At 05

My name is Dyson Devine and I'm an Official Disclosure Project* Representative. I wish to assist you.

Your lengthy and apparently sincere efforts to discredit the Meier UFO material has come to my attention, and I am writing to you now to try to help you to understand the nature of what is really going on.

I'm very aware that your time is valuable, but you've already made quite an undertaking, so please bear with me and I'll try to make my line of reasoning as concise and cogent as I can. Please also open your scientific mind very wide, as what you must understand will strain your credulity. This is quite intentional, as I shall explain.

I'm afraid that you have indeed been the victim of a subtle deception by people who are trying to make you look foolish if they can, but as long as you continue to erroneously make the a priori assumption that all people come from the planet Earth, all your hypotheses will be based on an egregious canard. These PEOPLE are unimaginable smarter than us, and they are our relatives.

The brilliant Professor Emeritus James W. Deardorff has actually already finished a lot of the photo analysis work you undertook for Michael, and I invite you to study in detail his iconoclastic conclusions on his website. Jim has also provided a very compelling argument for why it is that the "UFO" images that you analyzed moved as if the object was suspended from a string. Please study his educational website. www.tjresearch.info Until a person fully understands the concept of semi-plausible deniability, he will simply not "get it." Take my word for it.

You dismiss the possibility of such flight manoeuvres because you are stuck with the idea that Occam's Razor demands the ostensibly simplest explanation. The operative word is "ostensibly". This is where you were sucked in sideways, just as almost everybody was, at first glance. Me too. This was just what was intended by the people (extraterrestrial human beings) in the beamship. The heterodox supposition that it really is an extraterrestrial craft, and that such superluminal interstellar vehicles visit our beleaguered planet regularly, is thought to be too disruptive to announce with a landing in the Rose Garden. Therefore those of us qualified to spread the word gently - mouth to ear, as it were - are winnowed out by dint of our preparedness to do the hard work to get to the bottom of this very confronting issue. Those who take Occam's Razor too far end up looking like fools as a harsh example to others.

Of course a logical acceptance of the reality of extraterrestrial intelligence on and around Earth is easy compared to accepting the vast international conspiracy required to maintain the secret. This is where the Disclosure Project comes in. If you do not already know about us, I would be obliged if you could tell me why. If you do already know about it I would be obliged if you would please explain your silence and your waste of your, and Michael Horn's, precious time.

I don't have the time or resources to elucidate the recondite nexus that binds the illegal and grossly unconstitutional "black operations" (Unacknowledged Special Access Projects) to ancient and very malign extraterrestrials, but it would be consistent that if such a scenario was true, the ruling elite who sacrifice children to these ancient ET "gods/overlords" would go to extreme lengths to set the scene so as to make anyone who seriously mentioned an international pedophile, Zionist/Freemason conspiracy sound exactly like an archetypal paranoid schizophrenic. If you like, you can add to that, the mind reading/control devices and behavior monitoring/modifying subdermal and/or intercranial microchip implants ... not to mention the off-the-shelf, functional, domestic, quantum zero-point free energy devices being ruthlessly suppressed by the rogue military/industrial complex President Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell speech in 1961.

If you do your science by the book, you will be surprised how quickly your traditional paradigm evaporates in the glare of reason. If not, then the revolution that Copernicus started will remain - for you - still unfinished.

Please forgive me if you feel that my tone is disrespectful, Steven. We are all in this together, but there's no time to lose. Please join us in The Great Enlightenment, and nobody who is reasonable will denigrate you for showing the courage it takes to admit you made a mistake.

It was Max Plank of course who said, "Progress in science is measured in funerals." Please don't wait for that.

A visit to our private whistleblowers website www.gaiaguys.net - currently soaring in popularity with well over a million hits a day - should be of interest to you. You have a mission to inform.

Thank you for your valued time and in anticipation of a prompt and rational reply.

The Disclosure Project is a nonprofit research project working to fully disclose the facts about UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence, and classified advanced energy and propulsion systems. We have over 400 government, military, and intelligence community witnesses testifying to their direct, personal, first hand experience with UFOs, ETs, ET technology, and the cover-up that keeps this information secret.

Thank you for your polite and informative e-mail. You should know, I cut off my conversation with Michael Horn because of his threats and harassments.

I have read much of Deardorff's site and I think I have a better understanding of your belief system. I have no pretense of changing your mind, but I would like to give you a few thoughts.

From your e-mail this must run counter to your impression - an impression which is inextricably tied to your belief system, but I am in fact very open to the possibility of alien intelligence. I believed very strongly when I was young that we were being visited by aliens. It was not until I became more mature in my scientific thinking, and I looked closely at the evidence, that my opinion was changed and I became convinced that the UFO phenomenon was more likely to be a psychocultural phenomenon and there was insufficient evidence to support the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH).

I would be overjoyed if Earth were in contact with benevolent, wise, and advanced aliens. This knowledge would not "devastate" me, as Deardorff callously and naively assumes (must assume). There is no lack of imagination or openness. My objections to the ETH conclusion is purely on grounds of logic and evidence. You may disagree with my conclusions, but dismissing this opinion as necessarily a byproduct of being closed-minded and fearful is self-serving nonsense.

You speak of intellectual pitfalls, like overapplying Occam's Razor (which I understand is a mere rule of thumb - I refer you to our article on the topic), yet it seems to me that you are trapped in a huge one yourself. Specifically, the trap of adhering to a self-contained and insulated belief system that contains the mechanisms to protect itself from falsification.

For example: Creationists, when confronted with rather irrefutable evidence for the historical fact of organic evolution, will often argue that god created the earth to appear as if it had evolved, with a history implied in its design and details. This intellectual convenience immunizes the creationist belief system from any possible refutation by evidence.

Believers in bigfoot often, ad hoc, bestow upon bigfoot amazing powers - such as the ability to become invisible at will, step into parallel dimensions, or read the thoughts of those near them, in order to explain the lack of confirmatory evidence for their existence.

A prosecutor who believed he had caught a family of satan worshipers who were conducting ritual killings in the woods behind their home, when confronted with the startling fact that forensic investigators could not find a single scrap of evidence to indicate that anything unusual occurred at the alleged site (let alone multiple murders and butcherings), concluded: "These people are master satanists. The fact that there is no evidence proves that they did it."

Unfortunately, there are countless other examples. It seems to be a weakness of our species to fall into this kind of thinking, and only hard-earned mental discipline keeps us out of it.

Now, in the case of Deardorff, which you seem to be echoing, his self-contained belief system is immunized in a couple of ways. First, he has his "plausible deniability" theory. This theory basically says that the aliens want to ease us into the knowledge they exist. (Of course, those who have the "virtues" of open mindedness and being "prepared" for the truth are the first to have this great enlightenment. Just as those who have the virtue of "blind faith" are chosen to be the enlightened few of more traditional religious belief systems.) Therefore, they reveal themselves to us but in ways that have the look and feel of a hoax. That way, those of us with weak constitutions (like skeptics) will find it easy to find reasons to disbelieve (thanks for the thoughtful help).

But practically, what this means, is that any evidence which suggests a hoax or simple misinterpretation of more prosaic phenomenon is simply the brilliant aliens granting us weaklings plausible deniability. Therefore, even seemingly devastating evidence, like a supposed UFO moving in a fashion which is identical to that of an object dangling from a string, can be easily explained away as the clever aliens deliberately piloting their ship in a way to look like a model on a string.

Second, we have the bogey men of the UFO crowd - the dreaded men in black (or whatever you want to call the secret evil organization who is working to hide evidence of aliens). Any hard evidence of a hoax or misinterpretation that is just too much for the plausible deniability hypothesis can be covered by the deliberate and malicious actions of the MIB. The immunization is complete - there is no possible evidence that can now touch the belief system.

I give you as further evidence of this the Asket photo debacle. (You appear to have been privy to my e-mails to Horn so I won't go over it again, but let me know if you need me to.)

Before you attempt to argue that my belief system is also immune to evidence, you must know that I do not have a belief system per se. As a scientific skeptic, and agnostic, I specifically abhor belief. All scientific conclusions are tentative an amenable to future evidence. There are all kinds of possible evidence that could convince me of the ETH, and I hope to live to see it. The standards are not arbitrarily impossible either. A proper UFO video that survives detailed skeptical analysis, for example, with clear unambiguous spacecraft and objective scale. A genuine alien artifact (whether informational or physical) - not pseudomysterious metals and arguments from ignorance, or lame prophesies, but something undeniably alien. Something which causes a cultural discontinuity. And, of course, there is always unambiguous contact.

Let me leave you with one question. When, do you think, will the aliens finally reveal themselves? Of course, you must believe this will happen sometime, and when it does I will gladly eat all the crow you want. But is there any length of time that can go by without such a revelation that you will begin to question their true existence? I ask because I have been following the UFO phenomenon for sometime, and have read books and articles going back 40 years. It seems like the believers of the day always feel that unambiguous revelation is just around the corner - but the corner never comes. I predict it never will come. When we finally do encounter an alien intelligence it will be nothing like the childish fantasies of the current UFO mythology. This prediction is entirely falsifiable. But what about you - what's your prediction for the future?

Thanks very much indeed for your prompt, (fairly) courteous (albeit with a whiff of sarcasm) and lengthy reply to my email to you regarding your assessment of the "ETH" in general and the Meier case in particular.

I'm delighted to read that you are also not a "believer", and I echo many of you sentiments about the nature of the scientific method, not to mention the intrinsic weaknesses of our species. It's even worse than you might imagine! Until about two years ago, I would have found almost no reason to disagree with any of your conclusions or methodologies, aside from you ignoring irrefutable hard material scientific evidence.

Incidentally, I'm sure that you'd be as delighted as I was, to learn that "THEY" are back now with the stated aim to - among other things - "put an end to religion". I'll drink to that! Did you actually look at Jim Deardorff's work on the New Testament? It's quite scientific and very good news, unless you're religious, which we are not.

I'm sure I could spend hours rationally addressing your email in detail, but the nature - not to mention the sheer quantity - of my work precludes that just now. Perhaps at a later date?

For the sake of potential progress, let's please set Eduard Meier, Professor Deardorff's research, and the various ET metal, sound etc. samples, aside for now. And I'll be happy to answer your question, and then I'd ask you to please return the favour for me.

You ask, "When, do you think, will the aliens finally reveal themselves?" My short answer is that they already have.

Now you'll have to forgive me for not having the details to hand, so you may chose to take this as apocryphal if you want to, but I seem to remember a media interview with a former director of SETI some years back in which that exact question was put to him, and he provided the exact same answer I do. But it was prefaced be the question, "If extraterrestrials decide to contact us, how do you think they will do it?" His reply, which engendered gales of laughter, "The Internet". But he wasn't laughing.

One of the other cunning ploys used by these advanced ET humans is to communicate in a secondary language: in this case, German. This means that the truth will seep very slowly - given the mainstream media's blatant corruption - into the English speaking world. Fortunately I speak German, and our work last year with the Disclosure Project brought us into contact with a great number of German tourists here in Australia who all said pretty much the same thing."It's about time! We were wondering when this would get into the English language!"

Having deliberately abraded you a little with my crack about the mainstream media, ( please see http://www.gaiaguys.net/Floridatoday7.5.02.htm ) I'd like to put this simple question to you, which I noticed entirely escaped your criticism.

How do you explain the Disclosure Project? And so-called "crop circles"? Your ideas about the erosion patterns on the back of the Sphinx would be very interesting too. Thanks very much for your very valued ideas.

P.S. Incidentally, Steve, I was a non-com in the USAF. I was an Air Traffic Control Radar Technician and have also provided testimony for the Disclosure Project (which was independently corroborated) My brief account is here, and might be interesting for you. www.gaiaguys.net/radar.story.htm

I will await your response to my primary criticism, that your belief system appears to be self-contained and immune to falsification.

