The Paracast talks to Linda Godfrey

NOW PLAYING! October 21, 2012 — Linda Godfrey

A Halloween treat. All things Werewolf.

I've been having some difficulty getting my work back on the web (blogs, BOA, Examiner, etc) due to the fact that I no longer own a lap top and am at the mercy of other computer owners (family, friends) but I will be back on my A-game soon.

Chasing UFO's...

The National Geographic Channel has a new show called CHASING UFO's which features DESTINATION TRUTH's Erin Ryder and follows "3" experts on a road trip to UFO hot spots. Two episodes in and it's become apparent to me (actually, it became apparent back when all these UFO/GHOST hunting shows became popular) that searching/hunting/investigating UFO's isn't a job for a handful of "experts".

It's a job for every interested person on this planet.

UFO's don't just show up when you want them to. Sorry Stephen Greer. And they certainly don't show up just because you have a camera crew and some tech specialists in your entourage. The one characteristic that many well documented UFO sightings have in common are "multiple witnesses".

For too long UFOLOGY has been a boys club with only certain recognizable names on the Marquee. Not to say those men haven't done a swell job of documenting the phenomena and shedding light on the subject to engage the public's awareness, but we need a new take on the quest to get answers.

Other avenues need to be explored. UFOlogy needs to go beyond tv shows and blogs and podcasts and books. It needs to become a part of the public domain. And yes, the popularity of the subject has made more people willing to explore UFOLOGY and open up about their own experiences, but still, there is this pervasive feeling that only EXPERTS are allowed to speak on the topic.

That's just bull. Anyone and everyone who's seen and documented the phenomena should have a voice. There needs to be more public awareness that goes beyond the realm of the Entertainment Industry.

Those Enigmatic USOs

STRANGE BEGINNINGS

On a cold night in January of 1644 an Unidentified Submerged Object was sighted. The Location was none other than my home town of Boston, Massachusetts. Some regard this as the first recorded sighting of a USO in America.

Not long after Captain John Chaddock's ship blew up in the North End, Unidentified Flying Objects were sighted entering and exiting the water. It was a time when people believed in Vampires and Ghosts and the sightings were given a paranormal explanation: Ghost Lights. The spirits of the dead sailors lost on Chaddock's ship.

But that wasn't all. Days later two UFO's were sighted coming out of the water and taking on the shape of a man. The fact that the sightings took place close to the wreckage of Chaddock's ship led the people of that time to believe spirits of the lost were trying to communicate with the living. Today we would speculate that USOs were interested in Chaddock's ship.

Since that time, and with no small thanks to Charles Berlitz, USO's have been just as or even more-so mysterious than their "all-air" cousins, the UFO's. The compelling thing about USO's that always seems to rankle my nerves is the all too UFO-like description of said objects.

Why would a disc-like object be used to traverse the oceans of Earth? But then again, I am the same person who believes if anything really did traverse several galaxies to get here, it wouldn't do it in shiny FEDERATION grade space vessels, but would instead have the intelligence to move about unnoticed in a machine resembling an asteroid, meteor or even a small moon.

So why not traverse the Earths oceans in a vessel built to resemble aquatic life? Discs in the ocean just doesn't seem logical to me. Especially if we are talking about a possible aquatic race that may have been here for thousands or even millions of years. You would think they had advanced to the stage of travelling in biological aquatic ships that at first glance would appear to the casual observer to be nothing more than a whale.

Which brings me to the legend of the NINGEN.



GIANT ALBINO MONSTERS, OH MY!

Sometime in the mid-1990's stories of a colossal, albino humanoid sea creature sighted in Japan, began circulating the web. Some grainy and some obviously fake pictures and videos made the rounds but there was never any definitive proof of such a creature.

Still, it makes you wonder. If the ningen is an actual 'thing', could it very well be what I have dubbed the 'smart' USO? That is: a sea vessel that blends in (or at least is trying to blend in) with the surrounding sea life.

