rigorousintuition.ca

This is part of a larger project I'm mostly doing with a small team, but I figure this particular tentacle would benefit greatly from being exposed here on RI.

This particular tentacle is a re-examination of the past 50 years of UFO and Psi phenomena research, with a focused eye for those thinkers, journalists and cranks who were offering divergent theories from the fringe of the fringe. The goal is an alternative cosmology, the UFOlogy that could have been. I am, of course, including the ESP/Psi aspect because I view that as an integral and inseparable part of the problem, focused as it is on the objective verification of highly unusual states of conscious experience. I also have a long-standing suspicion that the "alien craft" narrative was engineered to distract from this connection, which is probably vital to any useful understanding of the phenomena.

Some of my initial contributions:

Ivan T. Sanderson, most especially for his book Invisible Residents, which I need to track down a new copy of.

Aime Michel, an early influence on Vallee and Keel, and most certainly a divergent thinker who would do rigorous work with raw data.

Allen H. Greenfield, surely one of the most original and remarkable contributors to UFO literature, both of his published volumes being worthy of repeated study.

Michael Persinger, with his spook connections and God Helmet, is a complicated character but his theorizing on UFO events as natural geological / plasma is worth chewing over, not least for the educational value of the core concepts behind his theory -- this Earth is an amazing spacecraft!

Peter Sturrock deserves mention for the same line of questioning with an even more distinguished scientific background. For my money, Sturrock is a candidate for the real Aviary of National Security State collaborators who worked behind the SAP veil.

Mead Layne hero to Borderland Sciences and an early proponent of the gorgeously elaborate "interdimensional" theory of UFO events.

And finally Hilary Evans, who really took Jung's concept of UFO phenomena on his shoulders and ran with it. I don't think it's a promising hypothesis but holy shit, the man has done voluminous research and his historical perspective/context is vast. Tasty stuff.

Please submit your own personal favorites, if personal favorites there be.

Please also note that the fairly total lack of ESP/Psi entities was my own lack of grounding in that history...just a babe in the parapsychology woods, got my Hansen, my Tart and my Broughton to get me caught up, though.

Wombaticus Rex wrote:Ivan T. Sanderson, most especially for his book Invisible Residents, which I need to track down a new copy of.

http://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Residen ... 1931882207

$10 on Kindle.

For religious reasons, I don't read electronic copies of books, but you couldn't have known that and I deeply appreciate the time you took.

There was a strong French Canadian UFO field from the late 60s to the early 90s, virtually unknown outside the province. I could post some references if you're interested.

I'm currently reading Colin Wilson's Mysteries, which mostly reports the research of Thomas Charles Lethbridge:

Wiki:
Lethbridge was a dedicated researcher who considered matters known as "the occult" with what he considered to be a scientific approach and put forward theories on ghosts, witchcraft, dowsing, psychokinesis and even aliens.
..
Through his experience with the pendulum and his work with dreams, Lethbridge concluded that there are other realms of reality beyond this one and that the soul is probably immortal.
Legacy

In her monograph Anglo-Saxon Amulets and Curing Stones (1981), the archaeologist Audrey Meaney noted that Lethbridge's "observations on features in the cemeteries he excavated around Cambridge were persipacious but in advance of his time".[3]

Whilst Lethbridge and his theories were largely ignored by the archaeological community following his death, interest in him and his parapsychological ideas has been maintained within the esoteric community. In 2003, a group of admirers of his work calling themselves "the Hula-Sons of T.C. Lethbridge" (Doggen Foster, Kevlar Bales and Welbourn Tekh), with the aid of Julian Cope and Colin Wilson, released A Giant: The Definitive T.C. Lethbridge, a set containing a booklet and two CDs containing music accompanying discussions of Lethbridge's work.[4] Terry Welbourn's (Welbourn Tekh) biography entitled T.C. Lethbridge: The Man who Saw the Future is to be published by O-Books on 27th May 2011.

Gogmagog: The Buried Gods (1957) London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Ghost and Ghoul (1961) London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Witches: Investigating an Ancient Religion (1962) London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Ghost and Divining Rod (1963) London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
ESP: Beyond Time and Distance (1965) London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
A Step in the Dark (1967) London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
The Monkey's Tail: A Study in Evolution and Parapsychology (1969) London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
The Legend of the Sons of God: A Fantasy? (1972) London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
The Power of the Pendulum (1976) London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Persinger's Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events (Michael A. Persinger, Gyslaine F. Lafrenière) is a survey of paranormal reports across NA - may be useful data.

