The Extradimensional Ultraterrestrial Hypothesis: Superstition Masquerading as Science

nivek

As Above So Below

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
not only this thread have nothing to do with ESP but also there is no evidence its real

It goes to show that you criticize my post without reading it.

At least 80% of my post is about extra-dimensions, and 20% intro is about ESP. ESP seems to suffer from the same problem as UFOs. People who experienced ESP believe in it, people who haven't just come with low quality arguments.
 

SOUL-DRIFTER

Life Long Researcher
whetever it is, it seems to be behind all paranormal phenomena, you may notice that a lot of astral travels are similar to alien abductions
I agree there may be an occasional entity that may do things to test our psych...but there is no definitive evidence for that. We only have very rare cases where that may be the case.

Any entity sufficiently advanced over us would have little to no use for wasting their time that way except in a rare incident perhaps. IMHO
 
I only just came on this thread and it left me frankly quite bewildered. Nobody seems to have even mentioned John Keel and Jacques Vallee, who were the first ufologists to openly question the ETH. In particular, anyone supporting the ETH has to make some sort of response to Vallee's Five Arguments against the ETH. These are, briefly: 1. the estimated frequency of UFO landings over the 40 years of observations that Vallee was discussing, taking into account such factors as the inverse population density law, the nocturnal bias of sightings, etc. was some 14 million landings. The apparent reason for such landings -- taking samples of geology or life forms -- should be accomplished far more quickly and easily than this. 2. The fact that a huge majority of reported alien pilots seem to be able to breathe our air, move about the environment without difficulty, and are humanoid in shape, seems to argue against them originating on some distant planet. 3. The abductions, similarly, make no scientific sense -- if aliens were trying to obtain genetic materials from us, kidnapping individuals at random and doing bizarre sexually oriented experiments on them would be a very inefficient way of proceeding. 4. History shows that similar stories -- of strange humanoid creatures, sometimes abducting and sexually interacting with humans, have been around in all cultures for thousands of years. This argues strongly against the theory that was once popular, that the aliens were attracted by our development of atomic bombs in the 1940s. They seem to have been a long term feature of our environment. 5. The behaviour of UFOs often seems to contradict any kind of nuts and bolts interpretation of their nature. Appearing and vanishing, dissolving away, merging one with another, changing shape, etc., doesn't match up to the idea of solid metallic spaceships carrying alien visitors.
I would add to these arguments (a) that much of the thinking of ufologists has been shaped by the deliberate use of the extraterrestrial idea as a disinformation ploy to cover up accidents in black projects in the late 40s-early 60s, beginning with the infamous Roswell case. And (b) that while I agree it would be nice if we could explain such phenomena using our current scientific theories, I don't see any indications that we are anywhere near that. I don't support any particular theory but I do think we should keep an open mind, investigate sightings, try to spot the patterns that might point to a possible theory in the future.
 

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
3. The abductions, similarly, make no scientific sense -- if aliens were trying to obtain genetic materials from us, kidnapping individuals at random and doing bizarre sexually oriented experiments on them would be a very inefficient way of proceeding.

You left out specifics on this one. I am curious to hear more explanation.

Problem with Vallee's hypothesis is that we would need an additional scientific proof that extra dimensions exist and that they are physically accessible. For example, in String theory many dimensions are curled up inside sub-sub-atomic diameters and can never be accessed.

Nobody seems to have even mentioned John Keel and Jacques Vallee, who were the first ufologists to openly question the ETH.

That's not really true. I've added recently a post to this thread inspired by Vallee's idea.
 

nivek

As Above So Below
there is indeed a distinct similarity

Apologies for being short with you earlier, I should have waited until later today to reply as I'm doing now because it was a very busy afternoon at work and I didn't realize until later that I used my reply to you as an outlet for some stress...I shouldn't have done that, I apologize for that...

Could you please elaborate on this similarity since you said it is distinct...I have never been abducted by an alien visitor so I cannot compare that with astral traveling first hand but one huge difference right off the top, the individual in an astral body isn't looking to abduct anyone and doesn't even exist in the same resonance as those visited, which many times they are physical or seemed to be physical...Without those two distinctions any other comparison 'matches' cannot hold water, apples and oranges...

...
 
In particular, anyone supporting the ETH has to make some sort of response to Vallée's five arguments against the ETH.
[snip]
And (b) that while I agree it would be nice if we could explain such phenomena using our current scientific theories, I don't see any indications that we are anywhere near that. I don't support any particular theory but I do think we should keep an open mind, investigate sightings, try to spot the patterns that might point to a possible theory in the future.
I responded to Jacques Vallée’s criticisms of the ETH on another forum about a year ago – each of them crumble into dust under scrutiny. Here’s the full exchange with an anti-ETH advocate of the “co-creation hypothesis" (which is actually a misnomer because nothing is “created,” but that’s another story):

Burnt State said:
That is very far from the basic tenet of co-creation. You might not be reading the texts or hearing the explanation correctly but no where in any co-creation discussion or writing have i seen any promotion of the idea that radar traces get made with the human mind. That's just silly.
Yes, it is silly. We do have a number of credible radar-visual cases. So how does the “co-creation hypothesis” explain that, if it doesn’t suppose that our minds somehow interact with something else to produce radar returns?

Burnt State said:
Similarly i have not read anything scientific that has defined the ETH as likely or any more likely, unless you subscribe to what contactees have to say.
Modern astronomers and astrobiologists have crunched the numbers against the latest exosolar planetary discoveries, and concluded that it’s virtually certain that advanced civilizations share our universe with us:

“By applying the new exoplanet data to the universe's 2 x 10 to the 22nd power stars, Frank and Sullivan find that human civilization is likely to be unique in the cosmos only if the odds of a civilization developing on a habitable planet are less than about one in 10 billion trillion, or one part in 10 to the 22th power.

‘One in 10 billion trillion is incredibly small,’ says Frank. ‘To me, this implies that other intelligent, technology producing species very likely have evolved before us. Think of it this way. Before our result you'd be considered a pessimist if you imagined the probability of evolving a civilization on a habitable planet were, say, one in a trillion. But even that guess, one chance in a trillion, implies that what has happened here on Earth with humanity has in fact happened about a 10 billion other times over cosmic history’”
https://phys.org/news/2016-04-limits-uniqueness.html

“A New Empirical Constraint on the Prevalence of Technological Species in the Universe,” A. Frank & W. T. Sullivan III, Astrobiology, 2016
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1510/1510.08837.pdf

Burnt State said:
One more time i suppose:

I’m honestly surprised that you weren’t embarrassed to share that painfully banal video that features frickin’ video game footage throughout the entire rotten thing, with some snide twit beating his chest to rhyming couplets like an “Epic Rap Battle” video. Not to mention the weird worship-like fixation on Jacques Vallée, as if he has all the answers (even though he explicitly states that he doesn’t have the answers to the UFO phenomenon).

