Where is UFOlogy at in 2015?

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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2015?

Postby conniption » Sat Jun 26, 2021 6:43 pm

RT

Long-awaited UFO report mentions no aliens, but asks for more money for US spies
25 Jun, 2021

Image
An UFO flying saucer advertises a towing company in Kiev, Ukraine May 28, 2021. © REUTERS/Gleb Garanich

The newly released US intelligence community report on unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP) offers more questions than answers. It doesn’t mention aliens, says UAP might be a national security threat – and asks for more funding.

Released on Friday afternoon by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the entire unclassified report clocks in at only nine pages, including two pages of appendices with definitions of terms...continues.

https://www.rt.com/usa/527648-ufo-uap-i ... ce-report/
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2015?

Postby conniption » Sat Jun 26, 2021 7:00 pm

RT
(embedded links and video clips)

The aliens are coming: Here’s what the movies tell us we should expect from the Pentagon’s UFO report

Michael McCaffrey
Michael McCaffrey is a writer and cultural critic who lives in Los Angeles. His work can be read at RT, Counterpunch and at his website mpmacting.com/blog. He is also the host of the popular cinema podcast Looking California and Feeling Minnesota. Follow him on Twitter @MPMActingCo

24 Jun, 2021

Image
© Pixabay / Peter Lomas

Can we trust the government to tell us the truth in its eagerly awaited report on UFOs? If Hollywood over the years is anything to go by, the findings could be fascinating and chilling at the same time…

On Friday, the Pentagon is scheduled to release its highly anticipated report on UFOs, or as the government now calls them, UAPs – unidentified aerial phenomena.

Similar to Richard Dreyfuss in ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’, I’m a long-time, self-confessed, tin-foil hat-wearing UFO enthusiast/fanatic. As such, I’m delusionally hoping the recent government and media pivot to taking UFOs seriously will lead to some sort of ‘disclosure’, where the truth out there will finally be revealed.

Of course, my more rational side knows that any time you’re relying on the government or mainstream media for transparency or truth, you’re playing a fool’s game.

Regardless of what the new UFO report says, the possibilities of what’s going on in our skies and under our seas span from the mundanity of mistaken perception combined with malfunctioning equipment to the momentous notion of extra-terrestrial/inter-dimensional visitors. Despite the alleged implausibility of it, my bet is on the latter, which means that aliens are indeed traversing our air space and ocean depths with technological aplomb and military impunity. So, it might be a good idea to figure out their intentions.

As a film critic, I thought the best way to prepare for contact with our elusive galactic visitors the Pentagon cannot confirm or deny exist was to turn to the movies as a guide, as our collective imagination has projected onto the silver screen and our culture a cavalcade of useful alien archetypes.

The benevolent aliens

Movies about human-alien contact that feature gentle aliens we’d be lucky to have visit us are very reassuring, and among the best that cinema has to offer.

In this archetype, which features fantastic movies like ‘E.T.’, ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’, ‘The Abyss’, ‘Arrival’, and ‘The Iron Giant’, the aliens are good guys, and the villains are our aggressive and deceptive government.

In some of these types of films, like ‘Starman’, ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’, and ‘Midnight Special’, the alien can be a pseudo-Christ figure, and government bureaucrats a nasty combination of the Sanhedrin and brutish Roman soldiers.

These benevolent alien stories put us at ease, because humans are still in power. These movies are philosophical in nature and posit that the problem isn’t the aliens, it’s our own corrupt human nature, something we foolishly believe we can eventually overcome.

The malevolent aliens

Hollywood has also inundated audiences with a plethora of malevolent aliens with distinctly human mindsets over the years, which may lead us to assume nefarious intentions on the part of actual visitors from space.

For instance, in the less-than-stellar ‘Independence Day’, ‘War of the Worlds’ (1953/2005), ‘Edge of Tomorrow’, ‘Battle: Los Angeles’, and ‘Starship Troopers’, aliens – despite their non-human appearance – seem remarkably human in their militaristic behavior and thirst for blood and conquest. The malevolent alien archetype scares us, because it renders us powerless and reflects our violent aggression back onto us.

The creators of these fictional aliens assume that extra-terrestrials share our depraved belligerence and can only be defeated by military force (and accompanying bigger budgets), which is not surprising considering Hollywood’s long-standing, fierce commitment to making shameless propaganda for the Pentagon.

A similar archetype is the vastly superior malevolent alien with a specific weakness. For example, in the taut thriller ‘A Quiet Place’, the terrifying aliens are blind but have super-sensitive hearing… maybe too sensitive. In the often-overlooked M. Night Shyamalan gem ‘Signs’, the alien’s weakness is water, while in ‘War of the Worlds’ it’s a susceptibility to the common cold.

This specific archetype is actually religious in nature, as it spotlights humanity’s desire to think it exists under God’s divine protection against the demonic evil of alien invaders – which is sort of amusing, considering there are actually reports of some real-life military top brass believing UFOs/aliens are ‘demonic’ entities.

The hunters

To me, the most terrifying alien archetype is that of the alien hunter whose prey is humans.

In ‘Predator’, the alien hunts humans for sport, and in the ‘Alien’ franchise, the alien is a horrifying beast relentlessly tracking down humans in order to propagate its species by incubating its eggs in our bellies.

