Quantum Non-locality and UFOs

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.



Discussions here indicate a loathing, by some, to accept UFOs (and flying saucers) as tangible objects; some interpretations centering on psychical manifestations, others centering on a mental interaction between percipient and the UFO (image).

There are other hypotheses, and one that should be addressed is the possibility that UFOs are intrusions of a quantum kind from other places in the Universe or psychic ether, if you want) that appear because of quantum non-locality.

To get a grasp of the thought and theorizing about quantum non-locality, click HERE for a 1997 paper about the topic by John G. Cramer of the Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.

One paragraph focuses on what Bruce Duensing and Jose Caravaca call “observer-created reality” (which I eschew). Here’s that paragraph:

The nonlocality of the quantum mechanics formalism is a source of some difficulty for the Copenhagen interpretation. It is accommodated in the CI through Heisenberg's "knowledge interpretation" which views the quantum mechanical state vector (y) as a mathematically-encoded description of the state of observer knowledge rather than as a description of the objective state of the system observed. For example, in 1960 Heisenberg wrote, "The act of recording, on the other hand, which leads to the reduction of the state, is not a physical, but rather, so to say, a mathematical process. With the sudden change of our knowledge also the mathematical presentation of our knowledge undergoes of course a sudden change." The knowledge interpretation's account of state vector collapse and nonlocality as changes in knowledge is internally consistent, but it is rather subjective, intellectually unappealing, and the source of much of the recent misuse of the Copenhagen interpretation (e.g., "observer-created reality").

I’m asserting that UFOs may become present when an object tangentially connected to our area of the Universe is made visible because an observer here is conveniently in situ to see the non-local inspired manifestation.

The UFO may even come about by a quantum intersect across dimensions or parallel universes, ours and theirs.



The quantum possibilities strike me as more reasonable (feasible) than the psychic hypotheses.

Psychical hypotheses are prosaic and mundane for me.

The human mind is given too much credence and power in the psychical response, and we all know, intuitively and intellectually, that psychism leaves a lot to be desired in repetitive and scientific experimentation.

UFO mavens want some control over the UFO phenomenon and applying a mind/UFO interaction allows that control to remain intact, somewhat.

This is akin to the Einstein approach about quantum mechanics, and John Cramer’s paper will take you through Einstein’s caveats and the quantum renunciation.



Einstein couldn’t accept the quantum quirkiness, and those in the UFO community can’t accept the UFO quirkiness, unless they keep control of the phenomenon by saying that it’s the human mind that is needed for a manifestation of UFOs.

That view is unimaginative and errant.

The human mind is hardly able to deal with practical reality, let alone incomprehensible reality (such as that in the quantum world).

(Schizophrenics and paranoiacs display examples of what happens when the human mind accesses realities outside the norm.)

While quantum non-locality is best represented by light photons, there are indications that quantum artifacts can exceed the atomic level and are manifested macrocosmically.

(I’ve provided some of that information online here earlier and at the RRRGroup blog.)

More importantly, perhaps, is the notion that UFOs may derive from intrusions, accidental or purposeful, across dimensions or between parallel universes, as string theory allows.



This would keep intact my preference for UFO tangibility, which is obvious and well-witnessed.

The psychic view of Jacques Vallee and his devotees is old-hat for me. It’s something like the hysteria of the Salem witch trials or the insanity of the Catholic Inquisitional thrusts.

More on this approach to the UFO phenomenon will be ferreted out from other sources and pertinent quantum theorizing, and will be presented here upcoming.

Meanwhile, you “UFOs as psychic phenomena” people can have at it.

RR

Rex Heflin's inspiration for his UFO photos?

Paul Villa was an alleged flying saucer contactee, living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who provided a slew of crisp (faked) UFO photos in the 1960s:







These two photos were taken in 1963/64 by Mr. Villa, a mechanic.





Did Rex Heflin see these photos and tried to duplicate them in 1965?





RR

UFOs: Why Science Isn't Interested

Scientific methodology is thwarted when it comes to the UFO phenomenon.

What can science study when it comes to UFOs?

There is nothing tangible for scientists to study. There is no evidence that can be tested or any behavior that can be replicated or pinned down in any way.

Photos of aircraft or even of evanescent phenomena (lightning for instance) can be examined, but UFO photos offer nothing specific for science to look at.

The photos of Adamski, Villa, and Billy Meier, to name a few, would offer elements for science or intelligence agencies to scrutinize, if they were authentic photos.







Photos, less detailed, and maybe real, of amorphous UFOs don’t offer worthy elements that can be studied either. Does no one take a telephoto picture of a UFO? Where are the professional snapshots?

