He seemed relaxed, contemplative even, when out of the blue he said, “I wasn’t even aware of the Kecksburg incident when it happened. Didn’t bother much with the local papers at the time; didn’t pay much attention to news beyond stories about the increasing flames of the Vietnam War. Aliens from other planets were no more than an occasional movie interest, Flash Gordon kind of stuff, the The Day the Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds, others all obviously fictional. I never considered them to be real, but if I had to choose aliens I wish would visit, it would have been Michael Rennie’s character Klaatu.”
She asked, “Why bring this up in 2021? I once read that the Kecksburg thing was in the mid-1960s.”
“The Harvard guy,” he said.
“Who?”
“You know. There’s a Harvard professor who claims Oumuamua is an alien spacecraft that whizzed through our Solar System.”
“Ou?”
“Oumuamua. Ooo mu ah mu ah. Some kind of Hawaiian name, I think. Pictures of it were all over the news and Internet a while back. Looks cigar-shaped. Got a lot of attention at the time and, what with his label as a ‘Harvard professor’; the guy in the news has revitalized the interest in UFOs. Supposedly, Oumuamua didn’t originate in the Solar System. Been wandering through the galaxy, I guess. Anyway, the statement by the Harvard guy got lots of press, what with the desire to know if UFOs are ETs without a good navigation system or roadside service.
“I remember,” he continued, “when I first heard that people took UFOs seriously. It was about a year after the Kecksburg incident. Sure, I had seen space movies as a kid, but they were exciting fictions. In 1966 I was in my early twenties, and I met a guy in the teachers’ lounge where I first taught; if I remember correctly, he was a substitute teacher. He had a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings from around the country. Yeah. Scrapbook. That was before the digital age, before even 8-tracks, tape players, and the Walkman. Anyway, he was eager to convince me that aliens had landed or at least had passed by, skimming the atmosphere, hovering at times, and in Kecksburg and Roswell, crash landing. I wasn’t very receptive. Call me the Doubting Thomas of UFOs type, even back then in my younger days. Since that time there have been bunches of books, TV shows, and films that derive the rudiment of their plots from that 1965 incident in Kecksburg. Just a couple of years ago in 2019 there was another film about it.”
“So?”
“I suppose it’s in the nature of us to want there to be ‘something more,’ ‘something outside’ what we are, especially during a frightful pandemic. Maybe the isolation of lockdowns makes us ponder the ultimate isolation of being alone in the Cosmos. Idleness from lockdowns breeds speculations about almost everything. More removal from the daily grind breeds more dependence on other ‘realities,’ the realities of the mind. When we can’t physically escape, we flee through imagination. Cabin fever stimulates the right side of the brain, especially so when we’re bombarded with so much unavoidable and entertaining science fiction. And the videos. Oh! The videos. South Floridians reported seeing a UFO on February 9, this year. Turns out it was a Navy test missile. There’s an eagerness among many to see a UFO or to jump to UFO as the default explanation for all apparently inexplicable things in the sky.”
“Sure,” she said, “I would guess that UFOs are mostly explainable, but not always immediately, and there’s that occasional one no one explains. What if the Harvard guy is right? He’s from Harvard, you know. Had to have some credentials to get that job. Probably has a long list of pubs. By the way, what’s his name?”
“Loeb, Professor Loeb. I’m sure he has a long list of pubs. But I question whether or not his pubs recently included bars as well as publications. Okay, that’s not fair. I take it back, but he’s not going to get direct evidence on Oumuamua; the thing whizzed past us. We’re too late to land on it the way we landed on other asteroids. We don’t have anything to catch it, so no one is launching a vehicle to land on it. So, what does he have for his evidence beside its trajectory, its shape, speed, and its bright albedo? Could its velocity be the product of gravitational boosts from the planets? And, also, he thinks it was in interstellar space until the Solar System ran into it. That doesn’t sound like a vehicle under the control of intelligence. What was the plan? ‘Hey, Yerzlk, let’s get into this thing and wait in interstellar space for a Solar System to come by.’ Do these aliens live for tens of thousands of years, hundreds of thousands? Sure, there are lots of extrasolar planets, but in a galaxy with so much empty space, hitting one, or having one hit you has to be a long shot even in a rotating mass of stars.”