Meanwhile, I will quickly address some of your questions. You state that the ET's have already revealed themselves, but what I meant was when will they reveal themselves in an open and unambiguous way that is undeniable to anyone (landing on the White House lawn)? Not the coy "plausible deniability" stuff we have now.

Regarding the Disclosure Project, my assessment is that it is merely a formalized version of the psychocultural phenomenon of the modern UFO myth. It is a collection of testimony from people of presumed reliability and authority. Much of it is simply people in authority expressing interest in UFO's or research. Some is eyewitness testimony. None of it is hard evidence.

It is a general skeptical principle, learned from examining many various beliefs having nothing to do with UFO's, that no testimony is sufficient to establish the truth of a claim, and there is no such thing as a reliable witness. Science and knowledge can only advance through hard evidence and open investigation and discourse.

You claim there is hard scientific evidence - but I have never seen it despite having monitored the UFO phenomenon for years and despite multiple occurrence of asking believers to provide me with their best evidence, as I did with Horn. I never get solid evidence, and it always turns out that the believer's criteria for what constitutes good evidence is far below what a reasonable scientist would demand. It often further displays fatal naivte regarding mechanisms of self deception.

Regarding crop circles (time only allows for a bottom line summary), again there is no evidence that there is anything to this other than pranks. The methods of creating crop circles are well known and have been demonstrated, and it is very telling that the incidence of crop circles follows cultural lines and correlate well with school leave (but I guess you can dismiss this inference as plausible deniability). The claims of cereologists of unusual crystaline patterns in the stalks has not been validated - either that they have identified a genuine phenomenon or what its significance is (this is mere anomaly hunting and has no apparent predictive value).

I do not have enough familiarity with the sphinx claims to comment off the cuff. If you could direct me to a resource I will take a look.

You claim there is solid scientific evidence - so I will give you the same challenge I give everyone - show me. Give me whatever you think is the single best piece of evidence, one that is amendable to investigation, and I will evaluate it.

But before we go further on any discussion of evidence, I need you to address my primary criticism, for that would seem to trump any evidence or logic I can bring to bear. Therefore, there really is no point in talking about logic or evidence until we have an understanding regarding the plausible deniability claim.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I think we both deserve to be congratulated for our courteous restraint, and I thank you for maintaining such a gentlemanly exchange. My replies to your bold are in italics.

Thanks Steve,

I’ll do my best to amicably end this logical Mexican standoff we’re locked into, where we both perceive the others’ paradigm as self contained and immune to criticism. But I don’t like my chances as long as the proof accepted by others who are the top specialists in their fields of study is reflexively, and without adequate scrutiny, rejected as worthless by you. I’m genuinely not trying to sound offensive, and I apologize for seeming callous.

Your characterization here is not accurate. I am not reflexively dismissing anything, What I am saying is that arguments from authority are worthless. This is a logical fallacy. You cannot get around it by piling on more arguments from authority. Second, the scientific community is absolutely NOT of the consensus opinion that we are being visited by aliens or that any of the things you are claiming is true. Most importantly, whenever I have closely examined specific claims, where I had adequate access to first hand information, the claims have always evaporated into thin air. I found them, in every case, to be poorly reasoned or not supported by the evidence. It is perfectly reasonable for me to extrapolate from this to distrust arguments from authority in general.

This is not a form of logic that applies to the real world, and the quality of the corroborated testimony is a component of the quantity.

àOK., epistemology, then ontology. I’ll have another go at it. First, I have to state that my use of the phrase “the real world” was meant to tantalize a little. But given that English is tough enough to enjoy a little affectionate dynamism, and by now I can make a better informed opinion about how intellectually robust you are, Steve, I didn’t think you’d mind me lightly arranging you to invite me to explain myself more clearly.

What real world? Are we talking the quantum realm? Or Newtonian physics? (Newton? Sure, a giant, but he did die 276 years ago, and maintaining our devotion to his then superior Weltanschauung in the 21^st century is the modern equivalent of basing ontology, in Sir Isacc’s dim decades, on the superceded ideas of the ancient Greeks.

What I mean by that is - as I’ve tried so hard to explain - the real sublunary world we live in - you know, get up, eat, drink, etc. …the world of people places and things like laws, courts of justice, forensic evidence … it all pitches on the sea of proof beyond a reasonable doubt which can be logically developed with independent corroboration from other (for instance) eye witnesses, even though this so-called proof is largely based upon fallible peoples’ often faulty memories, delusions, preconceptions and so on.

My point is that it’s not some pure, abstract, transcendent realm where it is indeed mathematically possible that what looks like the bus you’re about to get into is really a cunningly disguised reptiloid lifeform from the planet Zarb, so you decide it’s safer to catch a cab, only to be paralysed by the mathematical possibility that it too is possibly a fiendishly disguised carnivorous fungus from ….

I hope I’ve made that point. That’s grave psychiatric illness. I know rational people would agree.

Now we can – as a thought exercise if you will – explore the rational world where our experiences are not fantastically isolated from it with beguilingly misleading phrases like “a test tube was taken”. In the real world we can practice common sense and be rational and accept – by all means skeptically – but accept, the ordinary world of things like independently corroborated ground and air eyewitness testimony complete with confirmatory multiple independent radar returns, both ground and airborne and corroborative recorded radio transmissions .

Here, in a very basic translation to English, is what the Italians have been told repeatedly on TV by the Pope’s (of all people!) official representative, Lac. Corrado Balducci Rome, C. 7 / 6 / 2001

I’ve ruthlessly bowdlerized it to launder it of the superfluous accretion of thick Catholic dogma. OK? Common sense prevails.

“Something real must exist. This is a statement coming out from basic considerations based upon common sense, human rationalism and upon a normal and possible course of our lives, considering not only individual and social aspects … it seems impossible to deny at a rational level that something real does exist! A totally sceptic behaviour is not justified at all, because a priori seems to be against to the elemental prudence suggested by the good sense. … (there) are always inaccurate explanations and considerations to explain the number of testimonies and the wideness of UFO phenomenon. The most severe and hard criticism could reduce largely this number, but never will be able to eliminate all of them.

Regarding the existence of something real within UFO phenomenon, I must add another consideration that was left for last to better underline its importance. And this is, that a generalised, systematic and total incredulity finally would weaken and destroy the value of human testimony, with serious and unforeseeable consequences, because that is the base of life … individual and social ….

à[Now, Steve, I know what a fan of Darwin (who died 121 years ago) like you must be thinking about. It would be that contemporary theologian twit who said, “But it cannot be true because the Bible would then not be true … etc.” Just bear with me, OK?]

(cont.) In fact, testimony is a form of communication of our faith in our partner. This is a widely spread way on daily life (when listening (to) news, spending, buying, etc.). Let's imagine what could happen on individual and social life if the value of human testimony was weaken(ed), with the logical decrease and disappearance of that faith many times is essential for daily life!

Points … in favour (of the ETH) from the various considerations: 1. Before all, that exist other inhabited planets is something possible. …2. Furthermore, the existence of other inhabited planets is something credible … not only possible but credible, that in the spaces that are distant and inaccessible for men and his scientific instruments, do exist other beings 3. Beyond to be something possible and credible, I would see desirable the inhabitability of other planets.

[I know. I know. The consequences of a claim that something is true are entirely irrelevant to the issue of whether the claim is true. But this cuts just as deep in both directions. - D]

(cont.) In a future, even if very remote, these eventual inhabitants, superior to us, could be very helpful to us, specially in our spiritual path. In a non practical way, they could had been protecting and helping us since long time ago. … astronomer Fr. Angelo Secchi (1818 - 1876) wrote: "It is absurd to claim that the worlds surrounding us are large, uninhabited deserts and that the meaning of the universe lies just in our small, inhabited planet.".

I did not make up the concept of the argument from authority – it is generally recognized as a logical fallacy.

Authority cannot substitute for actual evidence, least of all to establish a controversial and extraordinary claim which inspires strong emotion.

I’ll be blunt, but not impolite, Steve. I've already told you quite emphatically that I am - just like you - not a "believer", so your continual references to my (and Professor Emeritus Deardorff’s) "belief systems" is inappropriate and frankly personally offensive, but I'm sure neither of us want this correspondence to degrade into ad hominem assaults, so I’ll take it in the charitable spirit that I trust is intended by you.

I did not explicitly mean to equate belief system with faith. If the term has negative connotations for you then forget it. The real issue is the logical structure of the argument that Deardoff is putting forward and you are supporting – namely that Plausible Deniability and nefarious agents are explanations for any features of the Meier case which one might use to infer a hoax. This is a serious logical problem with the entire structure of his case, and I wonder if you can appreciate this or have any substantive response to it. I also think it makes any discussion of evidence moot until this matter is dealt with.

I do indeed appreciate the no-win corner we’ve painted ourselves into, and tried to allude to that in my previous email. I’ll address this below.

To put this into further perspective, as a skeptic who has dealt with hundreds of different beliefs, I have seen this pattern of logic over and over again. It is not unique to your situation. It appears to evolve out of an attempt to maintain a desired conclusion in the face of contradicting evidence. The belief must find rationalizations to insulate itself from the evidence that would otherwise disprove it. These mechanisms are invoked ad hoc and without independent evidence. This is a huge red flag for pseudoscience.

You have already dug yourself into a very deep legal hole, and when you find yourself in a hole it’s prudent to stop digging. Please let me help you out. I really don’t think you are taking this ETH issue seriously enough. This is not a threat, Steve. It is a heartfelt warning from a fellow human being.

I am very disappointed that you repeat Horn’s threat here (despite your assurances that it is not a threat). Bringing up the specter of “legal” issues can only be intended to intimate me into silence or retraction, and it certainly feels from my perspective like intellectual thuggery.

Really. It’s not meant to be anything other than a fraternal warning, but of course I’m no lawyer, nor was I aware of the guilty-until-innocent US defamation laws, which seem almost worse than Australian defamation laws, which we consider here to be the world’s worst. I suppose you’re legally in the clear, then, and have nothing to worry about, so I guess it’s pretty impotent “thuggery” on my part.

One final point (although I appreciate what you are saying) the relevant entry on my website was titled “The skeptical perspective.” Not “my proof” or “The results of my personal research which you should accept on my authority,” as Horn seems to think. This is iron clad insulation because I am just relating what skeptics generally believe about Meier’s claims. Certainly you can’t argue with the fact that skeptics generally believe Meier is a hoaxer (as the reference I provided to Korff also establishes).

àPerhaps it might be a good idea to make this clear on the same page that the article appears?

So, let me clear up a couple of things. First, in the good’ol USA there are specific legal requirements for making the case for slander or libel. The plaintiff must prove that the statements are wrong (the defendant does not have to prove they are correct), and must prove that the defendant knew they were wrong, had malicious intent, and caused demonstrable harm. I have no fear of facing a legitimate suit because it is my honest opinion that the best interpretation of all available evidence is that Meier is engaged in an elaborate hoax, I have no possible malicious intent and my skeptical philosophy is a matter of extensive public record, and I seriously doubt that anyone could convincingly argue that my meager efforts have caused Meier real harm. (I encourage you to further consider these legal criteria in the context of maliciously causing harm to the reputation of an academic physician – also look at the history of similar action against skeptical activists.)

Second, the very idea completely misses the point of my skeptical publications, which are intended to inform and inspire critical thinking in controversial areas. They are meant to be contentious and provocative. Threatening suit, even in a veiled way, is a completely transparent attempt to censure legitimate academic free speech.

See above. The other thing Meier’s ET contact told him in reply to his question”Why are you here? was, “To create controversy.” This is certainly working in the strict etymological sense of the word.

Your “cultural disruption” criterion as proof of open ET contact is quite inconsiderate, and bewilderingly illogical from an anthropological point of view. Can only a landing in the Rose Garden (etc.) qualify as your proof of ET contact? "... what I meant was when will they reveal themselves in an open and unambiguous way that is undeniable to anyone." (Please, Steve. This is becoming really difficult. Perhaps only volunteer workers for the Disclosure Project can fully appreciate the depth of denial that people can achieve.) Would you seriously suggest that a highly advanced spacefaring civilization would do this to us? Can you imagine the panic after all the state sponsored terrorism about scary aliens coming to eat our babies? It’s not happening that way, as I tried to tell you.

