The Bridewell museum in Norwich is a microcosm of industrialisation. In my recent visit to this museum I discovered that it has exhibits which are representative of all the prototypical elements of industrialisation: Machines, shopkeepers, and most important of all the avid consumer who can exchange money earned for manufactured goods. The consumer showcased at the museum was a country parson who made special trips into Norwich to buy, carefully monitoring his expenditure at the same time. As for machines, the working Jacquard loom and a electromechanical traffic light controller represented the antecedents of computerisation.
The
Time Traveller was confronted by a sphinx with a faint shadow of a smile on its
face.
In the two years following 1998
I wrote two essays that were inspired by my reading of H. G. Wells book “The Time Machine”. These essays can be
downloaded as one PDF from here. They were my personal exploration
of the loss of religious faith that is closely associated with the kind of
world view implicit in The Time Machine.
My copy of Wells' story, which I read in the nineties, was presented to me by my
brother-in-law Jonathan Benison. It was very helpfully
annotated by Jon’s erudite editorial notes, notes which proved to be very
illuminating as I struggled to form my personal view on the message in the book.
Jon himself was also struggling with the issues raised by the book and it was
clear to me that he too didn't accept what he referred to as “reductive half-truths”; in this sense
Jon was a fellow traveller and pilgrim.
The general tenor of the book is
bleak and nihilistic. In fact it is difficult to derive much consolation from
Wells' world view; that view is one of a cosmos which in the large scale is utterly
indifferent to human affairs and concerns, a place where beyond our very
parochial context there can be found no meaning and purpose. Wells sends his
Time Traveler on a mission into the far future thus giving him a startling retrospect
on the heady and confident times of Victorian England. Or were they confident? Doubts were beginning to set in, it seems. From the distant vantage point of nearly a
millions years hence ephemeral human affairs, according to Wells, pale into insignificance. This is what Jon Benison refers to as the cosmic perspective.
Wells was writing in late
Victorian England and his views were based on what he believed to be the
ramifications of the relatively new evolutionary theory. The riddle of meaning
that the science of the day posed Wells and mankind as a whole is, I believe, very
aptly symbolized by the figure of the Sphinx which the Time Traveler meets and
which looms forbiddingly over the whole story. It has now been well over a century
since the book was published, but that same riddle confronts us today. Wells was either warning us to respond proactively to the riddle of the cosmic perspective or Wells himself had actually acquiesced to it. These
essays are my own reaction to this riddle.
"The Universe doesn't care about us!" said one atheist when he saw this spectacular meteor entering the atmosphere over Russia.
During a recent holiday on the
Pernwith peninsula (near Land’s End in Cornwall, England) I took a set of
photographs of the coastal scenery and rock. These photographs can be seen in this Facebook album. For comparison I
have also added some photos I took in 2006 on Bodmin Moor. (Also in Cornwall)
Both Bodmin moor and the Penwith
peninsula are the eroded remains of huge granitic intrusions. Granite is melted
and re-solidified Earth’s crust, although the exact mechanisms of both the
intrusion and the subsequent production of exfoliation joints in the granite by
erosion is still the subject of academic debate according to this wiki article.
Whenever I’m confronted with
scenes of cliffs, valley’s and rock pinnacles such as we see at Penwith, the
deep time needed to generate this “rock of ages” landscape feels very real.
In this particular connection crustal melting caused by plate collisions that
built mountains was followed by the slow cooling of rock deep underground. This
slow cooling is evidenced by the large crystals of Penwith’s coarse grained
granite. (See the large white feldspar crystals in one of my photos). All this
was followed by an extremely slow process of grain by grain erosion. In fact
when one beholds a rock pinnacle of granite and imagines that it was once underground
and surrounded by an extensive apron of extremely hard igneous rock one senses
that the length of time needed to leave this isolated outlier must be immerse,
let alone first erode the mountain of rock above it.
As far as Cornwall is concerned
both Bodmin Moor and the Penwith peninsula have the greatest concentration of
Neolithic and Bronze Age stone monuments. This may be simply because these granite landscapes
provided a ready supply of very durable stone. Or, and this is a speculation,
did these ancient people, seeing the marvellous rock formations around them
desire to ape whatever agency they believed created them? We have, of course, no idea what these prehistoric
communities believed about a cosmos whose workings on the grand-scale was
utterly mysterious to them. Extrapolating from what we know today of preliterate
societies it is quite likely that prehistoric communities understood their
surroundings in terms of the operation of background sentience. To them, therefore, the
landscape was full of awareness and sacredness. Today, however, with our
mechanical paradigm, we understand how insentient processes have generated these
remarkable forms; we see these processes as being utterly unaware of us and
themselves, with no power of empathy; in effect they are psychopathic! No
surprise, then, that an atheist, when he saw the frightening and awesome
spectacle of the recent meteor entering the atmosphere over Russia, should say
“Nature doesn't care about us!”