‘Alien’in particularforces humans to consider the prospect of being moved down the food chain, and while that’s exhilarating in fiction, in reality it’s absolutely chilling.

The shapeshifters

Another terrifying alien archetype is the shapeshifter that can assimilate and mimic humans. Films like ‘The Thing’ (1983), ‘Species’, ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’(1956/1978), and ‘Under the Skin’ all turn humans into potential aliens.

This archetype is unnerving because it makes us suspicious of other people and ourselves. Aliens might already be among us, and anybody – including us – could be an alien.

That said, if aliens are seductresses that look like Scarlett Johansson (‘Under the Skin’) and Natasha Henstridge (‘Species’), there are worse ways to die.

In conclusion, to be optimistic about alien visitation, watch ‘E.T’.For a realistic portrayal of how all this UFO stuff will go down, check out ‘Close Encounters’ or Robert Zemeckis’ under-rated ‘Contact’. For a philosophical/religious alien experience dive into ‘Arrival’, ‘Starman’,or ‘The Iron Giant’. For a tense thrill ride, go with ‘A Quiet Place’. To indulge the nightmare scenario, go with John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ (1983) and Ridley Scott’s masterpiece ‘Alien’. To see a fantastic documentary that seriously examines the UFO phenomenon, watch ‘Out of the Blue’ (2003). And to find the truth regarding UFOs, keep your eyes on the prize and to the skies, and trust absolutely no one.

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/527509-ufo-pen ... rt-aliens/
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2015?

Postby conniption » Mon Jun 28, 2021 12:08 am



^^^ lol, I like that. .
We've been getting 3 X-Files episodes M-T on one of our cable stations, in which I occasionally partake, while my daughter is rapidly becoming a Trekkie, where a different cable station is bringing us, idk... five or six Star Trek episodes 6 nights a week. I didn't even realize at the time the series continuing way beyond Shatner's run. Guess that makes me not a Trekkie?

~~~


RT

From the pandemic to aliens, the evolutionary narrative towards global order

Image
© Pixabay / Stefan Keller

By Dr. Mathew Maavak, a Malaysian expert on risk foresight and governance.

25 Jun, 2021

The reaction to Covid has shown that the ‘unity through crises’ model of the global ruling class has backfired. As talk of UFOs intensifies, are they now hoping that mankind can be unified by an extra-terrestrial threat?

When enforced narratives fail, abrupt U-turns are inevitable. The global Ministry of Truth is now openly promoting the Wuhan lab leak theory when not savaging the darlings of yesteryear’s ‘coronapocalypse’.

One such fall guy is the British mathematical epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson, whose Covid-19 contagion model paralleled the 3.5-hour pandemic simulation exercise called Event 201 in October 2019. Up to 65 million people were projected to die from this contagion. Unsurprisingly, a common denominator between both projections was the omnipresent Microsoft, which helped ‘tidy up’ Ferguson’s code. Experts and politicians the world over naturally “listened to the science,” mirroring a teenager’s hysterics over another supposedly existential issue.

Now, however, shadow-banned links are emerging from Google’s search limbo to inform us that Ferguson’s code was in fact a “buggy mess” that looked “more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming,” according to one data expert. This is what our endless lockdowns and coercive vaccination programs were based on.

The ‘unity through crises’ model of the ruling class is backfiring, and the credibility of their political marionettes is plumbing new depths. The World Economic Forum’s prophesied “cyber pandemic,” if it ever transpires, will only to serve to harden growing public scepticism. Besides, such an event will only prove that the building blocks of the WEF’s Great Reset were in fact built on the ‘pastafarian’ codes of Big Tech. Blaming Russian or Chinese bogeymen may not work anymore.

It is not just our cybersystems that are wobbling on dodgy foundations; our entire global systems are primed for a mighty fall. Instead of unity, manifold planetary crises are leading to social fissures of an unprecedented proportion. Mankind can no longer be unified through internally generated crises. The Great Reset project needs to be salvaged by something more exogenous… perhaps something extraterrestrial? Coincidentally, the mainstream narrative is veering in that direction.

Many years ago, the author had gamed out two interlinked scenarios that could engender global order in an elitist-induced chaos. We will now delve into that bizarro world…

The Pentagon’s alien UFO ‘disclosures’

The build-up to the unclassified Pentagon report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) – the new euphemism for extraterrestrials (ETs) and Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) – was preceded by a confusing raft of mainstream admissions over their existence. During a late-night show in May, former US President Barack Obama quipped that “when it comes to aliens, there are some things I just can’t tell you on-air,” before confirming that there were indeed sightings of physics-defying objects in the sky.

This admission was straddled by more bizarre claims. According to Luis Elizondo, former director of the US military’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), extraterrestrials are fascinated by earthling nuclear technologies (in spite of the Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mile Island disasters).

Now, hold that thought for a second: Is it logical for aliens to waste galactic time, travel, and resources to probe the secrets of our primitive nuclear capabilities? We do not even have a prototype for a nuclear-powered mission to Mars, much less the ability to resolve obstacles associated with fusion and pebble bed reactors. Elizondo estimates that current UFO technologies could be “anywhere between 50 to 1,000 years ahead of us…” In technological terms, that is a wildly guesstimate timeline that spans aeons, between the supersonic and ‘Star Trek’ epochs. Besides, they seemed light years ahead of us when the first UFO sightings were documented nearly a century ago.

This is now mainstream study. While vaccine sceptics are viciously trolled and censored as conspiracy theorists on terra firma, no such constraints are placed on cartoonish claims that a “Galactic Federation” of extraterrestrials are working overtime for the ultimate good of mankind. General Haim Eshed, the former head of Israel’s military space division, even claimed that the US and Israeli governments have been roped in for this interstellar project. According to the general, the aliens have “signed a contract with us to experiment here,” but earthlings should not be worried, as ETs are merely looking to enlist them as “helpers” in their quest to “understand the universe.”

continues: https://www.rt.com/op-ed/527611-pandemi ... ing-class/


