Disclosure or distraction?

To those who (like me) follow the UFO story, Friday's release of formerly classified material from the US government was a bit 'meh'. Yeah, we know most of this stuff. Nothing groundbreaking from this (rather small) data dump that nevertheless is destined to enter UFO lore, and enrich the cultural mythology. Nothing that will shed new light on the UFO phenomenon. Much of what was released was well-known to UFologists, now it's finally been admitted to. So how should we see this: as a further admission from the US government that we share our planet with alien beings? Or as a distraction from the fact that the war Trump started is a mess which he can neither end by either force nor diplomacy, and is driving up the cost of living? 

Or could it be both?

Before diving in, let me start with a few words about terminology. The term 'UFO' – 'unidentified flying object', was devised by the US Air Force in 1952 to supplant 'flying saucer', which by the late 1940s had entered mainstream usage. And, since around 2020, the term 'UFO' is itself being replaced in official sources by 'UAP', or 'unidentified anomalous (sometimes 'aerial') phenomenon'. The word 'phenomenon' is more accurate than 'object', as it also covers non-material occurrences. And 'anomalous' is a broader concept than 'aerial', as it includes everything that cannot readily be explained, wherever it is witnessed – in space, under the water or on the ground.

Similarly, 'non-human intelligence' (NHI) is the new and more accurate term for 'aliens', since there's no evidence that these alleged beings are extraterrestrial. They could be extratemporal (from a future Earth) or extradimensional (from a fifth dimension of which physics is currently unaware). Or cryptoterrestrial – the intelligence associated with these anomalous sightings might co-inhabit the planet with us (under the oceans, for instance).

Having cleared that up – what have we got?

In February, on a TV interview, Barack Obama seemed to admit that aliens were real, prompting Trump to weigh in and say that Obama shouldn't have been giving away classified information. Trump then went on to promise that he'd start declassifying UAP material from Pentagon, FBI, CIA and NASA archives. And so it proved to be. Compared to the Kennedy assassination or Epstein dumps, which numbered into the millions of files, this upload of formerly classified documents was modest.

Let's start by assuming that the Trump administration is not sufficiently smart to make up a lot of CGI/AI videos and upload them to a gullible public. There is track record. There is form. Investigative journalists and researchers in this field know what's out there in the classified world, and simply making up a whole bunch of phony UFO videos wouldn't cut the mustard.

So is this disclosure or acclimatisation? Getting humanity ready to accept, without a mass freak-out, that Homo sapiens is not the only form of intelligent, technological life on Planet Earth, has to a decades-long process, not an overnight announcement. This is another step in confirmation, a confession from (primarily) the US military that there are anomalous phenomena across all four domains – space, sky, land and sea – that it cannot explain, and rather than covering up that they don't know what they don't know, at least to come out and say "here's what we cannot explain".

What do we know, what do they know, what do they pretend they don't know?

The key thing is lore and what is and what isn't accepted in lore.

UAP have been around since the dawn of human history, showing up in the Bible (for example Ezekiel's Wheel), in the Middle Ages, as pixies, elves and fairies; there was a spate of mysterious airship sightings over America in the 1890s. However, the current spate of sightings really began to build up concrete lore around them after WW2 – the Kenneth Arnold sightings and the Roswell incident (1947). Historically, the sightings have been closely correlated to military or civilian nuclear sites. Roswell, for example, was the site of the world's first (and at the time only) base for atomic bombers.

There are four main components to UAP lore. Each is tightly interwoven with eyewitness accounts that corroborate, they have internal narrative structure that's logical and hard to undermine.

1) Earth is being visited by non-human intelligence. This has been going on for millennia, but the visits have become far more frequent since H. sapiens learned to harness the energy of the atom. The visitors may be short bipedal creatures with large heads and big eyes. Or they may be tall, blond, Nordic-looking humanoids, or giant praying mantis-type insects, or ghostly interdimensional 'shadow people' that pop in and out of existence. Lore suggests that multiple alien species may be visiting us, with different agendas, some benign, others not, perhaps even at war with each other.