He paused and then continued his argument by saying, “And if it were a powered vessel from outside our Solar System, why would intelligent life come all that way and not stop for a close inspection of a big blue marble? Was Oumuamua the invention of some life-forms that have no concept of life elsewhere but that just decided to wander the galaxy? Are Oumuamua’s pilots creatures that have the technology to travel through the Milky Way but who have no idea that a world in a habitable zone like ours, a world that has not only liquid water but also green colors on continents, houses life-forms? Didn’t they put windows in Oumuamua? I know that if I were passing by, I’d take a look. You know how many times I pulled over on the berm just to look at rocks I had not seen before, maybe a view from an overlook, or a quaint town with a coffee shop or diner?”
“But you’re assuming that the life-forms think like you. Maybe they’re on vacation with a destination in mind and no time to stop to see the Grand Canyon or Dollywood along the way. Maybe Ou-what’s-its-name is driven by parents who in turn are driven to ‘don’t-make-me-come-back-there’ anger by fighting siblings in the back. What if they have reservations on Alpha Centauri Bb? Heck, even at the speed of 49 kilometers per second, they’re going to be pushing to make those reservations four light years down the interstate or interspace highway. There’s just no time for stops. Or what if in passing through the Solar System, they saw nothing of interest in what we are or do?”
He thought of what she said and replied, “If you spend centuries traveling, wouldn’t there be need for a rest stop? Eventually, you run out of snacks. But to address your first point. Sure, I want to think that in the main aliens think like me. I want to think that given the principle of equivalence in physics, that the universe has only so many options on how it works, and that addressing how things work is pretty much universal like the physics, the chemistry, and the biology. How many conclusions can intelligence draw concerning what life is and where it is? How many definitions of life could there be? And how do we define intelligence if not by its curious nature? Experience might make the base of the knowledge pyramid, but everything from the foundation up is constructed by curiosity.”
“Good point,” she said, “but still only a point and made in tiny point of space that might differ if ever so slightly from some other point in space, like the one from which Oumuamua came. Maybe the rules of the Cosmos are uniform, but those rules allow for lots of variability. Geez, I just read that some astronomers think there might be whole sections of the galaxy with antimatter suns and stuff. There’s an online paper published by NASA about X-ray binaries and clouds of antimatter near the center of the galaxy. Imagine that a group of life-forms originated there. ** People who live exclusively in Quito, Ecuador, on top a mountain don’t know much about living at sea level in Miami, Florida. I’ll bet where they live shapes their sense of the world; and I can’t see untraveled residents of Appalachia who live in valleys enveloped by tall mountains knowing much about the lives of people who live on the streets in New York City enveloped by tall buildings. If there’s a noticeable difference among people here on Earth, wouldn’t there be an even greater difference between Earthlings and Otherlings?”
“What you just said…Hmmm, it makes me think of the ocean dandelion. I’ll circle back to that. But first, so the guy with his UFO scrapbook in the teachers’ lounge had closely followed the UFO stories for more than a couple of years. He was probably ready to accept that there are different kinds of intelligent life-forms. I know he wasn’t old, but he had to be at least in his late twenties or early thirties, well beyond the age of reason. He certainly was convinced that the aliens were not only out there but also in here, or at least, over us. He no doubt could be counted among numerous likeminded people stretching around the civilized world. People like those who flock to Roswell. People who read through the same news. Obviously, I wasn’t one of them, still am not one of them. I don’t have a membership in that club.”
“And the ocean dandelion? What’s that all about? You wander more than Oumuamua.”
“Well, consider the nature of it, the ocean dandelion. It’s a siphonophore. It’s an organism made of different organisms, not like us with our trillions of cells and bacteria operating as an individual human, but different. Apparently, the ocean dandelion’s individuals share a single source of nutrients from some central organ that acts like a stomach for all. They are individuals, but if they get separated from that central ‘stomach,’ they die, falling like petals from a dead flower. It’s a strange creature on the ocean floor and little understood except that it is a collection of members whose viability rests on the attachment to that single ‘stomach,’ with a community of individuals who each play a specific role like the cells of sponges that perform individual duties in support of the whole body.