Actually, I was just asking if you think they will reveal themselves, and your answer is clear. You are saying that they are not. I am a bit surprised that you think they NEVER will, not ever.

Sorry, Steve. I apparently haven’t made myself adequately clear when I said that it was a slow and gentle process – like this dialog. It is slowly accelerating to a critical mass when there will indeed be shocking revelations - in my informed opinion – and I imagine that there will be many others like the Army psychiatrist who witnessed a very close encounter in the 50’s along with the rest of the passengers and crew, but said, when asked what he saw, “I didn’t see a flying saucer because I don’t believe in flying saucers.”

From my perspective – being a generalist – many of your arguments which rely on the well established criterion (for example) that solid objects cannot be simply made to disappear by any know terrestrial technology, look pretty weak, knowing what we now know about advanced ET technology. Not to open the “Spiritual powers” can of worms.

I know that this is not the major thrust of your work, and I do appreciate the time you’re taking from your practice with me, but if you can get a hold of Dr. Steven Greer’s polemic, “Extraterrestrial Contact: The Evidence and Implications” you’ll be confronted with many of the reasons this recondite subject remains off the public (not to mention conventional scientific) radar.

How does this fit into the concept of easing us into cosmic awareness – will we never arrive?

I certainly hope we do, Steve! And am working as hard as I can to bring this about, but we are told that we MUST do it for ourselves in order for it to work, and can only be offered the sort of guidance that we two respectively try to provide to others. We are indeed now in the process of arriving, and even if this effort does nothing at all to shift your perspective in the direction Copernicus, Bruno, et al, was trying to take us, then perhaps it will be a salient lesson for others. That’s my hope, as we are starting to go round and round with diminishing hope of a common perspective.

But what this means is that there will never be an objective resolution to this, because the plausible deniability thing will last forever.

No. As stated above and implied previously, this strategy is merely a brief interim measure applied to identify those of us doing what I’m doing now.

OK, so eventually the aliens will make themselves generally known, but you have no idea how long this will take. I was just curious about your personal feeling for this, because if you felt it was imminent that is something we can follow up on in our lifetimes.

àThere are two equally valid (or facile) ways of looking at this. One is that they’ve been unrewardingly awaited for so long that - a.) they’ll never arrive overtly at this rate, or b.) they’ll be here any minute now.

is not the only “proof” I would accept. You are confusing two issues. Again, I was just asking if you think the ET’s will ever reveal themselves in an undeniable way.

As above. When we’re good and ready, and when the social chaos becomes manageable, and not before. Do you ever watch current children’s’ television? The preponderance of cute fluffy extraterrestrial cartoon characters speaks well for a time when anyone on your side is “so yesterday” that it will be uncool not to “believe”. More intriguing yet are the friendly and benign grotesques.

àThat’s very mature and statistically unusual of you based on a social cross section. But if nobody can hear you, what’s the point of talking?

Don’t get me wrong. I think the Information Revolution heralds a bright and happy age of knowledge which grows out of the old age of belief, but Rome wasn’t built in a day and we’re a diverse mob. Some will lag just as some have yet to accept natural selection, etc.

Prior to this, I am perfectly willing to infer the existence of ET’s, if that is where the evidence and logic lead; I do not think it does.

I can point you in the right direction, but ultimately in your capacity as self-appointed arbiter of public reality

You must know how people dogmatically accept the word of authority figures – real or imagined. Please do not throw this back about the DP, as the previously unmentioned hard evidence (landing traces, etc. precludes that line of reasoning.

you’re going to have to really do your own reading. No offence intended, but you have engaged in some really awful “science” by blindly accepting Kal K. Korf’s risible sophistry without doing your homework first. Please see: http://meiercase.0x2a.info/meiercase/temp/index.html

Real scientists are in the business of assessing other people’s research and arguments all the time. We cannot do all the original research ourselves – it’s not only impractical, it’s impossible. I have evaluated Korff’s reasoning and evidence, and although it’s not perfect (I have yet to read any such document that is) his arguments are basically sound and fit with what I have examined myself and read from others. I am sure he made some mistakes and wrong inferences, but I do not think you can dismiss the bulk of his work.

I have also read much of the work of those who have attacked Korff. I think that they have pointed out a few legitimate errors, but on the whole I found their arugments to be fallacious and biased. Here are a couple of examples from the site you referenced above.

“Korff mentions Meier's explanation for the absence of the tree, namely that the conifer was eliminated by his extraterrestrial friends. Semjase's alleged reason for this is that the tree during the demonstration caught certain radiations which in case of an analysis by an Earth scientist could divulge too much about their technology. However, Korff doesn't mention Meier's explanation for the fact why nobody except Meier nowadays can recall the existence of the tree. Meier claims that the Pleiadians wiped out the relevant thoughts from the minds of the concerned persons.”

“About the horizontal lines it is also interesting to mention that Meier himself has stated that his photos have been retouched by malevolent persons and that horizontal lines have been introduced to his photos in order to depict him as a fraud (see p. 134. of Aus den Tiefen des Weltraums)..”

I have already stated why I think the above examples of reasoning are fallacious. If you really want to pick apart an argument, you can find things to quibble about. There is a difference between this, however, and making a careful and unbiased assessment of the good and the bad.

There is an accumulating body of eye-wateringly reductionistic work being done on this topic that you may be missing because you won’t find most of it in mainstream scientific papers. If you insist on that derivation, I put it to you that you are being dogmatic, not scientific.

Here’s some very nice science, while I’m at it, about the artificiality of a well-known Martian structure: http://www.metaresearch.org/solar%20system/cydonia/proof_files/proof.asp

Your definition of very nice science and mine completely differ.

You can read our article on the face on mars to get a summary of our opinion. Regarding the site you reference above, I have read that before. The “corrections” in the picture are completely unjustified and arbitrary, in my opinion from looking at all the images, designed to create the impression of a face – bottom line, this is worthless. The unaltered photos (yes, I’m aware of the filtering, but this would not change the basic structure of the image) speak much more clearly.

Why do you think the image was “filtered” by NASA, Steve? To what possible end?

High pass and low pass filters are absolutely standard for reducing noise. That’s it. I work with electrical equipment as part of my job (clinical neuroelectrophysiology) and you have to have high and low pass filters. This does NOT alter the signal, it merely separates the signal from background noise. Adjusting contrast and exposure is also standard and necessary (there is, in fact, no objective contrast (not even in the human brain) it has to be set somehow. But these kinds of adjustments would not alter the basic configuration of the picture, unlike the website you referenced which distorted the image and added detail. They might as well have painted a picture.

àArg! Now you’re in my specialty of professional training: radar. I could tell you a thing or three about pulling a signal up out of the grass, Steve. Cardinal rule #1- Don’t throw away data. NASA did, quite nakedly, and no painting in the world will change that. And I challenge your conception that the metaresearch guys base their work on the imagery to which you seem to refer.

This also represents yet another logical fallacy (you know I love them) that of inconsistency.

The website author criticizes NASA for doing basic filtering of the picture, then bases his entire case on a hugely altered image.

I might mention here that many of our DP witnesses were employed by NASA, airbrushing out unwanted ET artifacts from your country's photos of the Moon, Mars, etc. before they were sold on to the taxpayers who unwittingly fund this criminal operation. No, I cannot show them to you. You’ll have to evince some reasonableness in the context of utterly overwhelming corroborating evidence. And you'll have to look at it. And I know that testimony is not scientific proof.

But this is not differential equations. This is common rationality.

We seem to have run aground on semantics and an abnegation of common sense, I'm afraid, and I really wonder whether the "show me" requirement is feasible given that I am in Australia, and you are over on the other side of the planet. (I'm a native Bostonian, myself.) About all I can do is point you to one of the (still irreproducible) sound recordings made about 23 years ago of an extraterrestrial spacecraft, which you can find in the “Free Downloads” link @ http://www.andyettheyfly.com/. This may be easier than imagery. Otherwise, both of us must of course rely on our judgment of what we read, etc. in order to find the evidence of fact which leads to proof.

I needn’t remind you that, outside the legal sense of the word, proof is very subjective.

It sure is. Stop trying to portray you assumptions as common sense. If you can’t show me convincing evidence, then fine, that does not negate the requirement for it prior to acceptance of your claims.

As I said, we are not dealing with differential equations here, Steve, where it is POSSIBLE that there was no time to “easily” duplicate Meier’s photos. Given the extremely damaging legal situation you’ve got yourself into, it is hard to imagine that time could not be found to at least provide some substantiation of your vile calumny of Herr Meier. This is common sense, not voodoo statistics.

I have substantiated my opinions plenty in my e-mails. Now that I have spent the time to update myself on the latest claims, I will likely update my website and may publish and extended article to reflect that.

Much obliged. I’ll give you a prominent link. How are your hits? I’d love to help in this respect.

Hits are pretty low. Skeptical site don’t draw much attention, but it’s in the thousands per month.

àThis gets us back to how cool you are perceived to be by the bulk of the on-line population. By my reckoning we are several hundred thousand times more cool than you, minus perhaps the intangible component of the intellectual caliber and/or social influence – or lack thereof - of our burgeoning international readership.

Similarly, by what logic can you sweepingly dismiss the logically and independently corroborated sworn testimony of over 500 (!) military, intelligence, and corporate insiders who petition to testify under oath before Congress under threat of prosecution for perjury? This is simply irrational. Have you seen the line-up? You’ve even got the former head of the UK Defense force and famous US astronauts. And many of these officials were trusted with our thermonuclear arsenal, for goodness sake. And please don’t insult your intelligence and mine by telling me that even the (500+) most reputable people can make honest mistakes, because this is not the observation of a magician’s performance. In many cases these individuals spent their entire career secretly reverse-engineering ET hardware.

Argument from authority. This is a logical fallacy. Testimonials are unreliable because they are tainted by personal belief, which can be overwhelmed by emotion, and the many mechanisms of self-deception to which the human mind is susceptible. There is an extensive literature on this topic. I understand that this is probably the single greatest source of disagreement between our respective camps. You cannot imagine how so many otherwise respectable people can be so wrong, and I take it as a clearly established fact of human nature. Either way, the only way to objectively resolve the disagreement is with evidence that does not rely upon anyone’s personal word.

We’re really skating very close to reductio ad absurdum here, I think. How can you take the word of the specialists who do the tests? You can’t, by your criterion. You have to hold the metal sample in your own warm hand and insert it into the spectrum analyzer yourself, and then the device may possibly be faulty (It’s logically possible.), and those who attempt to repeat the analysis may possibly (It’s logically possible. ) also possibly have faulty devices (It’s logically possible ), even if their professional testimony was valid, (which it is logically not) etcetera, ad nauseam.

But this is your reductio not mine. As I said before, I rely upon the research of others, but I examine it skeptically. I don’t trust any single investigator, that’s why I rely upon reproducibility – even for basic medical claims without financial implications. But I further take into consideration the objectivity of the researcher, the quality of their other research, the prior probability of their claim, the validity of their logic, etc. And even then you can get burned by outright fraud – which again comes back to reproducibility. Scientists usually do not base any firm conclusions on single studies for this reason.

Also, all scientists will provide their raw data on request, and often do so to the journals to which they submit their work. No scientist would ever get published if he refused to show his raw data and just said “trust me.”

àThere’s a shadow science that doesn’t get into the stuff we read and is joined at the hip to the shadow government. - Senator Daniel K. Inouye: “There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, it’s own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.”

I’ve taken the liberty of uploading the Disclosure Project Executive Summary, squeezed down to a 87kb zipped .txt file from its original 7.7mb .pdf file http://www.gaiaguys.net/DPSummaryNoDocsTXT.zip

Thanks - I downloaded it for my files.