2) NHI craft have crashed on multiple occasions, the wreckage recovered, and (to a greater or lesser degree of success) reverse-engineered by the US (possibly also by the Russians and Chinese). The testimony of Bob Lazar, who claims to have worked at the classified Area 51 on the Nevada Test and Training Range in the 1980s, has been backed up by other whistleblowers since then. But here the lore is split. Some ufologists claim that the US had long possessed working craft based on reverse-engineered alien tech; others say that science is still a long way off from even understanding the physics behind the alien tech (imagine the top geniuses of the Renaissance trying to reverse-engineer a mobile phone). Especially if it is guided telepathically. 

3) Humans are being abducted by the NHI, possibly with the aim of creating a hybrid species. Alien abduction lore dates back to the early 1960s (Betty and Barney Hill). In the 1980s, academics John E. Mack and David M. Jacobs claimed that alien abductions were a mass phenomenon. Author Whitley Strieber's account of his alleged alien abduction, Communion, topped US non-fiction book sales charts for six months in 1987, and was made into a movie in 1989. By 1991, 3.7 million Americans claimed to have been abducted by aliens.

4) The US government has been covering up all of the above – UFO projects Sign (1947), Grudge (1949) and Blue Book(1952-1969) all ended up saying "nothing to see here". The US government is said to have had contact with alien races since the mid-1950s; a shadowy group (Majestic 12) knows the full truth which only some US presidents have been privy to; the secret is maintained by the men in black who intimidate UFO witnesses. Within the government there are those who press for controlled disclosure, while other groups are intent on keeping the whole thing above top secret. Controlled disclosure means acclimatising humanity to the idea, with a steady drip of media (films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind) and official confirmation. [Steven Spielberg's next film, Disclosure Day, premiers on 12 June. Yes, it's about aliens.]

The current UAP era began in December 2017 with the publication in the New York Times of an article by Leslie Kean, Ralph Blumenthal and Helene Cooper (behind paywall). "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program".The article added vast amount of new information to the corpus of the lore; the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which ran from 2007 to 2012 to analyse classified reports of UAPs from the US military. AATIP came up with the notion of the 'five observables': anti-gravity lift; instantaneous acceleration and manoeuvres; hypersonic velocities without sonic booms or vapour trails; low observability or cloaking; and trans-medium travel (moving seamlessly from space to air to water). 

In December, I was talking to a British lawyer here in Warsaw about UFOs. His reaction to me raising the topic was knee-jerk: "Only nutters believe in that sort of thing". Outright dismissal, a total lack of curiosity. Despite the fact that the US military has whole programmes investigating the phenomenon (currently the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office). Despite the thousands of verified sightings by pilots, radar operators and other trained professionals. It people such as this lawyer that will experience the greatest ontological shock when confronted with solid evidence – scientific proof – that humanity is indeed sharing this planet with another species of intelligent being.

It is likely that newly declassified files and videos will be released soon. The big questions are: will they prove the existence of an NHI presence on Earth? And will following releases be used to distract from ongoing political problems?

This time six years ago:
Things will never be the same again: Pt III – Risk

This time nine years ago:
En Marche! [Polish regional bus 'network']

This time 12 years ago:
Jeziorki spring pictorial

This time 13 years ago:
Kitten time

This time 14 years ago:
Warsaw – Centrum to Jeziorki by train with super-wide lens

This time 15 years ago:
Loose Lips Sink Ships - part II

This time 16 years ago:
Jeziorki in the infra red

This time 17 years ago:
Some rain, at last!
[could do with some right now...]

The November-December 2024 UAP flap

These weeks will go down in UFOlogical lore – the unexplained spate of drone sightings across the UK and US that's still ongoing as I write. Since the middle of November, eyewitnesses had been reporting lights in the sky over RAF Mildenhall, RAF Lakenheath and RAF Feltwell in eastern England night after night for 16 days. Though some were aircraft, helicopters or military drones, the majority of what was reported did not fit into any explicable category. This anomalous activity over Britain tailed off after almost three weeks, but since then, there has been even more intense drone activity in the night skies over New Jersey.

