Books

APIGuy

Independent Field Investigator
Evaluating ufology books can be tricky, any thoughts on the following quotes (from the book above):


The whole thing looks pretty fishy to me. Einstein did not complete a unified field theory that actually worked. Theories are actually a big deal, and tons of them come and go before there is a successful one. It not only needs to explain everything we already know, but predict nothing in contradiction with what we know, and predict new results that make it worth pursuing. That's very tough to accomplish.

From the rest of the quotes, it looks like a lot of dubious claims presented with no real evidence.
 

ChrisIB

Honorable
Strange Frequencies by Peter Bebergal
A journey through the attempts artists, scientists, and tinkerers have made to imagine and communicate with the otherworldly using various technologies
Bill Bryson's African Diary
Some weeks later, I was summoned to CARE's London offices for a meeting with Dan, his boss Will Day and a rugged and amiable fellow named Nick Southern, CARE's regional manager for Kenya, who happened to be in London at the time. We sat around a big table spread with maps of Kenya, while they outlined what they had in mind for me.

"Of course, you'll have to fly to the refugee camp at Dadaab," Will observed thoughtfully at one point. He glanced at me. "To avoid the bandits," he explained.

Dan and Nick nodded gravely.

"I beg your pardon?" I said, taking a sudden interest.

"It's bandit country all round there," Will said.

"Where?" I asked, peering at the map for the first time.

"Oh, just there," Will said, waving a hand vaguely across most of east Africa. "But you'll be fine in a plane."

"They only rarely shoot at planes," Nick explained.

This wasn't at all what I had had in mind, frankly. By way of homework, I had dutifully watched Out of Africa, from which I derived the impression that this trip would mostly take place on a verandah somewhere while turbaned servants brought me lots of coffee. I knew that we would probably visit a clinic from time to time and that someone in the party might occasionally have to shoot a charging animal, but I hadn't imagined anything shooting at me in return.

"So how dangerous is Kenya then?" I asked in a small controlled squeak.

"Oh, not at all," they responded in unison.

"Well, hardly," Will added.

"It depends on what you mean by dangerous, of course," said Dan.

"Like bleeding and not getting up again," I suggested. "Being shot and stabbed and so forth," I added.

They assured me that that only very rarely happened, and that it was nearly always one or the other. You had to be very unlucky to be shot and stabbed, they said.

"It's mostly diseases you have to worry about," Nick went on. "Malaria, schistosomiasis, trypanosomiasis."

"Rift Valley fever, blackwater fever, yellow fever," said Dan.

"Dengue fever, bilharzia--the usual tropical stuff," added Will.

But they pointed out that you can be inoculated against many of those and for the rest most people manage a more or less complete recovery, given time and a considered programme of physiotherapy. Many even walk again. I asked if there was anything else I should know.

"Well, the roads are a little dangerous--there are some crazy drivers out there," Will said, chuckling.

"But apart from that and the diseases and the bandits and the railway from Nairobi to Mombasa, there's absolutely nothing to worry about," Nick added.

"What's wrong with the railway?"

"Oh, nothing really. It's just the rolling stock is a little antiquated and sometimes the brakes give out coming down out of the mountains--but, hey, if you worried about all the things that might happen you wouldn't go anywhere, would you?"

"I don't go anywhere," I pointed out.

They nodded thoughtfully.

"Well, it'll be an adventure," Will said brightly. "You'll be fine, absolutely fine. Just check your insurance before you go.
 

ChrisIB

Honorable
David Jacobs, The Threat
Based on more than 700 hypnotic-regression interviews with alien abductees and a Roper survey of 6,000 adults, The Threat reveals why the aliens are here and what they want, explains why their agenda has been kept secret, and exposes their frightening plans for earth and its inhabitants.
The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World, David Deutsch
David Deutsch, an award-winning pioneer in the field of quantum computation, argues that explanations have a fundamental place in the universe. They have unlimited scope and power to cause change, and the quest to improve them is the basic regulating principle not only of science but of all successful human endeavor.
Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution, John Paul Stevens
For the first time ever, a retired Supreme Court Justice offers a manifesto on how the Constitution needs to change.
 

