On Sep 14, 11:42 am, Cujo DeSockpuppet <c...@petitmorte.net> wrote:
post stale screed....
Yes, you do, which is why ALL debunkers must get their regiment of 5
flu shots. Get going debunker!
Question: What level of proof is adequate proof, then?
SF: I talk in terms of evidence. The legal profession recognizes
certain standards: in a civil court, "preponderance of the evidence;"
in a criminal court, "beyond a reasonable doubt." I think there is,
right now, quite sufficient evidence. Given the physical trace cases,
the radar sightings, the photographs and the eye-witness testimony
from people all over the world, we have quite sufficient evidence to
conclude that our planet is being visited by manufactured objects
behaving in ways that we Earthlings cannot yet duplicate, and that
therefore were produced someplace else. Now, the reason for that
little kicker about not being able to duplicate: every government in
the world would love to be able to duplicate UFO flying capabilities.
If we could build these things, we would be building them. So, if they
weren't built here, they were built someplace else. There's nothing
exotic about that. It's not charismatic handwaving, it's perfectly
good reasoning. We have an adequate amount of evidence today to
clearly establish that some—I emphasize some—UFOs are alien
spacecraft. And I would take on anybody who says we don't. I would say
it's entirely because they haven't reviewed that evidence, which is
very different from saying there is no evidence.
Question: Give me some examples. What are some of the strongest cases
on record that you know of, and why do you find them so convincing?
SF: I feel the Roswell evidence makes a very strong case. We've talked
to more than 240
(now over 350) people about that case; people at the Roswell Army Air
Force base; people out at the rancher's site, including Mac Brazel's
neighbors, his son, his daughter, and his daughter-in-law. We've
talked to people who handled pieces of the wreckage at the base; we've
talked to the people who were in Texas where it went; people who were
crew members on the planes that carried some of the wreckage. I've
talked to somebody who saw the bodies, people who were threatened by
the government—that's being kind—to shut up about this whole thing. So
that's an excellent case.
But I'm also impressed by cases like the one that occurred over George
Air Force Base in California. Two jets had just finished maneuvering
practice and were coming back to base. Both were flown by experienced
pilots who had fought in Korea. The pilot in the lead plane spotted an
object in the distance. It looked peculiar because it was standing
still, so he radioed the ground. The ground control guy went outside
with binoculars and watched the two planes go after this thing,
meanwhile still talking to them by radio. And, as the lead pilot
reported, the object was standing still, and in three seconds it was
going a thousand miles an hour. It moved a pretty good angle through
the sky, then stopped dead again. The pilot switched direction a
little bit, going after it, and it went back the other way. Again, in
just a couple seconds of acceleration, it's going, he says, a thousand
miles an hour. Stops dead. Zigzagging, in other words, back and forth
across the sky. The lead pilot saw it, the pilot in the second plane
saw it, and the guy on the ground watched this whole thing while
listening to the radio conversations. Finally, the thing zipped away
at very high speed. Now, what do you do with a case like that? These
are military pilots reporting to a military control tower operator in
broad daylight. You can't say they're lying. What for? This was a
classified report. It makes no sense. And there are loads of cases
like that. (Including Gordon Cooper's similar case described in his
new book "Leap of Faith")
I'm also impressed with some of the abduction cases; for example, the
Betty and Barney Hill case. I was technical advisor on a television
movie about this case called "The UFO Incident," and I've spent time
with the Hills. These two people underwent individual medical hypnosis
sessions weekly for three and a half months. Betty was a social worker
and supervisor in the welfare department, State of New Hampshire.
Barney worked for the Post Office and was on the Governor's Civil
Rights Commission. Our whole society would fall apart if we had to say
that people like this who report anything strange must either be nuts
or else have some crazy angle to what they're doing. We have standard
procedures for accepting eyewitness testimony. These people and lots
of other abductees certainly meet those standards for providing
acceptable testimony.
So, I get irked when I hear people say there isn't any evidence. We've
got things like the University of Colorado study, the Condon Report,
in which 30% of 117 cases studied in detail couldn't be identified.
Bluebook Special Report 14 does a cross-comparison between 600-plus
unknowns and the balance of 2000plus cases that could be identified.