The UK government and media had been generally silent over the sightings. In the US, however, it's quite different right now. Mainstream media outlets , from CNN to Fox News, have been all reporting this phenomenon. We see once-sceptical journalists accepting that they're seeing things that are hard to explain, we see law-enforcement officers talking about swarms of lights flying in from the ocean, mayors and legislators are angry that they're not being told what's going on. Pentagon and White House press conferences that try to reassure ("they're not foreign adversary drones, they're not our technology"), but this only serves to deepen the mystery.

Applying Occam's razor to this phenomenon doesn't help. One way or another, it's bad news for America. Russian or Chinese 'sleeper' agents? An Iranian ship launching drones from offshore? Malicious hoaxers and pranksters? Black-budget projects from rogue groups within the government? The failure of anyone in authority to suggest any plausible explanation as they try to play down the seriousness of the situation in which a nation's airspace security is so evidently compromised, is a major concern for the public.

Meanwhile, social media is full of testimonies and footage of anomalous lights in the sky, and plenty of conspiratorial theories and warnings of doom. A strange, unreal atmosphere (especially on X).

"Because something is happening here, and you don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones"

A likely outcome once this is over is that like the mass sightings over Washington DC (1952), in the Hudson Valley (1983-84), Gulf Breeze (1987-88), Phoenix (1997), it will just fizzle out. A suitable explanation will be found (Doug and Dave, the British crop-circle makers; the Gulf Breeze UFO model found in an attic; military exercises; flares; top-secret high-altitude balloon experiments, sensor/equipment faults or mass hallucinations. The word will go out via trustworthy journalists, newspaper articles and TV items will appear, and in the end Johnny Sixpack and Eddie Punchclock will shrug their shoulders and say, "well that's been debunked then – it was swamp gas all along" before going back to their favourite show.

It's just that it doesn't feel like it right now.

[Update 15 December: BBC website summary of the story so far here.]

This time last year:
Impressions of Zielona Góra

This time two years ago:
Kraków to Jakubowizna in the snow

This time three years ago:
Frustration for the local wozidupek community

This time four years ago:
Small local milestones, Chynów station

This time five years ago:

Brexit: what next?
[UK economy's screwed – that's what]

This time eight years ago:
Kick out against change - or accept it?

This time nine years ago:
Warwick University alumni meet in Warsaw

This time ten years ago:
Pluses and minuses of PKP InterCity

This time 11 years ago:
When transportation breaks down

This time 16 years ago:
Full moon closest to Earth

Science vs. the Paranormal - Lent 2023: Day 31

Developing yesterday's theme about those with a propensity to believe in God vs those who reject the notion of a Purpose to the Universe, I want to take a look at the scientific method, which has been crucial in shaping people's mindset in the direction of rational materialism for the past three and half centuries or so. 

In 1964, British physicist Peter Higgs first postulated a new massive spin-zero boson. Forty-eight years and €6 billion later, rational science proved him right, with the discovery in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider of what's now known as the Higgs Boson. Which exists for all of 3.2x10^-22 seconds.

Now, bosons are not something that figure highly in one's day-to-day life. We all know that atoms are made of nuclei consisting of protons and neutrons, surrounded by a shell of electrons. The Standard Model of particle physics, however, is somewhat more complicated... 

At the core of the atom are the proton and neutron, both of which consist of three quarks - two up and one down (whatever that means) in the proton and one up and two down in the neutron. (There are also top, bottom, strange and charm quarks; these are all totally beyond me). Then we have leptons, of which the electron is but one of six. Then there are things called bosons, force-carriers - with gluons acting between quarks in the nucleus (strong nuclear interaction), photons acting between electrons (electromagnetic interaction), W-bosons (mediating the weak nuclear interaction). For the sake of completeness, there's the Z-boson, with zero charge. And finally, there is the crowning glory of contemporary particle physics - the Higgs Boson, which (somehow!) gives mass to particles. 

So the Standard Model is a lot more complex than the familiar picture of the atom was in my childhood - but then there's scientific progress for you.

Science had long theorised that a particle such as a Higgs Boson could exist; the equations suggested it. However, billions of proton-proton collisions had to be observed before scientists could look over all the data and arrive at a statistically significant result that indisputably proved the existence of the Higgs Boson.

