Telepathy and UFOs (at Roswell?)

Christopher Allan [CDA] takes Anthony Bragalia to task in a comment for the Bragalia link in the previous posting here.

CDA objects to the assertion that General Twining allegedly said he communicated with a Roswell alien survivor telepathically.

And CDA also protests that scientists or science eschews the idea of telepathy. Here’s CDA’s comment:

AJB:

You say, based on 2nd or 3rd hand testimony, that the live Roswell alien communicated with General Twining by telepathy.

Tell me please: 

1. Have you any reason for supposing that Twining had telepathic powers? Is this documented anywhere? 

2. Have you any reason for supposing the ET also had telepathic powers?

No such thing as intelligent life outside the earth is known to science; no such thing as telepathy is accepted by science either. Yet you go one step further and tell us that not only do ETs exist and have visited our planet but that they can also communicate with us by telepathy! 

While I [RR] am no fan of telepathy or other vagaries of ESP, I need to note that CDA is not well-versed or versed at all about what science thinks of telepathy.

For instance, there are a number of extant scientific considerations of ESP elements.

And I find one suggestion by Ted Bastins, a one-time Research Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge [in CDA’s backyard], in the chapter “A Clash of Paradigms in Physics” at Page 119 ff. in The Encyclopedia of Ignorance; Everything you ever wanted to know about the unknown [Edited by Ronald Duncan and Miranda Weston-Smith, Pergamon Press, Oxford/NY, 1977] to be applicable to the “discussion” here:

Bastin, defending telekinesis, or psychokinesis, as he calls it, writes, “that I have myself had extensive and variegated first-hand experience of experimentation with two well-known subjects [Uri Geller and Suzanne Padfield] who are able to influence physical objects in a paranormal way (that is to say, to execise psychokinesis.” [Page 124-125]

“Psychokinetic effects show an effect of ‘thought forms’” which he goes on to integrate into quantum theory, or hopes to. [Page 125]

He states that “I do not believe myself that the fact that one has to come to terms with ‘thought forms’ … means that one has to abandon rational inquiry.” [Page 125]

“I described earlier how violent a change the sequential paradigm [of classic physics] would demand” of common sense. [Page 125]

He elaborates on the how a “new paradigm frees us from the preconceptions of spatial and temporal” and how one might consider such paranormal activities, such as psychokinesis (and telepathy) even though contain the attribute that “they are separated in space and in time.” [Page 126]

He concludes, “familiarity may make us see a reasonable coherence where in fact there are great areas of ignorance while denying any coherence to unfamiliar ideas which may be no worse in their incoherence.” [Page 126]

(That conclusion should be read slowly by CDA, Lance Moody, and the marginalized and disappearant French skeptic, Gilles Fernandez,)

So, while telepathy is anathema to my friend CDA, and not an adherent topic I enjoy, one should be disinclined to dismiss it out of hand and make errant generalizations that science eschews the matter altogether.

If Mr. Bragalia’s Nathan Twining says he telepathically interacted with a Roswell-crashed alien, one can, as CDA does, dismiss the alien crash part but not the telepathic part. That would be imbecilic.

RR 

Nathan Twining said Roswell was an ET event?

Anthony Bragalia reports that Nathan Twining's son was told, by his father, that Roswell was an ET event:

http://bragalia.blogspot.com

N.B. If you wish to comment on Mr. Bragalia's piece, please do so here. (That would save us a lot of Blogger hoody-do.)