Toroid

Founding Member
David Jacobs, The Threat

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World, David Deutsch

Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution, John Paul Stevens
The Threat looks like a book I'd like to read. It's under $12 on Amazon. :)
 

ChrisIB

Honorable
UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry, Michael Swords
Governments around the world have had to deal with the UFO phenomenon for a good part of a century. How and why they did so is the subject of UFOs and Government, a history that for the first time tells the story from the perspective of the governments themselves. It's a perspective that reveals a great deal about what we citizens have seen, and puzzled over, from the "outside" for so many years.

The story, which is unmasked by the governments' own documents, explains much that is new, or at least not commonly known, about the seriousness with which the military and intelligence communities approached the UFO problem internally. Those approaches were not taken lightly. In fact, they were considered matters of national security. At the same time, the story reveals how a subject with such apparent depth of experience and interest became treated as if it were a triviality. And it explains why one government, the United States government, deemed it wise, and perhaps even necessary, to treat it so. Though the book focuses primarily on the U. S. government's response to the UFO phenomenon, also included is the treatment of the subject by the governments of Sweden, Australia, France, Spain, and other countries.
The Aliens Are Coming!: The Extraordinary Science Behind Our Search for Life in the Universe, Ben Miller
 

wwkirk

Divine
One of my favorite books on UFOs is Parallels by Richard L. Thompson. Originally titled, Alien Identities, Jim Marrs cited it in his UFO book.
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"For decades, researchers have exhaustively documented modern UFO phenomena, but questions remain about the origins of these strange objects and the intentions of the beings associated with them. In Parallels, Richard L. Thompson shows that answers may lie in the records of ancient civilizations claiming thousands of years of contact with races appearing to have an unearthly origin. Startling parallels between modern UFO accounts and events described in the ancient Sanskrit writings of India offer fresh insight into the nature of exotic incidents reported throughout human history.

"PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This book was originally published as Alien Identities: Ancient Insights into Modern UFO Phenomena. The new title, Parallels, was the author’s original choice."
 
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ChrisIB

Honorable
Top secret alien abduction files : what the government doesn’t want
you to know, Nick Redfern, 2018

It draws from FOI, contactee and abductee information and suggests several phases of alien activity.
The early years, from the 50s, where contactees reported benevolent, non abduction type interactions. Intrigued governments began discreetly opening files.
A second and more sinister phase from the sixties with abductions and experimentation. The reports included
spoke of the aliens telling him that they recycled human souls into new bodies and that the Greys had connections to the afterlife and the domain of the dead
Governments became more proactive with monitoring and rapid response, black helicopter type reactions and occasionally their own abductions.
Disinformation was used to limit widespread credence being given.
 

ChrisIB

Honorable
On the future, Prospects for Humanity
Martin Rees

The Astronomer Royal peers into the future
Searches for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) are worthwhile, but it’s like claiming that there’s no life in the oceans after analysing one glassful of seawater.

In popular culture, aliens are depicted as vaguely humanoid—generally two-legged, though maybe with tentacles, or eyes on stalks. Perhaps such creatures exist. But they aren’t the kind of alien that we’d be most likely to detect. I would argue strongly that an ET transmission, if we were to find it, would more likely come from immensely intricate and powerful electronic brains. I infer this from what has happened on Earth, and—more important—how we expect life and intelligence to evolve in the far future. The first tiny organisms emerged when the Earth was young, nearly four billion years ago; this primordial biosphere has evolved into today’s marvellously complex web of life—of which we humans are a part. But humans aren’t the end of this process—indeed, they may not be even the halfway stage. So future evolution—the posthuman era, where the dominant creatures aren’t flesh and blood—could extend billions of years into the future.
The history of human technological civilisation is measured in millennia (at most)—and it may be only one or two more centuries before humans are overtaken or transcended by inorganic intelligence, which will then persist, continuing to evolve, for billions of years. If ‘organic’ human-level intelligence is, generically, just a brief interlude before the machines take over, we would be most unlikely to ‘catch’ alien intelligence in the brief sliver of time when it was still in organic form. Were we to detect ET, it would be far more likely to be electronic.