But this raises an interesting point that I’ve been meaning to address in this thread: namely, the capabilities of technological devices originating from civilizations thousands (and more likely, millions) of years ahead of us.

An Apache helicopter over ancient Athens would’ve made the locals crap their pants in confusion and fear – and that’s just a 3000-year difference, give or take a millennium. Witnesses would’ve been convinced that either Ares or Zeus were furious and had sent some mythical beast to reign terror down on them for some imagined slight (neglecting to sacrifice a calf at their temple on the appropriate day, for example).

Similarly, we literally cannot even imagine the capabilities of a civilization 10-10,000+ millennia ahead of us. We got our first glimpse of a viable interstellar propulsion concept only about 23 years ago, and that covers all of the simple stuff like levitation and inertia-defying performance capabilities. But we can’t even imagine what a PSYOP would be like from a civilization thousands+ years ahead of us. Thought projection/manipulation, unthinkably advanced holographic capabilities, and genetic analysis and alteration capabilities vastly beyond our comprehension, would all be likely, given enough scientific advancement. But just as an ancient Greek couldn’t imagine quantum teleportation, we have no idea what the next million years of technological advancement could yield for an advanced civilization.

But let’s get back to gravitational field propulsion for a moment, because that perfectly fits most of the exotic performance characteristics that are widely reported. By definition, this involves engineering spacetime geometry. Space *and* time. At a minimum, that means that they could control the rate of time with respect to the device, to some extent – perhaps even making it slow to a crawl, or speed by, compared to an observer on the surface of the Earth. And what if they can also move backward in time as well? If they’ve figured out how to do that (and we already have compelling theoretical work that links things like warp drive and wormholes to time travel) – then we’re so far out of our league, it’s mind-boggling to consider. For example, we could occasionally be seeing the same device, separated by thousands of years or more in our time, as it collects data across our entire history, and does whatever weird stuff that a hyperadvanced interstellar civilization gets up to. Such a device could arrive at the Earth and opt to shape our entire history and/or genetic evolution however it wished, and check the results in the future until it got the outcome it wanted, within perhaps a week of its own time on board the craft. This would also allow them to erase all tangible evidence of their existence, of course: if some pivotal sighting accidentally happened that undeniably alerted us to their presence (which they seem to avoid), they could just go back in time and prevent that event from happening, nbd.

And that's just one of the possibilities that we can imagine. We can't even anticipate what another 100,000 years of civilization could yield, scientifically. All we really know is that it would seem like magic to us, and that's not much.

Anyway, I found all of the arguments in this video to be either logically flawed, presumptuous, or simply myopic. So I’ve made a list of rebuttals to each point:

Scientifically rational rebuttals to Jacques Vallee’s five criteria against the ETH:

1.) “3 million landings per 20 years – we’d need only one probe to learn everything about a planet like Earth, so why so many?”

Rebuttal: A.) 3 million landings per each 20 years sounds preposterously large to me – where’s the evidence of this? I’ve only heard a handful of credible landing reports in my lifetime of interest in this subject. B.) The assumption that only one species has visited the Earth is illogical: if one civilization has visited us, then interstellar spaceflight is practical to any life form significantly more advanced than us, so millions of species could be exploring the cosmos with both occupied and artificially intelligent devices – and indeed, we do see a wide variety of craft, so that fits the ETH. C.) The presumption that one of our current probes could learn everything there is to know about our global ecosphere is ludicrous on its face; we’ve sent multiple probes to the barren wasteland of Mars and have only begun to scratch the surface of understanding it and the comparably primitive and evidently lifeless conditions there. The presence of a vibrant Earth-like biosphere would change that equation dramatically – it would take hundreds if not thousands of probes to learn everything that there is to know about; the Earth, the > 8 million species here, and we humans (who still haven’t figured ourselves out yet). D.) The assumption of motive is totally naive: why would an alien species limit its interest in this planet to collecting data? They could be doing all kinds of things that we both can imagine, and can’t imagine. Like running experiments of a biological or a psychological nature.

2. ) UFOs “move through objects,” “pop in and out of existence,” “defy physical logic and quickly change direction like a holographic projection.”

Rebuttal: Let’s take these one at a time:

* “move through objects” – where’s the evidence of this? I’m aware of these objects moving through sea, but so do submarines. I’ve never heard about a case of a UFO moving through a solid object. And if such a thing has been reported, then how can we be sure that it actually happened that way? An extremely fast-moving object could appear on the other side of a solid object (like a mountain) by going around it faster than we could see.

* “pop in and out of existence” – again, many of these devices exhibit lightning fast accelerations from a standstill. Ergo, they could also exhibit equally fast decelerations. An object doing either with sufficient speed would appear to “pop into and out of existence” to the naked eye. Also, we’re already developing and deploying various forms of cloaking & camouflage technology; a civilization that’s, say, a million years ahead of us technologically, would obviously have the ability to cloak and decloak virtually instantaneously.

* “defy physical logic and quickly change direction like a holographic projection” – first off, it’s simply wrong to say that these devices “defy physical logic.” We already have a theoretical concept for gravitational field propulsion (Alcubierre, 1994), that would explain pretty much –all- of the observed performance characteristics quite neatly. And in labs right now, physicists are learning how to engineer the quantum wavefunction of matter to create all kinds of novel effects that have never been achieved before – in time, our very understanding of what properties a “solid object” can exhibit, will change radically, and the capabilities of such devices would be incomprehensible to our current understanding of materials science. Rapid changes of direction are elegantly explained by the principle of gravitational field propulsion, where even extremely high accelerations produce zero g-forces on board the device generating such a field. Also, it’s quite possible that some of the sighting reports –do- involve holograms: holograms generated by extremely advanced interstellar devices (because we’re almost certainly not capable of generating holograms of that nature yet, which appear solid and emit light).

3.) “They usually look like humans and breathe our air etc” – the cases we know of that fit this description, like the Adamski case, usually turn out to be frauds. Those that aren’t frauds, could be psychological/perceptual manipulation of some kind using technology unknown to us. And of course it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that since Earth-like conditions are ubiquitous throughout the universe, some of those planets would yield similar evolutionary patterns that could produce bipedal primates like ourselves. There are evolutionary reasons that we have two forward-facing eyes, and stand upright, and have the size and body mass that we have, for example. Given a large enough sample size, some extraterrestrial life forms will resemble us, and of course, those are likely to take an interest in us because we’d belong to their own class of bipedal humanoid species.