~~~

Edited to add: (...ran across this on my way out the door..)
off-guardian

Alien Minds and the Will to Believe
Edward Curtin
Jun 28, 2021

https://off-guardian.org/2021/06/28/ali ... o-believe/
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2015?

Postby BenDhyan » Mon Jun 28, 2021 11:00 pm

Pentagon report says UFOs can't be explained, and this admission is a big deal

Adam Dodd, The University of Queensland June 28, 2021

A report from the US task force dedicated to investigating UFOs — or, in the official jargon, UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) — has neither confirmed nor rejected the idea such sightings could indicate alien visits to Earth.

On Friday June 25, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released its eagerly awaited unclassified intelligence report, titled “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”.

The document is a brief nine-page version of a larger classified report provided to the Congressional Services and Armed Services Committees. It assesses “the threat posed by unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and the progress the Department of Defence Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force has made in understanding this threat”.

The report certainly does not, as many were hoping, conclude UFOs are alien spacecraft. Rather, it shows the task force hasn’t made much progress since first being set up ten months ago. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given its task.

However, the task force’s very existence would have been unthinkable to many people just one year ago. It’s unprecedented to see the broader policy shift towards the acknowledgement of UFOs as real, anomalous physical phenomena that are worthy of extended scientific and military analysis.

Seemingly advanced technologies
The report withholds specific details of its data sample, which consists of 144 UFO reports made mostly by military aviators between 2004 and 2021. Its bombshell finding is that “a handful of UAP appear to demonstrate advanced technology”.

This “handful” — 21 of the 144 reports — represents classic UFO enigmas. These objects:

appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, manoeuvre abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion. In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings.

These characteristics indicate some UAP may be intelligently controlled (because they aren’t blown around by the wind) and electromagnetic (as they emit radio frequencies).

In March, Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told Fox News some reports describe objects “travelling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom”. Sonic booms are sound waves generated by objects breaking the sound barrier.

No known aircraft can travel faster than sound without creating a sonic boom. NASA is currently developing “quiet supersonic technology”, which may allow planes to break the sound barrier while issuing a subdued “sonic thump”.

Some have claimed the objects are probably secret, advanced Russian or Chinese aircraft. However, global aerospace development has failed to match the flight characteristics of objects reported since the late 1940s. And it seems counterproductive to repeatedly fly secret aircraft into an adversary’s airspace where they can be documented.

The report’s release is a profoundly important moment in the history of the UFO mystery, largely because of its institutional context. To fully appreciate what this moment might mean for the future of UFO studies, we have to understand how the UFO problem has been historically “institutionalised”.

In 1966, the US Air Force was facing increasing public pressure to resolve the UFO problem. Its effort to do so, then known as Project Blue Book, had become an organisational burden and a public relations problem.

It funded a two-year scientific study of UFOs based at the University of Colorado, headed by prominent physicist Edward Condon. The findings, published in 1969 as the Final Report on the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, allowed the Air Force to end its UFO investigations.

Condon concluded nothing had come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that added to scientific knowledge. He also said “further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby”.

Nature, one of the world’s most reputable scientific journals, described the Condon Report as a “sledgehammer for nuts”. But by then the Air Force had collected 12,618 reports as part of Project Blue Book, of which 701 sightings were categorised as “unidentified”.

Unlike the new Pentagon report, the Condon Report didn’t find any UFOs that appeared to demonstrate advanced technology. The most problematic cases were resolved by being categorised ambiguously. Here’s one example:

This unusual sighting should therefore be assigned to the category of some almost certainly natural phenomenon which is so rare that it apparently has never been reported before or since.

With this strategic category in the toolkit, there was no need to acknowledge seemingly advanced technology exhibited by UAPs. Indeed, they were deliberately filtered from institutional knowledge.

Recovering from ‘institutional forgetting’
For most of their postwar history, UFO reports have been regarded by state institutions as knowledge out of place, or “information pollution” — something to be excluded, ignored or forgotten.

The Pentagon’s UAP task force represents an abrupt reversal of this longstanding organisational policy. UFO reports, made primarily by military personnel, are no longer pollutants. They are now important data with national security implications.

That said, they do still represent “uncomfortable knowledge”. As the late Oxford University anthropologist Steve Rayner observed, knowledge can be “uncomfortable” for institutions in two ways.

First, Rayner said, “acknowledging potential information by admitting it to the realm of what is ‘known’ may undermine the organisational principles of a society or organisation”.

Meanwhile, he said “not admitting such information may also have serious deleterious effects on institutions, either directly or by making them prone to criticism from other parts of society that they ‘ought’ to have known”. Both aspects describe the institutional context of UFO information.

The US Department of Defence has confirmed UFOs threaten flight safety, and potentially, national security. In doing so, it has exposed a weakness in its organisational principles. It has admitted it’s not very good at knowing what UFOs are.

