Dealing with Zoam…

Ya just can’t go dormant, when you have such an energetic guy as Zoam Chomsky hovering around.

You hafta deal with him, and you gotta luv the guy.

Zoam’s “UFO atheism” – couched in quasi-scientific jargon (Null and PSH, Psychosocial hypothesis) – misses the logic that Richard Hall decried as missing in ufology.

Frank Warren has insistently asserted that UFO merely means a thing or apparition seen flying or floating in the sky not identifiable and is tagged a UFO, an unidentified flying object. (The use of “object” being a bit much maybe but understandable as most sightings of unidentified things in the sky seem to be tangible, or object-like.)

Zoam insists, just as vehemently, that those things seen are delusions or imagined or confabulated.

All we have are UFO reports, nothing verifiable as reality, despite the fact that people do see odd things flying about. I have, as have others, and while most of us don’t call those things seen “flying saucers,” they can be call unidentified flying things or objects.

Bruce Duensing likes to call them UAP (the Vallee designation, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), a sobriquet I use at one of our blogs but a term that misses the continuity of the jargonesque letters UFO over the years.

Now if Zoam wants to quibble with the ET explanation of those unidentified flying things, he has grounds for doing so.

But how can he argue this: “Every hoax, every flying-saucer fairy tale is evidence of nothing more than a myth and social delusion”?

Sure, some UFO/flying saucer tales are hallucinogenic or neurological delusions, and some even outright confabulations or lies.

But can everyone be lying about what they think they’ve seen?

Scientific proof of UFO sightings has been woefully indeterminate, surely, but can we really discount witness observations as wholly bogus, without throwing out consciousness and morality altogether?

Are humans subject to an overwhelming delusion called consciousness, a matter for discussion perhaps, but that isn’t part of Zoam’s protestations, not directly as I read him.

I think people are basically honest and reporting as best as they can what their senses have imposed upon their brains.

Zoam says, not so fast. He writes:

“Scientific skepticism is an application of our overwhelming worldview, modern Scientific realism. The scientific method and the continuously evolving truth about the world and the Universe it generates are advocated by Scientific skepticism to displace ignorance, irrationality and superstition in the world because stupidity and false beliefs degrade the quality of life on Earth and are increasingly dangerous in our technological democracy.”

But is there such a thing as “scientific skepticism”?

I think it doesn’t exist, and can argue that there is no proof for it.

It’s merely a terminology and practice foisted upon non-scientists without a semblance of reality, outside the myth-making of science, a false belief to create a caste system favorable to those advocating science as something real.

I like Zoam’s egregiously vibrant UFO protest, his “UFO atheism.”

It sparks debate, nutty as it seems.

It just strikes me as overwhelmingly non-dialectic, and a lot loopy.

RR