4.) “what are the abductions for? Thousands of cases all over the planet – what kind of experiment requires that much activity?” “And why is their [surgical] technique so primitive?”

Rebuttal: Who says that abductions aren’t entirely psychological in nature? The evidence of abductions is even thinner than the evidence for UFO sightings – perhaps it’s just some kind of sleep paralysis nightmare. But even if they are real, then how the heck can we determine how many abductions would be required, if we don’t know the intention behind them? Consider this: we say that science has “mapped the human genome,” but in reality, every person possesses a unique complete genome, each with different strengths and weaknesses and idiosyncrasies and unique sets of mutations. If a race wanted to 100% understand the potentials and limitations of a species like ours, they’d quite possibly have to study every single man, woman, and child on the planet, because the same genetic profile never occurs twice. As far as their surgical techniques, who knows? Maybe there’s a psychological component to their program to gauge our fear and pain responses. Or maybe it’s easier to stick a needle into somebody to get a deep tissue sample, than any other method available. In any case, recovery seems to be complete in nearly every case, so gauging by “patient outcomes” they seem to be doing far better than our own hospital procedures, which frequently kill people (and sometimes kill them horribly).

5.) “Why does it seem like they’ve always been here, and been described so differently throughout thousands of years of history?”

Rebuttal: The fact that “they” have been visiting the Earth for thousands of years makes absolute sense if the cosmos is teeming with alien civilizations. In that case, most civilizations would be millions or more years ahead of us, so they could’ve been visiting us from the age of the dinosaurs or earlier, perhaps to observe the trajectory of our evolution. And of course we would’ve described them in religious terms before science provided us with the notion of “flying machines” only about 100 years ago. Language evolves: today’s “antigravitational metallic spacecraft” would by necessity be described differently by, say, the ancients Greeks – they’d only have concepts like “a chariot of the gods” to describe a luminous aerial object maneuvering in dramatic ways. Similarly, some uneducated peasant in feudal Europe might witness some glowing object lurching around against the background of stars as an “angel” or a “devil.”

I’ll close by citing a couple of key points that are usually overlooked.

1.) Nobody’s saying that the ETH explains –all- anomalous sightings reports. It’s a big weird universe and we’re only beginning to map the terrain of possibilities for life, consciousness, energy, physics, biology, etc. So lots of freaky things are probably going on all over the place but with sufficient rarity that we haven’t understood them yet.

But the ETH certainly appears to explain some, if not most, of the anomalous reports extremely well. It’s all but certain that –some- sightings are extraterrestrial in origin.

2.) There’s no viable alternative hypothesis, that I’ve seen anyway. It seems to come down to: 1.) the ETH, and/or 2.) an empty and hand-wavy argument that goes a bit like this “something extremely nonspecific about consciousness,” and/or 3.) "they’re extradimensional, whatever that means – and don’t bother me by explaining how extra physical dimensions don’t mean what I think they mean or that we’ve never seen a whisper of physical evidence to suggest that such a thing exists,” and/or 4.) “we have no idea what the heck is going on.”

Note that the ETH is the only concept which actually rises to the status of a hypothesis; none of the other options even achieve the level of a cogent thought.

So the most rational position is this: the ETH explains many sighting reports, and the rest we have no explanation for yet. That works for me.
 
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Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
To, kind of, borrow from myself, in that another forum and in this forum I used this same argument to counter ETH hypothesis:

Now, non-locality easily explains ESP, but it can possibly prove Vallee's Extra-dimensional Hypothesis. Big problem with Extra-Terestrial Hypothesis is that even if UFOs only traveled at a speed of light through interstellar vacuum, which is full of hydrogen atoms, for the ship itself it would be equivalent of traveling through Hadron Colider's beam that's the same size as the spacecraft's cross section. And Hadron Colider's beam, if used as a weapon is a beast, it can cut in a half a full size aircraft carrier in under 14 sec. Even with a warp drive etc., an UFO traveling back and forth, for say 12 months would have to endure that attrition throughout the whole journey. One way to avoid facing this self-inflicted beam of attrition is to travel multidimensional via some kind of worm hole, possibly created within these complex dimensions.

Creating a warp drive to propel the spacecraft at speed of light or faster is the first big problem. Second big problem is how to save the spaceship from ablation by the oncoming particles, not to mention micrometeorites and meteorites. That is where Vallee's hypothesis actually offers better solution, because if it was possible to just jump through dimensions problem of ablation by interstellar particles and micrometeorites would be avoided.

Not that I know which solution is more probable, because both are currently in a sci-fi realm. I just want to bring to light all the problems that interstellar travel faces.
 
To, kind of, borrow from myself, in that another forum and in this forum I used this same argument to counter ETH hypothesis:



Creating a warp drive to propel the spacecraft at speed of light or faster is the first big problem. Second big problem is how to save the spaceship from ablation by the oncoming particles, not to mention micrometeorites and meteorites. That is where Vallee's hypothesis actually offers better solution, because if it was possible to just jump through dimensions problem of ablation by interstellar particles and micrometeorites would be avoided.

Not that I know which solution is more probable, because both are currently in a sci-fi realm. I just want to bring to light all the problems that interstellar travel faces.
Here's the thing though - AAVs are commonly reporting streaking through the sky at hypersonic speeds, without creating either a sonic boom or a glowing trail of superheated atmospheric plasma. If they can do that in our fairly dense atmosphere, then they can do it in the tenuous plasma of the interstellar medium as well. I assume that they're doing this by generating a negative gravitational field in front of the craft, forcing incident particles out of the way as the craft moves. But however they're doing it, they are doing it, so they've solved that problem one way or another.
 
You left out specifics on this one. I am curious to hear more explanation.

Problem with Vallee's hypothesis is that we would need an additional scientific proof that extra dimensions exist and that they are physically accessible. For example, in String theory many dimensions are curled up inside sub-sub-atomic diameters and can never be accessed.



That's not really true. I've added recently a post to this thread inspired by Vallee's idea.
Vallee's point regarding the theory that aliens are abducting people to obtain genetic material was that (e.g.) by entering a hospital or medical research facility, or sperm storage depot, they could quickly access huge amounts of genetic material.
 
I responded to Jacques Vallée’s criticisms of the ETH on another forum about a year ago – each of them crumble into dust under scrutiny. Here’s the full exchange with an anti-ETH advocate of the “co-creation hypothesis" (which is actually a misnomer because nothing is “created,” but that’s another story):


Yes, it is silly. We do have a number of credible radar-visual cases. So how does the “co-creation hypothesis” explain that, if it doesn’t suppose that our minds somehow interact with something else to produce radar returns?