It also faces the criticism that seven decades after UFOs first appeared on the radar, it ought to know what they are. The new Pentagon report doesn’t compel us to accept the reality of alien visitation. But it does compel us to take UFOs seriously.

https://theconversation.com/amp/pentagon-report-says-ufos-cant-be-explained-and-this-admission-is-a-big-deal-161806?fbclid=IwAR3UFtXaeg62m0W4GVlfVm6Lo_wDGSgjHlqKGShxf93B0q6geFo4T-Tupus

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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2015?

Postby Pele'sDaughter » Tue Jun 29, 2021 7:20 am

No wonder they can't figure out what they are. They can't even take a decent photo of one!
Don't believe anything they say.
And at the same time,
Don't believe that they say anything without a reason.
---Immanuel Kant
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2015?

Postby BenDhyan » Tue Jun 29, 2021 8:23 am

Pele'sDaughter » Tue Jun 29, 2021 9:20 pm wrote:No wonder they can't figure out what they are. They can't even take a decent photo of one!

That is the 'big deal', some of the UAPs are not compliant as is most natural phenomena to human observation, photo ops, etc.. That these indeterminate UAPs actually exist and interact, apparently in an intelligent manner, with US Navy aircraft whose pilots attest to the form they take, is not the question, it has now gone past that phase of the debate, exactly what and who is behind them now remains to be determined.
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2015?

Postby drstrangelove » Tue Jun 29, 2021 2:13 pm

Looks like they are gearing up to increase the military budget for a new war against extra-terrestrial terrorists.
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2015?

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:35 pm

8bitagent » Sat Jun 05, 2021 4:54 am wrote:It's such a bizarre timeline, when offworld UFO craft being taken seriously by the CIA, Pentagon, politicians, and the media is met with a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ shrug by most people. I mean if it's not US "black budget", "China/Russia adversarial leap frog tech", or "anomalous weather/birds/swamp gas"...well what else is there?

To me the big news of today is that NASA is now taking "UAP" seriously. Scientists, astro physicists, etc are always out there saying there's nothing to the UFO phenomenon...


NASA has always taken UAP seriously, as does DOD, as does the MIC contracting / R&D nexus. This has always been a phenomenon with multiple layers and a clear esoteric / exoteric distinction. Many of the scientists working the debunking beat are useful idiots whose limited toolkits are evident in their shoddy work, but some of them are actively involved with researching UAP even as they laugh it off in public.

Most of what is being discussed in this most recent PR push -- and that is all this is, there is no organic activist movement, and there is no media coverage without a messaging roadmap -- are, in fact, US black budget, in the sense that these naval and air force encounters are red team exercises involving officially denied drone technology.

This is a kabuki piece with multiple goals, which is something Doty has explicitly told his marks he is trained to do. The immediate mission is testing supersonic probes, the secondary benefit is testing the response of their own enlisted men and women to this technology, and the point of publicizing all this -- note that this third step is completely fucking optional but they're doing it anyway, with counterintelligence assets coordinating the publicity and timing -- is to show this off for those with eyes to see, namely military personnel in China who are aware of this technology and actively trying to steal it.

That state of affairs parallels the last time that the DOD was competing against a communist leviathan for dominance on the cutting edge of the military technology sphere. Indeed, a lot of the men -- and it's almost entirely men, no disrespect to Pasulka's ordeal over the last few years -- a lot of the men involved with this are the same assets who were running the UFO community in the 70's, 80's and 90's. From my vantage point it is difficult to muster much hate for these men because their victims are such willing participants.

The reason you have so many counterintelligence operatives lurking (and ratfucking) in this community is because they're managing a sandbox for leaks, for whistleblowers, and for foreign operatives. UFO fans who aspire to be paranoid accept at face value the testimony of enlisted soldiers who are reading from a psyops script.

As ever, I don't mean to handwave this all away as military operations and spook chess, because there is absolutely a real phenomenon underneath all of this, something deeply inexplicable and intimately related to our own latent capacities for .... psychic, precognitive, telekinetic, kundalini, bioenergy, whatever, it's a big tent and a sloppy umbrella, but it's also our birthright and woven into the human culture of every race. But: most of it is just military operations and spook chess.

And, most importantly, even the real phenomenon is the domain of military operations and spook chess because it's a huge force multiplier and strategic advantage. So of course NASA is interested in UAP because even if it's just an optical artifact on a smartphone, it might give your engineers an idea. And if it's a real, Persinger-style space-time transient, or some Hessdalen lights, then that shit will definitely give your house nerds some deep thoughts.

Boeing was doing all kinds of fucked up shit that involved not only exotic energy sources (and there's a whole constellation of promising stuff that abides in the realm of security through obscurity) but they were also doing human testing to create situations that would make this phenomenon observable. Greer and company are giving you gems if you can see them; they're not just grifting rich people with these CE5 retreats just like Tau Allan Greenfield isn't just involved with the Hellier cast because he loves a good prank.

It's wild how much where UFOlogy is at in 2021 is exactly like where UFOlogy was at in 2015, but far wilder that essentially nothing has changed at any point in the entire existence of the field, aside from Spielberg making it into a national mythos and Vallee making a shit-ton of money in Silicon Valley.

Same songs, same band, same venues, three generations of fans.
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2015?

