UFOlogy at the Hotel California - Notes from the 2015 MUFON Conference
©2015 Craig R. Lang, MS CHt
"Relax said the night man, we are programmed to receive. You can check out any time
you like, but you can never leave..."
At the time of writing this article I've been home from the 2015 MUFON conference for over a month. The conference was held at the Hotel Irvine, Thursday September 24th through Sunday September 27th and it was one hell of a weekend. I learned a lot of stuff, met a lot of great people and experienced some fascinating mysteries. I attended the field investigation workshop on Thursday, then the state directors meeting on Friday, followed by lectures on Saturday and Sunday. This article talks about a few of the talks at the conference I found to be the most interesting and useful. It also touches on a frightening darker element of the mystery that emerged during the weekend.
Thursday, I learned (reviewed, actually) some fascinating new tools for use during field investigations,
and refreshed my understanding of some of the latest procedures. Much of this was actually a review of what we learned in October, at the advanced Field Investigator boot camp. But it was very useful and covered a lot of ground. Especially for the new FI's in the room (and there were a lot of them), it was a great opportunity to learn more about how the FI process works, what the steps are, and what the paperwork entails. So far, I didn't see too many grimaces of panic at the thought of paperwork. But then it's only been a few days since the conference... :-)
The state director's meeting was another time to see the inner workings of the MUFON organization. And I came away from the meeting with a tremendous sense of optimism. The organization is growing. We are undertaking some very interesting work - including the development of a new, upgraded UFO reporting and database system, and a monitoring and analysis system which we will eventually deploy around the country (and world?) to catch 'em in flight.
Dubbed UFOTOG2, this will include a set of cameras, field detection and measurement, radiation
sensors, etc. The intent will be to observe UFOs in real time, and to some extent, confirm how they just might work - which gets us back to the physics topic described above.
Some of the biggest wake-up moments for me occurred during the two lectures I went to on physics. For the last few months, I've been trying to re-ramp-up on things I learned in my undergraduate years - far longer ago than I want to think about. This included relativity, quantum mechanics, Maxwell's equations, etc.
So in the last few months I have been trying to re-learn the math behind relativity. To say the least it's
mind-bending. So I thought the talk on UFO physics really hit the point - at least for me. He talked about an older theory - Kaluza Klein or KK theory - behind gravity and electromagnetics. KK theory is something that contemporary physicists have discounted but which ultimately has led to string theory.
It turns out that the 'discounting' may have been a bit premature, to say the least. KK theory postulates that we live in a five-dimensional universe - four dimensions being our space-time continuum, with a fifth being another spatial dimension we cannot perceive. Kaluza first came up with the theory at about the time of Einstein's general relativity. Yet, since we do not perceive the 5th dimension, scientists of the day needed a way to explain that away. So along came Oscar Klein, who explained how higher dimensions could exist but not be observed.
The process is called compactification - essentially, these dimensions are rolled up into closed spheres or cylinders, too small for us to notice. But one problem with that idea is that the size of the 'roll-ups' is arbitrary - how small are the tiny cylinders, and what determines that? (In an ideal theory of physics, nothing is left to chance - as physicists would say, a free parameter, undetermined by the theory itself. This is one of the "Holy Grail's of theoretical physics.)
KK theory has the advantage that, while formulated in five dimensions, when viewed in four dimensions (space + time), the mathematics of relativity and electromagnetism fall out of the equations. This is a big insight, and many physicists have never given up on KK theory for just this reason.
In addition, a third field besides gravity and EM also shows up - what we call the "scalar field" (Note: I had always wondered just what the scalar field or 'scalar waves' were. Now, I see that this is where they come from). Contemporary physics has largely discounted this as no apparent particle has been observed corresponding to this scalar field. Yet perhaps they are present in a way not yet understood. This is another big adventure for many in the new science community.
The biggest breakthrough has been in the last year, where a new version of "M" theory (M meaning membrane). It postulates that ours and other universes are four dimensional surfaces (or 'branes’) in higher dimensional space-time. This gives us our fifth dimension (and/or more), and nicely solves what I call "the rollup problem".
In the talk on UFO physics, Dr. Schroeder used KK theory and the 5D as a backdrop of his ideas on how a field propulsion mechanism could work. He briefly flashed up the Einstein field equations (General Relativity in all its brutal glory), and then said we could stop panicking now... He was done with the ugly math. The rest was pretty intuitive.
Bottom line - at least in principle, field propulsion is possible, so is interstellar flight. Many descriptions of UFO close sightings describe behavior with would make sense according to this model. So, my interpretation of this is that if they can do it, so can we.
Note: I know the critics of 'nuts and bolts' are going to come down on me. And in a sense they would be right. This describes some UFO manifestations. But it does not explain the more metaphysical cases. It merely describes how a large piece of metal and electronics could travel between our pale blue dot, and other dots (of various colors) out there in the cosmos. But the biggest take-away for me was the core of the nuts and bolts engineering idea: "we can do this too..."
Another talk I attended was on "How to talk to an alien". In this talk, the speaker described her research into reports throughout the world UFO-encounter of different forms of communication with (and among) "Them". She discussed writing, telepathy, spoken language, and other areas of alien interaction. But again, the bottom line to me was that this is something we can (at least in principal) understand.
I was most struck with her examples of alien writing. In work with experiencers, I have asked them to sketch some of the symbols and writing they have seen while onboard the - well, whatever they go onboard of. As a result, a number of experiencers have sketched some pretty extensive script. Furthermore, at least one experiencer I have worked with appears to have been able to read the script written by another experiencer.
After her talk, went up to her table and in addition to buying her book, getting her signature on it, and chatting for a while (to the annoyance of the people behind me in line), I showed her the writing samples on my website. She told me they looked remarkably similar to the script in the files of the late Budd Hopkins, as well as of David Jacobs and numerous other researchers. I have seen indications of this, but so far linguistic analysis is still one of those things on the to-do list.
The final, and probably the ultimate aspect of the weekend was a series of close encounters, yes real ones, that at least one person (possibly more) had during the weekend. I discuss this in my CE4 Corner article for this month, “The mystery gets real.” It shows that while UFOlogy is a science in itself, we are probably not the only scientists. The intelligence behind phenomenon is studying us just as intensely, or maybe even more so, than we are studying it. Regardless of the outcome of the (currently ongoing) investigations to these events, they add a new urgency to the question of what is going on. And they remind us that for some the phenomenon is a real inescapable presence in their life.
So what are we to make of all this? I don't know. To me, it's yet another fascinating, powerfully-real, in-your-face twist in the mystery.
After the conference on Sunday, we were also treated to another show - the super-moon and total eclipse. The moon turned into a deep blood-red disk that almost looked like it would disappear. Then, right on schedule, God returned the moon to us as we watched from the roof observation deck of the Irvine Hotel. It seemed like a fitting ending to the events of the weekend. And with the anomaly events of the weekend, the blood red moon seemed to mark for me the beginning of a new, deepening chapter in the mystery of close encounters.
I came away from the conference even more deeply dedicated to exploring both the hard realities, and the subjective experience that together make up the UFO mystery. As the song says, "you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave..."
