UFO Religions

Archive for the ‘ET Life’ Category

I just finished Thomas Bullard’s book, The Myth and Mystery of UFOs, by scholar-folklorist Thomas Bullard (University of Kansas Press, 2010). Rather than write my own review, I found the work summarized nicely in this review over at Magonia review of books blog. I’ll just add a few thoughts below on this important work.

Bullard’s book is not light reading. It is an academic work. In my view, as an academic, it’s a wonderful volume. Bullard has detailed chapters, with the expected documentation in mainly academic sources, on all the major motifs of UFO studies: descriptions of alien craft, the aliens themselves, abduction narratives, and alien mission and homeworlds. In each case, Bullard painstakingly details how virtually all the UFO anecdotal evidence can be found in ancient, medieval, and early modern tales across the globe. Importantly, the vast majority of these correlations have nothing to do with other planets, inter-planetary travel, or extraterrestrials. That is, though the correlations are overwhelmingly present, it is only in the contemporary era that narratives about abduction and “otherworldly visitation” conforms to anything we would recognize as high technology. His point in this effort is to raise question of how any of the UFO phenomena could in reality be about visitors from space given the vast arrays of correlations. Good question.

Bullard’s (for the most part) explanation is the psycho-social approach. This is not a view that says a culture produces these episodes or encounters and their descriptions. Rather, it is the encounter with the anomalous that produces the descriptions — and the descriptions are far more likely to not be about genuine aliens from space than other deep-seated thoughts, fear, beliefs, yearnings, etc. The reason the overlaps are so high, reasons Bullard, is that experiences are parsed in such a way that new mythologies are constructed that serve the same fucntion or outlet as older ones.  The garb changes because we are living in a different era, our lives defined by technology and the “final frontier” of space.

Bullard doesn’t take a dogmatic stance on this, though. He simply feels it has high explanatory value, but not complete explanatory power. He leaves room for truly anomalous events that might include genuine extraterrestrial contact, and outlines in some details how such experiences might be winnowed from the those experiences for which the psycho-social explanation can best account.

I would encourage anyone interested in UFOs to read this book, and to keep it as a handy reference for its coverage and source material. In particular, those for whom the UFO subject goes beyond the nuts and bolts (questions of physics and reverse engineering which a priori assume that most UFOs are physical craft of non-human origin) will be well served by Bullard’s focus on how the UFO subject molds and produces religious experience and worldview.

Technorati Tags: abduction, aliens, Bullard, fairies, folklore, magonia, mystery, myth, review, UFOs

I found this recent post entitled, “Is This the Dumbest Ever ‘Refutation’ of the Fine-Tuning Argument Ever?” worth the read (and a bit funny). It’s about some very poor thinking on the part of British philosopher Anthony Grayling with respect to his disdain of the fine-tuning argument often associated with the intelligent design movement.

I don’t often post things like this here, but examples like this are worth it. Part of the debate over the likelihood of ET life is linked to the debate over the alleged probability that other planets *must* be out there capable of supporting ET life. The other side is the “rare earth” view — that earth is alone (or probably alone) in being home to intelligent life and even complex life forms. That view is consistent with the fine-tuning argument, which posits earth is capable of supporting life because the universe is “fine-tuned” to make that possible. The term naturally implies intelligent design, but there are some fine-tuning proponents that don’t make God part of the equation.

Technorati Tags: aliens, extraterrestrials, fine-tuning

Astrophysicist John Gribbon’s new book Alone in the Universe: Why Our Planet Is Unique was recently reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. The reviewer refers to the book as “grimly plausible” and notes that Gribbon has a firm grasp on something obvious to all those who still care to approach the subject of ET life with logic:  there is a world of difference between habitable planets and inhabited planets. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: astronomy, astrophysics, extraterrestrial life, habitable planets, inhabited, unique

I like to post on things like this every so often to remind readers that science can be marred by, and married to, hype. I was reading through some recent posts by mathematician Peter Woit on his Not Even Wrong blog this morning and came across several items worth offering my own readers here. After all, the multiverse and associated ideas are inextricably part of the ET life and deep space travel issues. I like Woit because he insists that mainstream ideas be probed for internal coherence and not simply embraced for their (pardon the pun) symmetry on the surface of things. Reminds me a lot of my dissertation work on the “obvious” evolution of Israelite monotheism. Anything but.

For those new to Woit, he is a mathematician at Columbia University whose PhD (Princeton) is in theoretical physics. He is most known for his book, Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law.