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Thu Jul 01, 2021 2:12 pm

Interesting talk with Kripal -- to me, more interesting because of the messaging he's pushing and who he's working with -- but whatever else can be said about ol' Jeffrey, at least he's not a fuckwit hack.

Via: http://news.rice.edu/2021/06/30/jeffrey ... henomenon/

...the tone of media coverage on UFOs notably has shifted since the initial New York Times article in December 2017. Derision and skepticism have given way to more serious inquiry. And as government reports like these trickle out, open and rational discussion of UFOs may become more normalized — or, as Jeffrey Kripal has said for over a decade, attitudes of disparagement and a general refusal to engage with the full spectrum of the subject may become even more entrenched.

Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion and Associate Dean of Humanities at Rice, and he has devoted much of his professional research, public lecturing and published thought to the UFO phenomenon. Along with his graduate student researchers, Kripal has also been compiling a massive archive from the works of fellow UFO scholars and researchers, all of it housed at Fondren Library’s Woodson Research Center.

With this newest report, Kripal and his colleagues, including Leslie Kean — the New York Times journalist who helped break the UFO story in 2017 — will have much to discuss next spring when Rice hosts a conference centered around this new archive. “Opening The Archives Of The Impossible” will take place March 3-6, 2022, in Fondren, and will also include exhibitions from the UFO archives across several floors of the library.


Kean comes from an American ruling family with very deep roots and has a number of relatives in the power system today. She started her writing career working State/Langley beats (her first book was Burma's Revolution of the Spirit: The Struggle for Democratic Freedom and Dignity) and pivoted to UFOs / paranormal shortly before Bushadmin came into power. She's been managed by John Podesta's network and did important work creating the disclosure narrative over the past two decades, along with Ralph Blumenthal at NYT. (Muckrack index.)

Rice News sat down with Kripal to discuss the immediate impact of “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” and what it means for humanity at large.

Rice News: How does a professor of religion come to be an expert on UFOs? They’re not topics one would immediately associate.

Jeffrey Kripal: Well, no one is an expert here. No one. That’s the first thing to know. For my own part, I have been thinking and writing about the UFO phenomenon since about 2004. I first struggled with it because I had to: it was simply everywhere in my historical and ethnographic sources with which I was working for a big history of alternative spiritual currents in the California counterculture that I was writing at the time. My own interests definitively began there, at the Esalen Institute.

People commonly assumed then that the UFO phenomenon was not serious or was some kind of “California” thing. But that is simply not true, and it has never been true. Some of the earliest and most dramatic documented modern encounters have been around nuclear military sites and in cultures and places like Brazil, France, New Mexico — in the summer of 1945, just a few miles from the recently radiated Trinity atomic bomb site and just a week after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — and New England. The latter case involved a mixed-race couple who were civil rights activists, no less. The U.S. military, the U.S. intelligence services, American space exploration, Western colonialism, indigenous American cosmologies, a major Black religion — the Nation of Islam — U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Latin America, American-Soviet and now American-Russian relations, NATO, the aerospace and aviation industries, Western esoteric and mystical currents, science fiction literature and the history of science have all been involved. And that is just the beginning.

To study the UFO phenomenon adequately is, in actual fact, to study pretty much everything. It is also to come up against, hard, the realization that the institutional or university order of knowledge within which we work and think today, an order that effectively splits the sciences off from the humanities, is simply not helpful, and certainly not reflective of the reality we are trying to understand. The difficult truth is that the UFO phenomenon has both an objective “hard” aspect (think fighter jet videos, photographs, alleged metamaterials, apparent advanced propulsion methods, and landing marks) and a subjective “human” aspect (think close encounters, multiple and coordinated visual sightings, altered states of consciousness, visionary displays, often of a most baroque or sci-fi sort, and experienced traumatic or transcendent abductions). And both sides — both the material and the mental dimensions — are incredibly important to get a sense of the full picture.

Of course, one can slice up the UFO phenomenon into the “scientific” and the “humanistic,” but one will never understand it by doing so. That, in the end, is why I think the subject is so incredibly important: it bears a particular power to challenge, or just obliterate, our present order of knowledge and its arbitrary divisions. Whatever “it” is, it simply does not behave according to our rules and assumptions. Period.

RN: So what’s your overall assessment of the new report?

JK: Well, I have one positive thing to say about it, and one big complaint. The positive thing is this: The recent release, along with the leaked radar video dating back to December of 2017 that was so effectively reported in the New York Times by my colleagues Leslie Kean, Ralph Blumenthal and Helene Cooper has fundamentally changed the public conversation around the topic. Serious researchers are no longer looked on with quite so much contempt, and the dogmatic debunkers no longer have the upper hand — if they ever really did.

Moreover, and just as importantly, people from all walks of life who would have kept quiet are now “coming out” of their closets and speaking up. To take just one small example, Miles O’Brien, the science correspondent for PBS, confessed on camera a few days ago about witnessing a UFO that behaved in ways that are basically identical to the ways the objects reported in the document behave: impossibly. Indeed, the most basic point of the O’Brien interview is that the government release constitutes a kind of “turning point” in the public conversation. I think — I hope — O’Brien is correct.

RN: OK, so what’s the complaint?