“So,” he puffed up to present a conclusion to his analogy, “UFOlogists seem to be individuals dependent upon the same ‘news stomach.’ And I just don’t seem to have the connecting esophagus or intestine they have. When all those years ago some guy talked about Kecksburg, I had no idea, even though the initial reports on the incident were written by a reporter for my hometown newspaper. Obviously, he hadn’t written that report on the sports page. It certainly wasn’t included in the writeup about Roberto Clemente’s latest hits. Kecksburg? Where’s that? I knew I had heard the name Kecksburg but had never to my knowledge driven through the community which, I’ve since learned, was just a dozen miles from my hometown. And in my self-imposed news blackout in 1965, I hadn’t heard the story of the supposed crash.
“Siphonophores, I know. I’m all over the map, talking like some Forrest Gump on a town square bench. But in looking back I see an analogy. The hometown news outlets of AM radio and newspapers were like the stomachs of ocean dandelions, whose members were the residents of the area. All the area’s individuals were dependent upon them and connected by them. It was a time when people placed a great deal of trust in the news, well, that is, other people, because I couldn’t have cared less about the news after we all got through the Cuban Missile Crisis a few years before. I paid attention to that; talk about being worried that something from above was about to land! Think atomic bombs. So, sure, during the crisis I was connected to the ‘stomach,’ but had afterward fallen away, a petal that detached itself from the dandelion, but one that remained viable.”
“You just ramblin’, or is there another point?”
“We haven’t changed much over the last 300 years of newspapers; we feed off the news that ties us together. and we depend on authorities in whom we place our trust. Of course, with all the alternative news sources today, we’re connected by like-mindedness in ever more specialized groups that follow this network or that, this podcast or that. And given our stereotypes that suggest scientists look like Albert Einstein and have knowledge the rest of us don’t have, we’ve been trained to believe that someone associated with astrophysics and astronomy, someone whose work has been published, is worth an ear. We put great emphasis on the thoughts of someone associated with an Ivy League school, too. We think, ‘Wow, if he’s saying it, it must be so. Aren’t all those professors geniuses?’ We’re still uncritical when it comes to getting information from sources we are supposed to respect and from people of like mind. It’s that persistent confirmation bias we can’t shake. But I have to say that Professor Loeb hasn’t gotten the reception by his peers that he has received by the Press. Guess he isn’t toeing the academic line on astrophysics or astrobiology; maybe that’s why some consider him a maverick like Copernicus or Galileo and others consider him a crackpot, a former respected scientist gone off the rails of conformity.
“But basically, that siphonophore attachment to a single stomach is the main point. I’m guessing that that scrapbook guy, if he’s still alive, is still out there scrapbooking articles about UFOs on his IPad, and maybe he’s a card-carrying member of MUFON, the Mutual Unidentified Flying Object Network. I looked them up. They have a conference in Las Vegas in 2021. You can go if you want. And if you can’t make that one, there’s one in Arkansas, the Ozark Mountain UFO Conference or Symposium in April this year. See. These are people who like siphonophores are nourished by a common news stomach, the one that provides every tale or video of strange appearances in the sky. They’re individuals, but attached and codependent. And they’re dead serious, even though they see UFO incident after incident explained away. But in some ways, I can’t fault them at all because any of us can be convinced if we hear something often enough; repeated information makes even doubters doubt their doubt. We’re really subject to self-fulfilling prophecies, or, should I say, self-fulfilling beliefs. That’s why, for example, so many believe that urban legend about 95% of scientists thinking humans have changed the world’s multiple climates, even though no such survey has ever been conducted and the one on which the statement rests was a survey of under 50, maybe under 40, research papers.
“Political junkies are the same; they’re also like ocean dandelions. Most belong to groups who follow one kind of news source exclusively. And in every human siphonophore analog, there are those who command respect, whose voices are heard, who make whatever statement they feel like making because they know their opinions will be siphoned off by the attached groups. Gosh! I just realized I painted a bleak picture of mankind. Am I allowed to say that word?”
“You certainly have painted a bleak picture of personkind,” she said jokingly. “I don’t want to think that I’m siphoning any opinions the way siphonophores get their sustenance from a central stomach. And I don’t want to think I follow anyone just because of a position in an Ivy League school. Sure, there are connective mental tissues among us, and there are people whose voices are respected. Maybe the Harvard guy is right. Maybe he’s the new Copernicus, Galileo, Bruno.”