Covers these phenomena:

Introduction & Perspective to Phenomena
Fall Phenomena
Unusual Electromagnetic Phenomena
Unexplained Sonic Phenomena
UFLO: Unidentified Flying & Landed Objects
Unusual & Infrequent Astronomical Events
Unusual & Infrequent Meteorological Events
Unusual & Infrequent Geophysical Events
Unusual & Infrequent Forces
Unusual or Unexplained Disappearances
Unusual Animals & Animal Behaviour
Unusual Archaeological Finds
Summary of Results
Repeated Space & Transglobal Impulse Hypotheses
Large Scale Solar-Geophysical Electromagnetic Phenomena as Contributory Factors to Unusual Events
Low Probability Explanations: Extrapolations from Conceptual Limits of Space & Time

1. Aleister Crowley and Kenneth Grant and LAM, the proto-type "Gray" alien.

http://www.excludedmiddle.com/LAMstatement.html

2. Philip K Dick and VALIS and his Exegesis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VALIS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exegesis_(book)

3. Terence McKenna and his trans-dimensional elves.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna

if you go through the 3 - 5 old 70's UFO docs I've posted in the "where's it at" thread, there's a wealth of now mostly forgotten researchers.

For the sake of synthesis:

Another take on LAM: http://www.blastedtower.com/misconcepti ... n-contact/

Supporting details: http://thebaptistshead.co.uk/2007/02/14 ... in-of-lam/

Wombaticus Rex wrote:For the sake of synthesis:

Another take on LAM: http://www.blastedtower.com/misconcepti ... n-contact/

Supporting details: http://thebaptistshead.co.uk/2007/02/14 ... in-of-lam/

Thank you for the links and expansion of my linkage of Crowley and Grant.. Think we are on the same page.

The very reason I listed 1) as "Aleister Crowley and Kenneth Grant and LAM, the proto-type "Gray" alien." together is for the reason that one needs Grant's interpretations of Crowley's art piece to make LAM a "Gray" alien.

Here is a first draft of something. There is still a lot of work to do, and I am forgetting a ton of stuff that I need to look up.

Very early on, and as far as I can tell independently, Quebec Ufology developed a spiritual orientation and situated UFOs as one of many phenomena in a much broader field that included spiritism, secret societies, esoteric christianity, time travel, and paranormal phenomena such as telepathy and telekinisis. Jean Casualt was probably the first published Ufologist in Quebec. In his 1972 Manifest pour l'Avenir (A Manifesto for the Future), he examines the relationship between UFOs, religious faith, Catholic mysticism, and secret government. Significantly, the book is dedicated to a spirit guide called Monak. This dedication marks the work as fundamentally different from the classic American contactee strand in that Monak is not obviously an extra-terrestrial entity, or even related to the UFO phenomenon. Monak's guidance merely brings the author toward the light, and in the process reveals truths about all phenomena, including UFOs.

It isn't surprising that following the rapid collapse of Quebec's virtual theorcracy in the period 1959-65, in the wake of the Quiet Revolution, Ufology would emerge as one of the elements that fill the conceptual vacuum. And it isn't surprising that it does so in the context of a wider spiritual awakening, and as an element of it, rather than as its own field.

In that same year of 1972, Jean Ferguson publishes the first work in what would rapidly become the minority nuts and bolts, physical ET strand of Quebec Ufology. It may not be a coincidence that Ferguson's Tout sur les Soucoupes Volantes (Everything About Flying Saucers) was published out of Val d'Or, the capital of the outlying mining region of Abitibi, more than 500 km north of Montreal, and an area still today quite physically and culturally removed from the rest of the province.
Both Casault and Ferguson are still active, and still largely true to their original orientation. But while in 1972 the rest of the world was still firmly in the late classic nuts and bolts phase of Ufology, Ferguson's version of the field never really took off in Quebec. In some ways, it felt to early French Canadian Ufologists like Casault that the rest of the world was slowly catching up to their holistic vision of UFOs as beings of light and as bearers of messages from ourselves to ourselves.

In his 1975 Le Procès des Soucoupes Volantes (Flying Saucers on Trial), Claude MacDuff does not take position explicitely on the nuts and bolts vs spiritual UFO question. He simply approaches the phenomenon like a prosecuting attorney out to prove the existence of UFOs and the book is laid out like the transcript of an imaginary trial. As in most of Quebec Ufology, the bible is never far, but it is used as people's exhibit A, under the theory of Ancient Aliens.

In 1976, Richard Glenn began broadcasting Esoterisme Expérimental, the most watched program in the history of Quebec public access television, and which ran until 1997 (for a typical sample http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vf6Z41bCEI). He moved Ufology rapidly away from nuts and bolts toward holistic, even all encompassing, spiritual UFOs. In the same episode, sometimes in the same breath, he covered bible prophecy, spririt healing, secret government, and UFOs. He brought to a mass Quebec audience classics of the UFO field from George Adamski to Billy Meier and Jacques Vallée and Whitley Streiber, in an era when information was hard to come by. Over time, he tied all these strands together by developing a concept of intra-terrestrials that gave all phenomena an inward looking cast. Early on, although he identified the access point to the world of these intra-terrestrials at Mont St-Hillaire in Quebec (an obligatory nod to Quebec nationalism in those days), it wasn't clear that they were physical. As the concept developed, it became clear that this was not simply a version of hollow earth theory, but that his intra-terrestrials were spirtual and in some ways intra-humans; reflection of us.
Glenn became a figure of controversy when he was convicted of sexually molesting a minor in the late 90s. He argued that he had been teaching tantric meditation to teen boys and that the practice should be protected under freedom of religion. The argument didn't keep him out of jail. Since his release, he has continued his successful series of esoteric seminars all over Quebec, in which he still discusses Ufology, but apparently in the context of the coming of the Great Monarch, a strand of French Catholic prophecy.