Modern astronomers and astrobiologists have crunched the numbers against the latest exosolar planetary discoveries, and concluded that it’s virtually certain that advanced civilizations share our universe with us:

“By applying the new exoplanet data to the universe's 2 x 10 to the 22nd power stars, Frank and Sullivan find that human civilization is likely to be unique in the cosmos only if the odds of a civilization developing on a habitable planet are less than about one in 10 billion trillion, or one part in 10 to the 22th power.

‘One in 10 billion trillion is incredibly small,’ says Frank. ‘To me, this implies that other intelligent, technology producing species very likely have evolved before us. Think of it this way. Before our result you'd be considered a pessimist if you imagined the probability of evolving a civilization on a habitable planet were, say, one in a trillion. But even that guess, one chance in a trillion, implies that what has happened here on Earth with humanity has in fact happened about a 10 billion other times over cosmic history’”
https://phys.org/news/2016-04-limits-uniqueness.html

“A New Empirical Constraint on the Prevalence of Technological Species in the Universe,” A. Frank & W. T. Sullivan III, Astrobiology, 2016
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1510/1510.08837.pdf


I’m honestly surprised that you weren’t embarrassed to share that painfully banal video that features frickin’ video game footage throughout the entire rotten thing, with some snide twit beating his chest to rhyming couplets like an “Epic Rap Battle” video. Not to mention the weird worship-like fixation on Jacques Vallée, as if he has all the answers (even though he explicitly states that he doesn’t have the answers to the UFO phenomenon).

But this raises an interesting point that I’ve been meaning to address in this thread: namely, the capabilities of technological devices originating from civilizations thousands (and more likely, millions) of years ahead of us.

An Apache helicopter over ancient Athens would’ve made the locals crap their pants in confusion and fear – and that’s just a 3000-year difference, give or take a millennium. Witnesses would’ve been convinced that either Ares or Zeus were furious and had sent some mythical beast to reign terror down on them for some imagined slight (neglecting to sacrifice a calf at their temple on the appropriate day, for example).

Similarly, we literally cannot even imagine the capabilities of a civilization 10-10,000+ millennia ahead of us. We got our first glimpse of a viable interstellar propulsion concept only about 23 years ago, and that covers all of the simple stuff like levitation and inertia-defying performance capabilities. But we can’t even imagine what a PSYOP would be like from a civilization thousands+ years ahead of us. Thought projection/manipulation, unthinkably advanced holographic capabilities, and genetic analysis and alteration capabilities vastly beyond our comprehension, would all be likely, given enough scientific advancement. But just as an ancient Greek couldn’t imagine quantum teleportation, we have no idea what the next million years of technological advancement could yield for an advanced civilization.

But let’s get back to gravitational field propulsion for a moment, because that perfectly fits most of the exotic performance characteristics that are widely reported. By definition, this involves engineering spacetime geometry. Space *and* time. At a minimum, that means that they could control the rate of time with respect to the device, to some extent – perhaps even making it slow to a crawl, or speed by, compared to an observer on the surface of the Earth. And what if they can also move backward in time as well? If they’ve figured out how to do that (and we already have compelling theoretical work that links things like warp drive and wormholes to time travel) – then we’re so far out of our league, it’s mind-boggling to consider. For example, we could occasionally be seeing the same device, separated by thousands of years or more in our time, as it collects data across our entire history, and does whatever weird stuff that a hyperadvanced interstellar civilization gets up to. Such a device could arrive at the Earth and opt to shape our entire history and/or genetic evolution however it wished, and check the results in the future until it got the outcome it wanted, within perhaps a week of its own time on board the craft. This would also allow them to erase all tangible evidence of their existence, of course: if some pivotal sighting accidentally happened that undeniably alerted us to their presence (which they seem to avoid), they could just go back in time and prevent that event from happening, nbd.

And that's just one of the possibilities that we can imagine. We can't even anticipate what another 100,000 years of civilization could yield, scientifically. All we really know is that it would seem like magic to us, and that's not much.

Anyway, I found all of the arguments in this video to be either logically flawed, presumptuous, or simply myopic. So I’ve made a list of rebuttals to each point:

Scientifically rational rebuttals to Jacques Vallee’s five criteria against the ETH:

1.) “3 million landings per 20 years – we’d need only one probe to learn everything about a planet like Earth, so why so many?”

Rebuttal: A.) 3 million landings per each 20 years sounds preposterously large to me – where’s the evidence of this? I’ve only heard a handful of credible landing reports in my lifetime of interest in this subject. B.) The assumption that only one species has visited the Earth is illogical: if one civilization has visited us, then interstellar spaceflight is practical to any life form significantly more advanced than us, so millions of species could be exploring the cosmos with both occupied and artificially intelligent devices – and indeed, we do see a wide variety of craft, so that fits the ETH. C.) The presumption that one of our current probes could learn everything there is to know about our global ecosphere is ludicrous on its face; we’ve sent multiple probes to the barren wasteland of Mars and have only begun to scratch the surface of understanding it and the comparably primitive and evidently lifeless conditions there. The presence of a vibrant Earth-like biosphere would change that equation dramatically – it would take hundreds if not thousands of probes to learn everything that there is to know about; the Earth, the > 8 million species here, and we humans (who still haven’t figured ourselves out yet). D.) The assumption of motive is totally naive: why would an alien species limit its interest in this planet to collecting data? They could be doing all kinds of things that we both can imagine, and can’t imagine. Like running experiments of a biological or a psychological nature.

2. ) UFOs “move through objects,” “pop in and out of existence,” “defy physical logic and quickly change direction like a holographic projection.”

Rebuttal: Let’s take these one at a time:

* “move through objects” – where’s the evidence of this? I’m aware of these objects moving through sea, but so do submarines. I’ve never heard about a case of a UFO moving through a solid object. And if such a thing has been reported, then how can we be sure that it actually happened that way? An extremely fast-moving object could appear on the other side of a solid object (like a mountain) by going around it faster than we could see.

* “pop in and out of existence” – again, many of these devices exhibit lightning fast accelerations from a standstill. Ergo, they could also exhibit equally fast decelerations. An object doing either with sufficient speed would appear to “pop into and out of existence” to the naked eye. Also, we’re already developing and deploying various forms of cloaking & camouflage technology; a civilization that’s, say, a million years ahead of us technologically, would obviously have the ability to cloak and decloak virtually instantaneously.