Now let's look at attempts to prove or disprove paranormal phenomena. Be it something as simple as willing outcomes of coin flips, or influencing a random number generator with the power of the mind, or guessing which of four friends would be ringing you on the phone.

Not a very strong effect. Indeed, a very weak effect. Out of 100 coin-tosses, 51 are heads (where you will heads to come up) and 49 are tails - but if you conduct 100 coin-tosses a thousand times, always willing heads, in the vast majority of the thousand runs of 100 tosses, you get 51 (or more) heads - then that is statistically significant. That's the proposition made by Prof Etzel Cardeña in his peer-reviewed study of psychic abilities, The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A review. published in 2018 by American Psychologist, a mainstream publication.

Similar studies have been published by Dean Radin and Rupert Sheldrake; there does exist a weak effect of mind over matter, but it is strong enough to be observed in a manner that's as statistically significant as discovering the Higgs boson amid the data coming from billions of observations of neutrons colliding in the Large Hadron Collider.

The problem science has with paranormal phenomena is that there's no theoretical framework to explain how it happens. There was masses of theory underpinning the speculation that a Higgs boson exists - there's exactly zero theory behind phenomena of mind affecting matter, or non-local consciousness effects such as precognition or remote viewing. Science hasn't a clue as to how it might work. But - weak though it be - it does work.

Yet if experimental results show statistically significant data - does it matter if the effect is weak? According to scientific debunkers yes - without some kind of a theory backing it up, the work is worthless. Surely, that's what science should do - accept that there is something going on, and try to posit an explanation for this phenomenon - whether it be normal or paranormal.

Lent 2022: Day 31
Consciousness - fundamental and universal?

Lent 2021: Day 31
I'm better than you - no really, I am!

Lent 2020: Day 31
Divine Inspiration

The Bright Side

Most nights before I go to bed, I will open the front door and peer out. If there's a cloudless sky, and I can see stars, I'll go outside onto the balcony round the back of the house. Looking up, I'll observe the night sky for several minutes. Over the summer, on warm nights, I do this frequently. Once, I saw a meteor from the Perseid shower entering the earth's atmosphere; another time, I observed a satellite in orbit, moving from south to north. I have spotted and identified (using charts from Timeanddate.com) Saturn and Jupiter, Venus and Mars. I have seen the Starlink satellite train overhead. Quite something.

Yet try as I might, I have yet to see a black triangle, the size of three football fields, hovering silently 50ft above my head. I haven't witnessed multiple luminous orbs dancing in the sky or saucer-shaped craft performing manoeuvres that defy the laws of physics. And across in the forest next door, I have never seen any strange creatures with glowing red eyes moving stealthily through the undergrowth. 

These kinds of anomalous phenomena have evaded me somehow.

From time to time, I'll go for a walk in the dark - through the orchards and into the big forest at the top of the lane. Entering the forest at night holds no terror for me. This is, however, something that evolution warns us against doing. Our imagination kicks in first. Nocturnal predators maybe on the prowl. But not today, not in my world. Living here, I know these forests, fields and orchards well. I see hares and deer, buzzards and pheasants, and once, I saw an elk. But there are no big cats, wolves or bears stalking these parts. Even humans are not to be seen round here at night - I've yet to run into one. Dogs I can hear barking in adjacent farms, but they are behind fences.

The night doesn't scare me - there are no demons lurking in the darkness. Just the same trees and bushes that are present there during the day - but with far fewer photons bouncing off them into my visual cortex. The familiar is not frightening. Familiar by day, familiar by night. And there's nothing that goes bump in the night, other than the refrigerator's pump toggling between on or off or the radiator casing expanding or contracting with a metallic 'rdank!'. 

I may never see a ghost, UFO, werewolf or hobgoblin; my own experiences of the anomalous reside exclusively in my subjective realm - dreams and anomalous qualia-memory flashbacks to another time and another place; both being products of consciousness. A consciousness, which - I hope - is increasingly open to the Cosmos, to spiritual inputs. 

