An Image of (One) Reality (and Memory)

Copyright 2020 InterAmerica

Alternate realities, that appear in the reality that most think is our real reality, are everywhere.

For instance, in the December 23, 2019 New Yorker the maga- zine’s long-time art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote about his diagnosis of lung cancer, after years of smoking cigarettes, which will end his life sooner than he’d like. He’s seventy-seven now.

His story is more than interesting, it’s insightful in a number of ways and I told Bryan Sentes to find it online and give it a read. (I don’t know if he did or not.)

On Pages 40 and 41, Peter noted a famous “anecdote” about Dostoyevsky that says “Seeing Hans Holbein [Jr’s} ‘Dead Christ’ (1520-22) shook Dostoyevsky’s Christian belief: a two-days gone corpse in a warm climate, a thing.”

Here’s the painting (along with some details from it):

Mr. Schjeldahl, a terrific art critic, my favorite, I think, writes this [Page 43]:

“We have lousy memories. Proust [whose great masterpiece À la Recherche du Temps Perdu was about memory] had a lousy memory. (There is no ‘little patch of yellow wall’ in Vermeer’s ‘View of Delft.’) Memory is a liar.”

That painting referred to in À la Recherche …:

 My point(s) here?

Memory is faulty and images (of UFOs) can affect deep-held beliefs.

RR

Let us assume …….

Copyright 2020 InterAmerica

….that the reality I’m experiencing is the same one you are experiencing and it is the only reality,.

We have been coping with UFOs in this reality, some of us for a longish time, but where are we now?

We’ve moved on from flying saucers of the remote past and UFOs of recent times, the modern era, as bits and pieces of UFO lore, the record for “ufologists” and we’re mostly, it seems from The Anomalist’s advisory links and the blogs and web-sites I visit, that  UFOs are now pinched by and subject to the late 2000 decade accounts of U.S. Naval pilot encounters of weird thingies in the skies.

The Naval "come-upons" have usurped almost all of the news and conversations about UFOs, inside the UFO community and within news media.

This is a fine thing, apparently, as my astute visitors here and Anomalist pal Bill Murphy see it.

And, superficially it appears they may be right; UFOs have taken on a patina of reality for many who, until recently, saw the things and the topic as crazy observations and talk.

But, again, where are we?

The accumulation of metal(s) that seem to be too exotic to come from this planet are in the hands of rock star Tom Delonge and the aerospace billionaire. Robert Bigelow.

And those two guys, along with a few others, appear to imply that the metals are remnants from extraterrestrial UFO crashes.

But does that make sense? Flying machines from somewhere in the cosmos coming to pieces, after wending their way through the terribly awesome vicissitudes of space, inside our galaxy and even worse outside it, in the Universe itself, makes for a stymied credulity.

Can a spacefaring, advanced species' spaceships be so vulnerable to Earth’s atmospheric configurations that they fall apart or end up on the ground, in pieces so small as to cause detection of a troublesome kind?

And how many ships – beyond one or two – would be so vulner- able?

The odds for such ineptitude by a space-traveling species boggles the sensible mind.

UFOers are awash in hope that the Naval videos – the few so far released, inadvertently it seems – are just a few of many.

The thingies captured on film or digital machinery are provocative and outside the normal realm of hallucination….the normal realm, as some of you are familiar, I hope, of my views about the intrinsic nature (essence) of UFOs.

What U.S. Navy pilots have encountered and captured by various technologies offer a way out from the flurry of past UFO accounts that are without such validity as that provided by the qualifications of those seeing the recent things (Naval pilots) and the latest technologies providing back-up of what has been seen or encountered.

We can, I think, leave UFO reports of the pre-2000 era far behind now and concentrate on the new “sightings” with a hedge against skepticism and debunkery.

We are in a new UFO era, one conflated unfortunately by a few who insist that they have proof of extraterrestrial machinery because they have some scraps of odd metal(s) which doesn’t prove any- thing but that they have some weird ores or compounds yet to be discerned as from anywhere but earth AND we have some interest-ing visuals of things said to be flying in Earth’s airspaces, as seen and experienced by qualified and credible observers, finally.

That’s where we are, and all the rhubard about past sightings, whether Roswell, Socorro, or Rendlesham, et cetera, can be set aside as figments, I mean fragments, of the past, without any need for continued scrutiny or attention.