* “defy physical logic and quickly change direction like a holographic projection” – first off, it’s simply wrong to say that these devices “defy physical logic.” We already have a theoretical concept for gravitational field propulsion (Alcubierre, 1994), that would explain pretty much –all- of the observed performance characteristics quite neatly. And in labs right now, physicists are learning how to engineer the quantum wavefunction of matter to create all kinds of novel effects that have never been achieved before – in time, our very understanding of what properties a “solid object” can exhibit, will change radically, and the capabilities of such devices would be incomprehensible to our current understanding of materials science. Rapid changes of direction are elegantly explained by the principle of gravitational field propulsion, where even extremely high accelerations produce zero g-forces on board the device generating such a field. Also, it’s quite possible that some of the sighting reports –do- involve holograms: holograms generated by extremely advanced interstellar devices (because we’re almost certainly not capable of generating holograms of that nature yet, which appear solid and emit light).

3.) “They usually look like humans and breathe our air etc” – the cases we know of that fit this description, like the Adamski case, usually turn out to be frauds. Those that aren’t frauds, could be psychological/perceptual manipulation of some kind using technology unknown to us. And of course it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that since Earth-like conditions are ubiquitous throughout the universe, some of those planets would yield similar evolutionary patterns that could produce bipedal primates like ourselves. There are evolutionary reasons that we have two forward-facing eyes, and stand upright, and have the size and body mass that we have, for example. Given a large enough sample size, some extraterrestrial life forms will resemble us, and of course, those are likely to take an interest in us because we’d belong to their own class of bipedal humanoid species.

4.) “what are the abductions for? Thousands of cases all over the planet – what kind of experiment requires that much activity?” “And why is their [surgical] technique so primitive?”

Rebuttal: Who says that abductions aren’t entirely psychological in nature? The evidence of abductions is even thinner than the evidence for UFO sightings – perhaps it’s just some kind of sleep paralysis nightmare. But even if they are real, then how the heck can we determine how many abductions would be required, if we don’t know the intention behind them? Consider this: we say that science has “mapped the human genome,” but in reality, every person possesses a unique complete genome, each with different strengths and weaknesses and idiosyncrasies and unique sets of mutations. If a race wanted to 100% understand the potentials and limitations of a species like ours, they’d quite possibly have to study every single man, woman, and child on the planet, because the same genetic profile never occurs twice. As far as their surgical techniques, who knows? Maybe there’s a psychological component to their program to gauge our fear and pain responses. Or maybe it’s easier to stick a needle into somebody to get a deep tissue sample, than any other method available. In any case, recovery seems to be complete in nearly every case, so gauging by “patient outcomes” they seem to be doing far better than our own hospital procedures, which frequently kill people (and sometimes kill them horribly).

5.) “Why does it seem like they’ve always been here, and been described so differently throughout thousands of years of history?”

Rebuttal: The fact that “they” have been visiting the Earth for thousands of years makes absolute sense if the cosmos is teeming with alien civilizations. In that case, most civilizations would be millions or more years ahead of us, so they could’ve been visiting us from the age of the dinosaurs or earlier, perhaps to observe the trajectory of our evolution. And of course we would’ve described them in religious terms before science provided us with the notion of “flying machines” only about 100 years ago. Language evolves: today’s “antigravitational metallic spacecraft” would by necessity be described differently by, say, the ancients Greeks – they’d only have concepts like “a chariot of the gods” to describe a luminous aerial object maneuvering in dramatic ways. Similarly, some uneducated peasant in feudal Europe might witness some glowing object lurching around against the background of stars as an “angel” or a “devil.”

I’ll close by citing a couple of key points that are usually overlooked.

1.) Nobody’s saying that the ETH explains –all- anomalous sightings reports. It’s a big weird universe and we’re only beginning to map the terrain of possibilities for life, consciousness, energy, physics, biology, etc. So lots of freaky things are probably going on all over the place but with sufficient rarity that we haven’t understood them yet.

But the ETH certainly appears to explain some, if not most, of the anomalous reports extremely well. It’s all but certain that –some- sightings are extraterrestrial in origin.

2.) There’s no viable alternative hypothesis, that I’ve seen anyway. It seems to come down to: 1.) the ETH, and/or 2.) an empty and hand-wavy argument that goes a bit like this “something extremely nonspecific about consciousness,” and/or 3.) "they’re extradimensional, whatever that means – and don’t bother me by explaining how extra physical dimensions don’t mean what I think they mean or that we’ve never seen a whisper of physical evidence to suggest that such a thing exists,” and/or 4.) “we have no idea what the heck is going on.”

Note that the ETH is the only concept which actually rises to the status of a hypothesis; none of the other options even achieve the level of a cogent thought.

So the most rational position is this: the ETH explains many sighting reports, and the rest we have no explanation for yet. That works for me.
I don't disagree that the ETH could explain many reports, and as I'm sure you know, Aime Michel presented very sensible arguments regarding how the workings of a hugely advanced technology would appear magical to us. Certainly although these things appear physically impossible to us now, all theories are eventually overturned, and maybe in generations to come we might begin to appreciate how such phenomena might be produced. And it may be that there are so many ET civilisations around that their appearances here going back to the remote past are nothing remarkable. I am not so much discounting ETH for all sightings as pointing out that the alternatives -- other dimensions, non-human species from these dimensions accessing our dimensions and interacting with us for their own purposes -- are equally valid. Appealing to current scientific theory to rule out this possibility is a little dishonest when we actually agree that a civilisation millions of years ahead of us could visit us and present the bizarre types of UFO phenomena. All I am saying is that all possibilities are still on the table and ruling some out because we can't yet fit them into our world view is mistaken. The fact is that many other phenomena -- so called paranormal events, time slips, glitches, hauntings, etc. -- also require explanation, and in many of those areas the existence of other dimensions, parallel universes, and the like, could explain quite a lot.
 

nivek

As Above So Below
Vallee's point regarding the theory that aliens are abducting people to obtain genetic material was that (e.g.) by entering a hospital or medical research facility, or sperm storage depot, they could quickly access huge amounts of genetic material.

That is just one theory which cannot account for all abductions or scenarios, for instance there are many instances where the abductee has allegedly been abducted throughout their lives...I doubt the abductors are looking for genetic material in those type of cases...If the alien visitors wished to stay incognito as it seems evident, then raiding a hospital or other facilities of that nature would not be convenient or an option for them...

...
 
I don't disagree that the ETH could explain many reports, and as I'm sure you know, Aime Michel presented very sensible arguments regarding how the workings of a hugely advanced technology would appear magical to us. Certainly although these things appear physically impossible to us now, all theories are eventually overturned, and maybe in generations to come we might begin to appreciate how such phenomena might be produced. And it may be that there are so many ET civilisations around that their appearances here going back to the remote past are nothing remarkable.
Yep. The latest analysis of the average age of other warm habitable Earth-like worlds in our galaxy (and by extension, the universe at large) is around 3 billion years older than our planet. That's an awful lot of time for other civilizations out there to surpass us technologically by an unimaginable degree.

