This is a draft of my November/December 2013 article for The CE4 Corner
==========================
In
nearly 20 years as a UFO investigator and over 15 years as a hypnotherapist,
I've seen and heard a fair amount of interesting stuff. Some of it makes a lot
of sense, while some of it is (at least to me) pure nonsense. I have seen
claims taken at face value and many corresponding belief systems manifest in
peoples' minds - sometimes uncritically. Most of all, I've seen the need to
keep our critical thinking hat on. Especially, there are times when we need to
question everything we are supposedly taught - key critical moments of discernment.
One example of a moment where a lot of discernment was in order, I discussed in a posting within my blog, The Cosmic Bridge. While at a civic health fair, presenting information on hypnosis, a woman confronted me, telling me that my hypnosis work was evil - against her Christian faith. Unfortunately, she skittered off before I could ask her more about what she had said. I can only surmise that her beliefs about hypnosis were heavily influenced by some religious fundamentalist preacher, and she had uncritically accepted those claims.
Then, a few days later, I had a different view of discernment. At the Paradigm symposium in Saint Paul in mid-October, I heard an arch-skeptic speak. The Paradigm symposium had speakers on many fascinating topics from (very) ancient archaeology to the paranormal, to UFOs, etc. - and this time, the conference organizer decided that having a skeptic (more like an arch-debunker) speak would make things even more interesting. The organizer was right.
The skeptic was a professor of genetics and biology. He gave a coherent, well-reasoned and thoroughly thought out talk. He presented an argument about how most of the material we had examined in the symposium the previous few days was untrue. To state it (overly) simply, aliens were not involved in any of our ancient constructions. Alien abduction does not exist. UFOs cannot be extraterrestrial, and are undoubtedly simply misidentified prosaic phenomena. Interstellar travel is impossible due to the laws of physics (as we currently understand them). There was no alien intervention in human evolution. I think you get the picture.
During the post-talk, I challenged him on some of his claims about alien abduction. And at one point, I think I backed him into a corner. He claimed that there was no evidence - a statement of absolute negative. I asked him to prove that. How did he know that there was NO evidence? He immediately assumed that I meant there was something hidden within some government coverup (maybe there is, or maybe not) and then said something else very interesting. When he hears about such conspiracy theories, he "loses interest." Does losing interest mean that something is invalid, or does it simply mean he is no longer interested in it (for reasons other than scientific). I leave that question to the reader...
But the biggest lesson in his talk was not whether or not alien abduction exists, how the pyramids were built, or any other such specific question. To me, the real question is how we decide what to believe - and conversely, what to reject as false. In this case, the speaker's claims amounted to a belief that our present body of knowledge is sufficiently advanced to "know" certain phenomena cannot (and therefore do not) occur. It is a belief at least as unsubstantiated by evidence as that which it opposes. In my view, there is no more evidence that there are no aliens present on Earth (and could not be any), than there is of present-day alien contact.
Switching gears - a few days later, I got into a discussion on line about toxic contrails. The person of on the other end of the dialog was totally sold on the idea that some conspiratorial organization is spraying toxic chemicals all over the globe. As we chatted on line, his ideas became increasingly far-fetched and vitriolic. His words indicated he was increasingly certain, increasingly dug in to his position.
One example of a moment where a lot of discernment was in order, I discussed in a posting within my blog, The Cosmic Bridge. While at a civic health fair, presenting information on hypnosis, a woman confronted me, telling me that my hypnosis work was evil - against her Christian faith. Unfortunately, she skittered off before I could ask her more about what she had said. I can only surmise that her beliefs about hypnosis were heavily influenced by some religious fundamentalist preacher, and she had uncritically accepted those claims.
Then, a few days later, I had a different view of discernment. At the Paradigm symposium in Saint Paul in mid-October, I heard an arch-skeptic speak. The Paradigm symposium had speakers on many fascinating topics from (very) ancient archaeology to the paranormal, to UFOs, etc. - and this time, the conference organizer decided that having a skeptic (more like an arch-debunker) speak would make things even more interesting. The organizer was right.
The skeptic was a professor of genetics and biology. He gave a coherent, well-reasoned and thoroughly thought out talk. He presented an argument about how most of the material we had examined in the symposium the previous few days was untrue. To state it (overly) simply, aliens were not involved in any of our ancient constructions. Alien abduction does not exist. UFOs cannot be extraterrestrial, and are undoubtedly simply misidentified prosaic phenomena. Interstellar travel is impossible due to the laws of physics (as we currently understand them). There was no alien intervention in human evolution. I think you get the picture.
