Paul Kimball weighs in on the Roswell Incident:
Why the "Roswell Incident" was not a crashed ET spacecraft
If there was a mothership, surely [the aliens] would have moved to recover any crashed excursion module as quickly as possible, a process which, considering the advanced technology that the aliens must possess in order to get "here" from "there" is something that they would have accomplished before Mack Brazel discovered the debris field and then altered the military, even if that involved simply disintegrating the debris field so as to leave no trace behind of the crash.
Paul's breakdown appears to make sense, but only if one subscribes to the the lamentable ufological conceit that UFOs are comprehensible vehicles akin to F-16s (the position taken by Stan Friedman, Kevin Randle and others of a stridently "nuts and bolts" persuasion).
Paul ascribes further human motivations to the hypothetical aliens when he writes of their presumed military imperative and need to eliminate debris before it can fall into human hands -- a position that reeks of anthropomorphic chauvinism. (To be fair, Paul's piece appears to be a veiled challenge to Friedman's materialistic certainties and, as such, offers a useful perspective. But are we really to accept that the Roswell crash can be satisfactorily dismissed because the aliens fail to do what we think they "should" do based on our own brief tenure as a technological species?)
I can think of any number of reasons why a nonhuman intelligence might deliberately choose to provide us with a bit of alien technology -- some benign, others ominous. Whitley Strieber's novel "Majestic," for instance, revolves around the idea that the Roswell crash was a sort of sacrificial offering intended to serve as an invitation (which we forfeited in our rush to counter the perceived threat with official denial).
Roswell may yet prove to be a genuine paranormal event. But if we're to address it meaningfully, researchers must dispense with the casual certainty that UFOs are anything so quaint as high-tech vehicles manned by inquisitive humanoids.
13 comments:
Mac,
You missed my point, which was to expose the logical inconsistencies in the thinking of Friedman et al with regards to Roswell, wherein they expect the aliens to behave as we do, to the point of carelessly crashing their spacecraft, as we sometimes do, while at the same time they ignore the other side of the argument, which is that if the aliens did behave and think as we do, then they never would have left the wreckage in the desert.
You can't have it both ways - aliens that behave like humans when it supports your argument, and then they don't when it undermines your argument. But that's exactly what Friedman et al have done over the years.
Paul
P.S. You should really stop referencing Strieber. He's nuts. ;-)
Okay, so UFOs are info translated to our reality through our collective cultural archetypes.
So why has the government played this along for over sixty years?
Just to cover secret military programs?
Have to admit that's worked pretty damn well, but that's a very cynical and jaded reason for worldwide censorship all these years.
There has to be actual physical evidence stored somewhere, someplace.
Otherwise this is the biggest con job in the history of civilization.
Besides religion.
Paul--
I realized you were addressing Friedman's double-standard but thought you were essentially of like mind. Sorry about that!
Dad--
Roswell continues to defy explanation. Mogul doesn't hold water and never did, leaving us to once again wrestle with the ET possibility. Then again, ETs would be a great cover for a truly ugly terrestrial secret the likes of which we might never determine.
Paul--
P.S. You should really stop referencing Strieber. He's nuts. ;-)
I cited a science fiction novel. Frankly, it doesn't matter who the author is: it's the idea that matters. And since we're on the subject, you don't know that Strieber's "nuts," nor do I.
I certainly have concerns regarding some of his claims, and I think his website is absolute crap, but I *do* think he's experienced some genuine high strangeness.
Strange, but I responded to Paul's post with a comment, which was apparently approved by Paul, because it showed up, and when I went back just now I couldn't find it anywhere. My comment was one of the original two, which are no longer available.
Well, whatever happened to it, I made the point that human beings are not a monolithic entity. We are not all the same. Thus, to say ETs would no more be interested in us than we would be in ants, is a poorly conceived argument. A human being who is also an entomologist, for example, would have an interest in ants that other human beings lacked. Whether they are like us, are not like us, like us in some ways and not others, is yet to be seen.