I am not so much discounting ETH for all sightings as pointing out that the alternatives -- other dimensions, non-human species from these dimensions accessing our dimensions and interacting with us for their own purposes -- are equally valid. Appealing to current scientific theory to rule out this possibility is a little dishonest when we actually agree that a civilisation millions of years ahead of us could visit us and present the bizarre types of UFO phenomena. All I am saying is that all possibilities are still on the table and ruling some out because we can't yet fit them into our world view is mistaken. The fact is that many other phenomena -- so called paranormal events, time slips, glitches, hauntings, etc. -- also require explanation, and in many of those areas the existence of other dimensions, parallel universes, and the like, could explain quite a lot.
I've exhaustively explored this notion of other dimensions from a physics standpoint, and there remains zero evidence that such a thing exists. And if they do exist, then they would have to exist as knots at the Planck-scale as described by superstring theory, otherwise we would be able to detect their influence on known physical interactions. For anything to exist in "other dimensions," those dimensions would have to be macroscopic - i.e. large enough for things to exist in. But it's easy to show how the laws of physics as we know them would break down if any extra macroscopic dimensions existed. We recently published a Physics Frontiers episode about this:

The Dimensionality of Space-Time | Free Podcasts | Podomatic"

My stance is very simple: it's one thing to idly speculate about things for which no evidence exists, like extra dimensions - after all, string theorists do that every day (although they've never come up with anything useful in over half a century, so I question the wisdom of that exercise). It's another thing to formulate a scientific hypothesis and argue for it as an alternative to other scientific hypotheses (like the ETH for example). The notion of beings from other dimensions visiting our world is not a valid hypothesis because no means has been found to simultaneously A.) explain how such dimensions could exist without ever being detected, 2.) explain how those dimensions could exist in reality breaking all of the known laws of physics, and 3.) explain how anything could exist in those dimensions. Until somebody can do those three things, the notion of visitors from other dimensions fails to rise to the level of a valid scientific hypothesis.

It's easy to be cavalier about it and just say "details, details - one day we'll figure it out." But in truth, the more closely one scrutinizes the idea, the less viable it appears.

On the the hand, the ETH has grown increasingly viable as an explanation as astronomy and astrobiology and several other scientific disciplines have progressed. In fact the scientific consensus about the existence of life elsewhere - and even technological life like us, has quietly shifted to one of favorability as our knowledge has grown. That's the hallmark of a successful theory. The concept of extra dimensions, however, started with a flurry of enthusiasm and has been slowly petering out as increasingly elaborate ad hoc models have been required to explain why we see no evidence of those dimensions - enormous experimental and theoretical efforts have been made to find any evidence or significance for that idea, and all such efforts have met with dismal failure. That's the hallmark of a failed model.

"Parallel dimensions" of reality and the many worlds interpretation make for great science fiction stories, but they make for lousy science. So whatever weirdness is going on in this reality demands other explanations which are couched in the 4D reality that we know and love.

And if somebody someday somehow finds any empirically or theoretically compelling reason to re-open the book on extra dimensions, then we can do that. But right now, nobody knows how to make that idea make physical sense - so the most reasonable thing to do is forget about it until we have a reason to do otherwise. That's the bedrock of empirical reasoning, which I advocate (after all, that's how we clawed our way from the Dark Ages to manned Moon landings).

I'm also bewildered by the appeal of this notion - people seem to favor it because they don't understand the recent advancements in the theoretical physics of interstellar spaceflight - they still think that the distances between stars are too great to traverse (this is wrong, btw). But for some reason they think that travelling between parallel dimensions would be much easier. The exact opposite is true: we already have a viable theory for traversing interstellar distances, but nobody has the faintest idea about how travel between dimensions would be possible (assuming that such dimensions actually exist, which is a huge and groundless assumption). Presumably we'd have to tear some kind of hole in two universes (assuming without any evidence that there's more than one universe in the first place) and make a stable bridge to connect them together. Frankly that project makes the attainment of a gravitational field propulsion technology sound like a walk in the park by comparison. So we're back to Occam's razor - the ETH is the vastly simpler explanation (and it's fully consistent with the entire body of scientific knowledge across multiple disciplines) so it's probably correct.
 

wwkirk

Divine
Yep. The latest analysis of the average age of other warm habitable Earth-like worlds in our galaxy (and by extension, the universe at large) is around 3 billion years older than our planet. That's an awful lot of time for other civilizations out there to surpass us technologically by an unimaginable degree.


I've exhaustively explored this notion of other dimensions from a physics standpoint, and there remains zero evidence that such a thing exists. And if they do exist, then they would have to exist as knots at the Planck-scale as described by superstring theory, otherwise we would be able to detect their influence on known physical interactions. For anything to exist in "other dimensions," those dimensions would have to be macroscopic - i.e. large enough for things to exist in. But it's easy to show how the laws of physics as we know them would break down if any extra macroscopic dimensions existed. We recently published a Physics Frontiers episode about this:

The Dimensionality of Space-Time | Free Podcasts | Podomatic"

My stance is very simple: it's one thing to idly speculate about things for which no evidence exists, like extra dimensions - after all, string theorists do that every day (although they've never come up with anything useful in over half a century, so I question the wisdom of that exercise). It's another thing to formulate a scientific hypothesis and argue for it as an alternative to other scientific hypotheses (like the ETH for example). The notion of beings from other dimensions visiting our world is not a valid hypothesis because no means has been found to simultaneously A.) explain how such dimensions could exist without ever being detected, 2.) explain how those dimensions could exist in reality breaking all of the known laws of physics, and 3.) explain how anything could exist in those dimensions. Until somebody can do those three things, the notion of visitors from other dimensions fails to rise to the level of a valid scientific hypothesis.

It's easy to be cavalier about it and just say "details, details - one day we'll figure it out." But in truth, the more closely one scrutinizes the idea, the less viable it appears.

On the the hand, the ETH has grown increasingly viable as an explanation as astronomy and astrobiology and several other scientific disciplines have progressed. In fact the scientific consensus about the existence of life elsewhere - and even technological life like us, has quietly shifted to one of favorability as our knowledge has grown. That's the hallmark of a successful theory. The concept of extra dimensions, however, started with a flurry of enthusiasm and has been slowly petering out as increasingly elaborate ad hoc models have been required to explain why we see no evidence of those dimensions - enormous experimental and theoretical efforts have been made to find any evidence or significance for that idea, and all such efforts have met with dismal failure. That's the hallmark of a failed model.