I vaguely remember a USO case in which a diver spotted two large humanoids exiting a crack or crater in the ocean. They wore no breathing apparatus and they were nordic-like in appearance. I wish I could locate the story for more in-depth clues to the habits of such beings but I can't.

MYSTERIOUS SOUNDS

In 1997, the U.S. National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration recorded a mysterious !BLOOP! The mysterious sound was detected off the coast of South America and was detected more than once. The NOAA admitted the sound resembled that of an unknown living creature.

The sound was later speculated to be Ice calving in Antarctica by a Dr. Christopher Fox, but the NOAA has since recorded five more unexplained sounds and named them!

If the Mysterious BLOOP is NOT ice calving, could it be from a living creature larger than the Blue Whale or perhaps an actual recording of a USO?


IN CONCLUSION


Ghost ships. The Bermuda Triangle. The Dragon's Triangle. Amelia Earhart. Atlantis.


The sea is full of mysteries. USO's may be responsible for all of these legends of the great, blue deep. Or none of them. For ages, navigators have reported sightings of flying dragons, strange balls of light, floating ships with missing crews, and flying discs.


USO's are a very old mystery. And yet for a mystery so old and recorded in the annals of some of the greatest men known to traverse the worlds oceans, not much, if anything is known about these mysterious objects seen entering and exiting our seas. Which brings me to this: Maybe they have discovered a way to hide in our midst. Maybe traversing our oceans in the guise of aquatic life isn't necessary because even when metallic discs break the surface and jettison out of our atmosphere, we still refuse to believe.


That is the greatest disguise of all. Living in plain sight.

Speak of the Devil

I've often wondered if things spoken out loud do have some power of invocation. I grew up with a very religious Catholic grandmother who believed that if you said, " I hope you get run over by a Tonka truck!" it would happen.

I did witness a few things that were at first nothing more than angry utterances. A cousin fell off a gate and down a flight of stairs after my grandmother told him he would. Sometimes I wondered if it wasn't her. My family, historically speaking, has been plagued by insinuations of Witch craft. Older people who are too close to the grave to care have often referred to members of my family as "witches".

Wish I could say I had a broom with the ability to zoom from here to Dunkin Donuts in under a second, but alas, I don't. So the rumours are shit. But the power of words and invocations is very real. So real in fact that I can't have a conversation about the paranormal without certain people in my circle telling me to stop before I "get it started" or "call something"  or "bring it out into the open".

In other words, STIR SHIT UP.

Speaking about Sleep Paralysis invokes sleep paralysis. I learned this the hard way. And have since managed to make the subject off topic in my presence. Speaking about Alien Abduction makes strange things happen. I too have witnessed this. Which makes me wonder, is it the words that invoke or the very thought of such things?

Can you invoke the DARKNESS just by thinking too much on it?

I asked my grandmother once how come every time she said something would happen, it did. She said simply that is was already going to happen regardless. So, do we speak of these things because we feel a stirring in the air? Because we know that SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES? Or, is it the other way around? Speak of the Devil and he will hear you?

It's something I am still trying to figure out, but somehow I know it all goes back to the days when words were powerful. Powerful enough to raise land from sea, set stars in the sky and perhaps raise the dead. Or maybe like the fall of the walls of Jericho, the power isn't in the thought or the words. It's all in the sound.

Anderson Cooper tackles UFO's...

Q&A: The Anthropology of Searching for Aliens (from WIRED)

Before we can understand an alien civilization, it might be useful to understand our own.

To help in this task, anthropologist Kathryn Denning of York University in Toronto, Canada studies the very human way that scientists, engineers and members of the public think about space exploration and the search for alien life.

From Star Trek to SETI, our modern world is constantly imagining possible futures where we dart around the galaxy engaging with bizarre alien races. Denning points out that when people talk about these futures, they often invoke the past. But they frequently seem to have a poor understanding of history.