The Anomalist and other UFO attendees tell us that.

RR

ARE UFOS A COGNITIVE PARADIGM WHOSE PHYSICAL REALITY IS ONLY THE PRODUCT OF AN EPIPHENOMENON? By José Antonio Caravaca

Copyright 2020, José Antonio Caravaca

For decades, many researchers believed that the UFO phenomenon is hidden behind a great camouflage to deceive and manipulate witnesses for purposes we do not understand.

It did so centuries ago with the manifestations of fairies, goblins, supernatural creatures and Marian apparitions, and in the middle of the 20th century it managed to mimic the label of extraterrestrial visitors.

But, are we really before an intelligent phenomenon that chooses a role to present itself to humans? Or, on the contrary, are we before a disconcerting cognitive paradigm that evidently shows itself with socio-cultural "disguises" present in its time of action?

That all the apparitions of strange entities throughout time have interacted with humans by being reticent and "lying" in their communications, and have offered so little evidence of their existence, is a very interesting indication, and to be taken into account, that all these unusual manifestations may have the same and unique origin and above all a direct incidence on the psyche of the witnesses, which would indicate that the paradigm does not exist independently of the witnesses, at least in the final result of the manifestation. 

Therefore, we should first distinguish 1) The Phenomenon (the origin) from 2) The Manifestation (the incidents), which are probably two very different things, similar to a painter from his pictorial artwork.

That the content of all these manifestations has such a human background (perfectly recognizable), both visually and narratively, is another key that indicates the covert participation of the witness's psyche in the shaping of the experiences, helping to elaborate them in an unconscious way.

Furthermore, the fact that it is so difficult to document the existence of these phenomena is very possible that it is due to their ambiguous dual existence, between the psychic world and the physical world, which is why it would be complicated to obtain much evidence of their existence, even though their presence seems totally "real" and unquestionable in our environment.

But this does not mean that the paradigm cannot mediate in our reality in a palpable way and cause all kinds of physical effects, but simply that it does so in a different way from what we know, even though its results are practically the same as those produced by an ordinary real event.

Perhaps that is one of the keys to understanding the UFO paradigm. Are UFOs a phenomenon whose origin escapes the conventional limits of our cognitive dimension? I do not mean an interdimensional origin as defended and conceived by many researchers for years, but the UFO phenomenon comes from unknown areas that can be accessed by our mind in certain states of consciousness, regardless of whether what is manifested in this exploration of a new "reality" can be made momentarily visible and tangible in our dimension.

And it is because of the participation of our psyche that the content of all encounters with beings and entities have enormous human cultural implications and extremely absurd and chaotic aspects, such as those offered by the universe of dreams or, for example, even mental disorders and feverish states. But this does not mean that UFOs are something strictly mental (understood as something unreal or illusory), quite the contrary, but it is very likely that their nature can be closer to the "matter" that makes up our dreams than to a sheet of metal or screws.

This does not detract from the mystery, nor the strangeness of the paradigm. It only directs the attention towards other aspects that are more unknown and considered unimportant until now. We have always thought that the material, the tangible, the measurable, the quantifiable, only that which we can put in a laboratory test tube or touch, tells us what is authentically real and unquestionable.

But perhaps there is another way of exploring the universe that is far removed from the scientific methodology that we have chosen as the only suitable tool for decoding everything around us.

The existence of UFOs and other similar anomalies are very interesting examples that show the human psyche is not a simple biological reflection of our brain, but can access much more information from the universe than the sensory organs transmit through the known pathways.

In this way, it is capable of interacting with an apparently intelligent cognitive phenomenon, which is presented to us through a highly flexible "scenography" due to our involvement, and which is capable, in turn, of activating latent faculties of our psyche: A manifestation that moves in that psychic/physical duality that makes it so complex, with our methodology, to achieve some kind of response.

Only changing our way of experiencing the phenomenon will help us to understand it.

But taking into account that probably its physical aspect, very important for some of us, is only a simple epiphenomenona; that is, a mere consequence of its interaction with our psyche in our environment and not an intrinsic characteristic of the phenomenon itself. 

UFOs, in short, represent portions of information in a new reality "inserted" within another established reality.

JAC