#1
Well Stephen, my theory about all this is a theory of multiple cultural confusions (including mine own!).
The UFO is but one anomaly amongst many. Basically, almost all of the questions raised in the frenetic discussions of the past week concern the general function of anomaly sets within a techno-scientific culture. The problem is how we manage the framework of cerebral cognition with respect to the psycho-social structure of explanations, see my two features "Management of Mysteries" and "Chemtrails and UFOs" in UFO magazines (Volume 21, Issue 6 and Vol 22 Issue 6 - both these two works are available as downloadable pdf from UFO Store). "Chemtrails and UFOs" was translated into German by Nexus, as was "Putting the Noise Back Into the System," which also originated in UFO magazine. Translations into French are following.
Basically the main theme is how we as a culture construct and manage explanations in order to get some sleep at night. I can't show the mathematics here, but I am making some progress with set theory as a mathematical approach concerning overlapping rejection and acceptance scales with regard to how we structure the so-called "mechanical real" as a measure of experience. "Putting the Noise Back Into the System" is now available in English on my web site. It is a post-modern discussion and analysis of Cargo Cult tribalism which is the only area fully validated as an analogue to UFO contact. What was (is) given and taken in the flow of goods and ideas between cultural level 1 and cultural level 2 is a good model for "contact" whether with Little Green Men or the ghost of Old Mother Riley.
Here is some of it:
The Film Crews Arrive
"Consider: a cargo-cult believer wakes up one morning in 2008 to see a film company on a beach shooting a dogfight between an F-51 Mustang fighter and a F-47 Thunderbolt. Such aircraft would inevitably be re-builds, fashioned from many parts of wrecked World War II aircraft plus modern parts built from original blueprints. These classic planes would be on hire either from private owners or from the equally private Confederate Air Force of the United States. Now let us suppose this combat represents a fight between a Japanese Zero and a Douglas Avenger, simply because now there are very few actual Zeros or Avengers in flying condition. Already, without metaphysics or theology, the situation as described is becoming symbolically rather complicated for an observer who has not yet invented the wheel, never mind agriculture or primitive navigation. This simple dog-fight situation becomes symbolically rather complex with regard to how we structure the real. Here are imitations within imitations fighting yet other imitations. The four aircraft mentioned are already subliminal filmstrips within the Western imagination. We cannot rid ourselves of such flying machines and their background any more than we can rid ourselves of James Bond or Charlie Chaplin, whose adventures are still running in our heads as we read and speak. Each young child, whether he or she likes it not, is going to have such aircraft in the head as operational software from countless games, commix, TV shows and films; kits will be sold, models made, dreams will be dreamed indeed of battles long ago way before almost a spoon is lifted to the mouth.
As well as being finite things, such machines are therefore major historical elements. They trail social psychology, science, and technology, as well as vales of tears and grief regarding the living and the dead. These shapes and sounds are therefore direct routes back to the almost-past of Western technological culture. Our holistic life threads right back through these aircraft and their mighty struggles, back to the Industrial Revolution via the development of engines, carburettors, propellers, rudders, and undercarriages. Can we be objective before the ghosts of such machines and men?
Fractal Aeroplanes: the Forms of Time
How would our native conceive of such socio-historical-technological scaling, with all its complex history and its many dimensions? How could we explain that though the aircraft mentioned are now static in one form of time, in another form of time they represent ever-evolving adventures in the head? Further possible confusions abound as the fractals of perception open. Suppose our islander knows of a long-forgotten B-29 buried deep in the bush, and suppose the film-company carpenters built parts of a fuselage of a mock B-29 for this supposed war film before his very eyes, indeed? Mentally, his mind would be like a smashed telephone exchange. What would he make of our concepts of fact and fiction and infinite scaling of Sartre’s "being and nothingness" in between? Supposing one of our mock-mock aeroplanes were to develop engine trouble and crash to the ground, killing the pilot whose ancestors might well have happened to have flown the original planes in the original situation over the very same island? What measurements are possible here? What time, what clocks, and what measuring rods? Next, let us imagine that as part of our film a great naval task force appears offshore to land Marines. Let us suppose that blanks of varying dramatic power are fired, and the dead fall to the beach, only to get up again and head for the refreshment tent!
What a pickle out native philosopher would be in! He would hear radios, he would see women, he would smell fuel, and he would see many men as black indeed as himself comfortably involved in the entire order of things. However, he would not know that the whole dimension was a stage set. He would not know that what he was seeing was part of a system organized to produce and supply a series of artificial images without which almost all image-fed human beings in the Westwould suffer withdrawal symptoms.
Supposing now a UFO flies overhead, as has happened. The film crew are now in the position of our native, who won’t be bothered much, because in all likelihood he will equate the UFO with the Mustang and the Thunderbolt. The double trick is that the film crew themselves do not understand such paths in any case, due to internal differences of class, education, and intelligence.
If we build further into our model a theory of fallibilities and mistakes, then we have a reasonable degree of sophistication emerging involving a model of alien/human interaction...."
Colin Bennett M.A. (Oxon)
Author, London
Editor The New Fortean Times