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Post by swamprat on Jan 5, 2019 21:59:09 GMT
“What brand of tinfoil do you wear?” Media passes on UFO sightings coverage
By Cheryl Costa
Posted on January 4, 2019
In the spring of 2017 just prior to the release of our book UFO Sightings Desk Reference (co-written by Linda Miller Costa), I reached out to about 60 television, radio and press outlets in the principle cities of the top 10 states for UFO sightings as of 2015. I presented the editors and news directors with unique regional statistical information about UFO sightings history in their news markets. I was met with mostly silence.
Only two newspapers covered the book’s release: The articles in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The New York Times provided huge visibility. What I found startling was that several news outlets I had approached later carried the Post-Intelligencer or New York Times’ wire stories.
Early in 2018, I went through a similar pitch with press outlets in major cities in New York state. I had figured that with the huge media coverage about the Pentagon UFO research program in December 2017, perhaps they would be more receptive. I received either silence or was laughed off the phone in two instances.
Recently I chatted with several newspaper editors and asked their perspective. One editor told me his former bosses seriously feared the “ridicule factor” that they, as credible professionals, might face for publishing a story about the UFO topic.
Another editor simply said to me, “What brand of tinfoil do you wear, Cheryl?”
And another editor expressed the notion that “the existence of UFOs doesn’t seem proven. Even when it’s an intriguing story, where’s the proof?”
From my perspective, what does this editor want for proof? Does he expect to see an extraterrestrial spacecraft cracked up in a mall parking lot and the bodies of dead aliens littering the pavement?
I have presented some very serious evidence at prestigious UFO conferences that would make for one heck of a feature story. But you’ll never see a news director or senior editor at a major UFO conference to get perspective. In the minds of many journalists, the UFO topic is painted in conspiracy theories and less-than-credible individuals.
A few months ago a news director asked if I would support local television news teams from stations owned by his parent national media group. As I was one of the co-authors of the most notable book of national UFO statistics to date, I agreed to support them, without charge.
The idea was that more than 100 stations in the media group would all run a story about the huge quantities of UFO sightings in their area. The target was November Sweeps Week in order to get a bonanza of great ratings for their news units. After all, UFO stories do bring in the viewers, if teased in advance of the newscast. Likewise, when the video of the story is posted on the television station’s website, usually the page views are impressively high.
I made some adjustments to my UFO statistics database with an algorithm that would enable me to give any station, in any television market in the country, their specific UFO sighting statistics. What a gem of an opportunity to any news team.
Sadly, only three television stations participated: the home station of the news director who pitched me, plus two other stations that used the story from the first station, but weren’t interested in their own local story.
Would we be a step closer to official disclosure if 75 to 100 television stations in that one media group had done a Sweeps Week blitz about UFO sightings in each of their viewing areas? We’ll never know.
A senior editor recently remarked to me that, in his opinion, “The Fourth Estate has violated its trust with the American people by not properly covering and reporting on the UFO-ET topic matter.”
www.syracusenewtimes.com/blog-no-press-for-ufo-sightings-coverage/
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Post by swamprat on Jan 5, 2019 22:08:48 GMT
Devoid
The roots of confusion
By Billy Cox Wednesday, Jan 2, 2019
As we embark upon yet another trip around our star, wondering when/if the NY Times plans a followup to their reporting on the Nimitz/Tic Tac incident, wondering if Tom DeLonge’s To The Stars Academy will ever produce anything indisputably unique, we might also try to step back and contemplate the daunting complexity of what we may be confronting in our efforts to comprehend the peculiar and unending events unfolding in our atmosphere. Because one theory gaining a lot of momentum lately suggests that maybe what’s happening isn’t extraterrestrial at all, that maybe the roots of these unidentified aerial phenomena are a lot closer to home than initially surmised, if no less puzzling. That’s another discussion altogether. Either way, no matter where the evidence leads, the highest hurdle we may have to clear is the ability of our species to move beyond the conceits of our anthropocentric definitions of intelligence and consciousness.
One can argue that we’ve been using the wrong behaviors – our own – when it comes to assigning motivations to any alien intelligence. The existing scenarios are clichéd and unimaginative: The Others want to save us from ourselves, if only we knew how to listen. They’re here to undermine our perverse sense of order. They intend to keep us in blinders, or under quarantine, until we figure out how to clean up our mess. We’re a genetic experiment designed to rescue the gods from boredom. Or maybe we’re just fish in an aquarium, worth taking a look at in a passive tranquil innocuous zen kinda way but not worth getting the fingers all wet and smelly.
