what to do with all the proposals made public in recent UFO history? A real encyclopedia of bad science can be erected upon books and articles and papers (some of them published in scientific journals) exhibiting remarkable errors in formulation, methodology, and twisted manipulation of certain theories, hypotheses, techniques, or approaches.
Miscalculations, flawed statistics (GIGO), false assumptions and worse development, wild hypotheses on motion, flight patterns and capabilities, fantasized propulsion theories, etc. Ufology has created all sorts of scientific monsters in the form of factual errors and wrong application of mathematical, statistical, physics, engineering, electrical, magnetic, or gravitational principles, when not plainly pseudoscience.
Universal culture needs a critical thinker (mainly a physicist) who is able to make a synthesis of all those works disregarded by the history of science, never to be recognized by the mainstream scientific establishment. Not disregarded for being too audacious for an epoch, but for being misguided, lost and off base. I can imagine an annotated catalog of scientific falsehoods in ufology, placed in a historical context of vogues and trends and waves, disclosing how personal belief spoiled potential discoveries, not as sensational as those promised but much more realistic and down to Earth.
So, basically hes going the way of debunkers, saying we have wasted our time and its all in our minds...
I posted this because i think his conclusions are somewhat unusual among the known veteran UFO researchers. Most of them to my knowledge havent given up and still pretty much think there is something to it, despite the decades of lacking conclusive physical evidence(at least in the public realm). Including the researchers in my own country. And i think theyre right, as long as a single possibility exists, it is worth it to turn over every rock.
Thoughts?
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