"Parallel dimensions" of reality and the many worlds interpretation make for great science fiction stories, but they make for lousy science. So whatever weirdness is going on in this reality demands other explanations which are couched in the 4D reality that we know and love.

And if somebody someday somehow finds any empirically or theoretically compelling reason to re-open the book on extra dimensions, then we can do that. But right now, nobody knows how to make that idea make physical sense - so the most reasonable thing to do is forget about it until we have a reason to do otherwise. That's the bedrock of empirical reasoning, which I advocate (after all, that's how we clawed our way from the Dark Ages to manned Moon landings).

I'm also bewildered by the appeal of this notion - people seem to favor it because they don't understand the recent advancements in the theoretical physics of interstellar spaceflight - they still think that the distances between stars are too great to traverse (this is wrong, btw). But for some reason they think that travelling between parallel dimensions would be much easier. The exact opposite is true: we already have a viable theory for traversing interstellar distances, but nobody has the faintest idea about how travel between dimensions would be possible (assuming that such dimensions actually exist, which is a huge and groundless assumption). Presumably we'd have to tear some kind of hole in two universes (assuming without any evidence that there's more than one universe in the first place) and make a stable bridge to connect them together. Frankly that project makes the attainment of a gravitational field propulsion technology sound like a walk in the park by comparison. So we're back to Occam's razor - the ETH is the vastly simpler explanation (and it's fully consistent with the entire body of scientific knowledge across multiple disciplines) so it's probably correct.
I think most people who speak of "other dimensions" really intend to be referring to other universes. Are you favorably inclined to multiverse theory?
 
Yep. The latest analysis of the average age of other warm habitable Earth-like worlds in our galaxy (and by extension, the universe at large) is around 3 billion years older than our planet. That's an awful lot of time for other civilizations out there to surpass us technologically by an unimaginable degree.


I've exhaustively explored this notion of other dimensions from a physics standpoint, and there remains zero evidence that such a thing exists. And if they do exist, then they would have to exist as knots at the Planck-scale as described by superstring theory, otherwise we would be able to detect their influence on known physical interactions. For anything to exist in "other dimensions," those dimensions would have to be macroscopic - i.e. large enough for things to exist in. But it's easy to show how the laws of physics as we know them would break down if any extra macroscopic dimensions existed. We recently published a Physics Frontiers episode about this:

The Dimensionality of Space-Time | Free Podcasts | Podomatic"

My stance is very simple: it's one thing to idly speculate about things for which no evidence exists, like extra dimensions - after all, string theorists do that every day (although they've never come up with anything useful in over half a century, so I question the wisdom of that exercise). It's another thing to formulate a scientific hypothesis and argue for it as an alternative to other scientific hypotheses (like the ETH for example). The notion of beings from other dimensions visiting our world is not a valid hypothesis because no means has been found to simultaneously A.) explain how such dimensions could exist without ever being detected, 2.) explain how those dimensions could exist in reality breaking all of the known laws of physics, and 3.) explain how anything could exist in those dimensions. Until somebody can do those three things, the notion of visitors from other dimensions fails to rise to the level of a valid scientific hypothesis.

It's easy to be cavalier about it and just say "details, details - one day we'll figure it out." But in truth, the more closely one scrutinizes the idea, the less viable it appears.

On the the hand, the ETH has grown increasingly viable as an explanation as astronomy and astrobiology and several other scientific disciplines have progressed. In fact the scientific consensus about the existence of life elsewhere - and even technological life like us, has quietly shifted to one of favorability as our knowledge has grown. That's the hallmark of a successful theory. The concept of extra dimensions, however, started with a flurry of enthusiasm and has been slowly petering out as increasingly elaborate ad hoc models have been required to explain why we see no evidence of those dimensions - enormous experimental and theoretical efforts have been made to find any evidence or significance for that idea, and all such efforts have met with dismal failure. That's the hallmark of a failed model.

"Parallel dimensions" of reality and the many worlds interpretation make for great science fiction stories, but they make for lousy science. So whatever weirdness is going on in this reality demands other explanations which are couched in the 4D reality that we know and love.

And if somebody someday somehow finds any empirically or theoretically compelling reason to re-open the book on extra dimensions, then we can do that. But right now, nobody knows how to make that idea make physical sense - so the most reasonable thing to do is forget about it until we have a reason to do otherwise. That's the bedrock of empirical reasoning, which I advocate (after all, that's how we clawed our way from the Dark Ages to manned Moon landings).

I'm also bewildered by the appeal of this notion - people seem to favor it because they don't understand the recent advancements in the theoretical physics of interstellar spaceflight - they still think that the distances between stars are too great to traverse (this is wrong, btw). But for some reason they think that travelling between parallel dimensions would be much easier. The exact opposite is true: we already have a viable theory for traversing interstellar distances, but nobody has the faintest idea about how travel between dimensions would be possible (assuming that such dimensions actually exist, which is a huge and groundless assumption). Presumably we'd have to tear some kind of hole in two universes (assuming without any evidence that there's more than one universe in the first place) and make a stable bridge to connect them together. Frankly that project makes the attainment of a gravitational field propulsion technology sound like a walk in the park by comparison. So we're back to Occam's razor - the ETH is the vastly simpler explanation (and it's fully consistent with the entire body of scientific knowledge across multiple disciplines) so it's probably correct.
There's no way we will agree on this point, but I would simply observe that the physical theories that you have recourse to have boundary conditions defined by the physical dimension that we find ourselves in. If other dimensions do exist -- and I think the door is still open -- they would likely be subject to totally different physical laws. Therefore we still need to keep all possibilities in mind -- if you prefer to limit your options that is your choice, of course.
 

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
Here's the thing though - AAVs are commonly reporting streaking through the sky at hypersonic speeds, without creating either a sonic boom or a glowing trail of superheated atmospheric plasma. If they can do that in our fairly dense atmosphere, then they can do it in the tenuous plasma of the interstellar medium as well. I assume that they're doing this by generating a negative gravitational field in front of the craft, forcing incident particles out of the way as the craft moves. But however they're doing it, they are doing it, so they've solved that problem one way or another.

This criticism is on a level of UFO skeptic. Thomas, I expected more effort from you. Both of us and many other people on this forum are here because we want to steer UFO research in a direction of scientific knowledge.

For example, back in 50's there was about a dozen UFO cases where they were clocked, strangely, at exactly 3,500 mph, which is about Mach 5. To move through the air at a speed of Mach 5 requires lots of energy, but to move through empty space in universe very near to speed of light requires at least 100,000 times more energy. And, I am guessing here, to move upwind through Hadron colider's beam would take 1,000,000 times more energy or even more. Even if some kind of warp drive was used, energy required would be of the similar magnitude.

