The Phenomenon: What is it?

Great Debates
81

Its interesting how different races of aliens that people claim to see seem to represent different ideals in human culture. The nordics are like the ideal human civilization, while the grays and reptilians are like our worst nightmares. Primates evolved to have an innate fear of reptiles due to threats from things like snakes and crocodiles, so the fact that the reptilian aliens would resemble animals we evolved to be afraid of is interesting. I have no idea how the zeitgeist of that works. It would be like a planet full of zebra got invaded by aliens that looked like giant cats.

Either way, Vallée seems to imply that the beings he describe seem to intentionally try to be confusing and deceptive. As a hypothesis, I would assume if they did that, its because they want to induce attention and emotional reaction because they feed off of that. That would be my guess. Always doing things that are on the brink of explanation but just beyond it, and what it takes to be on that borderline varies by culture and level of technological development.

82

If you postulate that there’s some agency which wants to remain secret, actively works to deceive people and has more power than us, than anything is possible.

83

One might even call it a woo bearing “if” since it’s asking us to accept as real “entities altering perception, memory, and reality” with no evidence. Since by definition they are altering any evidence of their existence. Quite convenient, that.

84

What if the thing repeating itself is an inherent glitch in the way human brains work? What if the pattern that is repeating is that humans are pattern recognition devices, so much so that we often see patterns that aren’t really there?

That would happen across cultures and centuries and modalities, and it would look similar but with different clothes, because the thing is a psychological effect of being human.

Different people have the same type of experience, but interpret it through the lens of their own culture.

Incubi and succubi vs ghosts haunting vs alien abductions vs secret home invaders… it’s all dream psychosis and hallucinations through a common sleep state scramble. The overall pattern has similarity because the brain misfunction is the same, but the imagery and interpretation are highly dependent upon the culture of the afflicted.

People are highly prone to misinterpreting data. Even trained people can misinterpret, especially because they expect a certain thing and interpret through that expectation, rather that seeing the alternatives.

I’ll give an example: I just rewatched the movie Deepwater Horizon about the tragic drilling rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana a decade or so ago.

The crew had drilled a bore to find undersea oil. They were in the process of capping the bore so they could move on and get an oil extraction plant installed.

As part of the prep to remove their drill pipes, they had to verify the cap was holding and not leaking. They ran a “negative pressure” test on the bore line; that is, they removed pressure above the bore seal to look for escaping pressure. The test gave them an anomalous result. There was some bank pressure reading, but they weren’t getting flow up the bore pipe.

One of the execs decided that the seal had to be good, that there was a trap of pressure at the sensor, so they ran another negative pressure test on the vent line. In theory, it should be zero, and it fluctuated but and then hit zero. So they began extracting the mud they used as a temporary cap until the concrete one had set.

Except the tests were both fouled. Neither test was good, because the concrete cap wasn’t set, so it only allowed a partial leak until the crew started removing the mud. That’s when the concrete collapsed and caused a catastrophic blowback that killed 7 and destroyed the rig and created the largest oil catastrophe in US history.

Because the goofy results were interpreted by someone who wanted the answer to be good instead of held for a thorough evaluation by people considering all angles.

Seeing aircraft on sensors because you are looking for aircraft, then freaking out because the aircraft are not conforming to physics, is an almost certain giveaway that the interpretation is wrong, it is a projection of expectation instead of a look for the real answer.

Wanting the Phenomenon to be something real is gaming the interpretation.

85

On the contrary - it’s because the human brain works too well. We’re good at finding patterns in things, which is a very useful skill. Only problem is, sometimes we get false positives.

Seeing the Virgin Mary in bread products doesn’t mean that the human brain doesn’t work very well; deciding that it actually is the Virgin Mary, does.

86

Well, yeah, which is why I said report and not see. It’s one thing to be amused by the patterns. It’s another to allow oneself to be fooled and to represent those patterns to others as meaningful.

87

I respect your position, and I get the frustration, decades of stories, and still no artifact you can hold in your hand. That’s a fair standard to want.

But I’d offer this; What if the issue isn’t lack of seriousness but a mismatch between the tools we use and the nature of what we’re observing?

If the Phenomenon is something that manipulates perception, cognition, and spacetime—then chasing it like it’s a crashed drone might be like using a voltmeter to measure a dream. The methods don’t fail because the subject is fake. They fail because it’s outside the assumptions they were built on.

