[Bach]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Het Oosten

Er bestaan heel wat boeken over ufo's . Zeer degelijke en minder degelijke en ook 'bucht'. Het komt er op aan het kaf van het koren te kunnen scheiden. En dat kan men pas wanneer men er een behoorlijk aantal van gelezen heeft.

Maar vermits u het mij vraagt, zou ik u het boek van Leslie Kean aanbevelen: UFO's . Het is een nuchter, niet zweverig boek gebaseerd op degelijk onderzoek over het zogenaamde 'ufo fenomeen' .




Toemaatje.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uivbu5KiwsI

Ik heb een aantal gesprekingen van dit boek gelezen. Waaronder deze:

1. This is very impressive-looking new book on UFOs by journalist Leslie Kean, with impressive endorsements and a lot of reader excitement. I advise stepping back and taking a few deep breaths.
2. I've been fascinated with the subject all my life, from a skeptical but puzzled point of view -- and although most cases (even most FAMOUS cases) seem to have prosaic explanations, I think there could well be phenomena of significant interest to science, theology, national security, law enforcement, meteorology, perceptual psychology, dianetics, whatever, lurking among the weeds.
3. I'll be writing a longer commentary on the book for a major media website to appear in a few days, but this can't wait.
4. Kean's book, in my view, suffers from major shortcomings and misunderstandings that render its conclusions -- "UFOs are real physical objects that deserve high-level government respect" -- invalid.
5. Nobody is in any position to "prove" that "UFOs do NOT exist" or that (for one typical theory) "alien civilizations can NOT be visiting Earth." Such arguments are only opinions without logical foundation. And if aliens really are here, they can be as invisible as they like.
6. The REAL question is this: is there a subset of UFO reports that cannot be explained in ANY earthly/prosaic terms, but instead are undeniable proof that some NEW stimulus, some entirely unknown phenomenon (or phenomena) causes them?
7. Kean says YES. I say MAYBE NOT. Here's why.
8. Kean claims that pilot testimony of strange aerial events is the best ever, they are the most reliable human eyewitnesses to any events in the air.
9. Au contraire, I say that pilots have been shown by studies to react based on the dangers they expect, so they are very safe to fly with, but they 'worst case' fleeting glimpses into the kinds of aerial situations they have reason to fear most. That 'first impression' can then persist over any long and complicated subsequent pilot interaction with the apparition or others that follow. A 'false positive' (mistaking something harmless for a hazard) has no cost, but a 'false negative' (NOT recognizing as hazardous something that really IS so) can be fatal -- so 'rather safe than sorry' is a good rule.
10. Both statistical studies (eg, by Hynek, 'Professor UFO' of the 1960s) and case after case of actual pilot reactions, support this surprising assessment. Pilots often misperceive even astronomical phenomena as collision-course aircraft.
11. Kean claims that explainable 'UFO reports' are useless once the prosaic cause is determined, but experts can separate out a distinct subset of all reports which can be proven to have no earthly explanation -- these are the "true UFOs".
12. Au contraire, I claim that there is a 'slippery slope' of "solvability" of cases, which get harder and require more 'lucky breaks' in finding out the prosaic cause, but no SHARP boundary on which one side is all the solvable cases and the other, the unsolvables.
13. Kean actually provides supportive evidence for MY assertion in her book (p. 136) where she refers to a list of 1300 pilot UFO cases collected by French researcher Dominique Weinstein, asserting that the cases are all 'true UFOs" because they have been investigated by experts and determined to be unsolvable.
14. But a cursory review of the list reveals at least a dozen cases in my own technical specialty, missile and space activity, where the solution was found and published years ago[list and links to be given in 'comments']. But Weinstein ignored the published solutions and Kean declared that no such explanations even existed.
15. And Kean then provides involuntary support for my assessment that pilots perceive ambiguous apparitions in terms they have been trained to fear, for their own safety. On page 137 she asserts that the 'true UFOs' recognize the nature of the pilots who are observing them and tailor their behavior to the pilots -- threatening collisions for civilians, and mimicking dog fights for the military, based on the markedly different descriptions that the two categories of pilots give for their own UFO encounters.
16. Think about this: to explain how the different categories of pilots perceive the UFOs each in terms of their own special experiences, Kean proposes that the UFOs are deliberately behaving differently for different types of pilots.
17. A much simpler explanation makes more sense: the pilots, when faced with ambiguous, rapid, short-lived apparitions, receive the raw data and process it in terms they are already familiar with. Which is what I argue from the beginning.
18. But for Kean, the UFO reports are gospel and since they have been validated (in her imagination only), they can be absolutely relied on. Skeptical investigations of these or any other case she uses simply, to her, do not exist. Published prosaic explanations, even those widely accepted by serious ufologists, do not exist.
19. This allows her to use as evidence cases such as Jimmy Carter's 'UFO', one that was solved decades ago. And others.
20. By declaring that all 'solved' UFO reports are useless garbage, she can avoid facing the difficulty that the pilot cases she highlights do not in any essential aspects differ from them, from cases known to have been caused by prosaic stimuli perceived through the pilot's pro-survival interpretive process.
21. By falsely declaring all 'non-UFO' reports as garbage, she also can argue (p. 449) that military interest in UFO reports (which she defines as reports that have NO earthly explanation) is proof the government treats them as genuine. A more complete understanding of such interest is that many of the prosaic stimuli behind many pseudo-UFO reports are themselves of genuine and justifiable interest to specialists. Missile launches, for example, or warhead reentry tests -- the stimuli for a number of the 'true UFO' stories in the Weinstein list that Kean declares totally genuine and unsolvable.
22. None of these arguments can prove that the reports Kean promotes cannot be genuinely unexplainable, even alien in nature. The only logical assertion a skeptical view can establish is that the reports don't HAVE to be caused by aliens or unknown phenomena. Plenty of examples exist to show that pilots have made and doubtlessly will continue to make similar reports, even in the total absence of any genuinely unexplainable stimulus. Bizarre ground marks and instrument readings happen all the time. Further, solving the last few percent of the stories can't be expected since the fewer that remain the harder they get to find the explanation for. This is a feature of the human 'explaining process', not necessarily a feature of the stimulus.
23. In real life, the same is true for murders, kidnappings, accidents, illnesses, all the catastrophes that befall humanity. We don't need to conjure up alien murderers or kidnappers to account for unsolved crimes, we realize that life's like that. Not finding Jimmy Hoffa isn't proof he must be on Mars.
24. The 'maybe not' assessment makes it even MORE important to keep eyes and minds open to vigorously observe, accurately perceive, and precisely relate unusual aerial perceptions, both for the chances something really new COULD be discovered, and for the chances that something critically important is masquerading, by accident or design, in a manner that might prompt too many people to pay too little attention to the sighting. Rejecting it ALL, or jumping to a blind alley's wild goose chase, is equally harmful.