Today we have to dig a bit
deeper, quite a bit deeper in fact, before we find sacredness. But then we know
a lot more than those simple Neolithic societies; a lot, lot more. So where we
lose we also gain. We know today that conscious sentience is not to be found at
the low level of the bit, byte, particle, or boulder but at the high level of the grand organization of the world .
(See also here)
The Cheesewring, Bodmin Moor, UK. Perched pillows of granite.
I like to keep my eye on the paranormal, a
subject that as far as I’m concerned also embraces UFOlogy. Some of the latest UFOlogical
news can be found on Nick Pope’s web site. It was from his
site that I got to hear about the Citizen’s
Hearing on Disclosure held at the beginning of May of this year. The above
YouTube Video contains ninety minutes of highlights. The idea behind this
hearing was that in the absence of an official American Government hearing American
Citizens, who as a rule think their government is always conspiring against
them, would convene their own occasion using the format of a formal hearing.
This format, I presume, was one way to give these proceedings an air of
official gravitas, perhaps hoping that this might bring about a turning point
in attitude. However, the fact remains UFO believers, in terms of official status, are in the main marginalized and establishment figures are too concerned with their reputations to get
involved; moreover UFOlogy has a noticeable lunatic fringe. The subject of UFO
disclosure only gets a small mention on Wiki and the hearing
itself gets all of four sentences!
Nevertheless, as always, I was very interested
in the hearing. I was particularly fascinated by the testimony of UK ex-transport
police officer Gary Heseltine (Starts at 40 mins 30 secs). He gave a run-down of
some of the sightings he had received from UK police officers. Heseltine entered
these sightings into an official police database; for example in October 1978 three
uniformed officers in Buckinghamshire
saw a football field sized UFO “suddenly and silently materialize in front
of them in the blink of an eye”. After 5 minutes it dematerialized as
suddenly and silently as it came. I don’t think this (de)materialization
capability is an isolated case as I have heard other accounts where UFOs
materialize or dematerialize “just like that”.Moreover, silence, or at least
low levels of sound, is a theme with UFO sightings.
Interesting, yes, but then think about it:
A huge “nuts and bolts” vehicle suddenly introduces itself into a volume in the
atmosphere. What happens to the air molecules occupying that volume during the appearance
and disappearance of the craft? How could this operation be carried out without
producing shock waves? Where did the air molecules go to and come from as the
vehicle respectively made its entrance and exit? How were these molecules
removed and reintroduced without causing pressure disturbances in the
atmosphere? Whatever we are dealing with here appears to be unable to control the photons of electromagnetic fields and yet at the same time shows supreme control over the particle fields of matter. Strange.
Either these "entities" are not subject to reality as we know it or they are playing around with our perception of it, if
indeed there is a difference there. As I have said before I put this whole
subject in the same category as the apparitional in general, a category which
includes ghosts, channelling, alien animals, the Loch Ness monster, road ghosts, time
regressions, past life regressions etc. In this domain of experience it is common for scenes to change
abruptly, discontinuously, silently and often be accompanied by the altered state of
consciousness referred to as the Oz Effect (as are UFO experiences).
But if I’m right in classifying UFOs with
the apparitional in general then I have rather committed myself to disbelieving
those stories about governments possessing crashed UFOs and alien bodies; this
would be a bit like claiming to have in one’s possession a coat left behind by
a ghost! To be fair there are claimed physical traces in UFOlogy: e.g. photographic
evidence, marks on the skin (cf. the stigmata marks), even marks on the ground
(cf. the ghostly wet foot prints found by the Most haunted team near the Queen
Mary’s swimming pool), but no evidence so compelling that it crosses over into
conclusiveness. Even the so-called alien implants seem to be just homogeneous
lumps of blended matter with little or no discernible structure that would mark
them out conclusively as hi-tech artifacts. My own opinion is that every UFO related
phenomenon has a corresponding counterpart in the more general apparitional world – even the
silent unidentified flying objects, which appear to mark out UFOlogy as a distinct
subject, have a parallel in the accounts of phantom World War II aircraft seen to fly silently over the Derbyshire dales in England. As I have said before the quality of the
observational protocols of UFOlogical interest are commensurate with the quality
of the protocols from those who claim to have had a more general apparitional
experience. Therefore if we are to take one set of protocols seriously we are
obliged to take the other seriously. I would even go as far as to suggest that
if we ever succeed in explaining one apparitional special case, like say, road
ghosts, this will provide important keys for the explanation of apparitional
experiences as a whole. In fact according to Janet and Colin Bord in their book
“Alien Animals” [bca 1980] UFO sightings often go together with alien animal
sightings.
Another aspect of UFOlogy that undermines
the “little grey men from Zeta Reticuli” paradigm is the way some UFO stories
develop over time to the point where they start to look like movie plots. Take
the Rendlesham forest case with Colonel Halt and his trusty men Jim Penniston
and John Burroughs. I’ll accept that I don’t think you could find any more
honest and authentic sounding guys. Their claims to having seen a zig-zagging object, and not just a light, and even having
the opportunity to touch the object as Jim Penniston claims, is inadequately
explained by the light of the distant of Orfordness light house, or space junk
returning to Earth. Either they are hoaxing us, or their experiences, at least
on the level of perception, are genuine.