We who seek God - or Purpose - or whatever we call this end-point of the unfolding of the Universe - all travel the journey in our own way. For some it is religious practice; for others - contact with the spirit world; others claim to have experienced contact with UFOs. (This isn't to say I don't believe in visitations from intelligent beings from other worlds - it's just that I've never witnessed one.)

I have always tended to look on the bright side of life, but not in a cynical way. Cynicism is corrosive. I am instinctively drawn to brightness; my favourite qualia experience is looking towards a hot sun in a cloudless sky, with a cool wind blowing in my face. 

I am not drawn to the dark side; yet night scares me not.

This time five years ago:
Waiting for the level-crossing barriers - Nowa Iwiczna and W-wa Dawidy

This time six years ago:
More Sandomierz photos

This time seven years ago:
All aboard the Gold Train rush

This time 11 years ago:
Dominicans at large, Służew 

This time 12 years ago: 
Late summer moods, Jeziorki 

This time 13 years ago: 
The next one hundred years 

This time 14 years ago: 
"What do we want? Early retirement!
When do we want it? NOW!" 

This time 15 years ago: 
Twilight of Warsaw's greenhouse economy

Precognition and Willing the Future - Lent 2022, Day Nine

Can you tell the future? Are you blessed with foresight? Do you sometimes have intuition regarding some forthcoming event that turns out to be correct? Or a prophetic dream? Which well-known astrologer publicly predicted the outbreak of Covid-19, or Putin's invasion of Ukraine (clue: none). Someone is bound to find a quatrain written by Nostradamus that predicts both, by engaging in verbal backflips to make predictions made four and half centuries ago fit the facts.

Well, I certainly didn't predict (if anything, I was two days out) - but I did feel an encroaching air of unease towards the end of 2019, in an elegy to a passing decade that was a tipping point between an upward and downward arc of history. Unlike many in Western Europe who blithely dismissed the growing threat posed by Putin, I could see it coming, as past posts going back many years on this blog atest. But this is merely my assessment of information, based on history - politically, nothing good ever comes out of Russia. Fearing Putin isn't the result of my precognition or foresight, rather it's hindsight.

Though there may have been a general sense of mounting anxiety, other than having a vague feeling that things have been good too long, no definite prior knowledge that Russia would launch an all-out invasion of Ukraine on the morning of Thursday 24 February 2022.

Pinning down events and dates in the future is truly a paranormal power that few can actually prove to possess. Usually, clairvoyants are deft at using similar sleight-of-hand tricks that stage magicians deploy - good storytelling skills and selective use of facts. None have passed the test of repeatability and proof that science demands.

It's one thing to foretell the future, another thing to ward off personal misfortunes by precluding the possibility of them befalling you, and yet quite another to draw out of the future a positive outcome by force of will. Visualising peace and contentment in place of bloodshed and fear. Prayer, in effect.

Praying not for ego satisfaction. Tevye, in Fiddler on the Roof, sings "Lord, who made the lion and the lamb/You decreed I should be what I am/Would it spoil some vast eternal plan/If I were a wealthy man?" The answer is - yes, it would spoil some vast eternal plan. Tevye wants a big house in the centre of the town, and above all, for "the most important men in town would come to fawn on me!"

This is not how prayer works - the Lord does not heed such venal petitions. Prayers for peace is what the world needs right now; so let us pray...

This time last year:
Muscle memory and mindfulness

This time two years ago:
Choosing the music for your religion

This time three years ago:
Photo round-up of the week

This time four years ago:
Do the laws of nature govern or describe our universe?

This time nine years ago:
A selfless faith

This time ten years ago:
Ul. Profesorska after the remont

This time 11 years ago:
Lent kicks off again, for the 20th year in a row for me

This time 12 years ago:
Half way through Lent

This time 14 years ago:
Spring much closer

Precognition - peering into 2022

Not your usual 'the world in the year to come' text, more a mystical contemplation of the future unknown. Czas jest umowny - 'time is something consensually agreed upon'. We commonly determine that our year - the point at which our planet starts its lap around the sun - begins around nine days after the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, which as an astronomical turning point, would be more logical. We agree that the year starts on the first day of January, a month named after Janus, the two-faced Roman god of beginnings and transitions. Janus looks forwards and backward simultaneously; and so it is at this time of year that we tend to look back over the past 12 months and seek to ascertain what will happen over the next year.