They looked at six different characteristics—apparent size, color,
shape, speed, etc. —to see if there was any chance that the unknowns
were just missed knowns. It was less than one percent. They did a
quality evaluation. They found that the better the quality, the more
likely to be an unknown. That's exactly what you'd expect if we're
dealing with something different. Because they had other categories:
not only "unknown," but insufficient information, aircraft,
astronomical, balloon, psychological aberrations. The unknowns were
different. And the differences were in the direction of being able to
move with much greater maneuverability and much greater speed, to have
a different shape, to have different lighting. What do people want?
We're dealing with vehicles in the air, many of them observed in the
early 1950s or late '40s, doing things that we certainly could not do.
So, the evidence, for anybody who wants to take the time,—and it does
take time—is overwhelming that some UFOs are alien spacecraft and that
we're dealing with a kind of "Cosmic Watergate." No question.
Question: We also have a situation of extremely high strangeness
associated with a lot of UFO sightings. Stories where people floated
through walls by aliens, or where beings seem to just appear in a room
and then disappear--things that are absolutely fantastic. And yet,
some of these abduction cases are among the most reputable ones. How
do you account for that?
SF: Arthur C. Clarke once said it very well: "Advanced technology is
by definition magic." If you tried to show your great-great
grandfather a television set, it would have been magic. Utterly
impossible. There must be midgets inside. And yet, when humans landed
on the moon—a remarkable thing in itself—we could watch it in real
time, as it happened. Quite extraordinary. A pocket calculator today
represents an enormously sophisticated kind of device. What about a
hologram? You want crazy stuff! If you've ever seen a big hologram,
you know you can put your hand through the darn thing, but it sure
looks like there's something there. That's magic.
So, what I'm saying is, I don't have the faintest idea how to float
somebody through a wall, but the way of science is to recognize that
the observations are real, though the explanations may be all wet. And
that's a problem for a number of ancient academics, fossilized
physicists. If they don't understand how something happens, it can't
be. The sun has been fusioning up there, the primary source of energy
for all our society, since the beginning. We figured out in 1937-38
how the sun works, that it's fusion, not burning gas. But could
anybody in his right mind suggest that it was fusioning until we knew
about fusion? Of course not. So, you have to have a tolerance for
ambiguity, for mystery, and a recognition that there are things we
don't know. The more questions we ask, the more we don't know, because
there's more we can dig into. The true scientist recognizes that.
He'll say, "Gee, that's intriguing, that's different, how could we do
that?" The false scientist says, "That's impossible, I'm going to
ignore it." I'm reminded of Simon Newcomb, a great American astronomer
of the 19th century, who published in October, 1903, a long detailed
paper considering the possibility of man flying in a vehicle. His
conclusion was that the only way man would ever fly would be in a
lighter than-air vehicle, a balloon. This was two months before the
Wright Brothers' first flight, and when told about that, he said,
"Well, maybe a pilot, but it'll never carry a passenger." He didn't
know anything about flight. It's the basic assumptions that mattered.
A little over 20 years later, another great astronomer "proved" it
would be impossible to give anything sufficient energy to get it into
orbit around the earth. All he proved was that he had made the wrong
assumptions. Finally, the example that kind of teases me the most is
Dr. Campbell, a great Canadian astronomer, who published in 1941 a
long detailed paper proving that the required initial launch weight of
a chemical rocket able to get a man to the moon and back would be a
million-million tons. We accomplished it less than thirty years later,
with a dumb old chemical rocket whose initial launch weight was 3,000
tons. He was off by a factor of 300 million. Why? Because he didn't
know anything about space flight! All his assumptions were wrong.
We're stupid, we're silly, we're ridiculous, we're unprofessional. And
that's the kicker here. Because we don't have explanations, because we
cannot duplicate, doesn't mean that it cannot happen. Friedman's Law,
if you will: technological advancement almost invariably comes from
doing things differently in an unpredictable way. The future is not an
extrapolation of the past. A great scientist, Max Planck, once said,
"New ideas come to be accepted, not because their opponents come to
believe in them, but because their opponents die and a new generation
grows up that's accustomed to them." So, I get upset at professional
people who put their pride before their science. They can't figure out
how something could happen, so it couldn't, and that's the end of
that. And that's not science, that's pseudo-science.
Question: Why are they keeping it a secret?