My pleasure, Steve. Please don’t hesitate to let me know how I can assist. I have a lot more which should, by rights, be of enormous interest to you.

But, regarding the rest of your e-mail let me tell you what I am willing and not willing to do. Skepticism is not my career, and UFOlogy is one small part of my skeptical activities. I have no intention of dedicating my life to a thorough examination of the overwhelming mountain of minute data collected by the UFO community.

When I hear the expression “the UFO community” I want to reach for my Lugar. One of the items which emerged from the DP witnesses (some of whom actually WERE the “Men in Black”) were the reports that prominent “Ufologists”, “Ceriologists” and various “Skeptics” were bought off with a cool US$1 million. I’m not casing aspersions.

Damn, how can I get my $1million. I pretty much know everyone prominent in the skeptics movement and I don’t know anyone with that kind of money. But hell, if I wanted to use my skeptical powers for greed I could invent a medical scam tomorrow that would make me hundreds of millions of dollars.

àIf you had used numerals, I would have thought you’d had the shakes as you hit the zero key, Steve. I take it that you are grossly exaggerating for comic effect? I ask in all seriousness, because this is the sort of price range the black ops/multinational petrochemical/pharmaceutical industry deals with.

I know that the UFO community is not monolithic, and I did not mean to imply that. I was just referring to the large amount of data that collectively is out there for examination.

àMost of it hardly qualifies for the term data. Most of it is state sponsored disinformation, in my learned opinion.

If you want to use that as an excuse to dismiss my opinions, go right ahead, thanks for playing, and we can end this conversation right here.

This is no game for me. We are literally talking about the immanent fate of our planet which obviously cannot continue to rely upon exponential economic grow on this finite and diminishing resource base. And terraforming Mars is no logical solution, I’m sure you’ll agree.

I agree to a point, but (this is way tangential) all prior predictions of calamity due to running out of resources have been proven wrong by the passage of time. There is one human resource that is not limited by a zero sum dynamic – that of human ingenuity. We always seem to find a way to squeeze more out of the resources we have – and not just a little more but orders of magnitude more. I wouldn’t sell us short. But I agree, as a species we need to be much better at protecting our environment and resources.

àThank goodness for all those free energy devices gathering dust of shelves, eh? And an answer to radwaste, etc.

However, what I think is reasonable is this. As background, I have read many books and countless articles and websites on UFOlogy,

and have spent much time in conversation with proponents of the ETH. I think I have sufficient breadth and depth of knowledge in the area, combined with a scientific background and extensive experience in skeptical analysis and all that that involves.

Can you see the logical paradox here? Hint: think Kurt Gödel. :-) You can’t have it both ways.

This is not an attempt to offer myself as an authority, which I have never done outside of my subspecialty in medicine, but rather is simply an attempt to counter any dismissal of my opinions as uninformed or thoughtless.

As an aside, arguments should always stand or fall on their own, based upon their relevance, logic, and factual basis. (The argument from authority does not do this, but rather relies solely or predominantly on the authority of the person making the statement.)

Further, anyone making a specific claim to truth has the burden of proving their claim, especially if it is a new or extraordinary claim or is outside of mainstream established science. What I and many of my fellow skeptics have frequently encountered among ETH proponents is the “three foot stack” phenomenon, which is the challenge to thoroughly digest a three foot stack of documents (a stack which is ever growing and changing) or else not dare to have an opinion on the subject. This is not fair or reasonable. This is a strategy of obfuscation.

Rather, having reviewed a representative sample of the best evidence is sufficient to render an informed opinion. What I think is reasonable is for proponents to make their best case in a cogent and accessible way. I will make you the offer I have made to many before you – rather than overwhelming me with hundreds of pages of data, let’s focus our efforts on one piece (or chain) of evidence. Give me whatever you think is the best most solid evidence for the ETH and I will be happy to review it.

Done with alacrity. See: my previously ignored reply to this. “About all I can do is point you to one of the (still irreproducible) sound recordings made about 23 years ago of an extraterrestrial spacecraft, which you can find in the “Free Downloads” link @ http://www.andyettheyfly.com/. This may be easier than imagery.”

I’ve heard it. The problem with sound recordings is that they are difficult to validate. There is really no way to determine what method was used to get sound onto a recording. Also, even if I am willing to grant you that the recordings are irreproducible (which I am not, but I have yet to more thoroughly examine the claims) this cannot represent credible evidence for alien spacecraft. A recording of an unknown sound is just that, unknown. To conclude from that that the sound is an alien spacecraft is another logical fallacy – the argument from ignorance. What is it about the sound that demands an ET explanation?

àIt’s the independently verified corroborated circumstances of the recording, for a start. Plus rationality in the context of a continuum of logically coherent events. It cannot reasonably be removed from that framework.

By coincidence I am in the process of dealing with a ghost hunter who believes she has sound recordings of ghosts.

àWait until you read Steven Greer’s book. You think what I’ve told you so far has been whacky?

àYou don’t have to try to validate them as ET, but don’t throw them out as a distant data point either.

Common sense and the above perspective points toward an unknown origin, given that nobody on this planet has succeeded in finding a prosaic origin, in spite of the pressure I mention below so to do.

So, I will look into this deeper, but the very nature of this evidence is too weak to have a significant impact.

Also, in order to conclude that the sound cannot be replicated there really needs to have been a credible effort to exhaustively search for methods to replicate it, and not just by one guy (no matter what his credentials) at least a couple different people should have had a crack at it.

àPlease do. And it seems prudent to posit that – given the shift of the global power structure that ET contact will likely engender – if the plutocrats could have, they would have. Reasonable? Like so much from these folks from the stars, these sounds are superficially insignificant seeming, but only superficially.

As an example of what I am talking about, the Fox sisters, who launched the spiritualist movement in the 1800’s, used to produce rapping noises during their séances. For forty years no one could explain how this was done. Not a single expert had any clue, and every hypothesis was proven wrong – for decades. This remained a mystery (but just that, a mystery). Many argued it was proof of spiritualism (based upon the argument from ignorance). Then, in their old age they confessed that they had learned to crack their toes and produce the loud rapping noise. The mystery was finally solved. That’s the inherent problem with basing a conclusion on a mystery.

àYou would of course know from your study of the UFO phenomenon that there are very harsh federal legal prohibitions in the United States regarding all things ET or presumed to be ET. It’s outwardly to do with exobiohazards, but the provisos that forbid things like even telephone contact with anyone during your potentially indefinite period of solitary confinement puts the lie to that one. If you even found a piece of an extraterrestrial’s used kleenex, you’d have the goons onto you like there was no tomorrow, trying to wring whatever intelligence out of it they could.

When people ask me about evolution, I don’t just refer them to the 20 or so books I have read on the subject, tell them to take a few college courses, etc. I can provide for them a cogent summary of the best evidence for the fact of evolution, tailored to however much time and interest they have in the subject.

àI’m sorry to tell you that what we now understand about human evolution will infuriate you at least as much as it will the stupid Biblical fundamentalists.

Scientists summarize their research all the time. What I am saying is, you have a claim, if you wish me to accept it then don’t just point me to the stack of evidence and tell me to fend for myself, give me a cogent summary of what you think is the best evidence. But I repeat myself.

Volumes of low quality data never will. You cannot substitute quantity for quality.

One other comment, you frequently make jabs about the quality of my science. Let me give you my honest opinion on this topic. Most UFO proponents haven’t the slightest idea what real science is. That is the real reason they are often dismissed as kooks, why most respectable scientists won’t touch them with a ten foot pole, and why our opinions differ.

This is a non sequitur. I quite agree with the above and quite disagree with your characterization of me, and my work as “most ufologists”. People here think most medical practitioners are quacks, but I don’t have reason to believe you are.

Bear in mind I came to this very late, and my unpopular support for the Disclosure Project, Meier and “crop circles” has ostracized me from suborned “ufology”.

My point is that in my past experience this is what I have almost universally encountered.

I also hobnob with other scientists, so I know what they think. The topic is tainted in academic circles as being kooky, but I think that many proponents of the ETH bring that impression down upon themselves by their attitude, which is hostile to critical examination and skepticism, overly demanding of acceptance of their fantastical theories, and often angry at the fact that they are not immediately accepted.

àThis is to be expected if they are being manipulated to do just that. See Lugar comments regarding ufologists’ stupidity, too.

àPlease practice what you preach. Michael Horn sent hundreds of letters to astronomers and got almost nothing back. Why? Because he’s not a member of your academic circles, who lack common courtesy.

A good start would be more patience with criticism and more care at constructing logically valid arguments and not overstating claims.(again, I am not applying this a priori to you, this is my experience in general)

The core of science is this – creatively thinking of all plausible explanations for a phenomenon (a process often dismissed as “speculation). The explanations, let’s call them hypotheses, but be testable in some way. They must make a prediction about future observations, the results of experiments, or it must be possible to infer from the hypothesis that other correlations must be true. Scientists then devise clever ways to test the various hypotheses, and in the process some will be proven false and discarded, some will be modified, and some will be supported (but can never be proven 100%).

BINGO! You demand proof from me at the same time demanding that proof is impossible. Should we call it a day here, shake hands Masonically, and get back to our other work?

àGood career move. And the mere fact that you replied is enough for me to go on.

àVery apt. Ignorant dupes, almost to a man. They don’t believe in absolute truths, nor are they even aware of the historical identity of the triune deity to who they offer their abject obeisance.

I think we are having trouble with the semantics of proof. I think if you read again you will see that I never demanded proof from you, just credible evidence. There is a difference.

àYes indeed, and I’ve done about all I can do to try to show you how I think credible evidence should be afforded the respect it deserves, in spite of the fact that it strictly speaking PROVES nothing. But we agree that science doesn’t provide PROOF, per se.

There’s so much more I could offer you, but I don’t do this as a living, and have to rationalize my workload. At least until you take another look at the new evidence you have so far not commented upon. I ask again, What have you read lately?

This process never stops, because someone can always think of a new hypothesis that’s better than the current ones, and new evidence may always be brought to bear.

A good scientist is the harshest skeptic of his own claims and hypotheses, will look at all hypotheses, fairly assess probability and evidence, not exclude difficult evidence, and will welcome criticism from colleagues, even those with harshly different opinions. A good scientist will not invent ad hoc reasons to explain experimental failures or dismiss evidence of a hypothesis he does not favor, will not makes claims which exceed the evidence, and will not offer a hypothesis which cannot be tested and offer nothing but excuses for this.

I have come to my conclusions regarding the quality of the science being done on all sides, although I am always willing to change my mind in the face of new evidence. I hope you will reevaluate what you have presented to me as “evidence” in light of the above.

Thank you for your time and effort, Steve. I hope to hear from you about the above if you still feel there is anything to be gained.

By removing document imagery, these huge files are somewhat more Internet friendly, but I strongly urge you to visit www.disclosureproject.org to obtain all the deleted facsimile documentation, etc. It’s well worth it. You DO have a need to know.

Here’s the above in .pdf http://www.gaiaguys.net/DPSummaryNoDocs.zip @594kb

And here’s the 500 page Briefing Document. http://www.gaiaguys.net/DPBriefingDocument.zip @ 2.29mb

And I implore you to study the work of Professor Eltjo Haselhoff www.deepeningcomplexity.com who has done a wonderfully scientific overview of so-called crop circles. (I personally prefer the term “field form”, connoting a concisely holistic elucidation of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s wonderfully iconoclastic Hypothesis of Formative Causation ... the nature of nature. www.sheldrake.org If you call yourself a scientist, you owe it to yourself to familiarize yourself with Sheldrake’s work, not just have a scornful glance and leave.)

And if you are still clinging to the misconception that the gigantic and breathtakingly complex mathematical patterns in fields around the world are hoaxes by school kids, you should really change occupations. I’m dead serious, Steve.