The first of Woit’s posts that caught my attention was entitled, “The Ultimate Guide to the Multiverse.” Some excerpts:

Yet another cover story about the Multiverse can be found this week at New Scientist, which calls it The Ultimate Guide to the Multiverse. As just one more in a long line of such stories over the last decade, a trend that shows no signs of slowing down, one can be pretty sure that this is not the yet the “ultimate” one, nor even the penultimate one.

The content is the usual: absolutely zero skepticism about the idea, and lots of outrageous hype from the usual suspects (Bousso, Tegmark, Susskind, etc.) We’re told that scientists are now performing tests of the idea, even at the LHC. The LHC test has been a great success: Laura Mersini-Houghton used the multiverse to predict that the LHC would not see supersymmetry, and that prediction has worked out very well so far.

This past week also saw the premiere of the Multiverse episode of Brian Greene’s Fabric of the Cosmos series on PBS. It’s more or less an hour-long infomercial for the Multiverse, with the argument against it pretty much restricted to some short grumpy comments by David Gross about how he didn’t like it. Brian’s pro-multiverse argument was that many new advances in physics are all pointing to a multiverse, and he showed support for the idea as resting on a three-legged structure. One of the legs was string theory, and I’ve described elsewhere recently how circular reasoning makes this one very shaky.

The multiverse propaganda machine has now been going full-blast for more than eight years, since at least 2003 or so, and I’m beginning to wonder “what’s next?”. Once your ideas about theoretical physics reach the point of having a theory that says nothing at all, there’s no way to take this any farther. You can debate the “measure problem” endlessly in academic journals, but the cover stories about how you have revolutionized physics can only go on so long before they reach their natural end of shelf-life.

Another post of a couple days ago saw Woit defending himself against ad hominem attacks from mainstream string theorists: “String and M-Theory: Answering the Critics.” Again, some excerpts.

Mike Duff has a new preprint out, a contribution to the forthcoming Foundations of Physics special issue on “Forty Years of String Theory” entitled String and M-theory: answering the critics. Much of it is the usual case string theorists are trying to make these days, but it also includes vigorous ad hominem attacks on Lee Smolin and me (I’m described as having an “unerring gift for inaccuracy”, and we’re compared to people who campaign against vaccination “in the face of mainstream scientific opinion”).

Duff explains that his motivation for answering the critics is that we have been successful on the public relations front, supposedly responsible for the British EPSRC “office rejecting” without peer review grant proposals on string theory. I know nothing of this, but I think it’s clear to everyone that the perception of string theory among physicists has changed, and not for the better, over the past decade. One dramatic way to see this is to notice that at this point, US physics departments have essentially stopped hiring string theorists for permanent appointments (i.e. at the tenure-track level).

Duff’s article contains an appendix about this, in the form of a “FAQ”, where he explains that he approved the text of the press release headlined “Researchers discover how to conduct first test of ‘untestable’ string theory” which is misleading hype by any standard. Initially someone who was successfully misled in the Imperial media team added the subtitle “New study suggests researchers can now test the ‘theory of everything’”, which was later removed. Duff claims that Shelly Glashow, Edward Witten and Jim Gates told journalists that they didn’t agree with this because of the “theory of everything” subtitle, implying that otherwise they were fine with the “first test of ‘untestable’ string theory” business (except for Gates noting that in any case this is just supergravity, not string theory). It would be interesting to hear from the three of them if they’re really on-board with this “first test of ‘untestable’ string theory”.

Technorati Tags: multiverse, Peter Woit, physics, skepticism, string theory

The November 2011 issue of The American Spectator featured an essay of interest to all those who lurk at this blog: “Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Search for God.” I was gratified that the author, Tom Bothell, was familiar enough with the subject matter to note Michael Crichton’s well-placed dismissal of the Drake Equation that ET life enthusiasts breathlessly love to reference. But Bothell also saw the religious bait-and-switch going on with respect to SETI and anything resembling traditional theism. He writes:

The late novelist Michael Crichton gave an entertaining lecture at Caltech in 2003 saying that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a religion. And in a way it is. Carl Sagan, one of its leading promoters, “believed in superior beings in space, creatures so intelligent, so powerful, as to resemble gods.” … That’s religion. The well-known atheist Richard Dawkins shows similar tendencies. He was quoted in the New York Times the other day as saying, “It’s highly plausible that in the universe there are Godlike creatures.” But he was careful to add that “these Gods came into being by an explicable scientific progression of incremental evolution.” (He would not have wanted to see “Gods” capitalized, however.)

These observations and others in regard to the religious commitment of atheist materialists to their quest for non-divine deities make this brief essay worth the read.

Technorati Tags: atheism, drake equation, extraterrestrial, extraterrestrials, God, religion, Sagan, SETI, theism