Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Friedman on NASA



Stan Friedman discusses NASA, the space program, and space exploration in this clip from a pre-interview I conducted with him in May, 2001, for the documentary Stanton T. Friedman is Real.

I don't agree with Stan on much when it comes to UFOs, but we are on the same page when it comes to space exploration.

Paul Kimball

Sunday, February 08, 2009

Roswell

Lately, the Roswell case has been the subject of discussion at a number of places, most notably Kevin Randle's blog A Different Perspective and the UFO Iconoclasts blog.

Roswell is a subject that I've addressed here in the past, particularly in The End of Roswellism and the Creation of a Ufological Third Way, wherein I talk about why the fixation with Roswell by UFO researchers has had a negative impact on serious UFO research. My conclusion about Roswell, and Roswellism (i.e. crashed flying saucers, government conspiracy stories, and the like), has not changed. I wrote:

What ufology needs, and has started to get in the past few years, is a “Third Way” of its own. My own version of this Ufological Third Way – which marks the end of Roswellism – is as follows:

1. Roswell is but one case. There are many others which provide more compelling evidence that the UFO phenomenon is real, and worthy of serious scientific, historical, journalistic and political attention.

2. Roswell remains unsolved, but is worthy of continued objective investigation until an explanation is finally proved.

3. The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis is a very plausible explanation for the UFO phenomenon, and is worthy of serious scientific consideration, but remains unproved. Further, other possible explanations, including time travel, extra-dimensional travel, and the prospect that UFOs are terrestrial phenomena and devices of which we may or may not be aware, also deserve study and consideration.

4. The American government has not released all information it has pertaining to the UFO phenomenon; this is not proof, however, of a conspiracy of silence / Cosmic Watergate to keep the “truth” about extraterrestrial visitors / crashes from the public.
I also addressed Roswell, and Roswellism, seven years ago in my documentary, Stanton T. Friedman is Real:





There is no harm in a continued discussion of Roswell; I just don't think it's particularly productive, especially when that debate usually remains focused solely on the crashed flying saucer(s) vs. Project Mogul positions, with no new research on either side being offered; rather, it's just a re-hash of old positions with which everyone is pretty much familiar. The one guy who is doing new research into the Roswell case, Nick Redfern, is almost never mentioned. It's like a bar argument between old timer Red Sox and Yankees fans - they don't care about the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, even though they're the team that actually made the World Series this year. The argument isn't about the actual fact or fiction of the Roswell case anymore; it's about the tribal instincts of each camp of followers, whether Mogul or alien. The questions that pop up are ones like: "who was the bigger liar, Charles Moore or Jesse Marcel, Sr.?" What both sides miss is that neither Moore not Marcel are very credible sources, but then their "debate" is not really about credibility, which would imply that there is an actual search for the truth involved. Rather, it's about defending their well-established positions. It is the intellectual equivalent of trench warfare.

So what is the answer when it comes to Roswell? It may be Mogul, but there are a number of flaws with that story. It may be aliens, but there are even more problems with the crashed flying saucer story than Mogul. Nick may well be on to something with his "third way". Although I think the witnesses presented in his book "Body Snatchers in the Desert" were problematic in many respects, he could well be right that the answer to Roswell lies in an explanation that comes from terra firma, but which represents a shameful secret that the United States government would still work to cover-up over sixty years later. You can follow his work at his blog, Darkness in the Desert.

The real answer, however, is that even if the truth was revealed, many people would still reject it. Roswell has become the stuff of legend, and arguments between fans of "this" theory or "that" theory. The truth doesn't really matter anymore; perhaps it never did. Perhaps what really matters is the telling of the story, and what it says about us and our capacity for creating our own "truths".

Paul Kimball

Saturday, February 07, 2009

Friedman on Sagan, science and UFOs



This is a clip from the pre-interview I did with Stan Friedman in May, 2001, prior to the making of the documentary Stanton T. Friedman is Real. In this part, Friedman discusses Dr. Carl Sagan, science, and UFOs.

Paul Kimball

Kimball on UFOs and Filmmaking



I appeared on the Eastlink program Aperture Atlantic this past season to discuss my career, filmmaking, and so forth. It seems I can't do an interview without the subject of UFOs coming up - this clip shows that segment, along with some remarks about the YouTube generation and UFO filmmaking.

Paul Kimball

Thursday, February 05, 2009

Some Sage Advice

The late Karl Pflock, in an interview I conducted with him on September 9, 2001, talking about what's wrong with UFO research.



He was right then; sadly, he's still right now.

Paul Kimball

Monday, February 02, 2009

Ghosts, UFOs and the Holographic Universe

In a post at his must-read blog UFO Mystic, which he co-writes with Nick Redfern, my good pal Greg Bishop has this to say about the UFO phenomenon:

In Michael Talbot’s seminal book The Holographic Universe, we find a clue to secrets about the UFO problem which mainstream Ufology has ignored. Talbot, looking at the work of physicists like Alain Aspect and David Bohm, posits that reality, the universe, and everything is akin to an infinite hologram, in which all things contain complete information about all other things.

What physicists call the “quantum field,” is also the “collective unconscious” of Jung, where archetypes arise, and where spontaneous and simultaneous events occur, independent of distance. Western occultists are convinced that this realm is where everything we experience (both in waking and dream states) resides, but we are only seeing and sensing a small piece of what it truly “is.” This “dimension” is not bound by time, space or our attempts to understand and more importantly, to explain it. Language traps us in a conceptual web of illusions, at least as far as this symbolic realm is concerned. We may imagine that our reality could be a sort of shadow or epiphenomenon of this holographic dimension, looked at through a mental web of expectations, sensory input, and our illusory flow through time.

I would like to suggest that this is where the intelligence behind the UFO phenomenon “resides.” Perhaps this intelligence is dependent on the observer for its form and appearance. Maybe the ufonauts are implicit in this realm or hologram or idea-space, and need only other sentient intelligences to bring them into being. The interaction becomes the existence. What I am trying to get across here is that at least part of the UFO “problem” may be in our heads. Most of us, through cultural conditioning and input from our senses look at the physical universe as parts or pieces of some sort of infinite “machine.”
Greg has raised the point in a comment on another post here that this same theory may apply to the phenomenon we call "ghosts". In some ways this ties in, as Greg noted, with my idea that ghosts may represent a form of "time travel", or at least a kind of temporal remote viewing.

If ghosts exist - and I am still far from convinced that they do - I suspect that they have far more to do with the kind of phenomenon that Greg is talking about, than the traditional idea that they represent the spirits of the dead. I am also open to the theory of residual hauntings, i.e. that an event has been recorded which at a particular place which plays itself back to people in the present day, so that an "impression" remains, but not of a person's consciousness.

Paul Kimball