And what do you professional Skeptics make of this, I wonder? Schoolkids? I wonder from what planet? :-)
http://www.5thworld.com/Chilbolton/CodedForms.Chilbolton.html
http://www.5thworld.com/Chilbolton/CodedForms.Crabwood.html

And please have a read of this brief seminal work entitled “Anomalous baseline effects in mainstream emotion research using psychophysiological variables” which scientifically proves human precognition. http://www.gaiaguys.net/pa2000.pdf

I’m sorry I don’t have much on the Sphinx erosion, but here’s something which provides some references. www.catchpenny.org/sphinx.html

But don’t worry about that. I’d much rather you answer me straight if you are a Freemason, actually, as this is becoming known to us as a surprisingly relevant consideration in our work. No answer is also an answer.

I very genuinely hope that we can continue to correspond on these quite confronting (to most of us, anyway) topics, and I look forward to reading what you have to say in reply. In spite of the fact that you transparently see all this as delusional and plain stupidity on my part, I remain convinced that a rational and scrupulous examination of the evidence will eventually start to dissolve your anachronistic preconceptions of the world we live in. And since I can’t show it to you, I expect no response to the observation my family and I made of the (illegally) totally unmarked black (night camouflaged) attack helicopter that flew low over our remote homestead some months ago. The National Security people here agreed that it was very seriously illegal and they seemed to take our reports very seriously, but they never got back to us as they had promised to do.

Dare I ask for the party line on “chemtrails”? www.gaiaguys.net/chemtrails.htm

And last but by no means least ... a comment from you perhaps on the following, please?

Former Secretary of Defense William Cohen at an April 1997 counterterrorism conference sponsored by former Senator Sam Nunn. Quoted from DoD News Briefing, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, Q&A at the Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and U.S. Strategy, University of Georgia, Athens, Apr. 28, 1997. : "Others [terrorists] are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves… So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations…It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our [counterterrorism] efforts."

Thanks again for the time and effort you’re making with this. Rest assured that we will promulgate the fruits of your study as widely as our resources allow.

Yours faithfully,
Dyson
www.gaiaguys.net

You seem to be confusing philosophical skepticism and scientific skepticism. This is a common problem because the skeptical community generally uses the term skepticismto refer to scientific skepticism, while philosophers use it to mean philosophical skepticism, and the lay public often interprets it to mean cynicism. Its a bad term, we know, but we have struggled for something better, so far with disastrous results. (I am open to suggestions)

Philosophical skepticism, in the tradition of Descarte, is the idea that we cannot objectively know anything (except the fact of our own personal existence) because it is ultimately based upon a deeper unverified assumption. However, even Descarte only meant this as a starting point to wipe away the dogma and assumptions of his age and start with a blank slate to begin to develop a new philosophy from the ground up from basic principles.

I am not proposing the practical application of philosophical skepticism, that we cannot trust or know anything.

My position is that of scientific skepticism (I believe Carl Sagan was the first person to use this term, and it has been generally adopted by skeptics). This means applying rigorous scientific methods and critical thinking to all claims to truth. Some of the basic principles of this are:

- Carefully analyze all arguments (especially your own) to make sure the logic is valid and the premises are adequately supported.

- The burden of proof lies with the claimant, or with the one attempting to change or contradict what has generally been established and accepted (i.e. a competing claim has already met a reasonable burden of proof).

- "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish." - David Hume 1711-1776

- "Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvelous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified." - Thomas H. Huxley (1825-1895)

- Science does not deal with absolute metaphysical certitude. Rather, it is a probabilistic endeavor, and all conclusions are tentative. However, reliable evidence can accumulate to the point where it would be absurd to withhold at least provisional assent to a particular conclusion.

From a practical point of view, skeptics also do not advocate the application of extensive rigorous examination to everyday mundane claims. This is impractical and unnecessary. But, the requirement for rigor and evidence increases as the prior probability of a claim decreases for example because it requires new huge assumptions about the nature of reality, or it contradicts what is believed to be well established scientific facts.

Further, it is important to understand the difference between skepticism and denial (I wrote an article about this, but I dont recall if its online yet). Creationists, for example, are evolution deniers. No amount of evidence will convince them of the reality of evolution. They find fault with any evidence, and will forever raise the bar beyond existing evidence. However, they engage in logical fallacy and misstatement of fact to make their case. But it has been very helpful to engage the creationists because it has helped me to be vigilant against the tactics of denial in my own arguments against claims I do not accept.

I know you must feel that I am a UFO denier,at least to some extent. Just as you can tell that I think to some degree you are a true believer(I know you dont like the term, but bear with me), and just as creationists think that I am a true believerof evolution. The trick is not to fall into the false dichotomy of always assuming your opponent is a true believer or denier. Good scientific skepticism is a balancing act between the two, requiring judgment and fairness, and often there isnt an objective resolution because there are subjective elements, such as how much evidence is enoughand what evidence is reliable.Such judgments are unavoidable, but I find it most useful to focus mainly on the objective components specifically the logical of arguments and their factual premises.

In this way rational argument becomes a mutual and cooperative search for truth (with a small t), where both sides are willing to examine all arguments for logic and evidence in order to find common ground and then build carefully from there. Unfortunately, I so rarely get to engage in such discourse (outside of my profession, where it is standard and expected although certainly not universal). Most people see argument as a contest they want to win at all costs. Therefore, I truly welcome anyone who can point out a logical fallacy in my arguments. This can only help me improve my thinking (which is in line with the basic principle that science is a journey, not a destination). Whereas I frequently encounter opponents (not you) who see pointing out a logical fallacy as a personal attack, and then turn around and attack my character and not my arguments.

Back to the sound recording you seem to have missed my primary point about the argument from ignorance. The Fox sisters example was meant as a single cautionary tale about the weakness of the argument from ignorance. Essentially, the argument was that for decades experts were unable to explain the rapping noises the Fox sisters were able to summon during their séances. Therefore, the argument went, the noises were spiritual in nature. With hindsight we can now say that the noises were mundane in nature (the cracking of their toes) and the experts failed to consider this possibility.

With regard to the sound recordings, the argument is that experts have failed to explain or reproduce the sound, therefore it is ET in nature. But this is the same argument from ignorance that no miserably failed when applied to the Fox sisters, and why arguments from ignorance are considered logical fallacies.

The expand on this the failure to reproduce the sounds could be due to the fact that the experts have not been rigorous or extensive enough in their methods, or the sound is something with which they do not have direct experience (but is earthly and not ET), or, simply, the real solution has just not occurred to them. This latter possibility is not far fetched. Scientists have a very poor track record in detecting deliberate fraud. Stage magicians can fool scientists all the time, unless they also have expertise in such tricks. Further, any single event, occurrence, piece of evidence, etc. can be the result of quirky chance, seized upon in an opportunistic way. The Fox sisters made a very quirky an unusual discovery by chance, that they could crack their toes at will and produce a rather loud rapping noise. They then seized upon this chance discovery to fool scores of people, including experts.

Further, arguments from ignorance can only be used to rule out possibilities not confirm one particular conclusion. Not knowing what the sounds are DOES NOT equal, in any logical way, the sounds being ET in origin. And it is completely unreasonable to conclude that the ET hypothesis is the only one remaining. This is a failure of imagination, and a failure to apply the general scientific principle of fairly considering all alternatives.

I would like to stop there fore now. I think it might be best for us to proceed one point at a time to see if we can find common ground. If we cant agree on the argument from ignorance principle, it will continue to be a stumbling block in any further discussions that we have.

Thank you very much indeed! I only wish I could express these axioms so eloquently, and I hasten to add that I have no areas of disagreement at all with you an any of what you just wrote, except the fact that I are not arguing that the Plejaran beamship sounds - in strict isolation from their verifiably factual contextual background - are to be accepted as ET.

We supply this in the first instance as intriguing evidence of something VERY worthy of scientific scrutiny, with logical sequels to be similarly scritinised. This applies equally to the Disclosure Project and field forms.

We are SO like minded about detached amicable debate free of the ad hominem violence I previously encountered with the Australian Skeptics (for example) that I really feel at this point, that we're not both going to wander away from this matter, so I gratefully accept your sound reductionistic approach and sensible regrouping.

I just want at this point to try to let you know that you are really preaching to the converted. To the very best of my ability, I have tried to approach all these extraordinarily heterodox areas of research scientifically. I got it with my mother's proverbial milk, and it is an integral part of my being which has served me very very well in the past and I have no intention of abandoning it now. But our workload increases exponentially as more and more victims of the Untouchable Pedophile Elite find our site and contact us with corroborative testimony, so we may just have to pick at this thing we've got going for a bit instead of maintaining our frenetic egghead pingpong match. :-) I imagine you have other work too, and I have always been interested in neuroelectrophysiology, and have long wanted to be able to pick the brain (no pun intended) of a clinical neuroelectrophysiologist. Here's to living long enough to having the opportunity!

The only way to avoid the argument-from-ignorance black hole is to recognize when sufficient evidence is provided to spur scientific study, because it's a blindingly self-evident truth that unless we start to look into these things, we'll never overcome our ignorance.

Without trying to sound patronizing, I will do my best to help you with what I understand to be your unsurmounted difficulties in the application of our commonly held logic, and very warmly welcome that opportunity you so reasonably provide me to do so, and in the noble spirit it is offered. I want to help you to practice what you preach.

Remember that I'm a generalist epistimologist, which is about as far from clinical neuroelectrophysiology as we can get, so the common ground criterion is going to be uphill for you, Steve, and I'll try hard not to lose sight of the difficulties you have taken on for yourself.

What I want to know now is what you have exposed yourself to recently regarding what you would probably characterize as "psychocultural phenomena" ...

- weather and seismic/volcanic weaponry (longitudinally polarized electromagnetic wave/scalar interferometers),

- the 9/11 hoax, etc. and the history of public deception by illegal political regimes, for a start.

I won't bother with Meier or the Disclosure Project until you've done your homework.

This is, in my opinion, a necessary prerequisite to avoiding the arguments-from-ignorance which I respectfully perceive to be your biggest obstacle to epistemological progress. Please let me know if you want some direction through the cyberspace cesspool of deliberate disinformation about these topics. I personally prefer trying to profit from other peoples' mistakes instead of insisting on making them all myself.

So it seems we have sufficient common ground of philosophy that further discussion won't be totally worthless. Starting from that common ground, I think I have an idea where our logical paths differ. You mentioned that the sounds are worthy of scientific investigation - I won't argue with that, and agree that by themselves they cannot be used to establish the reality of any particular phenomenon (I'm paraphrasing) but are meaningful when placed in the proper context.

That is where we differ - on the context. Let's step back for a minute and think about that (as much as possible) from an outside perspective. I think the "context" argument is really a subtle form of circular logic. The sounds are likely ET because they were recorded in a context of other information that suggests ET, but the sounds themselves become part of the evidence to support a "context" for ET. The same can be true of each bit of data - of itself it does not represent solid evidence for ET, but when placed in the ET context it seems compelling. The problem with this style of reasoning is that there is no way to know that you are not trapped in an elaborate mesh of circular logic.

This is where the creative and imaginative aspect of scientific discovery comes in. Let's step back and imagine different worlds. In one world, we are being visited by aliens who are being coy, they are revealing themselves but only in an ambiguous way, while shadow governments try to both exploit this fact and cover it up. In another world, we are not being visited by aliens but human psychology, with it's hardwired desire for meaning, a profound connection to the universe, and benevolent parental figures, has collectively evolved many mythologies to meet these psychological needs. In the last century an alien mythology has evolved, complete with bogey men to help define the righteousness of the enlightened. There are other hypotheses were can generate (perhaps we are being visited by our descendents from the future, for example) but let's stick to these two.

Both paradigms are capable of explaining all available data, and when you look at the world through one filter or the other, everything seems to fit, everything is very compelling. When Horn looks at the Asket photo affair, he sees men in black framing and innocent prophet. When I do, I see a pathetic hoax and an even more pathetic attempt to explain it away with ad hoc fallacies.

But as scientists we are not doomed to an endless battle of competing philosophies without hope of objective resolution. We can understand that explaining all available data is a necessary but NOT sufficient criteria for scientific validation. What we must do, then, to be truly scientific is to think of ways to test the two hypotheses. What kind of observation would falsify one or the other, or would help differentiate between the two?