As I wrote yesterday, I've been keeping a daily record of exercise and diet over the past eight years. Today, I copy-pasted the 2021 spreadsheet into the next series of columns, re-dated them and deleted last year's data, week by week, month by month, ready for this year's numbers to be entered. And as I did so, I felt I was peering into a framework, a scaffolding, for the future. Tuesday 22 February 2022; Wednesday 18 May; Monday 14 November 2022. What would each of these days bring? Will we reach Saturday 31 December without Mankind encountering any new woes? The Netflix film Don't Look Up seems to be on the button when it comes to summing up the zeitgeist of early 2022...

I have mentioned my father's seemingly irrational phobia (maybe too strong a word) for the number 22. We spoke on 21 May 2017; he told me of his deep anxiety connected with the following day. "The number 22 is a bad number," he said. And so it came to pass that on 22 May 2017, a 22 year-old Islamic fundamentalist suicide bomber at the Manchester Arena killed himself and 22 people. Did my father have a sense of foreboding, of precognition - of was it merely a case of superstition? Can the 22nd of February, 2022, pass without something awful occurring? [Twenty-two is an unusual number to have a fear of. So many people have an irrational fear of the number 13 that this has a name - triskaidekaphobia - and the number is routinely avoided by hoteliers and cruise-ship operators.]

I have posited that few people are gifted with genuine psychic powers, such as telepathy, psychokinesis, clairvoyance or indeed precognition. Such powers are almost impossible to pin down by way of scientific experiment - I believe that this is because these powers do not wish to be pinned down. Some people have strong powers, many more have weaker powers - too weak to even recognise. Most, however, have none at all or się nigdy nad tym nie zastanawiali - they have never considered or contemplated such a possibility, having grown up immersed in a rational materialist worldview that roundly rejects psychic phenomena as mere magical thinking - effect without cause.

I have to be very careful about the words I choose here. I will be trying to describe a phenomenon that I have alluded to on this blog several times, a phenomenon I've noticed since primary school. Namely my observation that misfortunes befall me unexpectedly. I feel that to a some extent I can ward off misfortunes happening by consciously precluding them. Complacency almost draws such incidents upon one - it didn't happen yesterday, so it won't happen today. Bayesian inference. 

A car crash. Losing your wallet and its contents. Or your phone. A flood, fire or burglary in your home while you're out. An angry altercation with family member, neighbour or workmate. Terrorism. War. We constantly teeter on the edge of chaos, and from time to time we slip - chaos, misfortune, happens. Is it purely random - or can we guard ourselves against it? 

I have to be careful so as not to appear boastful. "Nothing bad ever happens to me because I have these amazing powers" - pride comes before the fall. The hubris that so often meets James the Red Engine. Instant karma, just turn the page.

We can certainly take prevention seriously (mask-wearing and vaccination at a time of pandemic!), but beside practical risk assessment and mitigation practices, there's also a metaphysical aspect, I believe.

When contemplating luck, one should separate ego from consciousness. "I want to win millions on the lottery and have a big car and show off" - guess what - you won't.  Wealth and power are attributes of the ego; it would indeed spoil some vast, eternal plan if you were to become a rich man suddenly. But actively wishing for things such as peace, health, comfort, fulfilment - and consciously discounting their opposites - I believe is eminently achievable. In this lifetime.

And so, at the beginning of this year, let me wish all my readers contentment of the consciousness.

This time last year:
communication/This is the gift you must not lose

This time two years ago:
Wealth and inequality - an introduction

This time three years ago:
Gratitude for a peaceful 2018

This time four years ago:
Fighting laziness - a perennial resolution

This time five years ago:
A Year of Round Anniversaries

This time six years ago:
Walking on frozen water

This time seven years ago:
Fireworks herald 2015 in Jeziorki

This time eight years ago
Jeziorki welcomes 2014

This time nine years ago:
LOT's second Dreamliner over Jeziorki

This time 11 years ago:
New Year's coal train 

This time 13 years ago:
Welcome to 2009!

This time 14 years ago:
Happy 2008!