UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Stoner, 68, lives in Florida with her husband. Now retired, she works with fellow “experiencers,” people who feel they have had contact with intelligent nonhuman entities. She also conducts investigations on behalf of the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON. Being an experiencer is very much part of her identity. Her story is coherent, she doesn’t ramble or get lost in the telling.

Do you believe her?

If you said yes, then you might be among the 77 percent of Americans, according to a 2012 National Geographic poll, who believe that aliens have visited Earth, or the 30 percent of Americans who believe that the government has covered up evidence of alien visitation, according to a 2015 YouGov poll. Or maybe it’s happened to you: There are few hard numbers, however, a 2014 survey for a British talk show found that one in 25 respondents believed they’d been abducted by aliens.

Belief that alien life exists on other planets is persuasive, sensible; nearly 80 percent of Americans do believe it, according to a 2015 poll. But belief that the aliens are already here feels like something else, largely because it requires a leap of faith longer than agreeing that the universe is a vast, unknowable place. Abduction and contact stories aren’t quite the fodder for daytime talk show and New York Times bestsellers they were a few decades ago. The Weekly World News is no longer peddling stories about Hillary Clinton’s alien baby at the supermarket checkout line. Today, credulous stories of alien visitation rarely crack the mainstream media, however much they thrive on niche TV channels and Internet forums. But we also still want to believe in accounts that scientists, skeptics, and psychologists say there is no credible evidence to support.

The abduction phenomenon began with strange case ofBetty and Barney Hill. On Sept. 19, 1961, the Hills were driving from Montreal to their home in Portsmouth, N.H. Betty spotted a UFO following them. Barney stopped the car on the highway, near Indian Head in the White Mountains, and got out to look at the craft through binoculars. Seeing humanoid figures in Nazi-like uniforms peering through its windows, he ran back to the car, screaming, “Oh my God, we’re going to be captured!” They drove off, but two hours later, they found themselves 35 miles from the spot where they’d first seen the craft (there is now a commemorative marker at the site), with little memory of how they’d gotten there. Soon after, Betty began having nightmares.

In 1964, the Hills underwent hypnotherapy. Under hypnotic regression — hypnosis with the intent to help a subject recall certain events with more clarity — the couple said that they had actually been pulled on board the vessel by aliens and subjected to invasive experiments. The Hills’ story, revealed to the public in 1965 with an article in the Boston Traveler and a year later in the book “The Interrupted Journey,” launched a flurry of public fascination with abductions.

Barney died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1969, but Betty went on to become a kind of sage of paranormal experiences. Their story became the blueprint for alien abduction experiences in the years that followed, especially after the airing of the 1975 made-for-TV film “The UFO Incident,” starring James Earl Jones as Barney Hill. Subsequent experiencers would describe similar missing time or have bizarre dreams and flashbacks of things they couldn’t understand. Many would use hypnotic regression to recall their experiences.

Over the next two decades, the alien abduction narrative wound its way into the American consciousness, fed by science fiction films like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and breathless news reports of mysterious incidents. In 1966, a Gallup poll asked Americans if they’d ever seen a UFO; 5 percent said they had, but they meant it in the literal sense of an unidentified flying object — only 7 percent of Americans believed that the UFOs were from outer space. By 1986, a Public Opinion Laboratory poll found that 43 percent of respondents agreed with the statement: “It is likely that some of the UFOs that have been reported are really space vehicles from other civilizations.”

Some experiencers said the aliens were here to save us and study us, some said they were here to harvest our organs and enslave us. But by the late 1980s, people whose stories would have been dismissed as delusional a generation earlier were being interviewed by Oprah and “true stories” of alien experience, such as Whitley Strieber’s “Communion” and Budd Hopkins’s “Intruders,” were bestsellers. By the 1990s, those who believed in the literal truth of alien abduction stories gained an important ally in John Mack, a Harvard professor and psychiatrist who compiled his study of the phenomenon into a 1994 book titled “Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens.” He later told the BBC, “I would never say there are aliens taking people away . . . but I would say there is a compelling, powerful phenomenon here that I can’t account for in any other way.”