Or how about this: What if the first species to figure out how to bend space and time was able to do so because it was unencumbered by ego, tribalism, and pedigree? What if the right environmental conditions allowed swarm intelligence – self-organized social networks like ants and bees with, let’s say, a mere 500,000-year evolutionary head start on us – to become masters of advanced technology? After all, despite our profligate domination of Earth, scientists will tell you that humanity’s social constructs are abnormal.
“Not only are oligarchies rare,” states Stefano Mancuso, “but imagined hierarchies and the so-called law of the jungle is trite nonsense. What is more relevant is that similar structures do not work well. In nature, large distributed organizations without control centers are always the most efficient … Decisions made by large numbers of individuals are almost always better than those adopted by a few. In some cases, the ability of groups to solve complex problems is astounding. The idea that democracy is an institution against nature therefore remains just one of the more seductive lies invented by man to justify his (unnatural) thirst for individual power.”
Mancuso is worth listening to because he’s not a political scientist or even an entomologist. This guy is a botanist. From Italy’s University of Florence, he runs the 14-year old International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology, a term that drives many of his peers nuts. He has joined with the European Space Agency in conducting botanical experiments aboard the International Space Station, as well as the Endeavour space shuttle. He has monitored root systems as they accommodate microgravity and fluctuating terrestrial environments alike. “A good example of organisms capable of collectively investigating unknown spaces, and therefore excellent models and sources of direct inspiration,” Mancuso offers by way of comparison, “is social insects.” But social insects, he argues, are no match for the more efficient sort of swarm intelligence exhibited by plants.
In the 2018 translation of his book The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior, Mancuso asks us to contemplate a novel and ancient sentience, one with which we last shared a common ancestor 600 million years ago. Taking full advantage of inexhaustible solar energy, these life forms eschewed conventional mobility, central nervous systems, organs and brains and – through mimicry, a communal network of chemical signaling, and the rejection of “vertical control” – proceeded to colonize a planet by providing 80 percent of its biomass.
“The vertebrate brain,” he writes, “is an ‘accident,’ evolved only in a very small number of living things – animals – while the vast majority of life, represented by plant organisms (with) intelligence, the ability to learn, understand, and react successfully to new or trying situations has developed without a dedicated organ.
“Plant evolution has led to the development of a distributed intelligence – that is, a simple, practical system that enables them to find effective responses to the challenges of the environment in which they live. It is a remarkable achievement … To counteract the problems associated with predation, plants have … develop(ed) solutions so different from those animals that they have become the very epitome of diversity (indeed, plant species are so diverse that they might as well be aliens).”
Mancuso reminds us that Earth’s flora, which influence everything from architecture to robotics, pushed humans, way back in 1896, to develop time-lapse photography in order to document and understand their movements. He also recounts a more recent breakthrough, requiring the development of a camera capable of recording 1,000 frames per second. The target was a plant called the Erodium, known for its explosive dispersal of seeds that hook into the soil and drill deeper. The results — slowed down to reveal scatter patterns — were delivered to the ESA, and “a future probe for space exploration inspired by the Erodium is a real possibility,” writes Mancuso.
Mancuso’s reflections on intelligence, memory and problem-solving are challenging but well worth the effort. Nobody’s saying we need to armor up for encounters with Triffids (yet). But if we’re trying to understand what UFOs are and why they’re here, The Revolutionary Genius of Plants assures us that cracking that nut could be far more complicated than anyone imagined.
devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/author/cox/
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Post by nyx on Jan 6, 2019 3:15:17 GMT
Well Swampy,
A little hope is that the Chilean government has join with Suzanne Hansen, New Zealand UFO Group, to find out why UFO reports have jumped in the North Island.
A lot of people have reported a lot of strange stuff in the sky there.
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Post by swamprat on Mar 9, 2019 16:34:29 GMT
It is important for us to always keep an ear and eye on those who would scoff and even ridicule such events as UFO sightings and alien visitations. After all, we already know that roughly 98 percent of UFO reports are hoaxes or mistaken identities. It is that 2% that keeps us all occupied. Years ago, I bought a couple of Philip J. Klass books. The ridicule and sarcasm were painful to read. However, it's important for us to understand where such people are coming from. Keep looking up!
The apparent decline of UFO culture is for the best. Still, we'll miss E.T.
Mar 2, 2019
Kevin McDermott, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Years ago, my wife and I were driving through a desolate stretch of central Illinois on a summer night when we saw something that — too briefly — changed the universe for me.