For instance, in September at the 100 Year Starship Conference — a symposium created by DARPA for thinking about long-term spaceflight goals — Denning noted that the conference was framed as an extension of old traditions of exploration, for example mentioning Ferdinand Magellan as an exemplary hero who circumnavigated the globe. Not only did Magellan not circumnavigate the globe (he was dismembered in the Philippines before finishing the task), his mission was not entirely laudable.

Anthropologist Kathryn Denning studies the very human way that scientists, engineers, and members of the public think about space exploration and the search for alien life.

“It’s easy to forget that it’s also a story of slavery, war, betrayal, hardship, violence, and death — not just to those who signed up for the journey, but a lot of innocent bystanders,” Denning said during a talk March 30 at the Contact Conference, an annual meeting dedicated to speculation about SETI and space exploration. The misuse of the past matters when thinking about the future, she added, because it deludes people, giving them a poor understanding of how history actually moves.

Wired spoke to Denning about contact with extraterrestrials, the rhetoric of the Space Age, and what it means to be human in the universe.

Wired: What does the field of anthropology bring to thinking about space exploration and SETI?

Kathryn Denning: Anthropologists are good at looking at discourses, and the stories that people tell to structure their lives and their behavior. So there are anthropologists working on the discourse surrounding interstellar flight. And anthropologists have always worked on the phenomenon of UFO abductions and aliens on Earth and that sort of stuff.

With respect to SETI, one of the main contributions is just grounding all of that speculation about other civilizations in actual physical data. In terms of civilization or civilizations, we only have one example — Earth.

And there’s a lot of data here, which has been very poorly mined so far. If people are drawing generalizations about civilizations elsewhere in the universe that don’t even hold here on Earth, then maybe we should throw them out.

Wired: What are some instances of wrong ideas about civilization that get invoked in talking about extraterrestrials?

Denning: I think one good example is the variable of L, the lifetime of civilizations, which dominates theDrake equation. [An estimate of the number of intelligent extraterrestrials that could exist in our galaxy.]

The speculation on this has been frankly goofy sometimes. I mean you can make up basically any value of L that you like and justify it in some way. So people say we should try to use Earth’s data to look at it. We should ask what really does cause civilizations to collapse or revert to a lower order of complexity or technological regime.

And, well, we’re still working that one out actually. We have so much work to do and I think that’s important for people to understand that our models of civilization here on Earth are not as solid as popular culture frequently assumes them to be.

Similarly, many people hold outdated ideas regarding scenarios of contact. We have our iconic case studies, such as Columbus landing in the Americas or Cortez and the Aztecs. But most of those have been revamped with additional historical work in even just the last 30 or 40 years.

So when I hear that standard model of Columbus or Cortez, frankly I want to roll my eyes. For example [Steven] Hawking says — interminably and repeatedly — that when Columbus showed up in the Americas, well, that didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans. And therefore we should similarly be worried about trying to attract the attention of an alien civilization.

The problem is that it tends to misrepresent Earth’s history. These stories get invoked in models of contact with an alien society, but it’s a biased retelling of Earth’s history and it’s usually not a very good one.

The underlying narrative there is that it went poorly for the Native Americans because they were the inferior civilization. And, by extension, it would go poorly for us because the other party would be the superior civilization. But that simply wasn’t the case for the Native Americans.

One of the reasons I do the work I do is to try and have people get the history a little bit straighter.

Wired: There is an oft-heard narrative for alien contact: after we find a signal, it would revolutionize everything, and humanity would put aside their differences and come together as one. How do you take that narrative as an anthropologist?

Denning: One way to read that, in the most general sense, is that it’s a narrative that makes us feel better.

One of the things that astronomy and space exploration in the 20th century has done is force us to confront the universe in a way that we never did before. We had to start understanding that, yeah, asteroids impact the earth and can wipe out a vast proportion of life, and our planet is a fragile spaceship Earth.

I think this has given us this sort of kind of cosmic anxiety. And it would make us feel a whole lot better if we had neighbors and they were friendly and they could enlighten us.