But even if the search succeeded, it would still be improbable that the ‘signal’ would be a decodable message. It would more likely represent a by-product (or even a malfunction) of some supercomplex machine far beyond our comprehension that could trace its lineage back to alien organic beings (which might still exist on their home planet or might long ago have died out). The only type of intelligence whose messages we could decode would be the (perhaps small) subset that used a technology attuned to our own parochial concepts. So, could we tell whether a signal is intended as a message or just some ‘leakage’? Could we build up communication?
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, ‘If a lion could speak, we couldn’t understand him’.

Even if intelligence were widespread in the cosmos, we may only ever recognise a small and atypical fraction of it. Some ‘brains’ may package reality in a fashion that we can’t conceive. Others could be living contemplative energy-conserving lives, doing nothing to reveal their presence.

ET might be a single integrated intelligence. Even if signals were being transmitted, we may not recognise them as artificial because we may not know how to decode them. A veteran radio engineer familiar only with amplitude modulation might have a hard time decoding modern wireless communications. Indeed, compression techniques aim to make the signal as close to noise as possible—insofar as a signal is predictable, there’s scope for more compression.

The focus has been on the radio part of the spectrum. And it’s worth looking for artefacts within our solar system; maybe we can rule out visits by human-scale aliens, but if an extraterrestrial civilisation had mastered nanotechnology and transferred its intelligence to machines, the ‘invasion’ might consist of a swarm of microscopic probes that could have evaded notice. It’s even worth keeping an eye open for especially shiny or oddly shaped objects lurking among the asteroids. But it would of course be easier to send a radio or laser signal than to traverse the mind-boggling distances of interstellar space.
Scientists are widely believed to follow a distinctive procedure that’s described as the scientific method. This belief should be laid to rest. It would be truer to say that scientists follow the same rational style of reasoning as lawyers or detectives in categorising phenomena and assessing evidence. A related (and indeed damaging) misperception is the widespread presumption that there is something especially ‘elite’ about the quality of their thought. ‘Academic ability’ is one facet of the far wider concept of intellectual ability—possessed in equal measure by the best journalists, lawyers, engineers, and politicians. E. O. Wilson (the ecologist quoted in section 1.4) avers that to be effective in some scientific fields it’s actually best not to be too bright.

the Popper doctrine nonetheless has two weaknesses. Firstly, interpretation depends on the context. Consider, for instance, the Michelson-Morley experiment, which showed, at the end of the nineteenth century, that the speed of light (measured by a clock in the laboratory) was the same however fast the laboratory was moving—and the same at all times of the year, despite the Earth’s motion. This was later realised to be a natural consequence of Einstein’s theory. But had the same experiment been performed in the seventeenth century, it would have been adduced as evidence that the Earth didn’t move—and claimed as a refutation of Copernicus. Secondly, judgment is needed in deciding how compelling the contrary evidence needs to be before a well-supported theory is abandoned. As Francis Crick, codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, reputedly said, if a theory agrees with all the facts it is bad news, because some ‘facts’ are likely to be wrong.

Many sciences—astronomy and cosmology among them—advance decade by decade so that practitioners can observe an ‘arc of progress’ during their career. Paul Dirac, a leader in the extraordinary revolution in the 1920s that codified quantum theory, said that it was an era when ‘second-rate’ people did ‘first-rate’ work. Luckily for my generation of astronomers, that’s been true in our field in recent decades.

Creationists believe that God created the Earth more or less as it is—leaving no scope for emergence of new species or enhanced complexity and paying little regard to the wider cosmos. It is impossible to refute, by pure logic, even someone who claims that the universe was created an hour ago, along with all our memories and all vestiges of earlier history. ‘Creationist’ concepts still hold sway among many US evangelicals and in parts of the Muslim world. In Kentucky there is a ‘creation museum’ with what its promoters describe as a ‘full-size’ Noah’s Ark, 510 feet long, built at a cost of $150 million.