“But we have no way of knowing, so the comparisons to those guys don’t hold water. It took decades until people accepted Copernican thought and Galileo’s science. Sometimes I think I would rather be an ignorant unattached individual than a knowing part of a collective of self-proclaimed smarties and authorities who get their smarts nourished by the same source. And I can’t leave this without pointing out a picture NASA took of the asteroid 243 Ida. Oumuamua has, according to Loeb, a strange shape; it’s elongated; it’s cigar shaped, and he uses that shape as one of his proofs. Well, sure, it is longer than it is wide, but look at asteroid 243 Ida. It isn’t round, either. Maybe Oumuamua just got pounded by other objects whose many collisions over millions of years whittled it to a cigar shape. With 13.8 billion years of universe history and uncountable billions of collisions in our own galaxy, certainly some odd shapes could occur. If you look at 243 Ida, you can also see an elongate object that seems to have been hit multiple times. Maybe Oumuamua is like a sliver of kyanite, a shiny blade broken from a larger piece.”
She concluded, “On the matter of attending one of those UFO conferences, I guess I’ll put you down as a no show. But you can’t be a hypocrite; you have to admit that you also feed off the same sources of knowledge as one group or another. You aren’t really as independent as you think. I’d think that with so few options that everyone has some connection to other people.”
“Good guess on my attending a UFO conference; I’m definitely a no show. But also good guess on my own hypocrisy. I’m probably a member of a siphonophore information stomach, also. And I just don’t recognize my dependence on others while I proclaim some individualism and autonomy. So, I guess when I brought up the topic of Kecksburg, all I ended up revealing is that I am like that guy in the teachers’ lounge. Not that I have a scrapbook of UFO sightings, but rather a scrapbook of philosophy and knowledge I share with others of like mind. Excuse me, I better go to see what my like-minded acquaintances and authorities are ingesting for the group stomach.”
Notes:
*https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/were-not-alone-harvard-astronomer-is-convinced-oumuamua-was-alien-vessel-visiting-earth/ar-BB1dtNt7 Accessed February 9, 2021
**NASA online at https://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/antimatter_binary.html Accessed February 11, 2021.
Compare 123 Ida and Oumuamua. The image of 123 Ida is from NASA.
243 Ida and Moon Dactyl (By NASA/JPL - NASA planetary photojournalhttp://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/?IDNumber=PIA00069http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA00069.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52270 )
She asked, “Why bring this up in 2021? I once read that the Kecksburg thing was in the mid-1960s.”
“The Harvard guy,” he said.
“Who?”
“You know. There’s a Harvard professor who claims Oumuamua is an alien spacecraft that whizzed through our Solar System.”
“Ou?”
“Oumuamua. Ooo mu ah mu ah. Some kind of Hawaiian name, I think. Pictures of it were all over the news and Internet a while back. Looks cigar-shaped. Got a lot of attention at the time and, what with his label as a ‘Harvard professor’; the guy in the news has revitalized the interest in UFOs. Supposedly, Oumuamua didn’t originate in the Solar System. Been wandering through the galaxy, I guess. Anyway, the statement by the Harvard guy got lots of press, what with the desire to know if UFOs are ETs without a good navigation system or roadside service.
“I remember,” he continued, “when I first heard that people took UFOs seriously. It was about a year after the Kecksburg incident. Sure, I had seen space movies as a kid, but they were exciting fictions. In 1966 I was in my early twenties, and I met a guy in the teachers’ lounge where I first taught; if I remember correctly, he was a substitute teacher. He had a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings from around the country. Yeah. Scrapbook. That was before the digital age, before even 8-tracks, tape players, and the Walkman. Anyway, he was eager to convince me that aliens had landed or at least had passed by, skimming the atmosphere, hovering at times, and in Kecksburg and Roswell, crash landing. I wasn’t very receptive. Call me the Doubting Thomas of UFOs type, even back then in my younger days. Since that time there have been bunches of books, TV shows, and films that derive the rudiment of their plots from that 1965 incident in Kecksburg. Just a couple of years ago in 2019 there was another film about it.”
“So?”