One of the things that runs through the whole SETI discussion is our problems with technology. There is an inherent assumption that the equipment needed for communication across interstellar space would necessarily evolve in tandem with weapons of mass destruction. Therefore any society that survived long enough to make contact with us would have solved their technological problems.

I think that’s a very hopeful take on it. These stories of contact and what it would do for us, they’ve emerged in concert with these anxieties about the universe and questions about our technology. I think in some way it’s almost like a coping mechanism.

Wired: In terms of space exploration, you’ve said that it’s like we’re entering a new Space Age. Why do you say that and what does it mean?

Denning: I think the biggest difference from the past is the role of corporations. Obviously nation-states have always used contractors, but they’re now achieving a degree of independence that is unprecedented.

When you have private companies that are planning on flying not just to the moon but also to Mars, that’s new and that’s different. We don’t have the government systems in place to deal with that sort of stuff because the outer space treaty and all our international agreements are geared toward nation states.

There are new legal discourses emerging but nothing moves as fast as private enterprise. It’s been specifically set up to move quickly, so nothing moves as fast as, say, the X prize.

Wired: The 1950s/60s Space Age often invoked the rhetoric of colonization or frontierism in thinking about their goals. How do these ideas play out in modern space exploration?

Denning: The ideological stages of colonization are still well underway. As soon as you have technology on another world, that constitutes a de facto claim of some kind. So, in a way, everyone watching Spirit and Opportunity are watching Mars through these robot’s eyes.

That’s not just an interesting kind of little jaunt; it’s a way of making Mars not only human but also American. When you’re naming features on other worlds after people here, these things constitute claims.

For example, NASA renamed the Mars Pathfinder lander the “Carl Sagan Memorial Station.” Any archeologist or anthropologist will tell you that one of the most effective ways of colonizing territory, at least ideologically, is through your dead.

Wired: Is there something you’d like to see as the narrative of the new Space Age?

Denning: I’m going to borrow a term here from a scholar named Bill Kramer. He spoke at the 100-Year Starship Conference and he suggested that instead of boldly going, we humbly go.

To me that really encapsulates it. Instead of getting out there as quickly as possible and using the systems that we used here on Earth, like extracting resources as quickly as possible in order to fuel whatever it is that we’re trying to do. What if we went instead with a collaborative, conservationist stewardship in mind?

What if instead of making messes that we don’t know how to clean up, what if we slowed down a little bit? Because the urgency is manufactured. I mean, I want to see space continue to be explored. It’s cool, and there’s stuff out there that we would like to know.

It doesn’t have to be the answer to all of our needs. Sure, we can harvest sunlight from solar arrays in orbit around the Earth but that’s going to have its own technological problems and geopolitical implications.

But the main problem with energy and resources here on Earth isn’t always that we don’t have enough: it’s that the distribution is unequal, and simply harvesting more is not going to resolve that. Chances are it’s just going to continue to increase inequity, and that doesn’t work well for anyone.

I think what everybody should be learning is that these immense disparities cause profound instabilities, which you have to continue to have to deal with. So I just don’t see it as the answer.

Space colonization is held up as being the natural next stage in our social evolution. Not only that, it’s an absolute necessity for the survival of the species. But if we are our own existential threat, then how does that follow? Wherever we go, there we are.

So the suggestion that ever increasing technology is the solution to problems that have been created by our technology is barking mad.

Wired: In some sense, we have a deterministic view of history when it comes to space exploration: We will go from airplanes to spaceships to conquering the galaxy. Where does that narrative come from and what do you see as some of the downsides of it?

Denning: I think it comes from two places. One is a specific version of history that’s quite progressivist and techno-philic. It’s a version of history that says we just increase in our energy consumption, we increase in our complexity and we increase our goodness. It all ratchets up together, and it’s a kind ofSingularity argument.

But it’s combined with this fundamentally apocalyptic view that the current order of things will one day be superseded by another. That’s kind of a Judeo-Christian thing. And it’s sort of a funny coincidence that the future is up there [points skyward]. In many popular space narratives, the heavens and Heaven really swap out. It sounds pretty glib but it’s so frequently suggested that it’s hard to dismiss.

