Aliens On Earth.com Resources for those who are stranded here Our Bookstore is OPEN Over 5000 new & used titles, competitively priced! Topics: UFOs - Paranormal - Area 51 - Ghosts - Forteana - Conspiracy - History - Biography - Psychology - Religion - Crime - Health - Geography - Maps - Science - Money - Language - Recreation - Technology - Fiction - Other - New Search... for keyword(s)   in Page Titles in Book Title/Author in Contents of Pages ---other searches--- Metacrawler Yahoo FAST Search Google Altavista Dogpile Inference Find Northern Light IWon.com MSN Search Las Vegas Sun Location: Mothership -> UFO -> Updates -> 1998 -> Sep -> Re: Ufology - A Personal Viewpoint

UFO UpDates Mailing List

From: Mark Cashman <mcashman@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1998 11:00:15 -0400
Fwd Date: Wed, 02 Sep 1998 08:33:07 -0400
Subject: Re: Ufology - A Personal Viewpoint

>From: Michel M. Deschamps <739411@ican.net>
>To: <updates@globalserve.net>
>Subject: Re: UFO UpDate: Re: Ufology - A Personal Viewpoint
>Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1998 04:04:30 -0400

>First, the only possible explanation I can come up with for why
>myself and other people around here have had so many sightings,
>is the fact that Sudbury, Ontario, Canada was, at one time,
>known to be the nickel capital of the world.

>Here, we find one of the largest deposit of nickel in the
>world...the result of an asteroid impact. Sudbury's main
>employers are INCO and Falconbridge, the two mining giants. I
>don't know if anyone else out there did their homework, but UFOs
>are attracted to sites such as these.

Michel -

No, I have never, in all of the geographic studies I have seen,
found mines as a UFO hot spot, and I would find it difficult to
name even one report which came from such. Bodies of water, yes.
Power plants, yes. Military bases, yes. Mines, no. To prove such
a contention requires that you show a significant percentage of
UFO reports come from such areas. If you can do so, I'm sure we
would be interested.

The problem with any sort of contention of any particular type
of locality as better than another for UFO reports on a
statistical basis is that the distribution must be normalized
for population (which we don't know is a safe thing to do),
exact locations of the UFO must be present (thus, landings or
close to the ground hovering (i.e. CE's) are required), and then
the resulting distribution needs to be compared to a random
distribution, as Vallee did in checking Michel's orthotenic
hypothesis.

I'm sure a study could be done with the French 1954 wave since
Vallee used those cases in his orthotenic study and good
coordinates are publicly available in one of his books. I'm not
sure where you'd get French mine locations for that year, but
there must be references.

I urge you to consider validating your hypothesis in this
manner. That's the kind of thing which can make the study of
UFOs scientific.

>Then, the second one came down and did the
>same thing for another half- hour, but this time, all the lights
>went out. After the two objects had left the area, the two men
>drove down to the hydro station and spoke with the guy on duty.
>Asked if he had seen it, he said that this was the second time
>that week that this had happened! He said that when the first
>object came over the line, the power dropped from 100,000 volts
>to 30,000 volts. But when the second object came down, the power
>dropped all the way down; there wasn't even a 1000 volts in the
>line, he said. He added that Hydro knew about these incidents,
>but that the public wasn't allowed to know the truth about the
>power outages.

As custodian of the Project 1947 EM Effects catalog, I would be
interested in knowing more about this report. Is the location,
date and time available? The witness names? Was a followup ever
done with the power station management by an investigator? Was a
profile of power problems in the area done, to determine whether
the temporal correspondence was tight or just coincidence? What
was the duration of the sighting and did the power return to
normal when the object departed?

>All this talk I hear about human perception and whether it's
>faulty or not is just a lot of bull!

Michel, it's not bull. Every investigator should be completely
familiar with the uncertainties of human perception, especially
with regard to NL class cases. I refer you to Haines (1980),
Observing UFOs, the most comprehensive reference on the subject,
as well as to any readable work on cognitive psychology.

Hynek and Vallee have both written extensively on the
misperceptions which are part of the reporting of this
phenomenon. Every competent investigator is aware of the sort of
cases they discuss - often because we've run into them.
Balloons, aircraft, even fireworks. They are part of the noise,
they exist, and they reflect a certain frailty to human
perception that is key to the work of the objective
investigator.

For you to make such a comment causes concern to me as to
whether I can rely on the reports you mention. If you are
unaware of these effects or are deliberately ignoring them as
"bull", then how can you be filtering UFO sightings?

>No doubt there are crackpots out there, but if you're really
>observant, you can almost weed them out everytime. Heaven's Gate
>is a perfect example of this. And remnants of the 1950's
>Contactee Movement is another. If someone comes up to you and
>asks about information on Venusians, you know that person's got
>to be crazy. That's happened to me at a convention in Toronto,
>so I know.

There are certainly plenty of New Age crazies, and yes, they can
be fairly easy to filter. Kenny Young recently reported the case
of an enthusiastic family who did not fit that profile, but who
made UFOs from every star and planet. Those are the kind of
witnesses that are harder to filter without an on-site visit and
reenactment.

>Perhaps one day, people will stop wasting time accusing each
>other of misperception or lack of objectivity.

When people stop mispercieving and cooking the data, it will be
safe to do so. Not until then.

------
Mark Cashman, creator of The Temporal Doorway at
http://www.temporaldoorway.com
- Original digital art, writing, and UFO research -
Author of SF novels available at...
http://www.temporaldoorway.com/library.htm
------