A more sophisticated variant—‘intelligent design’—is now more fashionable. This concept accepts evolution but denies that random natural selection can account for the immensely long chain of events that led to our emergence. Much is made of stages where a key component of living things seems to have required a series of evolutionary steps rather than a single leap, but where the intermediate steps would in themselves confer no survival advantage. But this style of argument is akin to traditional creationism. The ‘believer’ focuses on some details (and there are many) that are not yet understood and argues that the seeming mystery constitutes a fundamental flaw in the theory. Anything can be ‘explained’ by invoking supernatural intervention. So, if success is measured by having an explanation, however ‘flip’, then the ‘intelligent designers’ will always win.

Hard-line atheists focus too much, however, on religious dogma and on what is called ‘natural theology’—seeking evidence of the supernatural in the physical world. They also weaken science. If a young Muslim or evangelical Christian is told that they can’t have their God and accept evolution, they will opt for their God and be lost to science.
 

ChrisIB

Honorable
I always thought consciousness was individual, a universal consciousness seemed vague and unsatisfying.
But in Colin Tudge's 'The secret life of birds', he examines how birds and animals might view the world and describes the new generation psychology:
Consciousness, they say is built into the fabric of the universe. The base 'stuff' of the universe is not just 'matter', as the traditional materialists have it; nor is it just 'mind', as some philosophers (Berkeley) maintained; nor do mind and matter jostle side by side, as Descartes proposed.
The basic stuff is, in fact, 'mind-matter'. In the same way, time and space are merely aspects of the fundamental 'space-time'.
He goes on
We should not suppose that human brains create consciousness and mind.
In truth we partake of the mind that is all around us, and indeed built into us. Our brains focus the universal mind in much the same way that a radio picks up radio waves.
Not only humans, of course; all sentient creatures work in just this way.
 

Toroid

Founding Member
David Jacobs, The Threat

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World, David Deutsch

Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution, John Paul Stevens
Hey, I read 'The Threat' and it was very interesting. If you want to learn about the grays and their hybrid program it's the book to read.
 

ChrisIB

Honorable
We should not suppose that human brains create consciousness and mind.
In truth we partake of the mind that is all around us, and indeed built into us. Our brains focus the universal mind in much the same way that a radio picks up radio waves.
Not only humans, of course; all sentient creatures work in just this way.
Is it testable, this 'focusing a universal mind'?
Could the receiver be isolated by looking at simple organisms?

In general, the universe seems to use fields, so would the wave equations show differences, say for men and woman?
Is the information flow one way, just used to create something or duplex?
What would happen when a person is asleep or dies? Is there interference, attraction or repulsion between individuals, sexes?
If aliens could manipulate it, what would occur?
Does it explains things like intuition? Are religious people wide band?
 

humanoidlord

ce3 researcher
finished reading mothman prophecies and wow! what a ride!
definitely one of the most intense books i have ever read and one that will make you extremelly paranoid about every phone call you receive
the entire book is summed pretty well in the last paragraph:
After spending a lifetime in Egyptian tombs, among the crumbling temples of India and the lamaseries of the Himalayas, endless nights in cemeteries, gravel pits, and hilltops everywhere, I have seen much and my childish sense of wonder remains unshaken. But Charles Fort's question always haunts me: "If there is a universal mind, must it be sane?"
 

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
I picked up Application of Impossible Things: A Near Death Experience in Iraq by Natalie Sudman based on a mention in the Wild Things podcast. I've never been blown up and don't doubt the woman had some strange experience. Also don't doubt her sincerity - but it was just awful. Unreadable.

Also picked up Jeffrey Marks The Afterlife Interviews Volume 1. Easy read - be great on a plane. I really do think that when we die something happens and we continue on in some fashion. Whether he has the inside track on it or not is questionable - but he has an interesting approach and his writing style flows well so it was worth a couple of bucks.
 
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