JK: The bad news involves the nature of this erratic and classified “dribbling out” of data — the refusal of our government to release the goods, as it were, and so give serious researchers full access to all the data. All of it. By doing it this way, they are essentially trying to control the narrative. My complaint here can be captured in the folksy wisdom that, “If all you have is a hammer, all you will see are nails.” In this context, since the data is being collected by military professionals whose primary purpose is to protect the nation-state from intruders or enemies, the UAP or UFO phenomenon is inevitably framed in terms of potential “threats.” I mean, my goodness, the videos we are watching were taken by the radar systems of advanced fighter jets designed to do one thing: shoot down an enemy object. Is it any wonder that these filmed objects are being framed, literally and metaphorically, as threats?

RN: And are they even threats? We have no idea.

JK: In American popular culture, in film and science fiction, what I call the “cold war invasion mythology” has been dominant until very recently. In this mythology, the UFO is seen as an “alien” invasion that must be fought back or resisted by patriotic, God-fearing citizens. Think, for example, of H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel “War of the Worlds,” an invasion story, by the way, inspired by British colonialism. Or, on the American side, think “Independence Day” from 1996.

Only recently have writers and filmmakers begun to move away from this cold war invasion mythology and toward something much more positive, and frankly much more faithful to what we actually see in the encounter and contact cases, if we really study them as opposed to just assuming things about them. Hence a recent movie — by a Canadian director, significantly enough — like “Arrival” in 2016.

The latter movie borders on the profound, since it orbits lovingly and contemplatively around the paranormal transformation of its central character, a gifted humanist linguist, Dr. Louise Banks. And, indeed, in historical fact, human witnesses are often radically transformed by their encounters, often in extremely positive, if also difficult ways.

Such encounters, for example, can be of a deeply spiritual nature, by which I do not mean “good” or “nice.” People experience awe, fear, uncanniness and absolute terror; the Harvard psychiatrist John Mack rightly called this “ontological shock.” They experience, either within the event itself or later develop, new astonishing abilities — think telepathy and, yes, precognition. And they adopt new, much more cosmic worldviews.

Hence, in the film, Dr. Louise Banks develops the ability to precognize the future: She “remembers” the early and tragic death of her daughter, who is not yet born, as she gradually learns that time, like the grammar of the alien language she is deciphering, is circular, not linear. This is an idea about space-time, by the way, that is well known to humanists, from ancient Greek philosophy to Nietzsche.

My point? That we should be approaching the UFO phenomenon much more like “Arrival” and much less like “War of the Worlds.” But we can’t seem to do that. Instead, we go on and on about potential “threats” and enact endless security and secrecy measures. And then we wonder why no one understands this? As a result of these actions, the human witnesses, their sightings, their transformations and their traumas are arrogantly ignored and disdained as “anecdotal” and so unworthy of study.

I confess that I despise the snarkiness of that word — anecdotal — and the way it shuts down full inquiry. Every human experience, after all, is technically “anecdotal.” In this sense, I, too, am an “anecdote.” So are you. We all are. And yet there is no science or mathematics, no literature, language, art or religion, and there is certainly no UFO, without that human subject, without that anecdotal witness, thinker or seer. So why are we not talking about the experiences of those human witnesses and how the phenomenon seems to trigger or catalyze the human imagination in fantastic ways? Why are we not compassionately reading those imaginal dramas as meaningful signs instead of arrogantly ignoring them as neurological froth? Why are we not talking about what happens to the terrified pilots, or the baffled military professionals, or the confused private citizens who see these things, sometimes really up close and very, very personally? Is that not also part of the UFO phenomenon? Why are we looking away? And from what?

RN: That’s a beginning to a whole new conversation. Is there anything you’d like to conclude with, though?

JK: There’s always more. I would like to conclude by suggesting that the most sophisticated piece of technology on the planet to detect nonhuman or superhuman presences is not a quantum computer or an advanced military radar system. It is the super-evolved human body, brain and being. I would also like to suggest that the human being has been detecting strange humanoid presences in the sky and the environment not for a few years or a few decades, but for millennia. All we have to do is open our proverbial eyes and look. All we have to do is put away our hammer and look carefully at our histories, our literatures and, most of all, our religions.

On this new big humanist and historical canvas, what we are encountering in the sky and seeing from the ground today will take on fundamentally new meanings and future possibilities. I do not claim to know what those meanings and futures will be — and I certainly do not believe any of the reigning mythologies, be they political, secular or religious — but I am betting they will have very little to do with the assessment of “threats.” That’s the old cold war mythology that it is time to move beyond, way beyond.

RN: Talk about no upper limits.

JK: Yep. There are none.
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2015?

Postby Belligerent Savant » Thu Jul 01, 2021 4:18 pm

.
As you exemplify above, digging into the genealogy/career trajectory of a researcher/'journalist' is an increasingly critical aspect of the discernment process during intake of data points.

I'm looking forward to the phase when they begin to showcase their VR capabilities on a larger scale.
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2015?

Postby conniption » Thu Jul 01, 2021 9:05 pm

speaking of Shatner...

RT

LEGENDARY ACTOR AND AUTHOR WILLIAM SHATNER TO LAUNCH NEW SHOW ON RT AMERICA
29 Jun, 2021

COMING SOON: ‘I Don’t Understand’ with William Shatner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sxidE4DPow
RT America
Jun 29, 2021

Join host William Shatner and seek to answer fascinating and timely questions that pique the natural interest of everyone but that are too-often overlooked by establishment media. Come face to face with some of today’s most perplexing conundrums with each mind-blowing episode. Premieres July 12, 2021.
Watch it on RT America!