SF: That's a different question, of course. I'll give you several
reasons why all governments are keeping it secret. You see, it's not
just the United States government, it's a worldwide phenomenon. Some
people might think I'm saying there's a conspiracy. I'm not saying
that at all, although there may be. But I am saying that there are
sometimes common interests. People may be enemies and still think the
same way about things. Here are several good reasons for all
governments to not want to put the UFO data out on the table:
First, they want to figure out how the darn things work. As a top-
secret Canadian document said in 1950, "Modus operandi is as yet
unknown." You've got pieces, you've got wreckage. You set up your
secret project, say, a small group working under Dr. Vannevar Bush,
the top science administrator during and after World War II in the
United States. The first problem is, you want to figure out how they
work. Rule number one is security. You can't tell your friends without
telling your enemies. I mean, they read the newspapers too, listen to
the radio, watch television.
Second, the other side of the same coin: What happens if somebody else
figures out how they work before you do? They'd make wonderful weapons
delivery and defense systems. You don't want them to know you know
they know. Because, you see, if the technology is unusual, there may
be ways of countering that, as long as they don't know you know. It's
like poison gas. If you've got poison gas and I've got the antidote
and you find out I've got the antidote, you're going to change your
poison gas. Then I've got to change my antidote, and so forth. This
whole sequence has been going on for thousands of year: stronger
shields, bigger spears, swords and all the rest.
Third, and very important: the political problem. Suppose there were
to be an announcement tomorrow by highly trusted individuals around
the world, Pres. Clinton and Mr. Yeltsin maybe, or the Pope and the
Queen—you know, pick your own odd couple—saying that, indeed, some
UFOs are alien spacecraft. What would happen? Well, you know darn well
the stock market would go down, church attendance and mental hospital
admissions would go up. But the big thing that would happen, I
believe, is that there would be an immediate push on the part of the
younger generation, never alive when there wasn't a space program, for
a whole new view of ourselves. Instead of Americans, Russians,
Chinese, Paraguayans—just Earthlings. Because obviously, from an alien
viewpoint, we are all Earthlings, even though we tend to forget it
most of the time.
Gee, you say, that would be great. We could solve all the world's
problems—the environmental problems, the political problems—if we all
thought of ourselves as Earthlings. But then you realize that there
isn't any government on this planet that wants its citizens to owe
their primary allegiance to the planet. Nationalism is the only game
in town. That's why we spent a trillion dollars last year on things
military, in the name of nationalism, protecting ourselves against the
other guy, or preparing to attack the other guy, depending on where
you sit.
And there's a fourth problem, the religious one. There are a number of
fundamentalists who believe that this is the work of the devil, that
man is the only intelligent life in the universe. And the rug would be
pulled out from under them. And you may recall that on occasion the
government has been influenced strongly by fundamentalists. Reagan
certainly was.
Then there's the fifth problem: economic discumbobulation, if you
will. If the public perception, when an announcement was made, was
that there would be new means of transportation, new means of energy
production, new medical things—a whole new world—there would be a
tremendous loss in the stock value of oil companies, power companies,
car companies, plane companies. I mean, forget psychological panic;
that's a different story. There's still five percent of the people in
the United States who don't believe we've been to the Moon. But the
economic problems that might arise, should an announcement be made—
that's a big difficulty. How do you handle that? It's kind of like
we're seeing right now with regard to Eastern Europe. "Freedom,
freedom, they won their freedom." But that doesn't convert you from a
really second-rate economy into a capitalist economy. Now you've got
freedom, but how do you get from A to B? As we're finding out, it's
not easy.
And so, even though people might easily accept, as I think they would,
the notion of alien spacecraft—most people already do, according to
the polls—that doesn't mean the transition is without its
difficulties. Certainly, the government would have asked psychiatrists
and social scientists what would happen, and they'd say, "Well, it
depends on how you broach the announcement. You could make it 'Fear,
fear, fear!' Or you could make it 'just' difficulty for religion,
economics, politics, medicine, industry. You have a choice." And I
think for many governments, the natural thing to do is to postpone the
decision. Let somebody else worry about it. It's a big problem, and I
can understand the reluctance.
However, I must add that, as a nuclear physicist very much concerned
about the proliferation of nuclear weapons amongst countries that I
wouldn't trust with a bazooka, much less a nuclear weapon, the only
hope I see for a decent future for this planet is an Earthling
orientation. By far the easiest way to get that is to recognize that
there are aliens coming here.