Bridewell Museum, Norwich

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. 

See Facebook album here: 

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10202101714052219.1073741833.1468664406&type=1&l=0569b63aec

The Riddle of The Sphinx

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.

Further relevant links.

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/how-to-know-you-know-you-know-it.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/2001-spaced-out-odyssey.html 

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/cosmic-perspective-part-1.html 

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/cosmic-perspective.html 

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/cosmic-perspective-part-3.html  

Rock of Ages

Perched Granite Boulder, Lands-end, UK

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.

Note: 
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2006/10/contingency-conjecture.html

The Paranormal Part 4: Monsters from the Id

(See here for part 3)

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 are they 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!

Reference material

Wiki on the Rendlesham incident: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident

UFO - The Rendlesham Forest Case - Part 1 of 6 – History Channel: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qvq-RWWApO8

Rendlesham Forest: Jim Penniston and John Burroughs about the binary code: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qvq-RWWApO8 

Cracking the Alien Code of the 1980 Rendelsham Forest Encounter:
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMMOxHGWSvY 

Go here for some of the Binary codes received by Penniston: 
http://www.therendleshamforestincident.com/The_Decoded_Binary_Code.php 

You can try decoding it using this ascii decoder!:
 http://home.paulschou.net/tools/xlate/