WASHINGTON, JUNE 29, 2021 — RT America is proud to announce the premiere of 'I Don’t Understand,' hosted by world-famous actor and author William Shatner.

'I Don’t Understand' will see Shatner seeking to answer fascinating and timely questions that pique the natural interest of everyone, but that the establishment media all too often hesitates to tackle.

From “should I worry about space debris falling from the sky?” to “are we alone in the universe?” to “what is dark matter?” to “what was before the Big Bang?” each episode will bring the Emmy and Golden Globe-winning actor face to face with some of today’s most perplexing conundrums.

Speaking of his hopes for the show, Shatner expressed the universal, quintessentially human sense of curiosity that informs the show’s ethos.

“I have often pondered the questions we should be asking, but perhaps aren’t. Just how much stuff is in space? When I really think about it, I realize that I don’t understand anything. So, I’m going to ask questions no one else is on TV, and we’ll see if we can take a journey to enlightenment together,” he said.

Executive producer of the show and the head of the company Mikhail Solodovnikov said, “We are very proud to bring the inimitable talent of William Shatner to our network and digital platform Portable.TV. It is a show for the curious intellectual who would rather be educated than entertained by a TV show."

Host of 'I Don’t Understand' William Shatner’s many stellar accomplishments include playing the iconic role of Captain James T. Kirk on the original 'Star Trek' television series, earning multiple Golden Globes and Emmys as well as the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, and authoring numerous books, including New York Times bestsellers 'The Ashes of Eden' and 'The Return'. His memoir of recollections about 'Star Trek' co-star Leonard Nimoy, 'Leonard: My Fifty-Year Friendship with a Remarkable Man', was awarded the 2016 Goodreads Choice Award for Best History & Biography.

Digital platform Portable.TV is available on Android, iOS, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Roku, LG Smart TV, Jio TV and Samsung Tizen.

The first episode of 'I Don’t Understand' will air on RT America on July 12, 2021.

https://www.rt.com/about-us/press-relea ... -new-show/
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2015?

Postby elfismiles » Sat Jul 03, 2021 8:55 am

Wombaticus Rex » 01 Jul 2021 00:35 wrote:
8bitagent » Sat Jun 05, 2021 4:54 am wrote:It's such a bizarre timeline, when offworld UFO craft being taken seriously by the CIA, Pentagon, politicians, and the media is met with a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ shrug by most people. I mean if it's not US "black budget", "China/Russia adversarial leap frog tech", or "anomalous weather/birds/swamp gas"...well what else is there?

To me the big news of today is that NASA is now taking "UAP" seriously. Scientists, astro physicists, etc are always out there saying there's nothing to the UFO phenomenon...


NASA has always taken UAP seriously, as does DOD, as does the MIC contracting / R&D nexus. This has always been a phenomenon with multiple layers and a clear esoteric / exoteric distinction. Many of the scientists working the debunking beat are useful idiots whose limited toolkits are evident in their shoddy work, but some of them are actively involved with researching UAP even as they laugh it off in public.

Most of what is being discussed in this most recent PR push -- and that is all this is, there is no organic activist movement, and there is no media coverage without a messaging roadmap -- are, in fact, US black budget, in the sense that these naval and air force encounters are red team exercises involving officially denied drone technology.

This is a kabuki piece with multiple goals, which is something Doty has explicitly told his marks he is trained to do. The immediate mission is testing supersonic probes, the secondary benefit is testing the response of their own enlisted men and women to this technology, and the point of publicizing all this -- note that this third step is completely fucking optional but they're doing it anyway, with counterintelligence assets coordinating the publicity and timing -- is to show this off for those with eyes to see, namely military personnel in China who are aware of this technology and actively trying to steal it.

That state of affairs parallels the last time that the DOD was competing against a communist leviathan for dominance on the cutting edge of the military technology sphere. Indeed, a lot of the men -- and it's almost entirely men, no disrespect to Pasulka's ordeal over the last few years -- a lot of the men involved with this are the same assets who were running the UFO community in the 70's, 80's and 90's. From my vantage point it is difficult to muster much hate for these men because their victims are such willing participants.

The reason you have so many counterintelligence operatives lurking (and ratfucking) in this community is because they're managing a sandbox for leaks, for whistleblowers, and for foreign operatives. UFO fans who aspire to be paranoid accept at face value the testimony of enlisted soldiers who are reading from a psyops script.

As ever, I don't mean to handwave this all away as military operations and spook chess, because there is absolutely a real phenomenon underneath all of this, something deeply inexplicable and intimately related to our own latent capacities for .... psychic, precognitive, telekinetic, kundalini, bioenergy, whatever, it's a big tent and a sloppy umbrella, but it's also our birthright and woven into the human culture of every race. But: most of it is just military operations and spook chess.

And, most importantly, even the real phenomenon is the domain of military operations and spook chess because it's a huge force multiplier and strategic advantage. So of course NASA is interested in UAP because even if it's just an optical artifact on a smartphone, it might give your engineers an idea. And if it's a real, Persinger-style space-time transient, or some Hessdalen lights, then that shit will definitely give your house nerds some deep thoughts.