“I suppose it’s in the nature of us to want there to be ‘something more,’ ‘something outside’ what we are, especially during a frightful pandemic. Maybe the isolation of lockdowns makes us ponder the ultimate isolation of being alone in the Cosmos. Idleness from lockdowns breeds speculations about almost everything. More removal from the daily grind breeds more dependence on other ‘realities,’ the realities of the mind. When we can’t physically escape, we flee through imagination. Cabin fever stimulates the right side of the brain, especially so when we’re bombarded with so much unavoidable and entertaining science fiction. And the videos. Oh! The videos. South Floridians reported seeing a UFO on February 9, this year. Turns out it was a Navy test missile. There’s an eagerness among many to see a UFO or to jump to UFO as the default explanation for all apparently inexplicable things in the sky.”
“Sure,” she said, “I would guess that UFOs are mostly explainable, but not always immediately, and there’s that occasional one no one explains. What if the Harvard guy is right? He’s from Harvard, you know. Had to have some credentials to get that job. Probably has a long list of pubs. By the way, what’s his name?”
“Loeb, Professor Loeb. I’m sure he has a long list of pubs. But I question whether or not his pubs recently included bars as well as publications. Okay, that’s not fair. I take it back, but he’s not going to get direct evidence on Oumuamua; the thing whizzed past us. We’re too late to land on it the way we landed on other asteroids. We don’t have anything to catch it, so no one is launching a vehicle to land on it. So, what does he have for his evidence beside its trajectory, its shape, speed, and its bright albedo? Could its velocity be the product of gravitational boosts from the planets? And, also, he thinks it was in interstellar space until the Solar System ran into it. That doesn’t sound like a vehicle under the control of intelligence. What was the plan? ‘Hey, Yerzlk, let’s get into this thing and wait in interstellar space for a Solar System to come by.’ Do these aliens live for tens of thousands of years, hundreds of thousands? Sure, there are lots of extrasolar planets, but in a galaxy with so much empty space, hitting one, or having one hit you has to be a long shot even in a rotating mass of stars.”
He paused and then continued his argument by saying, “And if it were a powered vessel from outside our Solar System, why would intelligent life come all that way and not stop for a close inspection of a big blue marble? Was Oumuamua the invention of some life-forms that have no concept of life elsewhere but that just decided to wander the galaxy? Are Oumuamua’s pilots creatures that have the technology to travel through the Milky Way but who have no idea that a world in a habitable zone like ours, a world that has not only liquid water but also green colors on continents, houses life-forms? Didn’t they put windows in Oumuamua? I know that if I were passing by, I’d take a look. You know how many times I pulled over on the berm just to look at rocks I had not seen before, maybe a view from an overlook, or a quaint town with a coffee shop or diner?”
“But you’re assuming that the life-forms think like you. Maybe they’re on vacation with a destination in mind and no time to stop to see the Grand Canyon or Dollywood along the way. Maybe Ou-what’s-its-name is driven by parents who in turn are driven to ‘don’t-make-me-come-back-there’ anger by fighting siblings in the back. What if they have reservations on Alpha Centauri Bb? Heck, even at the speed of 49 kilometers per second, they’re going to be pushing to make those reservations four light years down the interstate or interspace highway. There’s just no time for stops. Or what if in passing through the Solar System, they saw nothing of interest in what we are or do?”
He thought of what she said and replied, “If you spend centuries traveling, wouldn’t there be need for a rest stop? Eventually, you run out of snacks. But to address your first point. Sure, I want to think that in the main aliens think like me. I want to think that given the principle of equivalence in physics, that the universe has only so many options on how it works, and that addressing how things work is pretty much universal like the physics, the chemistry, and the biology. How many conclusions can intelligence draw concerning what life is and where it is? How many definitions of life could there be? And how do we define intelligence if not by its curious nature? Experience might make the base of the knowledge pyramid, but everything from the foundation up is constructed by curiosity.”
“Good point,” she said, “but still only a point and made in tiny point of space that might differ if ever so slightly from some other point in space, like the one from which Oumuamua came. Maybe the rules of the Cosmos are uniform, but those rules allow for lots of variability. Geez, I just read that some astronomers think there might be whole sections of the galaxy with antimatter suns and stuff. There’s an online paper published by NASA about X-ray binaries and clouds of antimatter near the center of the galaxy. Imagine that a group of life-forms originated there. ** People who live exclusively in Quito, Ecuador, on top a mountain don’t know much about living at sea level in Miami, Florida. I’ll bet where they live shapes their sense of the world; and I can’t see untraveled residents of Appalachia who live in valleys enveloped by tall mountains knowing much about the lives of people who live on the streets in New York City enveloped by tall buildings. If there’s a noticeable difference among people here on Earth, wouldn’t there be an even greater difference between Earthlings and Otherlings?”