You said ‘woo’ means things that exist outside of science. But history shows science expands when evidence refuses to go away.

So maybe the challenge isn’t to prove it’s real right now, but to stay curious enough to keep watching without needing it to conform first.

If something’s truly nothing, it’ll fall apart on its own. But if we keep seeing the same high-strangeness persist across cultures, decades, and now sensor platforms, maybe it’s worth leaving the door open just a crack longer,
not for belief, for the next question.

88

That’s probably the strongest psychological counter-theory there is. I’m not denying humans are exceptional at seeing patterns where none exist pareidolia, false memory formation, and culturally-shaped hallucinations are all real. Your Deepwater Horizon example is dead-on, flawed interpretation under pressure can be catastrophic. That happens across domains.

But here’s where I hesitate to settle on that as the final answer: not all UAP data comes from eyewitness accounts, or even single-sensor hits. Some cases involve simultaneous visual, infrared, radar, and electro-optical sensor confirmation, often from trained operators who didn’t expect anomalies.

Even if pilots are fallible, FLIR systems and radar aren’t prone to dream-state psychosis. If a single radar reading showed an object dropping from 80,000 feet to sea level in under a second? That’s weird. But when multiple independent systems track it, and people visually confirm it in real time? That’s not a hallucination—it’s something. Maybe not alien, maybe not sentient, but anomalous.

Wanting the Phenomenon to be real is a bias.
But wanting it not to be is also a bias.

So the real task is staying in that uncomfortable space between, not jumping to belief, and not jumping to dismissal. Just listening, longer than is comfortable.

89

It took a lot of anal probing before aliens understood the functional aspects of human anatomy.

90

The problem is that, in the case of UFO believers, they continue to ignore what many reported about the early Adamski photos of the UFOs he claimed to take pictures of.

For the purposes of the discussion, it has to be pointed that several in the UFO community are not listening, to this day they do ignore what the evidence points at; that Adamski very, very likely used the top of a Sears lamp. That many still believe that “it was an extraterrestrial craft”, shows that is taking much longer than what is comfortable.

91

The challenge is to show us the actual evidence, period.

92

You’re right, Adamski’s photos are a cautionary tale. They should’ve been retired from serious discussion decades ago. The fact that they still circulate is evidence that belief, once emotionally anchored, doesn’t let go just because the facts do.

But I’d argue Adamski isn’t evidence against the Phenomenon. He’s evidence that our filter for signal vs. noise is still maturing. Every domain religion, politics, even science has its false prophets. That doesn’t mean the core questions lose meaning. It just means we have to get sharper at cutting through the noise.

The difference between ‘UFO believers’ and real inquiry is willingness to kill your darlings. Adamski? Should’ve been one of the first.

The Phenomenon deserves scrutiny. But so does the impulse to throw out all anomalous data just because some of it’s garbage.

93

To repeat. Nobody is doing that. The evidence continues to be studied through finer and finer sieves. Denying this basic truth is what separates the believers from reality.

94

What core questions? The point here is dealing with one very important core issue: History tell us that the accumulation of knowledge is a feature of science and the real world, the basic issue with the Phenomenon is that it accumulates garbage.
As Asimov noted in his classic essay on The Relativity of Wrong:

People think that scientific theories that
aren’t perfectly and completely right are
totally and equally wrong. In fact, good
concepts are gradually refined and
extended. Supplanted theories are not
so much wrong as incomplete.

In short, my English Lit friend, living in a mental world of absolute
rights and wrongs, may be imagining that because all theories are wrong,
the earth may be thought spherical now, but cubical next century, and a
hollow icosahedron the next, and a doughnut shape the one after.
What actually happens is that once scientists get hold of a good concept
they gradually refine and extend it with greater and greater subtlety as their
instruments of measurement improve. Theories are not so much wrong as
incomplete.

What the Adamski case showed me is that the Phenomenon theories, besides not relying on evidence, accumulate garbage and “evidence” like that is repeated ad nauseam. Denying that there was a lot of scrutiny made before does not make the new “evidence” better, it is trying to say that baloney that is reheated is different. The Phenomenon is not only incomplete, is getting more wrong when items like Adamski and many others are not dismissed by all the fortean proponents.

95

Fair. There are serious people studying the data, Mick West, Avi Loeb, Garry Nolan, and others. And yes, a lot of bad claims have been filtered out.