Now for pushing oncoming Hadron beam back with repulsive gravity. Gravity is 10 to power of negative 36 times weaker. That is 1 with 36 zeros weaker, more than billion billion billion times weaker :). Realistically, it would be to expensive to push Hadron beam back just with gravity. More likely with some electrical force, but that is a minor point.

Bigger problem with Vallee's extra-dimensional hypothesis is that currently there is no mathematical model supported by mainstream physics. Warp drive is at least fully allowed under general relativity.

Vallee's point regarding the theory that aliens are abducting people to obtain genetic material was that (e.g.) by entering a hospital or medical research facility, or sperm storage depot, they could quickly access huge amounts of genetic material.

Technically correct, but psychologically catastrophic. Alien's are smart, that would be silly way to do it, primarily because than aliens would be seen by many people (hospitals are full of people) and they would leave traces (like missing sperm storage flasks). Just imagine panic that would create. So far, aliens were proven to be very shy and operate mostly in very remote areas.

I've exhaustively explored this notion of other dimensions from a physics standpoint, and there remains zero evidence that such a thing exists. And if they do exist, then they would have to exist as knots at the Planck-scale as described by superstring theory, otherwise we would be able to detect their influence on known physical interactions. For anything to exist in "other dimensions," those dimensions would have to be macroscopic - i.e. large enough for things to exist in. But it's easy to show how the laws of physics as we know them would break down if any extra macroscopic dimensions existed. We recently published a Physics Frontiers episode about this:

Yeah, that's what I believed so far. But there is another, more recent, way to introduce extra dimensions through complex numbers. And that is the way which has significant support from physics and maths community. As usual, they call it so many names, but one is "complex eight space". Than there is as well 8D Clifton algebra, which is similar but not the same. Each complex number has 2 components, but counts as only one dimension, so total number of dimensions is still 4D, only to differentiate they call it 8D.

Complex numbers had already scored big in physics. Paul Dirac used complex numbers to predict anti-matter. Richard Faynman took inspiration from his mentor John Wheeler for negative time (complex number), turned it into famous Feynman diagrams and made Standard Model into most accurate QM model so far.

As well, there are some problems with complex numbers in classical physics. Because square of -1 is -1 that turns kinetic energy into negative number. So one really needs mathematicians to have better look, which is currently done by Quantum Gravity Research group and about of dozen of others. Particularly it seems that Stanford Uni physics is leaning in that direction.

More info in my previous thread here.
 
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This criticism is on a level of UFO skeptic. Thomas, I expected more effort from you. Both of us and many other people on this forum are here because we want to steer UFO research in a direction of scientific knowledge.

For example, back in 50's there was about a dozen UFO cases where they were clocked, strangely, at exactly 3,500 mph, which is about Mach 5. To move through the air at a speed of Mach 5 requires lots of energy, but to move through empty space in universe very near to speed of light requires at least 100,000 times more energy. And, I am guessing here, to move upwind through Hadron colider's beam would take 1,000,000 times more energy or even more. Even if some kind of warp drive was used, energy required would be of the similar magnitude.

Now for pushing oncoming Hadron beam back with repulsive gravity. Gravity is 10 to power of negative 36 times weaker. That is 1 with 36 zeros weaker, more than billion billion billion times weaker :). Realistically, it would be to expensive to push Hadron beam back just with gravity. More likely with some electrical force, but that is a minor point.

Bigger problem with Vallee's extra-dimensional hypothesis is that currently there is no mathematical model supported by mainstream physics. Warp drive is at least fully allowed under general relativity.



Technically correct, but psychologically catastrophic. Alien's are smart, that would be silly way to do it, primarily because than aliens would be seen by many people (hospitals are full of people) and they would leave traces (like missing sperm storage flasks). Just imagine panic that would create. So far, aliens were proven to be very shy and operate mostly in very remote areas.
 
Interesting point. Given the anti-physical aspects of several UFO incidents, and many abduction cases (witnesses being floated away through walls etc.) I'm sure entering larger facilities would not be a problem for them, nor spiriting away tiny samples of genetic material out of closed containers.

Re the more general issue of taking a scientific approach to UFOs, Vallee was the first major scientific figure to take a serious public interest in the subject, and in his early writings (up to 1970) presented a lot of very interesting analyses of UFO reports. But he realised, through his research for Passport to Magonia, that the simple ETH was lacking, and began to consider a wider range of data (e.g. and especially the psi elements in many UFO cases). He also respected Keel's completely original approach to UFO investigation, which was to take on board all the strange events that were also happening in many UFO flap areas. Such events were happening early on in the flying saucer story (see, e.g Kenneth Arnold's Coming of the Saucers), not only in the US but also in the French wave of 1954. Several ufologists besides Vallee also realised that UFOs were not just a scientific problem, but also an Intelligence problem, a psychological problem, and in fact that it has very many dimensions. To ignore all these facets of the subject and to try to submit sighting data to a purely "scientific" analysis is a recipe for failure (and I also began my involvement with ufology taking a "scientific" approach, but eventually saw that such an approach has actually not delivered much, save in limited areas such as analyses of UFO debris and landing sites).
 

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
Given the anti-physical aspects of several UFO incidents, and many abduction cases (witnesses being floated away through walls etc.) I'm sure entering larger facilities would not be a problem for them, nor spiriting away tiny samples of genetic material out of closed containers.

Yeah, but that is a fully malarkey. Even if it is going to be possible, in say million years, currently we have to ignore that argument, because we simply have to move one step at a time, while only stepping on a what we know is solid ground. Abduction cases are hugely subject to free-wheeling imagination of witnesses and downright plain attention seeking.

Re the more general issue of taking a scientific approach to UFOs, Vallee was the first major scientific figure to take a serious public interest in the subject

Vallee is not a scientist. According to one of his interviews he's a dropout from astrophysics college that ended up working as a programmer and eventually as a venture capitalist. According to that interview, he disliked the idea that time is a dimension that can be drown as a Cartesian coordinate on 2D plane. He definitely can not become scientist with that kind of mindset.

Vallee also realized that UFOs were not just a scientific problem, but also an Intelligence problem, a psychological problem, and in fact that it has very many dimensions.

According to that logic UFOs can be a culinary problem, because aliens were seen on many occasions collecting plants from woods and fields. They must be eating something, so it might be interesting what cooking recipes they do.

I mean, problem with psychology is that it only produces a very fuzzy picture from any data input and it can not make any predictions. Any data input into psychology can produce hundreds of opinions, none of which can deliver a good quality decision support. In the best case psychology can only thicken the plot and make it a more entertaining read. And in the worst case it could just stir up our prejudices and muddle up any good information we might have.
 
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