An object that is undeniably alien that is available openly to the scientific community and, after exhaustive examination, there is broad agreement that the object is indeed alien.

A clear-cut cultural discontinuity (information or technology that is separated by a broad and undeniable gap from anything human).

High quality video of an undeniable spacecraft with good lighting, objective scale, movement that cannot be faked, and survives investigation designed to detect deception.

Video or photos of alien landscapes, or of known extraterrestrial locations (the moon, or any of the other planets of our own solar system) that are not of known NASA or other space agency origin.

For the PCH, there is no one piece of definitive evidence, like there is for the ETH, because, for example, definitive proof of a hoax does not mean that we are not also being visited by aliens. But the PCH predicts that none of the above evidence will surface, and that all evidence being put forward will be of such a nature that it does not rule out the PCH. It also predicts that the alien phenomenon will, to a large degree, follow cultural boundaries (this is rapidly being eroded by the internet, but not completely as language barriers are still perceptible). It further predicts that cultural antecedents can be found to the many components of the alien phenomenon.

My position is this: at present the best inference we can make is in favor of the PCH because its predictions are so far all correct, and no evidence has surfaced that would falsify the PCH and support the ETH.

And this leads us to the next phase of the discussion, and the list of items you have below. If we can agree on the above, then we can go forward and examine pieces of evidence to see if they meet the criteria for validating the ETH and falsifying the PCH. So far, I have yet to see it. But I want to make sure you understand that this is why large volumes of evidence will not end the debate, because both paradigms can explain large volumes of evidence, numerous testimonials, etc. But one piece of something undeniably alien would end the debate. Also, from a practical point of view, I don't think either of us have time to write tomes on the breadth of evidence. Rather, let's pick one piece of evidence and try to dig deep. I will let you choose that evidence, based upon whatever you think is the best and most solid evidence for the ETH.

So far, you have given me the sound recordings, and I think we have agreed that this depends upon the argument from ignorance. You tried to rescue this evidence by saying it needs to be placed in the proper context, but I hope I have dispelled that argument.

So, I ask again, what would be, in your opinion, the most solid piece of evidence you are aware of for the ETH, trying to focus on evidence that is amenable to investigation?

To answer your question about my past reading, I have read numerous articles and websites on both sides of the argument for crop circles, chemtrails, holy land archaelogy, and the 9/11 hoax. I am not very familiar with formative causation or weather weaponry. I think you have to agree, however, that all of these topics are at best controversial - subsets of the PCH vs ETH. We can focus on one of them, and again I would ask you to direct me to what you believe to be the best evidence (and I would accept a chain of evidence, not just a single "piece", but please try to keep it bite-sized).

We seem to have hit the snag represented by you not informing yourself of recent events, but I had a go anyway.

So it seems we have sufficient common ground of philosophy that further discussion won't be totally worthless.

“… won't be totally worthless”? What an unrealistic degree of pessimism when you’ve yet to even study the evidence I’m providing you with. If you do study this material with reasonable logic, and still manage to retain your current opinions, you will be perceived as barking mad by those who made the effort and risked the ridicule to have familiarized themselves with what is now in the public domain. I reckon the scales will fall from your eyes long before that happens, and you may even use your influence to spread the truth. Certainly your stated methodologies are impeccable. It’s your application of them that I take issue with.

Starting from that common ground, I think I have an idea where our logical paths differ. You mentioned that the sounds are worthy of scientific investigation - I won't argue with that, and agree that by themselves they cannot be used to establish the reality of any particular phenomenon

We’re skating too close for comfort to philosophical skepticism here, I think. As long as you remove the sounds from their context you’re abusing the function of reductionism and you must know there are intractable logical problems with reductionism on its own.

You’re looking for evidence, right? Not proof. Don’t throw away data if you want to establish the truth. It won’t serve you.

The sounds are likely ET because they were recorded in a context of other information that suggests ET, but the sounds themselves become part of the evidence to support a "context" for ET.

That’s where your train of logic leaves the track. They would self evidently be corroborative, of course, and all the available evidence would naturally point in the same general direction: towards the truth, which I understand to be absolute and immutable.

The same can be true of each bit of data - of itself it does not represent solid evidence for ET,

Say what? So what is a “bit” of data? (More data). This is a facile misuse of the word/idea. Irreducible data don’t come that way except in mathematics. (Even then if you’ve read anything lately about infinitesimals) But isn’t the logical collation of these mythical databits just what has to be done to provide the only adequate perspective of the entire subject under investigation? This is exactly what reductionism is designed to provide. Have you just pulled the plug on your own system? Occam must be spinning.

Not “seems” compelling. It IS compelling. Objectivity is a requirement for the perspective needed to avoid not seeing the forest for the figurative chloroplasts.

The problem with this style of reasoning is that there is no way to know that you are not trapped in an elaborate mesh of circular logic.

You are not trapped in any circular logic. There’s nothing very elaborate about anything as simple as ”The sounds are likely ET because they were recorded in a context of other information that suggests ET, but the sounds themselves become part of the evidence to support a "context" for ET”. How can you make a “mesh” of two factors?

This is where the creative and imaginative aspect of scientific discovery comes in.

I’m so glad you said that, but all we’ll need to get started is good old stochastic reasoning and a tiny dash of common sense.

In one world, we are being visited by aliens who are being coy, they are revealing themselves but only in an ambiguous way,

Of course this is your though exercise, right? There is nothing remotely ambiguous about the hard material evidence supplied by the Disclosure Project (& Meier) even if I can’t airmail you a metal sample, and even though you’ve still not done your reading. I don’t blame you for being a busy man. I don’t know how anyone could do it adequately and still be a full time medico and academic.

In my very first email to you five days and about fifteen thousand words ago, I wrote this:

I'm afraid that you have indeed been the victim of a subtle deception by people who are trying to make you look foolish if they can, but as long as you continue to erroneously make the a priori assumption that all people come from the planet Earth, all your hypotheses will be based on an egregious canard. These PEOPLE are unimaginable smarter than us, and they are our relatives.

Please dump the erroneous idea, which is thwarting your understanding, that these ET people who are in contact with Meier are NOT HUMAN. You must assume that they are if your subsequent assumptions about the nature of this ET contact is ever going make sense to you.

You will know that I am a very patient man until I perceive sophistry. I’ll give you enough rope to hang yourself if that is your requirement, but if you continue to contradict your erudition with these logical flaws – not to mention not telling me what you’ve read lately about this topic, I’ll just give up on you. No offense, please. Just the harsh language of truth.

See above. Same thing. Your train is hurtling along right off the rails now, having relied on a false initial premise to construct your serial logic.

Psychology is not hard wired. Electrical devices are hard wired. You are here relying on an overextended metaphor. Surely you can see this? This is language abuse.

But isn’t everything? It’s my view that terrestrial human psychology is about the most loosely connected component of Creation I can think of. And don’t you know about our sister universe?

Part atavism and the desire to fall in behind the Alpha types, and part ancient recurring experiences from before we started getting too smart to maintain that tack of theirs by us taking notes.

Unwarranted assumption based on understandable but ignorant supposition. Wait until you read the material. You’ll see an egg (laid by the last proto-chicken) must precede the first chicken. You’ll also learn the etymology and definition of the word “god”.

Do not confound “psychological needs” with the symptoms of common religious toxicity.

Much older than that! And no, the recent one was engineered by Hitler’s puppet-masters. Sorry to hijack what remains of your exercise, but you seem to have already abandoned that characterization.

Oh, yes. I recall now that all these retired MiBs who’ve come out of the shadows to join the Disclosure Project were simply mistaken about the nature of their careers. Sorry if I sound sarky, Steve, but that is the illogical premise upon which this serial logic teeters. And the idiom bogey men is a transparently slippery way of introducing jejune absurdity, and off-side.

There are other hypotheses were can generate (perhaps we are being visited by our descendents from the future, for example) but let's stick to these two.

Not me. It’s simplistic. (Simplified to the point of absurdity.) Reality is much more likely to return some knowledge. Remember what Fred Hoyle said?

All available data? Please. You won’t examine it. And they are not paradigms, they are your own manufactured illogical thought exercises based on your fallacious reasoning and woefull ignorance, and as far as I can tell, since I still can’t elicit a straight answer from you, you have yet to even study the references I’ve taken the trouble to collect for you, let alone looked for more yourself. You’ll find empirical evidence and it will require logical reasoning and understand and properly applying the scientific process, defined as hypothesis testing, the experimental method and comprehending probability.

Since you seem to be happy to do psychology as well as being a high profile Skeptic and a practicing clinical neuroelectrophysiologist, You’d probably know at least as much as I do about the mechanisms of denial, and how the sufferer will go to enormous lengths to insulate his conscious mind from that which “cannot be”. Valid information, logically processed, rips away this insulation. I’m just glad you’re not a Christian, Jew or Muslim, or I’d REALLY be pushing it uphill.

I don’t. I won’t. It doesn’t work that way except in facile thought exercises.

Not to me. Not at all. It’s a big square peg hammered zealously into a small round hole. Do your reading please.

To you and yours maybe. Others who have familaralized themselves with what’s out there now disagree, and just because the luddites disagree too, please don’t lump us cognizanti in with them.

When Horn looks at the Asket photo affair, he sees men in black framing and innocent prophet.

That’s because he is a brilliant person who has very courageously devoted many years of his life to getting his head around this supremely important matter, and my partner’s and my work on field forms (and their underlying Euclidian geometry), mythology, comparative theology, archeology, the Unified Quantum Field, overunity, history, sociology, psychology, current affairs and the Disclosure Project is logically corroborative.

When I do, I see a pathetic hoax and an even more pathetic attempt to explain it away with ad hoc fallacies.

Unless you provisionally accept the premise that we are being dealt with by really smart people … people much smarter that anyone’s work I’ve ever exposed myself to (and I stand on the shoulders of giants) you’ll never escape from your ignorance. You have feet of clay, Steve.

But as scientists we are not doomed to an endless battle of competing philosophies without hope of objective resolution. We can understand that explaining all available data

We’re back to scientific validation again?. What became of empirical evidence? Let’s get that first, OK?

What we must do, then, to be truly scientific is to think of ways to test the two hypotheses. What kind of observation would falsify one or the other, or would help differentiate between the two?

An object that is undeniably alien that is available openly to the scientific community

If you don’t start to pay attention and stop wasting my time, I’m just going to post this and wash my hands of you. Less that 48 hours ago I wrote: àYou would of course know from your study of the UFO phenomenon that there are very harsh federal legal prohibitions in the United States regarding all things ET or presumed to be ET. It’s outwardly to do with exobiohazards, but the provisos that forbid things like even telephone contact with anyone during your potentially indefinite period of solitary confinement puts the lie to that one. If you even found a piece of an extraterrestrial’s used kleenex, you’d have the goons onto you like there was no tomorrow, trying to wring whatever intelligence out of it they could. If you had read any of the material from Dr. Greer, as I told you would be required of you in order to avoid the arguments-from-ignorance, you’d know that there is scientific elite that keeps this stuff right off your table and lethal force is brought to bear.

Former Secretary of Defense William Cohen at an April 1997 counterterrorism conference sponsored by former Senator Sam Nunn. Quoted from DoD News Briefing, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, Q&A at the Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and U.S. Strategy, University of Georgia, Athens, Apr. 28, 1997. : "Others [terrorists] are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves… So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations…It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our [counterterrorism] efforts."

“There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, it’s own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.” - Senator Daniel K. Inouye

“In the councils of Government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military Industrial Complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced

power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.” - President Eisenhower – January 1961

A clear-cut cultural discontinuity (information or technology that is separated by a broad and undeniable gap from anything human).

High quality video of an undeniable spacecraft with good lighting, objective scale, movement that cannot be faked, and survives investigation designed to detect deception.