But here’s the tension, when an anomalous case resists every conventional explanation, the skeptical default is often to label it ‘insufficient evidence’—and move on. But that isn’t neutral. It closes the loop without acknowledging that something observable still happened, even if we don’t know what.

That’s not ignoring data. It’s shelving it until it conforms, and that’s where belief flips sides.

Believers ignore the bad. Skeptics sometimes ignore the persistent.

Both groups need each other. But neither gets to claim they’re above the psychology at play.

96

You’re correct about how science refines and sharpens, Asimov nailed it. But let’s be honest, the scientific process hasn’t been allowed to fully engage the Phenomenon. Not because of lack of curiosity, but because the data is too irregular, too difficult to isolate, and frankly, too stigmatized.

Adamski-type garbage should be filtered out. That’s not a flaw in the inquiry, that’s a feature of real investigation. But we can’t pretend the entire Phenomenon is equivalent to its worst examples. That’s like rejecting meteorology because someone once mistook a balloon for a UFO.

The core questions aren’t ‘Is Adamski real?’
They are;

Why do certain patterns, like craft with no propulsion, or pilot physiological effects, persist across sensors, observers, and eras?

Why have governments acknowledged UAPs operating with performance characteristics we can’t match?

Why are these reports consistent enough to track but elusive enough to escape resolution?

Skepticism isn’t weakened by asking those questions. It’s weakened when we stop asking them because someone cried ‘lamp top’ in 1952.

97

Sure, the burden’s on the data, not the belief. But admitting we don’t have proof yet doesn’t mean we can’t still ask why certain patterns persist. Dismissing all of it outright might be just as premature as believing all of it.

98

Not convincing, in the history of climate change, a guy named Callendar was dismissed when he noticed that the earth could warm with all the CO2 being released, he showed his calculation then but many looked at the evidence on the whole and while one could say that he was dismissed unfairly, the evidence back then pointed to something else: the natural carbon sinks and heat reflection levels in the atmosphere pointed at the earth dealing with the CO2 even at the huge levels it was reaching. But what Callendar and other found was not forgotten, later Plass and others showed that CO2 reflected heath waves back to earth in levels that were missed until recently and then it was found that the natural sinks were not going to make it either.

The point here is that while data was irregular, difficult to isolate, and stigmatized, the improvements in data collecting and tools pointed to anthropological climate change as being a fact, rather than just the imagination of Callendar and others. By contrast, even by repeating that it was across sensors (I read about the evidence of the Tic Tac UFO, the best they made to sound was that it was possible that the same item was sensed on different sensors) the evidence of UFOs is not improving, it is not changing in the sense that strange sightings are still blamed to otherworldly beings, when even now the evidence likely points at military made secret crafts that the enemy and US authorities don’t want one to know about how expensive those crafts were.

99

Actually, other items were proposed before in 1952, the better shape and lamp that fits what Adamski made was reported in 2012.

Point being that, yes, many still look at the “Phenomenon evidence” after all these years.

So yes, the evidence for the Phenomenon is becoming flimsier, not stronger.

100

What I got instead was an increased understanding of how humans decide on beliefs first and then create the evidence to support them. The willingness to accept and disseminate wild claims goes back through history, but the modern newspaper with instant telegraphic communication throughout the country created a new communications sphere.

In my short ebook WHAT WAS IT? The Mystery Airship of 1896 I marveled at the way newspaper reports of what seemed to be voices and lights from the sky moved from Oakland to San Francisco to Los Angeles and then across the country following the railroad telegraph lines east. The eyewitness testimony created a phenomenon out of whole cloth, wonderfully abetted by newspapers battling for circulation and charlatans stepping up to get their fifteen minutes of fame. Myriads of similar events would follow, with each one creating larger and larger auras of dissemination and acceptance yet treading in the same well-worn paths.

I am not at all frustrated that no evidence has been found. That, after all, is the default hypothesis that everything must be tested against. An additional default hypothesis that people see and say what they want to be true despite that lack of evidence has been thoroughly tested and come through to 14 decimal points, like quantum mechanics. That something exists outside of all science and the lack of scientific evidence for that is proof of its existence is not a hypothesis, not even wrong, as the saying goes.

I wish I could convince you that your frustration is entirely self-generated and will never be relieved. Perhaps take some time to consider that no poster in this thread has given even an ounce of support to The Phenomenon (with one possible fuzzy exception). We’re not a completely closed-minded bunch. In fact, we love to share every new bit of science that appears in the news. But here we all draw the line. That’s a piece of evidence that should count.