As for trace elements in supposed UFO landings (Socorro) or debris elements (Roswell), those are so indefinite or imaginary that science really has nothing to examine. (Anthony Bragalia has discovered that Battelle has studied malleable metal, allegedly from the Roswell incident, but Bragalia’s findings are beclouded by Battelle’s “secrecy” in what they’re doing or have done.)

Scientists need specimens to study, or hypotheses based upon observation(s). Witness testimony, regardless of the support of such by some UFO buffs, is useless, for scientific purposes. Sure, a credible witness might provide a clue that helps a scientist see an avenue for study, but witness testimony, all by itself, is generally useless.

UFO sightings nowadays are even more transitory that flying saucer reports of the past, those that supposedly left indentations (Socorro again) or radiation traces (the Desvergers, Florida tale), so science is even less inclined to get involved with sightings.



Some UFO mavens keep indicating that the O’Hare sighting of a few years back is a prominent UFO sighting, but others (Lance Moody for one) ask for something tangible: where are the photos? After all, almost everyone has a camera-enabled cell phone, and so many persons relate that they saw something strange over the Chicago airport, one wonders (along with Mr. Moody) why none of them had the presence of mind to snap a photo of the alleged O’Hare UFO?

Scientists might have trouble with a photo, as noted, but at least they’d have something to scrutinize. (Of course, some UFO hobbyists insist upon the negatives or original photos for study but today’s photos are captured electronically, so there are no negatives to offer. That argument, from UFO tyros, even when applied to older photos, is just stupid, non-scientific.)

The point here, by me, is that science has nothing with which to grapple when it comes to UFOs. The phenomenon is primarily witness-induced today, or hoaxed, just as it was in the past. However, those past UFO or flying saucer incidents had a few ingredients (radar blips, movie-film captures, trace elements) that today’s sightings do not have.

Moreover, the topic is so tainted by the goofiness and circus-like atmosphere, even by those who once had some credibility and cachet when it came to UFOs, that science won’t touch the phenomenon at all, often acknowledging it as not a legitimate area for scientific scrutiny.

So, science is out. And ufology is a sham. That leaves us with what? A curiosity that is not going to be explained or understood as it stands right now.

To pursue the matter further takes a mind and/or personality that is in a state of denial about reality, and what is purposeful for life.

RR

UFOs are Mega-tachyons

Kevin Randle's blog is riffing on the loss of "robust UFO sightings" that we and others have mentioned recently.

Click HERE for a paper that provides a clue as to where "robust UFOs" have gone.

RR

Wonders in the Sky (and nonsense in the book)

David J. Hufford, Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Psychiatry, Penn State College of Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania provides the forward to Jacques Vallee’s and Chris Aubeck’s book (pictured above).

Professor Hufford is erudite and insightful.

Here are some examples from his Foreward:

I [Hufford] was pursuing the heretical idea that folk belief traditions might actually incorporate accurate observations…

[Vallee in his books, Anatomy of a Phenomenon and Passport to Magonia] recognized the difference between the core phenomenology of [UFO] reports and the local language and interpretations that clothed that core in traditional accounts.

Criticizing conventional UFO investigators for “confusing appearance and reality” [Vallee] said that “The phenomenon has stable, invariant features….But we have also had to note carefully the chameleonlike character of the secondary attributes of the sightings.

The willingness of [Vallee and Aubeck] to cast a very wide net, andn ot to allow the particular cultural interpretations of events to limit their view, offers us a remarkable opportunity to seek patterns that may lead to new understandings.

Those with a view of these matters narrowly focused on a particular interpretation, especially the extraterrestrial idea, may be annoyed by the mixing of the aerial and the religious, the political and the mystical and more.

The problem with “spaceship” is not that it is anomalous; it is that it is an interpetation rather than an observation.

But Vallee and Aubeck undercut these judicious remarks by Professor Hufford by making these comments in their Introduction:

We will show that unidentified flying objects have had a major [sic] impact not only on popular culture but on our history, on our religion…

…the fact would remain that an unexplained phenomenon has played and continues to play a fantastically important role in shaping our belief systems, the way we view our history and the role of science.

…their [UFOs] impact has shaped human civilization in important ways.

Vallee’s and Aubeck’s hubris astounds.

UFOs have never had a “major” impact on humanity or civilization or history or religion.

The phenomenon has always been a remote and peripheral aspect of societal life, of human existence.

UFOs, today, are as inconsequential to humanity and society as a whole as they have always been, despite Vallee’s insistence that UFOs have been and are integral to life on Earth.

Vallee’s view is egocentric, megalomanic almost.

His view typifies that of those, generally, who are absorbed by the pheonomenon.

