Where are the skeptics for this?
Gilles Fernandez provided a link to his site of his piece on
the Airship wave of the late 1800s.
But our resident skeptics won’t take a look at it or attempt
to belittle the common mistakes and erroneous conclusions within Gilles’ work, and there are many of both.
For instance, Gilles writes this:
“The first and probably most famous of the so-called
Airships waves is the great one of 1896/1897. The problematic is that there is
a large number of testimonies, mainly in newspapers, of sightings of such
aircraft. However, until scientific evidence to the contrary comes to light,
man-made airship flights at this time and place are unknown to aeronautical
history.
In other words, there are no historic or scientific evidence
of the realization(s) and flight(s) of 1896/97 of such designs explaining what
was observed.
The first historical steerable airship was probably
constructed by French inventor Henri Giffard (1852). On 24 September 1852, he
made the first powered and controlled flight (27 km) from Paris to Trappes, but
the wind was too strong and he was unable to return to the starting point.
However, he was able to maneuver, demonstrating a powered airship could be
steered and controlled.
In 1884, a french airship took again to the skies and it is
generally presented as the first historical truly controlled dirigible.
CalledLa France, it was designed by two French Army Captains, Charles Renaud
and Arthur Krebs (165 feet long, 2 tons, 12 miles per hour). At least seven
flights were performed and five times the dirigible was able to go back to its
starting point. It was able to flight a distance of 8 kilometers in 23
minutes.”
That material undercuts the whole tone (and premise) of
Gilles’ counter to those who see the observations of the 18986 airships and
others as observations of airship technology being tested by engineers and
others, as noted here:
And here:
Gilles continues:
“Extraordinary thesis concerning the 1896/97 are not lacking
in ufology, as Jean Sider's one in France and in particular in his French
on-line article L'airship de 1897. More complex extraordinary hypothesis have
been formulated here or there, for example by Swiss ufologist Fabrice Bonvin.
More complex because this kind of hypothesis are calling ufological coined
terms like "mimic" or "elusivity". Such terms or concept
are close those proposed by Jacques Vallée or John Keel: It is defended that
the origine of such wave or other so-called anomalistic phenomenons are
imputable to an omniscient intelligence having a manipulator or insidious
behavior.”
No one, here, or in my circle, thinks that the 1896 wave was
a caused by an extraordinary hypothesis or hypotheses involving “omniscient
intelligence” – a term Gilles imputes, surreptitiously to what has appeared at
this blog about the Airship wave.
No one thinks – I surely don’t – that the Airships seen and
reported in the 1896 time-frame were ET flown or derived.
That’s an absurdity, and in the links provided above,
pertaining to what has appeared here, will show the discerning reader that no
one implied an “omniscient intelligence” to the Airship creations but rather,
offer a human origination by innovative engineers and inventors of the period
and locale.
Gilles continues:
“The ufologists in favor of exotic hypothesis [sic] behind
the UFO would be then devoted in totality or in a very large part to this
intrinsic product and result of this inter-individual variability concerning
perceptions, memorizations and descriptions. And ufologists themselves
projecting their own expectations, and we have here a retro-action loop, a
circularity.
The reasons to drive some individuals to not identify a
conventional stimulus in reality are numerous. They could be imputable to the
observation conditions, because the stimulus is perceived in dark time, or
other particular ones (fog, mist, atmospheric refraction, etc.), or because the
stimulus is seen fleetingly, or under a non-prototypical angle of vision, or
undergone particular artificial or natural light exposure (and so on).
A false memory, created from scratch, results generally in a
source of confusion: the subject correctly remembers the information, but no
longer knows where it comes from. Some false memories and dreams are then
remembered as real events. The literature concerning false memory in cognitive
psychology is really abundant and a very fecund field of scientific studies,
but Elizabeth Loftus1 is probably the most famous researcher focused on this
thematic. These field of researches concerning Human Memory have experimentally
demonstrated how our memory is malleable and plastic. In Appendix A, I shortly
present some of the memory effects discovered and studied in cognitive psychology
as I did in my book (Fernandez, 2010).”
No one who reported an Airship sighting in the time period
was operating from memory; the reports were first-hand accounts and not
reminiscences dredged up from the unconscious.
Gilles creates a straw man argument to create the impression
we are dealing with a academic or scientific evaluation of the topic.
Gilles also presents a view that communication between and
among those who reported sightings was limited bb the dearth of vehicles and
machines for distributing information, including newspapers:
“The main arguments proposed to exclude any conventional
possibilities by the proponents of such thesis and for the 1896/97 airships
wave are for example the argument of a telecommunication network too low at this
period and a too low literacy rate of the American population... Then, it would
exclude all explanations in terms of mass contagion where newspapers and other
networks were playing a very strong role:
Insufficient penetration of the communication network and
the low literacy rate in 1897 exclude a shared spread of conscious
representation of the phantom airship in a predominantly rural population.”
He dismisses the above with this:
“We dont recognize this argument as solid, nor historically
valid, but a fallacious one. As Dominique Caudron stated, first, what ever is a
publication, the people who have a reading knowledge may read for the others
who have not. Second, even if 10% of a population have reading knowledge, there
are in fact only tens testimonies at a time, or less, and thoses [sic] knowing
the rumor of Airships can repeat and vehiculate [sic] it orally and then become
protagonists and actors of this contagion. Concerning a telecommunication
network too low, we are at the edge of the Telegraph and Rails for 50 years.
Phone is invented from around twenty years and more or less well implemented,
mainly in California. For example, if we focuse [sic] on the foremost sighting
of Oackland [sic], the San Francisco Call of 22 November 1896 (p.13) – the
article is reproduced after for his main parts – and we read that some
witnesses... have phoned to the Journal!”
The above hardly makes the point that intercommunication was
ubiquitous; it does just the opposite and supports the information and paragraph
above it.
Then Gilles presents his explanation for the sightings,
using an image that enhances a vision of the planet Venus, making it look as if
it were larger and more imposing than it was, in actuality. I’m surprised at
the shenanigan, but here it is:
Here’s Gilles’ view:
The most likely culprit is the planet Venus. During the
winter of 1896-97 it was visible in the evening sky, and was at its maximum
brightness on March 23 - just at the height of the airship mania. Many of the
airship reports were on cloudy or overcast nights. The bright disk of Venus
shining through moving clouds might appear to be an airship in flight.
Now, Gilles has friends here in the States – Lance Moody and
Christopher Allan among them.
And while those gentlemen would attack anyone else’s work
that is so filled with importunate nonsense, they won’t raise an eyebrow to
dissect Gilles’ sloppy but, in its way, spectacular attempt to deride the
sensible conclusion that the Airships reported in 1896 and around that era were
as they were accounted; that is, what was seen and reported is exactly what was
seen.
We await Monsieur Gilles’ second, fictional, installment.
RR
posted by RRRGroup at
Monday, January 06, 2014
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