A Boltzmann Brain?

https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/boltzmann-brain-nothing-is-real

UFO Madness and other kinds of Insanity

Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.

Christopher O’Brien’s UFO Data Acquisition Project should provide information that gives us an explanation or, at least, a hint as to what that strange phenomenon is which is dubbed UFO or UAP.

As Christopher noted in a comment here, a short while ago, his equipment and team will have access to data accumulated from a grabbing (observation) of strange things flying in great numbers, apparently, over the San Luis Valley in south-central Colorado.

As I’ve noted, this is an excellent endeavor that should put some valuable information in play that identifies the essence of some of those odd things penetrating the skies over Colorado (and elsewhere too).

Of course, Christopher’s project can’t tell us the source of the things that the project equipment picks up, but it’s something.

Now what about those encounters with odd things that land on the ground or hover above it in proximity to witnesses or cameras and mundane devices that pick up their image?

And what about the “reports” of people, seemingly sane people, that claim a thing (UFO or UAP) has been seen, sometimes interacted with (as Spanish UFO researcher Jose Caravaca has compiled for his Distortion Theory and Albert Rosales has massively gathered for his Humanoid Encounters books and online data base)?

How do we explain or come to understand what that is all about?

It’s a kind of madness, as Foucault delineates in his Madness: The Invention of an Idea.

But that madness – those observations of things outside the normal view of things – were once the province of The Church, until medicine (Psychiatry and Psychology ultimately) assumed the role of arbiter for things “not quite right” seen by persons.

Today when a person sees a UFO or “beings” associated with UFOs, they are considered to be “a little off [kilter].”

Surely, some UFO reports I’ve read indicate hallucinatory responses, related to memory or trauma but most reports (that are not confabulated) preserve an experience that is actual or real, insofar as such observations (experiences) can be considered real.

Foucault thinks parareligious phenomena – alleged visions of Mary, the Mother of Jesus and various saints – were a kind of madness but not a sign of mental illness. [op.cit. Page 109, PB, 1976]

Bryan Sentes has provided me, recently, sources of thought about such “experiences” in his attempt to understand exactly what Jose Caravaca is trying to tell us:

https://deadbutdreaming.wordpress.com/2018/10/22/some-faerie-metaphysics/

And Bryan offered these comments (about Caravaca’s “theory” and my writings about such things:

“You [refer] to what the Celts called "second sight" that allowed some people to see spirits and the Little People and the Sidhe; pets sometimes seem to have this, too … I don't understand another by knowing their vocal apparatus or neurology of their linguistic cortex but by the language spoken: agency, external or internal, is a question other than what is communicated or at least understood.”

Are we dealing with mental illness (insanity, that Thomas Szasz deplores) or the kind of folly that Foucault saw as a benign madness?

Or are we subject to reports of “second sight” where a person gets a glimpse of a reality that exists alongside our normal everyday reality?

John Keel and other UFO notables have offered their personal confrontations with another reality (or realities?) but in Keel’s case, his last days evidenced a slide in dementia.

People who see UFOs or something from another reality are not suffering dementia, in its common rendering. (See The New Yorker, October 8, 2018, article by Larissa MacFarquhar, The Memory House, for examples of dementia, not “madness.”)

Of course, some people have imposed and impose their imagination upon the UFO topic, Whitley Strieber is one, and Foucault offers this, which pertains:

“In France, in the early seventeenth century, there were famous madmen who were a great source of entertainment for the public, and the cultivated public at that; some of these, like Bluer d’Arbères, wrote books that were published and read as works of madness. Up to about 1650, Western culture was strangely hospitable to these forms of madness.” [ibid, Page 112]

But we UFO enthusiasts are right to ignore such entertainments, as that of Strieber or the 1950s contactees.

However, we would be remiss by dismissing the many accounts that Rosales has provided and which Caravaca takes under scrutiny.

Yes, such UFO accounts are hard to swallow, but they tell us something, something about reality that may be profound.

RR