“What you just said…Hmmm, it makes me think of the ocean dandelion. I’ll circle back to that. But first, so the guy with his UFO scrapbook in the teachers’ lounge had closely followed the UFO stories for more than a couple of years. He was probably ready to accept that there are different kinds of intelligent life-forms. I know he wasn’t old, but he had to be at least in his late twenties or early thirties, well beyond the age of reason. He certainly was convinced that the aliens were not only out there but also in here, or at least, over us. He no doubt could be counted among numerous likeminded people stretching around the civilized world. People like those who flock to Roswell. People who read through the same news. Obviously, I wasn’t one of them, still am not one of them. I don’t have a membership in that club.”
“And the ocean dandelion? What’s that all about? You wander more than Oumuamua.”
“Well, consider the nature of it, the ocean dandelion. It’s a siphonophore. It’s an organism made of different organisms, not like us with our trillions of cells and bacteria operating as an individual human, but different. Apparently, the ocean dandelion’s individuals share a single source of nutrients from some central organ that acts like a stomach for all. They are individuals, but if they get separated from that central ‘stomach,’ they die, falling like petals from a dead flower. It’s a strange creature on the ocean floor and little understood except that it is a collection of members whose viability rests on the attachment to that single ‘stomach,’ with a community of individuals who each play a specific role like the cells of sponges that perform individual duties in support of the whole body.
“So,” he puffed up to present a conclusion to his analogy, “UFOlogists seem to be individuals dependent upon the same ‘news stomach.’ And I just don’t seem to have the connecting esophagus or intestine they have. When all those years ago some guy talked about Kecksburg, I had no idea, even though the initial reports on the incident were written by a reporter for my hometown newspaper. Obviously, he hadn’t written that report on the sports page. It certainly wasn’t included in the writeup about Roberto Clemente’s latest hits. Kecksburg? Where’s that? I knew I had heard the name Kecksburg but had never to my knowledge driven through the community which, I’ve since learned, was just a dozen miles from my hometown. And in my self-imposed news blackout in 1965, I hadn’t heard the story of the supposed crash.
“Siphonophores, I know. I’m all over the map, talking like some Forrest Gump on a town square bench. But in looking back I see an analogy. The hometown news outlets of AM radio and newspapers were like the stomachs of ocean dandelions, whose members were the residents of the area. All the area’s individuals were dependent upon them and connected by them. It was a time when people placed a great deal of trust in the news, well, that is, other people, because I couldn’t have cared less about the news after we all got through the Cuban Missile Crisis a few years before. I paid attention to that; talk about being worried that something from above was about to land! Think atomic bombs. So, sure, during the crisis I was connected to the ‘stomach,’ but had afterward fallen away, a petal that detached itself from the dandelion, but one that remained viable.”
“You just ramblin’, or is there another point?”
“We haven’t changed much over the last 300 years of newspapers; we feed off the news that ties us together. and we depend on authorities in whom we place our trust. Of course, with all the alternative news sources today, we’re connected by like-mindedness in ever more specialized groups that follow this network or that, this podcast or that. And given our stereotypes that suggest scientists look like Albert Einstein and have knowledge the rest of us don’t have, we’ve been trained to believe that someone associated with astrophysics and astronomy, someone whose work has been published, is worth an ear. We put great emphasis on the thoughts of someone associated with an Ivy League school, too. We think, ‘Wow, if he’s saying it, it must be so. Aren’t all those professors geniuses?’ We’re still uncritical when it comes to getting information from sources we are supposed to respect and from people of like mind. It’s that persistent confirmation bias we can’t shake. But I have to say that Professor Loeb hasn’t gotten the reception by his peers that he has received by the Press. Guess he isn’t toeing the academic line on astrophysics or astrobiology; maybe that’s why some consider him a maverick like Copernicus or Galileo and others consider him a crackpot, a former respected scientist gone off the rails of conformity.