But it turns out that there happens to be another
player in the Rendlesham story called Larry Warren. He says that on the night
Halt and his team were in the woods he and another group of serviceman, a
little separated from Halt’s group, not only observed a UFO but also the aliens
themselves – small child sized translucent beings who hovered a little above
the ground beside their vehicle (why have they got legs when they can hover?). Halt and his
men were rather disconcerted about this bizarre account hinting that it cast
doubt on the authenticity of the whole occasion, particularly as no one in Halt's team remembered Warren being party to the events. Further casting doubt on
the reality of Warren’s claims is that he admits he was subjected to a
perception bending debriefing by the military authorities.
But the story didn't need just Larry
Warren for it to take an even more bizarre turn. Some years later during a
history channel production Jim Penniston said that when he touched the UFO
he received some sort of mental impression through his fingers, an impression which turned out
to be the visualisation of a binary sequence. He wrote this binary code into a notebook:
Just like Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Jim Penniston's note book recording the alien binary code impressed into his consciousness
And guess what …the binary sequence
translates using a common-or-garden ascii decode! Compared to the endeavours of the scientists
of the Arecibo message that’s not exactly a sophisticated universal cosmic language!
Cor blimmey mate, pull the other one it's got bells on! And just like all those otherworldly messages we've seen before, once “decoded” the Rendlesham
message is at once unspecific, general and enigmatic; although some UFO aficionado are
saying that the Earth coordinates it contains locate significant historic sites.
But then so what? What is that supposed mean? The enigma remains; it’s just an
enigma pointing to other enigmas!
Part of the "message" decoded " using ascii; Really?
There is just enough here to keep us on the edge of
our seats but that’s about all. We are actually being offered both too little
and yet too much – too little to constitute solid and interpretable evidence and
yet too much because it’s starting to look all rather silly and incoherent; in
fact it’s very reminiscent of The Close Encounters
plot of the 1977 film, screened just three years before Rendlesham. And that’s very interesting
because after the 1993 film Fire in the
Sky, which was loosely based on the Travis Walton alien abduction of 1975, subsequent
alien abduction accounts had similarities with this film! The final twist in the Rendlesham affair is that
Jim Penniston is telling us that it wasn't aliens who contacted him with the binary message, but time travellers
from our own future! I'm still waiting for someone to move the interpretation on to
the simulation argument!
The eclectic and bizarre nature of paranormal/apparitional
data means that it is very difficult to make sense of; no unifying rational scheme
easily emerges. But perhaps, like our dreams, that it’s very nature; that is,
that paranormal phenomenon cannot rise to the level of coherence
that we see in the “physical” world where rationality is replete to the extent that we feel we are interfacing with a matrix of noumena. If I believed that our world was pervaded by a rogue
mental substrate(s) that can somehow splice its(their) workings into our everyday stream
of experience then that’s where I would say these dreamlike apparitional sequences
are coming from. This substrate, I’ll hazard, absorbs and stores our fears, dreams,
aspirations, imaginings, demons and emotional content in particular. It then reflects them back to us in partially processed
form as it vainly tries to put together a coherent package that integrates with our reality; it fails and consequently compromises the rationality of our world. This substrate is too schizophrenic to finally succeed in generating the meticulous coherence of the fully rational. When familiar epistemic methods are applied to this irrational ontology they breakdown and generate nonsense. Apparitional sequences are pastiches cobbled together in a more or less haphazard fashion. How can you disclose when essentially you've got nothing intelligible and coherent to disclose? No surprise then that there is a cover up – what else can you do when, because the phenomenon itself is intrinsically irrational, you are basically in a position of utter, utter incomprehension? You can't offer any hard evidence in the way of molecular artefacts because there aren't any; all you can offer are some weird and bizarre sightings and experiences at the risk of making you look like a kook. Who with a responsible job is going to jump first and risk their reputation? Let me leave you with the words of J. Allen Hynek:
I am very much
afraid that UFOs are related to certain psychic phenomena. And if I say “I am very
much afraid”, this is because in our Centre at Evanston we are trying to study
this problem from the angle of the physical sciences…..UFOs may be psychic phenomena
and the ‘aliens’ may not come from outer space but from a ‘parallel reality’…..Certainly
the phenomenon has psychic aspects….the fact is that there are psychic things;
for instance, UFOs seem to materialize and dematerialize. There are people who’ve
had UFO experiences who’ve claimed to have developed psychic ability. There
have been reported cases of hearings [sic - healings?]in close encounters and
there have been reported cases of precognition where people had foreknowledge
or forewarning that they were going to see something…..whatever UFOs arethey want
to play games with us and lead us on a confusing chase. [The Encyclopedia of
Extraterrestrial Encounters 2002. Pages 305 and 306]
This must be one of the creepiest sequences in all cinematography! In "Forbidden Planet" a remark is passed in the film that the form of the monster from the id is a pastiche that appears to follow no rational scheme. Says it all really!