The mid-70s also marked the first forays of Claude 'Raël' Vorilhon in Quebec, which rapidly became and remains a bastion of Raëlism. In the post-Catholic angst and devastation of Quebec's spiritual landscape, his message of intelligent design of the Earth and creation of humans by benevolent extra-terrestrials found fertile ground. I met Raël at an esoteric book fair in Montreal in the very early 80s, and his booth was by far the most popular there.

A darker incarnation of this same kind of message took root in Quebec in the 80s in the form of the Order of the Solar Temple. This organization, which had elements of Raëlism, ultra-conservative Catholic ideology, Ufology, and millenarism, deeply penetrated some important Quebec institutions (Hydro Quebec, for example) and eventually self-destructed in several mass murder suicides in Quebec and in France in the mid-90s.

The Solar Temple episode, Glenn's legal troubles, and the birth of the Internet, all contributed to a change in attitude in Quebec towards Ufology. It remains primarily spiritual in orientation, but the reality check of the tragedies and scandals and the increasing availability of information from diverse international sources has led to the explosion of the tradition.

Being a Vermonter that was a very resonant slice of history, thank you daug.

Found this via the synch-stream today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Bast ... of_Mankind

In arguing for the “psychic unity of mankind,” Bastian proposed a straightforward project for the long-term development of a science of human culture and consciousness based upon this notion. He argued that the mental acts of all people everywhere on the planet are the products of physiological mechanisms characteristic of the human species (what today we might term the genetic loading on the organization and functioning of the human neuroendocrine system). Every human mind inherits a complement of species-specific “elementary ideas” (Elementargedanken), and hence the minds of all people, regardless of their race or culture, operate in the same way.

According to Bastian, the contingencies of geographic location and historical background create different local elaborations of the "elementary ideas"; these he called "folk ideas" (Volkergedanken). Bastian also proposed a lawful “genetic principle” by which societies develop over the course of their history from exhibiting simple sociocultural institutions to becoming increasingly complex in their organization. Through the accumulation of ethnographic data, we can study the psychological laws of mental development as they reveal themselves in diverse regions and under differing conditions. Although one is speaking with individual informants, Bastian held that the object of research is not the study of the individual per se, but rather the “folk ideas” or “collective mind” of a particular people.

The more one studies various peoples, Bastian thought, the more one sees that the historically conditioned "folk ideas" are of secondary importance compared with the universal "elementary ideas". The individual is like the cell in an organism, a social animal whose mind – its "folk ideas" – is influenced by its social background; and the "elementary ideas" are the ground from which these “folk ideas” develop. From this perspective, the social group has a kind of group mind, a social “soul” (Gesellschaftsseele) if you will, in which the individual mind is embedded.

...


What Bastian argued for was nothing less than what today we might call a psychobiologically grounded, cross-cultural social psychology. The key to developing this robust science of human consciousness was to collect as much ethnographic data as possible from all over the world before folk cultures became too “tainted” by contact with European imperialist powers. Through ethnographic research, he wrote, we can study the psychological laws of mental development as they reveal themselves in diverse geographical settings. Thus in modern day parlance, our different sociocultural forms are due both to trans-culturally shared (i.e., archetypal) processes inherent in our very distinct human psychophysiology—much of it operating at a non-conscious level—and to our development (or enculturation) within a particular environment.

Bastian a winner for me, my thanks to Volin for the unknown history.

Please also note that the fairly total lack of ESP/Psi entities was my own lack of grounding in that history...just a babe in the parapsychology woods, got my Hansen, my Tart and my Broughton to get me caught up, though.

Funny you should say - I just started delving into Hansen's "The Trickster and the Paranormal" recently, and posted a digital copy of it to my book blog a couple of weeks ago. Very good stuff...

JackRiddler wrote:Bastian a winner for me, my thanks to Volin for the unknown history.

Yeah, thanks DrVolin for that fascinating post. I'm most interested in Richard Glenn; did he only begin discussing UFOs in the context of Catholicism & "the Great Monarch" after his legal troubles?

My interest in various obscure sects of Catholicism was sparked by reading Picknett & Prince's "Sion Revelation" a while back, their in-depth look into the Priory of Sion quagmire of bullshit

cptmarginal wrote:I'm most interested in Richard Glenn; did he only begin discussing UFOs in the context of Catholicism & "the Great Monarch" after his legal troubles?

He actually started with UFOs way back when. The Great Monarch thing is fairly new and definitely post legal troubles. In the mid-90s, just before his legal troubles, he went through a kind of non-great monarch messianic phase when his son was born. He would have entire episodes about signs that his soon to be born was part of some messianic plan. In fact, I remember that marking the beginning of the end of his television series.