The idea is that longevity – immortality, in fact — the future and our destiny are all up there. And there’s simply no logical reason that should be the case. We have no evidence suggesting we can live anywhere for long periods of time other than on this planet. In fact, the evidence is steadily accumulating that’s it’s going to be really hard to do anything else.

We have problems with bone loss and blindness. Plus we have no evidence that we can reproduce safely in space. These are fairly big stumbling blocks and so this vision of a happy shiny future in space, it’s just so mythic.

Wired: Do you see that as changing, do you think people are coming to understand the problems with the previous narratives?

Denning: I think some are and this is one of the glories of humanity. But we’ll always have a tremendous diversity of opinion.

You’re always going to have these people who think Heaven and the heavens are interchangeable. And they’re going to be looking toward the stars for all kinds of religious or quasi-religious purposes.

Then you’re going to have the extension of the planetary protection mode of thinking. The people who are fundamentally thinking about environmentalism and stewardship and inequity. And then you’re going to have the people interested in militarization, and so on.

You’re always going to have this diversity of viewpoints, of motivations, and behaviors, and I mean: Welcome to Earth.

Wired: You write in a paper (.pdf) that someone in “the physical sciences might say ‘aha, here you have X which, by analogy, means that you must have Y, which means you have Z.’” On the other hand, “a scholar in the human sciences will often not venture past X.”

Denning: Right, we rarely get as far as Z. Most of the time, anthropology is not working as explicitly with a predictive model, it’s a much more descriptive model.

Wired: How do you see that difference between the physical and social sciences play out in the SETI discourse?

Denning: I think there’s been a lot of interesting discussion around the question of whether or not decipherment of an extraterrestrial signal would be possible.

Anthropologists tend to assume the answer is, basically, no. Unless you’re in direct contact, it would be very difficult to establish enough common language. Whereas the physicists and mathematicians tend to say, ‘Well all you need is math.’

And then the anthropologists laugh and it goes on. Maybe that tells you more about the various disciplines than about whether or not contact is possible, but that’s an entertaining and interesting problem.

Wired: What do anthropologists say when they look at the enterprise of SETI? That is, what does it say about us as humans that we are searching for others like ourselves in the universe?

Denning: It’s an interesting question and you can look at it in different ways. In one sense, its just the extension of a long tradition on thinking about what might be out there, which has just gone through a new technological manifestation.

Some people ask me: When did we first start thinking that there might be extraterrestrial life? And my reply is: When did we start thinking that there might not be? The sky has always been very busy, and the default position has always been that it’s populated. That doesn’t mean anything but that ideological substrate has always been there.

Only 200 years ago, we thought there could be people on the moon. Then, we got a good look at the moon and saw, well there’s no Lunarians there. And then there were the Martians — Lowell and all that— and it wasn’t very long ago, less than 100 years ago. As our range of vision keeps on moving outwards, the aliens keep on moving outwards too. And that’s one way you can look at SETI; it’s the logical trajectory of an idea that’s always been around.

And, of course, you can look at it within a religious framework. Our 20th century western culture includes Christianity and beings populating the Heavens. But anthropologically speaking, SETI also could be seen as being a reaction to the collapse of traditional religion.

In a universe where you’re no longer expecting God to provide the order, we are forced to ask: where is the order? Where’s the sense to it all and what are we then a part of?

Image: Diana Goss

Aliens in Fashion.

I read fashion magazines. Elle, Vogue, Marie Claire (more than a fashion mag, but...) Nylon and the rest. So I saw this AD a few weeks ago and thought the same exact thing: This model looks like an Alien. The extended eyes, the pronounced nostrils and lack of a nose altogether. The ears... the angle...the freaking cheeks. Dammit. I can't exactly put a finger on it, but I shop at Sephora and methinks they're trying to tell the public, "We had help inventing this makeup!" At least one industry isn't afraid of disclosure. I kid. I kid.

Read more here.