Irritated by Stephen Hawking’s postion vis a vis UFOs – “I am discounting reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos?” – Vallee and Aubeck don’t get it:

The persons seeing UFOs are not cranks and weirdos. Hawking is wrong. The people who study UFOs are the cranks and weirdos – Vallee and Aubeck among them.

RR

The Goldbach Conjecture and literal UFO reports

Witness testimony, whether about UFO sightings, crimes, accidents, et cetera, is an iffy thing. And witness testimony after a period of time has passed even more so.

But that aside, I take accounts of events -- historical, mythological, reportorial, Biblical – as a “true” rendering of what witnesses saw or experienced, expressed with caveats about “inflation,” misinterpretation, subjective extrapolation, and mental bias.

Thus, the Biblical account of Ezekiel, for instance, is not a fanciful metaphor to make moral a moral point not is it a confluence of fictional elements imagined for whatever reason by the Biblical writer whose rubric is Ezekiel. It is a representational rendering of what the witness experienced and set down, as best as he could, considering the limited parameters of existence at the time.



Roswell’s wirnesses, at the time of the alleged incident – 1947 -- can be accounted as veracious. (Witnesses, providing testimony, many years later, suffer the vicissitudes on metal acuity that afflicts people as they age and as time passes, so their accounts can be ignored -- should be ignored.)

But to get at the heart of the UFO enigma, UFO researchers may take a serious perusal of witness accounts and testimony, past and present, providing exquisite details and data that has, so far, been sublimated, replaced by the more sensational aspects of what witnesses experienced.

Every UFO report, including those of “hoaxers” such as Adamski or Fry, should be evaluated, vetted, for elements that abut other testimonies, from reliable, credible sources.



The UFO-like reports, from religious and mythical writings – the Bible, the Hindu texts, the Greek myths, the Norse sagas, and all the rest – should be immersed in scrutiny and examined systematically rather than literarily.

And the Goldbach Conjecture?

Goldbach's Conjecture is that any even number may be expressed as the sum of two primes. If this conjecture is false, then there must be at least one even number that cannot be expressed as two primes.

Just as Goldbach’s theorems and musings about integers remains unresolved, the pursuit of verification provides a methodology for study of UFOs, past, present, and future – if UFO mavens are serious about explaining the UFO phenomenon.

Quantum UFOs

We’ve touched on this previously with several blog postings, but a reading of The Black Hole War by Leonard Susskind [Little, Brown and Company, NY, 2008] allows for an extrapolation of our views.



The whole tenor of Susskind’s discussion of black holes and his consternation with Stephen Hawking’s once held view about black holes and information (the loss of it) revolves around the idea that quantum theory applies to black holes….something macroscopic rather than microscopic, which is generally the province of quantum reality.

Large elements of reality have always been eschewed by quantum physicists, but Susskind, and others, apply quantum mechanics to black holes, which are an egregious element of large reality:

“Jacob Bekenstein [a noted Israeli physicist]…had a sense that black holes had something profound to say about the laws of nature. He was particularly interested in how black holes might fit together with the principles of Quantum Mechanics and thermodynamics that had so preoccupied Einstein.” [Page 147]



So we contend, hypothetically, that UFOs may be quantum artifacts – large quantum particles as it were.



UFOs mimic several aspects of quantum theory: the indeterminacy of location, observation (measurement) of UFOs affect them, and their reality is hypothetical, not actual in practical, classical terms.

Quantum artifacts behave in strange, quirky ways, as you know. UFOs behave similarly.

UFOs, more often than not, disappear when observed, suddenly rather than gradually, according to most UFO sighting-reports.

The Hungarian physicist Eugene Wigner [1902-1995] said this:



“When we become conscious of something, we bring about the crucial collapse of the wave function, so that the perplexing mixed states of [reality] disappear.” [Page 148, Introducing Quantum Theory, Totem Books, NY, 1997].



UFOs behave, usually, as waves rather than particles, but they have had substance, seemingly, as trace elements of them have been adequately reported; however, they behave more readily as waves (of light), especially in current times.

As for quantum, Niels Bohr said this:



“Whether an object behaves as particle or wave depends on your choice of apparatus for looking at it.” [Page 160, Ibid]

Bohrs insight applies to Paul Kimball’s favorite UFO event, the so-called RB-47 sighting of 1957.



Erwin Schrodinger (of dead/live cat fame) conjectured that particles – let us insert UFOs here – do not exist at all, but are just a “superimposition of waves” [Page 140, Ibid]



While quantum mechanics/theory is abstruse for many, we think it may be a vehicle -- a methodology – for study of the UFO phenomenon.

We’ll continue this hypothetical thrust here (and elsewhere)…..