Boeing was doing all kinds of fucked up shit that involved not only exotic energy sources (and there's a whole constellation of promising stuff that abides in the realm of security through obscurity) but they were also doing human testing to create situations that would make this phenomenon observable. Greer and company are giving you gems if you can see them; they're not just grifting rich people with these CE5 retreats just like Tau Allan Greenfield isn't just involved with the Hellier cast because he loves a good prank.

It's wild how much where UFOlogy is at in 2021 is exactly like where UFOlogy was at in 2015, but far wilder that essentially nothing has changed at any point in the entire existence of the field, aside from Spielberg making it into a national mythos and Vallee making a shit-ton of money in Silicon Valley.

Same songs, same band, same venues, three generations of fans.
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2015?

Postby Handsome B. Wonderful » Wed Aug 04, 2021 4:37 pm

So the Pentagon acknowledges something is in our skies but they don't know what it is. Is this a form of telling us something without telling us anything? I'm disappointed. Of course, I shouldn't have expected anything less.
Born we are the same, within the silence, indifference be Thy name
Torn we walk alone, we sleep in silent shades
The grandeur fades, the meaning never known- 'Born' Nevermore
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2015?

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Wed Aug 04, 2021 5:25 pm

Handsome B. Wonderful » Wed Aug 04, 2021 3:37 pm wrote:So the Pentagon acknowledges something is in our skies but they don't know what it is. Is this a form of telling us something without telling us anything? I'm disappointed. Of course, I shouldn't have expected anything less.


Oh, I wouldn't say they're not telling us anything: they're saying "give us more money."

UFOs May Be Earthly and Dangerous
Adversaries could be developing technology to disrupt flight systems. The U.S. seems to be doing so.

By Jeffrey Scott Shapiro July 29, 2021

Have space aliens been visiting Earth? That’s the wrong question to be asking about UFOs—or, as they’re now officially called, unidentified aerial phenomena or UAP.

Last month the Office of the Director of National Intelligence sent Congress a preliminary assessment about UAP. It was produced by the Office of Naval Intelligence, which established a task force “to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs . . . that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security.”

After examining 144 credible event reports originating from U.S. government sources, the task force concluded that UAP could “threaten flight safety and, possibly, national security.” Many of the sightings took place in restricted airspace during military exercises, and until recently there was no reporting mechanism for such occurrences. This raises the possibility that the U.S. has become overconfident it is safe from attack.

The UAPTF was established after a series of unexplained aerial incidents with U.S. military pilots, a few of which were captured on video and published by the New York Times. In May, CBS’s “60 Minutes” re-examined those videos and explored the possibility that the UAP were of extraterrestrial origin. It’s likelier, though, that they’re of terrestrial origin and are a definite threat to national security.

One fact the task force’s assessment doesn’t mention is that in 2018 the U.S. Navy registered a patent application for “a method where a laser beam is configured to generate a laser-induced plasma filament (LIPF), and the LIPF acts as a decoy to detract a homing missile or other threat from a specific target.”

David Hambling described the technology in a May 2020 Forbes piece titled “U.S. Navy Laser Creates Plasma ‘UFOs.’ ” It creates “phantom images with infrared emissions to fool heat-seeking missiles,” he wrote. “The laser creates a series of mid-air plasma columns, which form a 2D or 3D image . . . similar to the way old-style cathode ray TV sets display a picture.”

Simply put, it’s a laser that generates a holographic image to confuse fighter pilots and their sensors during aerial combat. The patent is pending, and the technology may or may not be operational. But a foreign adversary may already be using something similar and testing the U.S. response. In 2017 Russia claimed it had achieved “next generation” laser plasma weaponry.

In a section about a “handful” of UAP that “appear to demonstrate advanced technology,” the task-force assessment notes that in 18 incidents, described in 21 reports, “observers reported unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics,” including the ability to “maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion.”

The laser plasma technology could explain why some captured images of UAP are grainy, why the mysterious “objects” move erratically at lightning speeds, and why pilots never see them launch or land. It would also explain why they keep appearing in restricted airspace during warplane exercises.

One gap in this theory is the assessment’s assertion that “most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects given that a majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors, to include radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapons seekers, and visual observations.”

According to the assessment, of 144 reports that originated from U.S. government sources, 80 “involved observation with multiple sensors.” That would suggest either that the laser plasma technology can produce enough particles to resemble a physical object on radar or that there is in fact a physical object being detected, whether it is the UAP itself or a drone projecting an image. It is possible there are different explanations for various UAP sightings. Some may be attributable to sensor anomalies while others may be real. Some may be attributable to a foreign adversary, and some may be of another origin.

While many questions remain about UAP, it’s clear that someone has either achieved air dominance or wants the U.S. to think they have. The task force focused on UAP accounts that were “largely witnessed firsthand by military aviators.” Some incidents included “range foulers,” defined as “an activity or object that interrupts pre-planned training or other military activity in a military operating area or restricted airspace.”

In other words, UAPs have repeatedly demonstrated their capabilities to U.S. fighter pilots in restricted airspace, possibly as part of a strategy to undermine the U.S. military’s confidence. Whatever its origin and intention, that “someone” is determined to get our attention at great risk. That should be enough to conclude that UAP are a threat to national security.

Mr. Shapiro is an investigative journalist who has reported on Russian aerospace. He served as a senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, 2017-21.
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