During the post-talk, I challenged him on some of his claims about alien abduction. And at one point, I think I backed him into a corner. He claimed that there was no evidence - a statement of absolute negative. I asked him to prove that. How did he know that there was NO evidence? He immediately assumed that I meant there was something hidden within some government coverup (maybe there is, or maybe not) and then said something else very interesting. When he hears about such conspiracy theories, he "loses interest." Does losing interest mean that something is invalid, or does it simply mean he is no longer interested in it (for reasons other than scientific). I leave that question to the reader...
But the biggest lesson in his talk was not whether or not alien abduction exists, how the pyramids were built, or any other such specific question. To me, the real question is how we decide what to believe - and conversely, what to reject as false. In this case, the speaker's claims amounted to a belief that our present body of knowledge is sufficiently advanced to "know" certain phenomena cannot (and therefore do not) occur. It is a belief at least as unsubstantiated by evidence as that which it opposes. In my view, there is no more evidence that there are no aliens present on Earth (and could not be any), than there is of present-day alien contact.
Switching gears - a few days later, I got into a discussion on line about toxic contrails. The person of on the other end of the dialog was totally sold on the idea that some conspiratorial organization is spraying toxic chemicals all over the globe. As we chatted on line, his ideas became increasingly far-fetched and vitriolic. His words indicated he was increasingly certain, increasingly dug in to his position.
I
asked the person for details of his chemtrail observation. Instead of any kind
of objective description of the circumstances, aircraft, weather, etc., I got a
lecture on how "they" are doing this to control the population,
geoengineering in the face of global warming, etc. The person had an elaborate
scenario built up involving secret government agencies, the New World Order, etc.
He noted how, following spraying the clouds thickened, the weather turned rainy, etc. But what was he actually describing? Perhaps he was describing an ordinary contrail left behind by a commercial jet flying through a region of supercritical air ahead of a cold front. In such weather conditions, contrails frequently persist, mixing with cirrus clouds as they thicken ahead of the approaching weather front.
He noted how, following spraying the clouds thickened, the weather turned rainy, etc. But what was he actually describing? Perhaps he was describing an ordinary contrail left behind by a commercial jet flying through a region of supercritical air ahead of a cold front. In such weather conditions, contrails frequently persist, mixing with cirrus clouds as they thicken ahead of the approaching weather front.
I
have heard many people say that the difference between normal contrails and
so-called chemtrails is that the latter will persist in the atmosphere, while
the former will disperse almost immediately. So, returning to the scenario of
the approaching cold front, the presence of cirrus clouds high in the
atmosphere would thus indicate this persistence condition was present.
Rather
than a chemical spraying plot, could he have been observing a cold front, with
the clouds thickening as a result? While yes, there were persistent contrails,
might they be the result of an approaching weather system, rather than of a
sinister New-World-Order conspiracy?
For me, it was an interesting switch of roles. Now I was the skeptic and the other person was the believer. Yet it did a lot to broaden my own perspective. My own skeptical view of chemtrail claims leads me to better understand the point of view of skeptics on UFOs and alien abduction. Yet in all cases, we need to be mindful of just what the evidence says, and doesn't say, about what does and does not exist
To be fair, I can't actually say that there are NO chemtrail conspiracies. One can't prove a negative. Furthermore, not being privy to meteorological or geoengineering inner circles, I don't actually know much about the details behind the controversy. I can only challenge the reporter to be aware of the weather conditions, consider all possible explanations, etc.
For me, it was an interesting switch of roles. Now I was the skeptic and the other person was the believer. Yet it did a lot to broaden my own perspective. My own skeptical view of chemtrail claims leads me to better understand the point of view of skeptics on UFOs and alien abduction. Yet in all cases, we need to be mindful of just what the evidence says, and doesn't say, about what does and does not exist
To be fair, I can't actually say that there are NO chemtrail conspiracies. One can't prove a negative. Furthermore, not being privy to meteorological or geoengineering inner circles, I don't actually know much about the details behind the controversy. I can only challenge the reporter to be aware of the weather conditions, consider all possible explanations, etc.
We
can almost imagine that taking a typical lead edge of a cold front to be
evidence of a massive ego-engineering campaign is the equivalent of seeing the
planet Venus (a bright star) in the evening sky and concluding that the alien
mother ship is about to land. It is a jumping-to-conclusions based upon an
already formed belief. It is a lack of discernment - just like the skeptic at
the Paradigm Symposium who announced that aliens would not look anything like
us (i.e. having two arms and two legs) - and that there was no (valid) evidence
for UFOs.
Runaway
belief (both positive and negative) reminds us of the need for discernment when
working with metaphysical topics, anomaly investigations, etc. For both the
skeptic and the believer, events sometimes bring us a teachable moment. They
teach those of us in the anomaly community to be ever mindful of the BS lurking
just around the corner. What we thought we knew is sometimes wrong.
These
are the unexpected moments of discernment that keep us on our toes