I told you that they find it morally repugnant to force anyone to believe anything they are not capable of properly dealing with. We don’t hogtie children anymore in open society.

Video or photos of alien landscapes, or of known extraterrestrial locations (the moon, or any of the other planets of our own solar system) that are not of known NASA or other space agency origin.

Meier has done this too, as well as supplied an astonishingly detailed weather report for Venus long before our probes confirmed its verisimilitude. And I told you that the Disclosure Project has corroborated testimony from ex-employees of the secret photolabs where this is airbrushed away.

Five days ago I wrote: I might mention here that many of our DP witnesses were employed by NASA, airbrushing out unwanted ET artifacts from your country's photos of the Moon, Mars, etc. before they were sold on to the taxpayers who unwittingly fund this criminal operation. No, I cannot show them to you. You’ll have to evince some reasonableness in the context of utterly overwhelming corroborating evidence. And you'll have to look at it. And I know that testimony is not scientific proof.

Psycho-cultural … the Giordano Bruno-was-wrong belief system. Sorry. But that’s what it is.

there is no one piece of definitive evidence, like there is for the ETH, because, for example, definitive proof of a hoax does not mean that we are not also being visited by aliens. But the PCH predicts that none of the above evidence will surface, and that all evidence being put forward will be of such a nature that it does not rule out the PCH. It also predicts that the alien phenomenon will, to a large degree, follow cultural boundaries (this is rapidly being eroded by the internet, but not completely as language barriers are still perceptible). It further predicts that cultural antecedents can be found to the many components of the alien phenomenon.

See above comment regarding mythology: Unwarranted assumption based on understandable but ignorant supposition. Wait until you read the material. You’ll see an egg (laid by the last proto-chicken) must precede the first chicken. You’ll also learn the etymology and definition of the word “god”.

can make is in favor of the PCH because its predictions are so far all correct, and no evidence has surfaced that would falsify the PCH and support the ETH.

Interesting choice of words, “surface”. See above again. They don’t call it the black ops for nothing.

And this leads us to the next phase of the discussion, and the list of items you have below. If we can agree on the above,

then we can go forward and examine pieces of evidence to see if they meet the criteria for validating the ETH and falsifying the PCH.

You never will unless you look in the right places and I have pointed them out to you, but you will not look at them.

But I want to make sure you understand that this is why large volumes of evidence will not end the debate,

Not adequately. Not to me and those who have already done the hard work that awaits you.

500+ independent and logically corroborative sworn statements tendered to Congress. Either they did have these experiences (as did I, personally, I remind you) or we’re all mad, somehow sharing independently and logically corroborated fever dreams along with our radar equipment, etc. Either way it warrants a bit of a glance, don’t you think? The following is about Bentwaters, but applies to the whole mess.

Admiral Lord Hill-Norton is a five-star Admiral and the former Head of the British Ministry of Defense who was kept in the dark about the UFO subject during his official capacities. He states “I know a good bit about the Bentwaters incident. I’ve interviewed a number of the people who took part in it, and what I have decided after careful thought, is that there are only two explanations for what happened that night in Suffolk. The first is that the people concerned — including Colonel Halt, who was, at the time, the Deputy Commander of the Base, and a lot of his soldiers — claim that something from outside the Earth’s atmosphere landed at their air force base. They went and stood by it; they inspected it; they photographed it.

The following day they took tests on the ground where it had been and found radioactive traces; they reported this. Colonel Halt wrote a memorandum, which was sent to our Ministry of Defense. He has appeared on British television at least once, to my knowledge — possibly more often — in which he has repeated, effectively, what he said in that memorandum. What he said is what I have just described. That is one explanation — that it actually happened as Colonel Halt reported.

The other explanation is that it didn’t. In that case, one is bound to assume that Colonel Halt and all his men were hallucinating. My position is perfectly clear — either of those explanations is of the utmost defense interest. It has been reported and claimed — and I, myself, have raised it to ministers at the Defense Ministry in this country — that nothing they have been informed about regarding UFOs is of defense interest. Surely, to any sensible person, either of those explanations cannot fail to be of defense interest. That the Colonel of an American Air Force Base in Suffolk and his military men are hallucinating when there are nuclear-armed aircraft on the base — this must be of defense interest.

And, if indeed what he says took place, did take place — and why on Earth should he make it up — then, surely, the entry of a vehicle from outer space (and certainly not manmade) to a defense base in this country also cannot fail to be of defense interest. It simply isn’t any good for our ministers — and the Ministry of Defense in particular — to say that nothing took place that December night in Suffolk, or that it is not of defense interest. It simply isn’t true.”

That’s exactly why you won’t get it, as I have tried to tell you repeatedly. Semi-plausible deniability. Learn what it means please.

Also, from a practical point of view, I don't think either of us have time to write tomes on the breadth of evidence.

No. This overzealous reductionism just takes you deeper into the gloom of ignorance. Let’s scrape all the available evidence together for a change and I’ll give you a hand to climb up onto it and see what you can see. As I said the other day, if you’re in a hole, stop digging. And you’re already in a deep hole. Look up.

I will let you choose that evidence, based upon whatever you think is the best and most solid evidence for the ETH.

See above. You won’t even do an adequate job on what you have. What more can I do? Do your homework and try holism as a useful - indeed necessary - adjunct to your beloved reductionism, and you’ll see the light. Not before.

So far, you have given me the sound recordings, and I think we have agreed that this depends upon the argument from ignorance.

You tried to rescue this evidence by saying it needs to be placed in the proper context, but I hope I have dispelled that argument.

So, I ask again, what would be, in your opinion, the most solid piece of evidence you are aware of for the ETH, trying to focus on evidence that is amenable to investigation?

Go to the And Yet They Fly Website and take your pick. Better yet, take the lot.

To answer your question about my past reading, I have read numerous articles and websites on both sides of the argument for crop circles, chemtrails, holy land archaelogy, and the 9/11 hoax.

“numerous articles and websites” Not ONE BOOK? Name some of these “numerous articles and websites” please. Gore Vidal on 9/11? Haselhof on CCs? Bearden et al on CTs? Finkelstein and Silberman on HLA?

As previously mentioned: Rupert Sheldrake. (Or try Google – you’ll quickly come to gaiaguys.)

I think you have to agree, however, that all of these topics are at best controversial

The consequences of a claim that something is true are entirely irrelevant to the issue of whether the claim is true.

Don’t throw away data. You need this stuff to fill in the gaps in your puzzle. It’s all firmly connected.

Add to that the previously mentioned Untouchable Pedophile Elite/ritualized child abuse. Read The Franklin Cover-up by Senator John DeCamp.

We can focus on one of them, and again I would ask you to direct me to what you believe to be the best evidence (and I would accept a chain of evidence, not just a single "piece", but please try to keep it bite-sized).

I trust I have done that without being nasty, Steve, but I can better understand where your difficulties lie now at least. It cannot be done that way for purely political reasons – theirs and ours, so unless you are capable of looking at the Disclosure Project witness testimony as empirical evidence, and unless you are prepared to honestly examine what I’ve gone to some trouble to provide for you, you’ll never ever see the light, and until you do you’ll never know what you’re missing.

You said, “I would be overjoyed if Earth were in contact with benevolent, wise, and advanced aliens.”

Unfortunately, we seemed to have veered apart. I was trying to establish some logical common ground, but you were not convinced. Although you seemed to understand that much of it was a "though experiment" you still criticized some of the details (which were not the point) and missed the logical big picture.

Perhaps our conversation is over for now. I will look at the evidence you have already sent me/referred me to, and if I find something interesting to comment on, one way or another, I will let you know.

For now, I remain unconvinced. You are still relying heavily on testimonials, which I find completely unreliable because people are emotional, psychological, unreliable conduits of information with fallible memories amenable to suggestion and alteration. You further rely upon the "black ops, shadow government, MIB, plausible deniability engineered by superintelligent ET's" hypothesis to explain the lack of definitive evidence or the availability of open investigation.

But the final stumbling block is this. I think if anyone is going to build a solid and convincing case for the ETH, then it must be built with solid pieces of evidence (this is not hyperreductionist, as you claim). I would prefer to proceed one step at a time, pick a piece of evidence and exam it closely to see if it holds up to scrutiny. You are insisting upon the opposite strategy - to review a large amount of evidence and take in the big picture. What I am saying, and what the core point of my last message was, is that this method is not reliable, because you may just be constructing a house of cards. This is especially true when coupled with the "plausible deniability" theory.

My opinion is also based upon the fact that whenever I have delved deep into any component of the evidence (such as the Asket photos, Horn's prophecy argument, the Meier video, to give examples from this exchange) the evidence is found wanting. I have yet to see a single piece of evidence that holds up to scrutiny.

Before you say it, relax, I know your response. As I said, I will look, as time allows, into the evidence you have already directed me to. If I find anything interesting I will let you know. But, honestly, this treadmill has been going on for decades. Each new generation of enthusiasts points to the three foot stack and says "what have you read lately." But the stack keeps changing, rather than being a cumulative chain of growing reliable evidence, it is a rotating stack of unreliable evidence. It is often used as a way to hide from standard scientific examination, and as a way to dismiss critics. And I can see how it may seem reasonable, because all you are asking for is for someone to be familiar with the evidence, but the way it is used is to obfuscate rather than elucidate.

………………………………………………………………………………………….

Thanks very much for that. I'll reduce it eventually to its component databits, :-). Although we seemingly remain unswayed by each others viewpoints, I continue to be struck by how wonderfully tough and willing you are to stand there and absorb and/or deflect the blows. I respect you enormously for that.

I've discovered the quite simple Catch-22 in this impediment to understanding, and I'll convey it to you as my time permits.

I straight away tapped out the appended reply to your most recent email, and then changed my mind about sending it until I'd given you a reasonable opportunity to examine the evidence that I've provided you, as you told me you would, and tell me if you found anything that interested you. I was intrigued to find out what you would have found “interesting". It seems quite astonishing that you have seemingly not made the effort to at least glance at - for a start - the short published scientific paper (from the U.S.A.) which very scientifically proves human precognition. Or more astonishing yet that you may have looked at it and found it uninteresting. At any rate, it would be logically consistent with your previous stance regarding Meier, et al, the Disclosure Project, so called “crop circles", etc.

I reflect now on your statement that “… large volumes of evidence will not end the debate." and consider the Biblical fundamentalists with whom we both cross swords from time to time and how apt that statement is when applied to them and all the other arrogantly ignorant dogmatists/Skeptics. I'm currently reading Dr. Tom Bearden's eye-opening book, Fer de Lance, and - in your capacity as a scientist - I strongly recommend it. Dr. Bearden is - as I would hope you know already - the Newton of his day, so far ahead of his time that he is as scorned as his iconoclastic predecessors. He's also the East Coast director for the Association of Distinguished American Scientists And according to your high-profile Skeptical colleague and stage magician, “The Amazing", James Randi, . Dr. Bearden is also "a known idiot" (personal correspondence)

There's just one more very important thing I've not mentioned to you yet (about this apparently difficult concept of semi-plausible deniability) that I'd hoped you would have picked up on by yourself, but probably haven't. Not only does the introduction of deliberate ambiguity in the evidence for ETs sort those who can see beyond the surface of things in order for us to break the news gently, but it's also a very clever intelligence test. Bad news, Steve. You flunked. Let’s hope others can perform less inadequately. Nothing personal.

So I'll just thank you once again for your very valued time and effort in this huge dialog, and once again apologize for any inadvertent stepping on your toes I may have done. And also re-extend my invitation to be reasonable and do the right thing by Herr Meier, who is smart enough to know that defamers like you - if left by him to their own devices - engender defenders of the truth like Michael Horn and me, and in the end the defamers ultimately serve the truth by exposing themselves to the light of reason, even if they themselves are blinded to it, (or by it) or have their eyes shut tight due to policy, vested interests, etc.

Here's my reply to your email that I wrote, but did not send, a couple of weeks ago.

Unfortunately, we seemed to have veered apart. I was trying to establish some logical common ground, but you were not convinced.