“These books sold really, really well, they were on book racks in airports and railway stations. You couldn’t really avoid it,” said Dr. Chris French, head of the anomalistic psychology department at Goldsmiths College in London and author of a study on alien abductees. And it wasn’t just books — one of the most popular television shows of the 1990s was devoted almost entirely to alien conspiracy theory: “The X-Files.” “All of these things influence people’s beliefs about what might be true, what might be plausible,” said French.

Other social currents, some of them peculiarly American, informed these stories and our interest in them. Space exploration in the 1950s and ’60s forced the country to admit that a vast unknown lay beyond our atmosphere — at the same time, the Cold War inspired existential fear of invasion. The 1960s and ’70s were attended by horizon-broadening mysticism, publicized experimentation with drugs — people talked about out-of-body experiences. The 1980s saw an explosion of angst around “stranger danger,” with a near-constant reports of child abduction and sexual molestation, and then, recovered and repressed memory. Alien abduction stories absorbed those strains, re-inventing them as anal probes and sinister hybrid breeding programs.

Meanwhile, psychologists like French were examining alien abduction narratives from a more skeptical perspective. And what they found is that the truth wasn’t so much out there as it was in our heads. “People have weird experiences in all societies, given that our nervous systems are the same the world over,” explained French. “It’s the interpretations that might differ.”

A small but stubborn percentage of alien abduction experiences defy clear scientific explanation, but many of the rest can have a number of different physiological or psychological explanations, including epilepsy, which can be preceded by visual disruptions, narcolepsy, or sleep paralysis.

In normal sleep, your body is relaxed nearly to the point of paralysis, presumably to keep you from acting out your dreams. Sleep paralysis is a disruption of lucid dreaming in which the mind partially wakes but finds that the body has not. It can be terrifying: Individuals report sensing entities in the room with them and being unable to move, pressure on their chests, out-of-body-like sensations coupled with intense, heightened emotions. In the past and in other cultural contexts, this experience was attributed to demons or evil spirits or a religious phenomenon. In America, science fiction was increasingly part of mainstream entertainment, and stories about alien contact experiences were covered as news, so aliens seemed like a plausible explanation for these experiences.

Then there’s the slippery nature of memory itself. The richness of a remembered experience is no guarantee of its objective reality, even less so if that memory was “recalled” through hypnotic regression. Though now largely dismissed by mainstream psychology, hypnotic regression remains popular with experiencers. Psychologists say that discerning true memories of actual events from true memories of imagined events is impossible, especially if the individual was predisposed to believe in paranormal or alien experiences.

Additionally, there’s old-fashioned hallucination. A recent international survey of more than 30,000 people, none of who were diagnosed with schizophrenia or other mental health issues, found that 6 percent of them reported experiencing a hallucination unrelated to drugs, alcohol, or sleep. Finally, Michael Shermer, prominent American skeptic and columnist for Scientific American, notes, “Sometimes people just make stuff up.”

By the end of the 1990s, the alien abduction bubble had burst. Ratings fell for the “The X-Files.” In April 2001, reports (later denied) circulated that the British Flying Saucer Bureau, 1,500 members strong at its peak, was shutting down after a long dry spell of no sightings. Five months later, two planes crashed into the Twin Towers and no one cared about little green men anymore. “X-Files” director Chris Carter, at the 2008 San Diego Comic Con, declared that after 9/11, the mood justwasn’t right anymore. In 2006, Ben Macintyre, columnist for The Times, declared that the Internet had undermined belief in UFOs and alien visitation: “The unidentified flying object has been identified, and cannot fly any more. ET has gone home.” Skepticism, it seemed, had killed the UFO.

Except that it hadn’t. Not really.

David Clarke is a UFO researcher who investigated the British government’s UFO files — a former believer, he’s now a skeptic and author of several books, including “How UFOs Conquered the World.” In his view, the Internet didn’t kill alien belief so much as offer up hundreds of echo chambers for it to thrive in. “I think there are just as many people who believe that these things happen, but I think that they’ve retreated from public view and they just talk to themselves,” said Clarke. “In order for you to be a party to that, you need to buy into that reality.”

Skeptics want to believe that fewer people believe, that more people are aware of explanations like sleep paralysis or false memories. “People are capable of these fantastic experiences without them being real outside of the brain,” said Shermer, adding, too, that the camera-phone age is increasing the burden of evidence on experiencers.

Experiencers want to believe that public skepticism is subsiding. Rosemary Ellen Guiley, a prolific American writer about paranormal and mystical experiences, explained, “More people are willing to talk about their experiences because media has opened the door, because there has been a lot of media attention on all kinds of experiences, positive and negative. . . . This is validating, that they can talk about it and not be ridiculed.”

Yet if periodic polls are any indication, Americans have remained consistent on the subject of aliens for the last three decades. At any given moment, roughly 10 percent of Americans believe they’ve seen a UFO. A Gallup poll from 1990 found that 47 percent of respondents believed UFOs were “real,” as in alien. A 2015 Ipsos poll found that 56 percent of Americans believed in UFOs. American disbelief of the government line on UFOs has also remained steady. In 1996, 71 percent thought the government was hiding something; it was 79 percent in 2012, according to a National Geographic Survey. In other words, more people believe that the US government is covering up evidence of alien life than believe that Jesus is the son of God (a 2013 Harris Poll survey found that 68 percent of respondents believed Christianity’s central tenet). That makes Hillary Clinton’s campaign promise to open up files on Area 51 look all the more canny.

It also points to a strange moment for us humans, for how our understanding of our place in the universe has changed over the last 50 years. “We’ve become more materialistic, scientific, secular, and yet we are exactly the same human beings . . . with the same physiological and psychological makeup. Our brains are hard-wired to believe in something other than ourselves,” said Clarke. “People will carry on believing it because I think it’s just a natural part of what we are.”

On that point, some skeptics and some believers agree. There’s a long history of anomalous experiences attributed to angels, fairies, gods, and monsters — nonhuman contact experiences made to fit a cultural context. Those experiences point to something common in human consciousness. “We have had experiences throughout history that demonstrate that we are connected to something greater than ourselves,” Guiley said.

Or maybe not. In 1979, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Merrill published “Mirabell: Books of Number,” a work transcribing the poet’s conversations with spirits using a Ouija board. “If the spirits aren’t external, how astonishing the mediums become!” he said in an interview. The implication is perhaps disappointing — it’s not spirits, it’s not aliens, it’s just us — but also beautiful. And useful. “Investing time and money into why people have these kinds of extraordinary experiences might help us to answer fundamental questions that we don’t have answers for, like why do we have consciousness? I don’t believe in aliens, but I do believe that something unusual is happening to these people and it ought to be studied,” said Clarke.

Solving those riddles takes a lot of serious work, leads to a lot of dead ends, and might not prove satisfying even if we arrive at answers. Which is why, in the end, it may just be easier to attribute to aliens all the many wonderful things that we simply do not understand about the condition of being human.

Linda Rodriguez McRobbie is an American freelance writer living in London.

As most credible UFOlogists readily admit, proving that extraterrestrial spacecraft have visited our planet is a maddeningly difficult chore.

“The hassle over the word 'proof' boils down to one question: What constitutes proof?” Edward J. Ruppelt, who headed the U.S Air Force’s secret investigation of UFOs in the early 1950s, once wrote. “Does a UFO have to land at the River Entrance to the Pentagon, near the Joint Chiefs of Staff offices? Or is it proof when a ground radar station detects a UFO, sends a jet to intercept it, the jet pilot sees it, and locks on with his radar, only to have the UFO streak away at a phenomenal speed? Is it proof when a jet pilot fires at a UFO and sticks to his story even under the threat of court-martial? Does this constitute proof?”

More recently, Investigative journalist Leslie Keen, author of the 2011 book “UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record,” has noted that in roughly 90 to 95 percent of UFO sightings, observers turn out actually to have seen weather balloons, ball lightning, flares, aircraft, and other mundane phenomena. But another five to 10 percent of sightings are not so easily explainable, but that’s not the same as demonstrating that they are extraterrestrial in origin. Nevertheless, she argues, the hypothesis that UFOs are visitors from other worlds “is a rational one, and must be taken into account, given the data that we have.”

Here is some of the most compelling reasons that UFOs may be more than simple misidentifications of natural phenomena or terrestrial aircraft:

• The long, documented history of sightings.

