The Year of the Phenomenon

It was on 1 June when a former colleague from work back in the Old Country sent me a link to a YouTube video about an interesting UFO case in Wales (thanks Nick!). After watching it, YouTube helpfully posted some more UFO-related links, including one that alerted me to the fact that on 25 June, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence would report to Congress about what the Pentagon knows about UFOs, or to use modern parlance, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).

The report was duly delivered to Congress on that day (I wrote about it here). Couched in cautious, bureaucratic language, avoiding sensation, the report said in essence that yes, there is a phenomenon; it is real; it cannot be explained. Quoting from the report: "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, weapon seekers, and visual observation." Out of 144 cases investigated by the military, only one was dismissed as a deflating weather balloon. The rest - they don't know. [If you're a sceptical debunker, you might like to help the US Navy with their investigations. They couldn't explain away these 143 cases - maybe you could.]

Since the report was published, Congress has passed the National Defense Appropriation Act for Fiscal Year 2022. This now includes an amendment calling for a new body to be set up to investigate UAP sightings, determining their source and their health effects on humans, and whether or not (as some believe) the US government actually has any alien craft in its possession. The amendment also calls for reports about UAP to be presented to Congress annually. The first of these is due on 31 October 2022 - Halloween - eight days before the US holds its mid-term elections.

On 17 December 1969, the US government's Project Blue Book, the code name for the systematic study of UFOs by the United States Air Force was officially closed. The final summary stated:

• No UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the USAF was ever an indication of threat to national security
• There was no evidence submitted to or discovered by the USAF that sightings categorized as 'unidentified' represented technological developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge; and
• There was no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as 'unidentified' were extraterrestrial vehicles

The UFO story has moved forward a long way since then. However, it's one thing to say: "There's a phenomenon - we don't know what it is; yes, there are physical craft - not ours, not our adversaries'." It's quite another to say: "We have possession of multiple craft and we've been trying for decades to reverse-engineer alien technology." And still another yet to say: "These aliens abduct human beings for their hybrid-race breeding programme", or that "we are being visited by numerous groups of aliens with their own diverse agendas, and this has been going on for thousands of years."

Each of the above statements is a red line; this year we - the human species - have crossed the first. I dare not speculate on whether there are more (I suspect the answer must be 'yes'), nor when we will cross them. The US government is now clearly saying, and for the first time, that these sightings by trained military personnel are something else other than misidentified flocks of geese, swamp gas or Venus low in the sky. 

Next year will also be the 75th anniversary of the Roswell Incident - the alleged crash of a flying saucer in New Mexico in late June/early July 1947. UFO lore suggests that a craft - and alien bodies - was recovered, and the US government, through its preferred aerospace contractors, has been attempting to figure out how the craft functions. A leap of faith too far? I'm sure that next summer there will be an outpouring of works of varying quality into what happened at Roswell.

How quickly this will all unravel is a puzzle. Personally, I don't believe mankind is ready yet to face a reality that we are not alone.

Religion - big business - science - all stakeholders in the comfortable status quo - will find it a hugely difficult to accept as a fact the physical presence of beings (or even just their craft!) on our planet.

Science - which still has so much to discover, from the nature of dark energy and dark matter, to what happened before the Big Bang (nothing? Endless cycles of expansion and contraction?), to the nature of consciousness - will get its knickers in a massive twist over final evidence of UFOs. From what we can gather to date, these are craft without visible means of lift or propulsion, capable of trans-medium travel, almost-instantaneous acceleration, ability to perform manoeuvres that would rip apart any man-made airframe, and to mask themselves from view at will. From what the US Navy is insinuating, the technologies used are far in advance of our knowledge of physics.

Some scientists are open to embrace the Possible. One of these is the head of Harvard's astronomy department, Avi Loeb. Sceptical at first (when asked about the US Navy's videos of UAP, he initially suggested it was a camera malfunction), Prof Loeb has since set up the Galileo Project, which "is dedicated to the proposition that humans can no longer ignore the possible existence of extraterrestrial technological civilizations, and that science should not dogmatically reject potential extraterrestrial explanations because of social stigma or cultural preferences, factors which are not conducive to the scientific method of unbiased, empirical inquiry."

Is a timetable for a staged disclosure being set out?

This morning, as I was about to do my daily blood-pressure reading, the word 'preternatural' just swam, unbidden, into my stream of consciousness. From Wiktionary:

Preternatural - beyond or not conforming to what is natural or according to the regular course of things;  having an existence outside of the natural world. Usage notes: in modern secular use, it refers to extraordinary but still natural phenomena. In religious and occult usage, used similarly to supernatural, meaning 'outside of nature', but usually to a lower level than supernatural. For example, in Catholic theology, 'preternatural' refers to properties of creatures like angels, while supernatural refers to properties of God alone.

Earlier in the week, I thought up the term 'superclassical' for physics that is above the classical Newtonian mechanics that everyone learned at school and can intuitively understand. This would start with quantum physics, and encompass everything that we might one day learn from other-world craft - wheresoever those other worlds actually are. (Imagine, if you will, three dimensions of time, paralleling the three dimensions of space. Not just time that runs from past to future (ie backward and forward) but also time that runs up-down, and time that runs left-right.)

And on my walk this afternoon to Dawidy, David Bowie intrudes:

Oh You Pretty Things,

Don't you know you're driving your

Mamas and Papas insane

Let me make it plain,

You gotta make way for the Homo Superior.

 

Look out at your children

See their faces in golden rays

Don't kid yourself they belong to you

They're the start of a coming race

The earth is a bitch

We've finished our news

Homo Sapiens have outgrown their use

All the strangers came today

And it looks as though they're here to stay

- Oh! You Pretty Things - released 17 December 1971. 

If there's one short video from this momentous year that you must watch before dismissing it all out of hand - it's this. Let US Navy pilots, former Pentagon and State Department officials and a US senator talk you through it all.



This time two years ago:
Sentimental stroll - streets of my childhood

This time three years agor
Streets of my childhood
[I did the same walk exactly a year earlier!]

This time four years ago:
Jeziorki - swans and bonus shots

This time six years ago:
A conspiracy to celebrate

This time seven years ago:
The Mythos and the Logos in Russia

This time eight years ago:
Going mobile - I get my first smartofon

This time nine years ago:
The world was meant to end today 
[It may not have ended, but this was a tipping point in history.]

This time ten years ago:
First snow - but proper snow?

The time 11 years ago: 
Dense, wet, rush hour snow

This time 12 years ago:
Evening photography, Powiśle

This time 11 years ago:
The shortest day of the year

This time 14 years ago:
Bye bye borders - Poland joins Schengen