The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
Category “Science”
A Control System (The Right to Bear Experience, Part Deux)
A theme running through all of Jacques Vallee’s writings, and expressed beautifully in my favorite of his books, The Invisible College, is that UFOs seem like a control system, a kind of thermostat that, through recorded history, has periodically kicked in to regulate the human psyche. His study of patterns of UFO waves revealed to […]
Vallee on Salon
The always fascinating Jacques Vallee has just published (with Chris Aubeck) a catalogue of 500 historical accounts of unexplainable aerial phenomena, going back as far as ancient Egypt. Salon interviewed him this week about the book. Like so much of the new research coming about about the UFO phenomenon in our own times, Vallee’s work […]
NASA’s Low-Hanging Fruit
Bryce Zabel, coauthor of A.D.: After Disclosure, has a great reaction to today’s much-hyped NASA nerd-fest about hardy terrestrial microbes: Today we heard about some microbes that can exist in the extremely salty, alkaline, arsenic-rich body of water in eastern California that’s known as Mono Lake. … Because Mono Lake is such an inhospitable environment […]
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 […]
Breaking Astrobiology News…
Interesting news from NASA: WASHINGTON — NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe. (from their press release) […]
Un phenomenon psychologique
Late this past May I attended a symposium called “Alien Abduction Experiences: Normal Science or Revolutionary Science?” at a conference of scientific psychologists in Boston. The speakers included eminent abduction researcher Budd Hopkins and abduction ‘debunker’ Susan Clancy—two polar opposites in the whole abduction question. As both a member of the psychology organization hosting the […]
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 […]
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 […]