“But basically, that siphonophore attachment to a single stomach is the main point. I’m guessing that that scrapbook guy, if he’s still alive, is still out there scrapbooking articles about UFOs on his IPad, and maybe he’s a card-carrying member of MUFON, the Mutual Unidentified Flying Object Network. I looked them up. They have a conference in Las Vegas in 2021. You can go if you want. And if you can’t make that one, there’s one in Arkansas, the Ozark Mountain UFO Conference or Symposium in April this year. See. These are people who like siphonophores are nourished by a common news stomach, the one that provides every tale or video of strange appearances in the sky. They’re individuals, but attached and codependent. And they’re dead serious, even though they see UFO incident after incident explained away. But in some ways, I can’t fault them at all because any of us can be convinced if we hear something often enough; repeated information makes even doubters doubt their doubt. We’re really subject to self-fulfilling prophecies, or, should I say, self-fulfilling beliefs. That’s why, for example, so many believe that urban legend about 95% of scientists thinking humans have changed the world’s multiple climates, even though no such survey has ever been conducted and the one on which the statement rests was a survey of under 50, maybe under 40, research papers.
“Political junkies are the same; they’re also like ocean dandelions. Most belong to groups who follow one kind of news source exclusively. And in every human siphonophore analog, there are those who command respect, whose voices are heard, who make whatever statement they feel like making because they know their opinions will be siphoned off by the attached groups. Gosh! I just realized I painted a bleak picture of mankind. Am I allowed to say that word?”
“You certainly have painted a bleak picture of personkind,” she said jokingly. “I don’t want to think that I’m siphoning any opinions the way siphonophores get their sustenance from a central stomach. And I don’t want to think I follow anyone just because of a position in an Ivy League school. Sure, there are connective mental tissues among us, and there are people whose voices are respected. Maybe the Harvard guy is right. Maybe he’s the new Copernicus, Galileo, Bruno.”
“But we have no way of knowing, so the comparisons to those guys don’t hold water. It took decades until people accepted Copernican thought and Galileo’s science. Sometimes I think I would rather be an ignorant unattached individual than a knowing part of a collective of self-proclaimed smarties and authorities who get their smarts nourished by the same source. And I can’t leave this without pointing out a picture NASA took of the asteroid 243 Ida. Oumuamua has, according to Loeb, a strange shape; it’s elongated; it’s cigar shaped, and he uses that shape as one of his proofs. Well, sure, it is longer than it is wide, but look at asteroid 243 Ida. It isn’t round, either. Maybe Oumuamua just got pounded by other objects whose many collisions over millions of years whittled it to a cigar shape. With 13.8 billion years of universe history and uncountable billions of collisions in our own galaxy, certainly some odd shapes could occur. If you look at 243 Ida, you can also see an elongate object that seems to have been hit multiple times. Maybe Oumuamua is like a sliver of kyanite, a shiny blade broken from a larger piece.”
She concluded, “On the matter of attending one of those UFO conferences, I guess I’ll put you down as a no show. But you can’t be a hypocrite; you have to admit that you also feed off the same sources of knowledge as one group or another. You aren’t really as independent as you think. I’d think that with so few options that everyone has some connection to other people.”
“Good guess on my attending a UFO conference; I’m definitely a no show. But also good guess on my own hypocrisy. I’m probably a member of a siphonophore information stomach, also. And I just don’t recognize my dependence on others while I proclaim some individualism and autonomy. So, I guess when I brought up the topic of Kecksburg, all I ended up revealing is that I am like that guy in the teachers’ lounge. Not that I have a scrapbook of UFO sightings, but rather a scrapbook of philosophy and knowledge I share with others of like mind. Excuse me, I better go to see what my like-minded acquaintances and authorities are ingesting for the group stomach.”
Notes:
*https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/were-not-alone-harvard-astronomer-is-convinced-oumuamua-was-alien-vessel-visiting-earth/ar-BB1dtNt7 Accessed February 9, 2021
**NASA online at https://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/antimatter_binary.html Accessed February 11, 2021.
Compare 123 Ida and Oumuamua. The image of 123 Ida is from NASA.
243 Ida and Moon Dactyl (By NASA/JPL - NASA planetary photojournalhttp://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/?IDNumber=PIA00069http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA00069.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52270 )
RSS Feed