The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
Posts tagged with “Psychology”
This Is Your Brain on UFOs
The very sound science on memory and its fallibility I discussed in the previous post is, as I argued, particularly relevant to the question of close encounters … and not, as most psychologists would hold, simply to cast doubt on their objective reality. I think that it is precisely the kind of memory research that […]
Those Alien Bastards (Or, Who Are the Real “Hybrids”?)
The “crypoterrestrial” hypothesis recently proposed by the late skeptic blogger Mac Tonnies has a lot going for it over the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) that most UFO believers still adhere to. For one thing, there is the historical span of reported encounters with strange humanoid beings. Encounters with “UFOs” and their purported otherworldly inhabitants are a […]
A Mime in the Glass Box of Science
My last post was partly about the impossibility of psychic phenomena — especially telepathy. That is, the impossibility of thought to travel between minds in any other way than by a physical signal receivable and readable ultimately by the private machine language of the brain. In other words, I was taking a firmly materialist assumption […]
Daddy’s Forbidden Closet of Mystery: UFOs and the Holographic Hypothesis
[Note (3/13/10): In the first version of this post, I began by proposing–I thought somewhat originally–that UFOs were like the laser pointers used to entertain cats. A reader pointed out, however, that that the UFOs-as-laser-pointer idea was offered a couple years ago by Mac Tonnies on his blog Posthuman Blues (September 29, 2006). I had […]
Belittling Ufology
How many times in the history of ufology has flip derision been the media’s or the government’s reaction? Arizona Governor Fife Symington’s farcical, dismissive news conference after the Arizona Lights incident, for example (as shown in James Fox’s terrific documentaries Out of the Blue and I Know What I Saw). Or the vaguely comedic spin […]
What Dreams Really Are
[edit 1/10/09 — The original post is now clarified and expanded in my article “Dreams and the Art of Memory: A New Hypothesis About Dream Bizarreness“] Every few months a psychologist—or now, more often, it is a neuroscientist—aggressively promotes their new theory of why we dream, and it gets picked up in the press as […]
Manifesto of Extraterrestentialism
The time has come for a new Copernican Revolution. Such a revolution would be, not merely a realization and understanding of our place in the order of things, but a true coming-to-grips which painfully and profoundly reorders our thinking. The realization must be this: Humans are not the apex of sentience or consciousness or intelligence […]