It was a large, glowing vessel, triangular, hovering about 50 feet off the ground, above a high bank of trees. As we drove by, it slid sideways against the night sky, emitting an eerie mechanical hum.
We’re both skeptics, but we’d seen something we couldn’t explain. After discussing and discarding every familiar thing it could be, we turned the car around. The closer we got, the more convinced I became there couldn’t possibly be a conventional explanation. For a science-fiction-fan kid turned rationalist adult, it was a Peter Pan moment.
Did I mention that this was years ago? Those triangle-topped cell phone towers were still a new thing; we’d never seen one before. The bank of trees had hidden the tower’s structure and gave the lighted array on top of it the illusion of movement as we passed. An unnoticed electrical substation near the road had provided the humming sound.
The mystery solved, we drove on, laughing about it, though I nursed a hollow disappointment. Once again, we were alone in the cosmos.
I thought about that night when I read recently that UFO sightings have decreased dramatically in recent years, after a long era of E.T. enthusiasm. Trends in ufology (yes, it’s called that) have always said more about those of us here on Earth than about anyone who might be visiting. It seems Peter Pan is growing up again.
The U.S. Air Force in the early 1950s coined a typically dry acronym for its pilots to describe any unidentified flying object — “UFOB” — that couldn’t be explained. The “B” fell away as military-speak went civilian, and then went Hollywood.
The decades-long UFO craze that followed is a mostly American phenomenon, suggesting it’s more cultural than extraterrestrial. How else to explain that the U.S., sitting on about 6 percent of the world’s land mass, with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, reports the overwhelming majority of the world’s UFO sightings? If little green men actually are visiting Earth, they’re being awfully picky about which neighborhood.
In fact, the utter lack of any hard evidence of alien visitation — 400 years after the telescope, 200 years after photography and half a century into the Space Age — suggests we’ve never been visited at all. This despite cosmic arithmetic that makes the existence of other life seem all but inevitable.
Astronomers call it the Fermi Paradox: Physicist Enrico Fermi noted that, given its age and sheer number of stars, the universe should, just by the law of averages, be teeming with life, much of it millions of years more advanced than us. Yet there’s no evidence we’ve ever been contacted. How could both be true?
Scientist have batted around possible explanations for years.
Some suggest that curiosity isn’t actually the innate characteristic of intelligence that we primates assume it to be; that the impulse to explore one’s surroundings is a human oddity. Maybe most of the universe’s life forms are more the stay-at-home types.
It could be that alien life is so different from ours that interaction is simply impossible. The plot imperatives of science fiction aside, there’s no reason to believe that extraterrestrials would look, think or communicate anything like we do. Consider the communication barriers there would be between, say, an elephant and a flea — and they’re both from the same planet.
But the most likely explanation for this interstellar silence is the least interesting one: They’re just too far away.
Even in our own galaxy, most stars are tens of thousands of light years from us. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity says that nothing, not even communications, can move faster than light. Meaning most aliens who wanted to even get a message to today’s human civilization would’ve had to send it before there was human civilization. Those aren’t the makings of a great conversation.
I tend to agree with most astronomers, who know way more about this stuff than most of us do: Alien intelligence is almost certainly out there — and we’ve almost certainly never crossed paths with it. It’s possible we never will.
Kind of ruins “Star Trek,” doesn’t it?
But if UFO sightings are categorically hoaxes, delusions or mistakes — and that seems to be the case — then it’s ultimately a good thing that they’ve fallen off. The less anti-science hokum society has to absorb these days, the better. (Now if someone would just work on the anti-vaccination crowd …)
All of that said, there’s a loneliness to it, isn’t there? It’s the same kind I felt that night, when I realized I hadn’t seen something otherworldly. In the end, our mantra is that of the old, alien-laden TV show “The X-Files”: We want to believe.
Kevin McDermott is a member of the Post-Dispatch Editorial Board.
www.stltoday.com/opinion/columnists/mcdermott-the-apparent-decline-of-ufo-culture-is-for-the/article_3f188f3e-f994-53cc-878b-40c0fe524d55.html
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Post by HAL on Mar 12, 2019 19:30:44 GMT
Odd that he didn't give the exact location of the sighting. And that the hum from the sub-station was loud enough to be heard from inside a passing car.
And surely there is a difference between a glowing triangular vessel, 50 foot of the ground, and a tower with lights attached.
Also, why would a structure only 50 foot of the ground need lights ? I have trees in my garden taller than that, and I live under an airport flight path.
HAL.
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