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Visitors here know that I have promoted Jose Antonio
Caravaca’s Distortion Theory wherein Jose contends that there is a “mechanism”
that surprises some UFO witnesses (and others) with scenarios that seem to be
real but have an hallucinatory patina: An external agent.
Jose has elaborated on his “theory” and its external
agent here and his various internet venues but the concept remains blurry
for many….even me, to some extent.
But the gist is that there is a mental state or “instigator”
that provokes images and scenes which emulate reality for the person(s)
affected.
In our world the scenes are ufologically oriented. In the
religious communities the images and scenarios invoked are related to spiritual
themes. In some instances, when a person or persons are afflicted by
neurological glitches or maladies, the images are bizarre and nonsensical,
seemingly.
While poring over the many accounts of humanoid encounters
(religious and ufological), I’m stuck by the details that are, usually,
uniquely related to the person(s) having the experience, as Jose has carefully
related in his theoretical accounts.
In the arena where madness (insanity) is cited, often
errantly as Thomas Szasz incessantly intoned, the insertion of external
agentalized material is harder to understand or explain, but it can be done
as the brilliant Oliver Sacks often did in his writings.
By providing the sobriquet, external agent, to the
instigator of UFO (and religious) scenes, Jose has introduced a seeming entity
for the mise en scène(s) that he is providing to explain his ideas.
But what else can he do? The “apparatus” or mental
methodology that provokes UFO encounters (or religious ecstasies) is not
epitheted by psychology or neurology, specifically. Those disciplines will call
such occurrences hallucinations or madness.
There is no doubt that these mental intrusions and scenes
have been with mankind since time immemorial as one finds out by reading Julian
Jaynes (or even Jung) and tomes about cave art and shamans or holy texts of the
ancients.
And the “scenes” offered in miracle stories or UFO reports
are rife, even though Jose admits, and I agree, that his “external agent”
doesn’t account for all UFO sightings nor, perhaps, even a few a few miracle
tales.
But many of the UFO encounters, in the literature, can be
explained, as Jose has amply documented, by his external agent (or the
mechanism by that terminology).
I’m hopeful that Jose’s ideas will be amplified and
acknowledged in the UFO community as they offer some explanation for many
accounts that riddle the UFO landscape.
RR
Note that the witness saw a series of small "propellers" along the outer edge of the object.
