UFO Religions

Archive for the ‘inter-dimensional’ 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 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

Pretty cool article on a recent experiment at Cal-Santa Barbara. Obvious implications for what we talk abut here.

Technorati Tags: aliens, extra-dimensional, extraterrestrials, interdimensional, UFOs

This is a bit peripheral to the main thrust of UFO religions, but I was asked by a reader on another blog about it. Discussions of UFOs and ETs often (right or wrong) gets lumped in with other “paranormal” phenomena. One such phenomenon is orbs (those little circular things that appear on photographs). Many people have presumed orbs indicate ghosts or some other “non-terrestrial” life forms (there’s the oblique connection to ETs). Is there anything to that idea? Not really.  Here’s a peer-reviewed article from the Journal of Scientific Exploration on the topic. In case you are not familiar with the JSE, it is a publication of the Soceity for Scientific Exploration, an association of scientists open to the paranormal (i.e., they aren’t debunkers).

Technorati Tags: aliens, extraterrestrials, orbs, paranormal, UFOs

In Part 3 of this discussion topic, I focused on the first of two descriptions of “alien” and talked about how that definition does not conform to the biblical characters we know as demons, angels, and gods. This first description of an “alien” went like this:

1. It isn’t human

2. It is from a different planet than earth within our universe / dimension.

3. It has a determinate life span (it can and will die in this universe / dimension)

4. It has to maintain its existence through some means of nourishment (i.e., it isn’t a machine) and through reproduction.

5. It is subject to the laws of physics by which our universe / dimension operates.

I noted that I didn’t believe any of these are in the Bible and discussed how biblical descriptions of angels and demons don’t really mesh with these descriptive criteria. Here was the gist of my position:

What this means is that, if there are real space aliens (beings that meet the above criteria), then they cannot be demons, since demons do not conform to these criteria in biblical theology. That said, such aliens could certainly be evil and demonic (using the adjective, not the noun) and unworthy of trust in any way. It would also mean that such beings cannot be angels for the same reason.  They would just be aliens, a separate category. But the point is of course moot without proof of actual aliens. If aliens are interdimensional, though, then things change.  The demon equation goes back on the table (I’ll explain in part 4).

This last comment-about the “interdimensional description-is my focus in this post. There is far more congruity between that description of an “alien” than the “physical, THIS dimension” description.

First Things First: What “elohim” Means At Its Most Basic Level

Readers are likely familiar with my discussion of “elohim” when it refers to the singular God of Israel (well over 2000 times in the Bible) that constitutes part of my rebuttal to the silliness of Zecharia Sitchin and his followers. That focus isn’t where I’m going here. Yes, elohim most often refers to the lone God of Israel (upwards to 98% of the time I’d guess).  But the curious thing is that elohim is used to describe several other entities besides the God of Israel. Elohim is used to describe the following in the Hebrew Bible:

1. The God of Israel

2. Demons

3. Angels / Sons of God

4. The spirits of human dead

I’ll spare you a lengthy discussion of what’s going on here (for Bible verses and brief comments, see this paper extract drawn from one of my published articles).

Anyone who’s read much of the Bible knows that neither the Bible nor its characters consider these four personages equal in attributes (power, character, etc.).  There is a huge difference between the attributes of God and the spirit of a dead human being. So why are they all called elohim? Because elohim is, at its most basic level, a “place of residence” term.  That is, if your “proper” realm is some place other than the reality plane embodied humans occupy, then you are, by definition, an elohim.  An elohim is a being that is a resident of another, different reality plane. Elohim can visit our reality plane and we can visit theirs, at least according to the Bible. There are many occasions where elohim (angels, demons) come to earth and interact with humans. There are also occasions where prophets get to see the other “dimension” or reality plane. The most common human path to that reality plane is, of course, death. The “other side” (other reality plane) has its own geography, too (heaven, hell/Hades/Sheol, that sort of thing).

In our scientific terminology, our concept of another dimension is basically the same as the ancient idea that there are other non-human reality planes where the gods (the elohim) live. It is an unseen realm, but considered just as real as the one we by nature inhabit.

Christians use terms like “spiritual world” or “supernatural realm” to describe this “elohim reality plane,” but those terms aren’t very accurate. Why not? Because, since ALL beings that exist are created by God, who is the lone uncreated being in biblical theology, then ALL other things must be made of something–they are material. We just mistakenly equate “unseen” with “non-material” but this is not allowed by biblical theology. Only God is not made of something. He is described as an uncreated spirit in the Bible.  He inhabits a reality plane that is occupied by the unseen entities he created (and of course may occupy ours). He is “realm independent,” but his “normal” place of residence (this is not a denial of omni-presence) is the unseen reality plane.

Applying this to the Alien Question

It’s pretty easy to see how these ideas dovetail with the discussion of “aliens.” If an alien is NOT a physical life form in the sense described in Part 3 and above, then perhaps “aliens” are members of another reality plane (dimension in our modern scientific parlance) that can interact with our reality plane / dimension.

What would the ramifications be? A number of questions and possibilities arise. If there is only one other dimension, this would suggest that angels and aliens and demons are all occupants of that reality plane — but there can still be differentiation. But there could also be overlap. Flying craft are still problematic IF one could ever prove that UFOs are BOTH alien in origin/manufacture AND physical (in terms of our reality plane). But we have all read instances where a UFO will break the sound barrier and NOT create a sonic boom, suggesting that whatever it was, it wasn’t physical (in our reality plane sense).

In some ways, this second description leaves us with the same questions and categories (angels, aliens, demons, gods can all exist and not be the same – they just share the same reality plane “normally”). The Bile does not put a number on the number of dimensions there are, primarily because such questions are not the focus of the Bible.  It wasn’t written to answer this question any more than it was written to tell us what’s really in fruit cake.  But the second description can also mean overlap and therefore lend credence to the demonic view — that what we think of as aliens (the Part 3 description) are actually best understood as beings from another reality plane that can enter our reality plane as they wish–possibly for the purposes of deception.

So what does this get us?  It shows that the demonic view shouldn’t be dismissed. But it also shows that, even if aliens are from a different reality plane, we cannot use that as a conclusive argument that they must be demons. The other-dimensional view is more useful for the demonic view, but isn’t a slam dunk. In short, even the other-dimensional view doesn’t compel a single Christian view.

Technorati Tags: aliens, ET Life, ExoTheology, extra-dimensional, extraterrestrials, interdimensional, theology