UFOs were around, in fact, long before humans themselves took to the air. The first account of a UFO sighting in America was back in 1639, when Massachusetts colony governor John Winthrop noted in his journal that one James Everell, “a sober, discreet man,” and two other witnesses watched a luminous object fly up and down the Muddy River near Charlestown for two to three hours. There are documented sightings of what were then called “airships” during the 1800s as well, such as the July 1884 sighting of a Saturn-shaped UFO (a ball surrounded by a ring) in Norwood, NY, and a fast-moving object that briefly hovered over the startled townspeople of Everest, KS in 1897.

• Numerous modern sightings by credible, well-trained professional observers.

In Ruppelt’s 1955 book , “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects,” he documented numerous instances of military service members, military and civilian pilots, scientists and other credible professionals who had observed UFOs. In one instance, Ruppelt describes the experience of a pilot of an Air Force F-86 fighter jet, who was scrambled to track a UFO and got to within 1,000 yards of a saucer-shaped object that abruptly flew away from him in a burst of speed after he fired upon it. He also mentions a 1948 UFO encounter in which two airline pilots got to within 700 feet of a UFO and saw two rows of windows with bright lights.

• Consistencies in the descriptions of purported alien ships.

Over the decades, witnesses who’ve seen UFOs have shown remarkable consistency in the shapes and other characteristics of the objects they’ve described. In 1949, the authors of the report for Project Sign, one of the early military investigations of UFOs, identified four main groups of objects—flying disks or saucers, cigar or torpedo-shaped craft without wings or fins, spherical or balloon-shaped objects that were capable of hovering or flying at high speed, and balls of light with no apparent physical form that were similarly maneuverable. Nearly a quarter-century later, a French government investigation headed by Claude Poher of the National Center for Space Research found similar patterns in more than 1,000 reports from France and various countries. One caveat is that in recent years, reports of wedge-shaped UFOs—which bear a similarity to the latest terrestrial military aircraft—have begun to supplant some of the traditional shapes.

• Possible physical evidence of encounters with alien spacecraft.

The 1968 University of Colorado report, compiled by a team headed by James Condon, documented numerous instances of areas where soil, grass, and other vegetation had been claimed by witnesses to have been flattened, burned, broken off, or blown away by a UFO. A report by Stanford University astrophysicist Peter Sturrock, who led a scientific study of physical evidence of UFOs in the late 1990s, describes samples of plants taken from a purported UFO landing site in France in 1981. French researchers found that the leaves had undergone unusual chemical changes of the sort that could have been caused by powerful microwave radiation—which was even more difficult to explain, considering that they found no trace of radioactivity at the site.

• Physiological effects on UFO witnesses.

The Sturrock report describes in detail various symptoms reported by individuals who had encountered UFOS, ranging from burns and temporary deafness to persistent nausea and memory loss. Among the most vivid examples: Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum and Landrum’s young grandson Colby, who reportedly happened upon a “large, diamond-shaped object” hovering over a Texas road in December 1980. All three became ill afterward; Cash, for example, developed large water blisters on her face and swelling that closed her eyes, in addition to severe nausea and diarrhea. The effects persisted for years, and she was hospitalized more than two dozen times.

Comment:

STEPHEN WENG

All these UFO sightings throughout history and other compelling pieces of evidence are more than enough to justify an official investigation into this phenomenon. Skeptics say "provide real evidence", but "real evidence" as in like an alien spaceship is hard to come by. What do want MUFON and every other UFOlogist to do? Try to hijack a UFO? If these are actual alien spacecrafts, then even if you have every single plane, nuke, bullet, cannon, anti-aircraft batteries, etc at your side, it would probably be totally useless. UFOs can supposedly go at tremendous speeds that could completely leave our best fighter jets in the dust. Reports say they can accelerate instantaneously. There is also some sort of bias against anyone who claims he or she has seen a UFO. Mainstream news outlets and scientists very rarely mention UFOs at all. Of course I can also look at this from the skeptics' point of view. Good evidence is almost nowhere to be found. There are too many nutcases who only disrupt credible UFOlogists and other people who genuinely want to see if there's something to this phenomenon. Frankly, the only chance I see of there being a real concern about this in mainstream news is if the aliens decide to fly their ships in broad daylight over the White House or any other famous landmark. You may think that all we can do is just wait and see, but the government is almost surely aware of the fact that UFOs are a genuine concern. We can do something about all the questions we have about these objects. Whether you want to disprove or prove that these UFOs are alien crafts or not, an official investigation should be launched.

{ http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/ }

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