Interestingly, use of the term "entomologist" in the exact same sense I had used it, made an appearance in Don Ledger's post which he wrote in response to Kimball's own (where my "entomologist" analogy had been recorded), and which just appeared on Frank Warren's blog.
That's odd. Having my own website, I would not delete anyone's comments I previously approved.
I didn't delete your comment (I don't even remember it - unless a comment contains profanity I usually just skim it and as a matter of routine approve it), and I'm not sure I appreciate you wandering over to someone else's blog and suggesting I did without asking me first. I have no idea what happened to it (as Mac can attest, Blogger has occasional glitches), but you're free to re-post.
As for your comment that the ant argument is poorly conceived, that's your opinion, but I don't think it's a very good one when viewed in context, namely that those alien entomologists would have to be pretty darned interested in this particular ant hill, for a prolonged period of time. Further, I assume that not all ants are the same - indeed, there are any number of types of ants which dsiplay different characteristics. However, we don't mount massive expeditions to study them for decades, nor do we attempt to communicate with them.
My apologies for my own inaccuracy. I found the comment under one of your earlier posts which I had confused for the more recent one, and JUST remembered it. That's entirely my own fault, due to too much activity and not enough sleep, which coffee cannot make up for.
As for your arguments, really, to be honest, I find them loaded with too many assumptions about something where the facts are wafer thin. The ant analogy is yours, not mine; if you want to strain the analogy by implying there are as many civilizations they could be visiting as there are kinds of ants on Earth, so that the question becomes why bother with our ant hill, again, the implication has even less factual support. They might be from a relatively nearby star, or they might be nomads without any home world at all any more, and we might be much rarer in the neighborhood than ants are on Earth. But it isn't the things that I CAN think of which keeps me from forming solid beliefs about their behaviors or motives or capabilities, but the things I CANNOT think of.
Even to say "we don't mount massive expeditions" assumes too much about them. They may seem massive to Paul Kimball, but why is it justifiable to assume that it's true for them? You know nothing at all about their society, their culture, their economy, if they are real beings at all. And into that vacuum of facts you are tossing all sorts of assumptions about why it has to be one way and not the other. So if anyone is making assumptions based on their own modern human perspective, as Keyhoe did about them in the 50's, it's YOU! You are doing the same thing Keyhoe did, imagining why things have to be one way and not the other based on his present day understanding of the world around him.
I am not saying you are wrong; you may not be. But to be clear, I don't know which way it is, and neither does anyone else, including you.
Actually, I should change that last statement. If something did crash at Roswell, then those who recovered the nuts and the bolts and who are presently in charge of keeping it may well know exactly "which way it is."
But if it isn't nuts and bolts, what is it that crashed?
In my readings on Buddhism there are claims that through meditation the mind can manifest visual objects that others can see too, but this has not to my knowledge ever been demonstrated by Buddhist monks in the way that meditatively produced bodily heat generation has been. In addition, in none of my readings can I recall it having been suggested that the meditatively produced images were produced by consciousness-generated real objects, but were instead regarded as a kind of hallucination that others could see, and which dissipated as such.
So the idea that Consciousness is somehow producing, outside of any explicable causal mechanism, real three dimensional objects that exist in the world and crash on Earth seems to belong to the realm of the miraculous.
Not that I am opposed to miracles, but if something did crash in Roswell, then the answers may be out there and known by some.
Tulpas. Now you're talking!
IF the crash at Roswell was an extraterrestrial vehicle, then it's possible that
A) The crashed vehicle was a landing craft, similar to our lunar modules, and that the entire expedition crew was onboard at the time, which might mean that
B) The various projects in the early fifties that searched for small natural 'moons' in orbit could have been searching for the mothership (the delay between the crash and the search being caused by the need to interpret whatever info was recovered at Roswell). Eventually the mothership's orbit would have decayed...
The one thing you have to acknowledge about the Roswell story, it has constantly and consistently evoked spirited discussions. So, if for no other reason than that, I would say aliens did land at Roswell and they have been with us ever since.
Michael
Michael--
Hey, maybe the "aliens" are nothing more than "mere" ideas.
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