I am less and less convinced that that was indeed what you were trying to do with me, as we seem to be standing on the same logical common ground, only we are behaving quite differently in that environment. Logic can be used - as you well know - to convincingly advance the argument that black is white and white is black, if one is prepared to abuse logic thoroughly enough.

Before I start to upset you, let me reassure you that I am very aware that, if we base a tentative conclusion solely on a huge raft of sub-conclusions that are simply not up to scratch, and don’t stand up to logical and reasonable scrutiny, then I quite agree we are headed for possible trouble. But this concept is open to misuse, when the scrutiny of any one discreet item (if such a thing exists) of information is inappropriately removed from its context, so as to deprive it of the data that it needs to be adequately understood. This is what I put to you that you are doing with - for instance - the beamship filmclip you looked at and its sound recordings you heard.

Although you seemed to understand that much of it was a "though (sic) experiment" you still criticized some of the details (which were not the point) and missed the logical big picture.

Just for the sake of clarity, Steve, what you initially wrote was, “Let's step back and imagine different worlds.” Then you immediately started representing your imaginary worlds as somehow real, twisting, misrepresenting and putting words in my mouth. This seems to be the kernel of your problem and the problem that the Fundamentalist Skeptics evince to such an extent that you have become a great church as hidebound in your own self-serving dogma as the worst of the older religions you purport to oppose. What you initially presented as your thought exercises you then seamlessly represent as reality. This doesn’t wash at all and is starting to look very deliberate. Your continual choice of word is similarly a very oily looking attempt to use cunning psychological tricks at every turn to make me look unreasonably unconvinced by your impeccable logic. I have seen this many times before. It is an old and useful trick engaged by those whose specious arguments cannot stand on their own merits.

Thank you sincerely. That’s a good start. I remain prepared to assist in any reasonable way I can. Several of the references I’ve provided have introductions and summaries on our site if you’re interested, but as you still cling to the appallingly ignorant ideas that “crop circles” can be adequately scientifically explained as schoolboy pranks and the 500+ Disclosure Project witnesses (and our accompanying corroborating hard scientific evidence) is the result of human error, all I can do by maintaining this dialog is prove that I’ve grotesquely overestimated your ability to see reason, and underestimated your ability to stage-manage mathematical logic abuse,

I only ever asked that you study the evidence, not to convince you in the first instance. You refused to study the evidence I gave you for a number of facile and self-contradictory reasons: too much, not enough, you’ve been burned in the past, nothing is new, etc. And then you admit that you’ve only read articles and websites while bemoaning the lack of anything which provided enough detail for you to “dig deep into”. The last I looked, And Yet they Fly, first published around November of 2001, is sold out of its first printing and was selling (used) on Amazon for about $200. You might wonder about that, given that the whole thing is just a “hoax’, eh? You might also wonder why this Meier “charlatan” you so slickly defame on your site has been the victim of NINETEEN independently verified assassination attempts. Or perhaps this context is deemed by you as similarly irrelevant to your publicly expressed opinions. I put it to you that K. K. Korf’s book is also one you’ve never read.

You are still relying heavily on testimonials, which I find completely unreliable because people are emotional, psychological, unreliable conduits of information with fallible memories amenable to suggestion and alteration.

I only “relied” on testimonials enough to try to let you know that there has been evidence presented in the last few years that should be remarkable enough for a reasonable person to want to look into. I do not rely on it alone.

You further rely upon the "black ops, shadow government, MIB, plausible deniability engineered by superintelligent ET's" hypothesis to explain the lack of definitive evidence or the availability of open investigation.

It is reasonable to expect that the problems you encounter would be manufactured this way if my experiences and conclusions are correct. I see the circularity in this, and I contend that that is also a quite intentional construct. Really, Steve. You seem to accept the obvious and terrible conclusion that the 9/11 hoax is real enough, but still think these far less iconoclastic notions are nonsense. Don’t you see a lack of consistent logic here?

I’m also a enthusiastic wielder of Occams razor. It serves me well, and it serves me well with the Meier material AFTER I HAD ADEQUATELY INFORMED MYSELF, but you openly abandon it when it doesn’t provide the results that the staus quo demands. You and your category would rather credit the one-armed, financially limited Meier with above genius level abilities in photography, special effects, movie making, videography, animation, model making, metallurgy, sound recording and engineering, digital effects (before all such existed), astrophysics, environmental sciences, astronomy, mass hypnosis, prescience, etc. ...again, rather than the simple explanation: He's telling the truth. What would happen if you were reasonable? You’d be in BIG trouble right away. As long as you’re unreasonable, you can be dismissed as a harmless kook who can still provide expert witness testimony in court about what diseases are impossible to cure and still get puff pieces in the New York Times. But know this. You’re on borrowed time.

I never claimed that, I claimed that new evidence which you refused to examine did indeed provide the solid evidence you seek, by any conventional measure of reasonable logic. So I’ve just removed that specious stumbling block you’ve invented for yourself to blockade the terrible truth from a mind clearly incapable of rationally dealing with it. You’ve demonstrated this over and over and until you address and accept this blatantly obvious fact, you’ll be stuck in the 20th Century for the rest of your life or until The Terror War comes to your doorstep.

I would prefer to proceed one step at a time, pick a piece of evidence and exam it closely to see if it holds up to scrutiny.

As stated above, this was my successful method, but you won’t do it. You took your “string theory” about Meier’s beamship films about as far as anyone would who had fallen for the Plejaran’s trick of making deceptive flight maneuvers. But you suddenly stopped when you started to realize that the model-on-a-string theory crashes in an illogical heap when it is subjected to the sort of reductionist scientific scrutiny employed by Professor Emeritus Deardorff, who practices the science you so hypocritically and hollowly preach. Shame.

You are insisting upon the opposite strategy - to review a large amount of evidence and take in the big picture.

This is vile sophistry - either intentional or otherwise - and this it is typical of your ongoing practice of putting words in my mouth and then treating them with your ongoing serial (and often flawed) logic. I’ll be charitable and assume that this is not intentional.

What I am saying, and what the core point of my last message was, is that this method is not reliable, because you may just be constructing a house of cards.

I am not stupid. I am only too aware of the pitfalls of doing this and have been very very careful to avoid it when reaching my conclusions. But to eschew all empirical evidence that is controversial or confronting in the same manner that you would tentative conclusions which are based alone on this empirical evidence - while omitting your own independent research, is very ill advised for someone who is keen to follow the path of truth regardless of where it takes him. It’s like looking for your lost watch under the streetlight even though you didn’t drop it there, simply because the light is better. You won’t find your watch and you won’t find the truth. Perhaps we should turn again to the consideration of what sort of neighborhood the truth will lead you into. For you, for starters, you’re looking for a job when the illegally suppressed medical technologies which can cure all known cellular diseases become publicly known. It’s also not at all unreasonable for you to expect particularly nasty and violent retribution from an outraged and long duped public. See this fraternal warning as whatever you like, Steve, but your choice is as stark as it is simple. And it’s your choice. Just please for your own sake and that of your loved-ones, make sure that it is an informed choice, not a choice predicated on avoidable ignorance.

This is especially true when coupled with the "plausible deniability" theory.

Are you intentionally taking the Asket photo hoax as evidence when Michael Horn told you it was a hoax designed to try to discredit Meier? I have to wonder why you are doing this.

Similarly, your rationale for rejecting the validity of Meier’s “predictions” is apparently based on the erroneous assumption that it is impossible, in spite of accepted scientific proof for human precognition. I showed you this publication, but you ignored it. You ignored it. Likewise the filmclip was taken only as far as you could without damaging your original forgone conclusion. Junk science and I think you know it.

Before you say it, relax, I know your response. As I said, I will look, as time allows, into the evidence you have already directed me to. If I find anything interesting I will let you know.

The Bible Unearthed, The Franklin Cover-up, The Deepening Complexity of Crop Circles, And Yet They Fly, and the Disclosure Project witness testimony were all books published within the last couple of years. They are the most heterodox and iconoclastic books I’ve ever read. Had you taken your position as President of the New England Skeptics Society with the seriousness it deserves, I could have been doing something else right now, but I cannot imagine what could have been more useful than being able to sit and pick apart every bit of this dialog for our huge and growing international readership. For that you have my thanks.

This is a gigantic, ancient and consummately evil treadmill largely funded by those same criminal plutocrats who spend the other HALF of their black budget - measured in the billions - on advanced secret technologies which would make your eyes water if you saw the logical empirical (and hard) evidence of their existence. But times have changed, fostered by the Information Revolution; our ignorant population is now seeing the end of an age of dogmatic belief and the dawn of the age of knowledge. This should please you.

Each new generation of enthusiasts points to the three foot stack and says "what have you read lately."

I point to exactly five fairly slim volumes, any one of which should get you started. Your exaggeration - not to mention your “enthusiasts” jibe - is beneath you.

rather than being a cumulative chain of growing reliable evidence, it is a rotating stack of unreliable evidence.

If it were otherwise, we would not be having this exchange, but it is not MY “stack”.

It is often used as a way to hide from standard scientific examination, and as a way to dismiss critics.

And I can see how it may seem reasonable, because all you are asking for is for someone to be familiar with the evidence,

The evidence I present to you is wholly new, and uniquely enlightening. And this is just the start of the reading list, once you see the light of reason.

You’re quite welcome and I repeat that you have provided an utterly unequalled opportunity for me to explore the Skeptics’ point of view that no other individual has ever made the effort to provide. For that I am in your debt, and I stand ready to forgive and face the future as soon as you are. It’s worth mentioning that -deliberately or otherwise - many of the old wives tales and superstitions you originally alluded to have a very interesting basis in fact. But I won’t put the cart before the horse.

And just so we can be sure to be using the same meanings, I take reductionism to mean: a whole can be understood completely if you understand its parts and the nature of its “sum”. Of course this tried and true method reached its absolute limits at the microscopic level when quantum weirdness takes hold. This demonstrates its fundamental flaw, and shows that although its an indispensable tool in reasonable hands it can also be a very blunt - but none the less very destructive blunt weapon if so employed against reasonable logic.

(This is a somewhat simplified definition, but since you didn’t object to it when I employed it previously, I’ll proceed for the sake of our ongoing non-acrimonious argument.)

I’ll try to treat these three concepts separately, and try to explain where I think we may have encountered our impediment to progress, Steve.

Axiomatically, there is an ongoing dynamic among these three above factors if science is to do its wonderful work, with the understandable caveat that at some time hypothesis testing has to be finalized for the experimental method to occur independently.

Comprehending probability relies to a great extent on empirical evidence and logical reasoning in order to use the experimental method to test a hypothesis. Here’s your logical loop. But I don’t think these elusive paradoxes have to impede understanding as long as we exercise a bit of reasonable logic and common sense.

Unfortunately, this logic and sense is very obviously what's missing among the Skeptics, and I know when I'm beat, so I won't continue to try to persuade you that what you've done to Herr Meier is wrong. Your mind is clearly made up, and nothing I've written and no amount of even more compelling evidence has budged you a centimeter. But I hope that we can stay in touch, as I've asked you several questions that I'd really appreciate some replies to, and have no real hope from anyone but you. Your alacrity in replying to my many emails plus your steadfast determination to play the ball and not the man is a rare and valued commodity. Thank you.

As you know, I advised you that I'll be promulgating the fruits of research as widely as our resources allow, and I'm taking the liberty of posting this entire exchange unedited on our website. @ www.gaiaguys.net/MeierDefamer.htm and I'll be adding copious hypertext as time permits, and a few prominent links to your website in the anticipation that more people learn about The New England Skeptical Society and the basis upon which it functions.

As you say, Steve, “… large volumes of evidence will not end the debate.”

Here’s to hoping that it can, at least, lead us to the truth that will set us all free.

[Q] Normal [ ] steven Novella 11:20 AM 24/12/2003 +1100 3 Addendum from Einstein

New England Skeptical Society

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia