WINDOWS

When veteran UFO researchers contemplate the great pile of reports that have accumulated, they all begin by tossing out "the obvious"--the errors of knowledge [Venus; Fireballs; scintillating stars et al], and the errors of perception [advertising planes; ordinary objects in non-ordinary conditions; and so on], and the surprisingly-not-too-many hoaxes. These removals and others cull the pile down to the true analysis problem: are those that are left genuinely difficult to explain? All of us try to stretch our minds, but reasonably, to fit the cases to possible military "black projects" and rare natural phenomena like "ball lightning", and if those "stretches" are possible the case goes not to the trash pile, but to the gray pile. What's left over after a reasonable and honest sifting is the still-rather-mountainous pile of UFOs, plus the gray pile sitting alongside as possible support. As I say, all the good UFOlogists do this. Not all the famous ones do, but all the good ones. There are stages in all case evaluations where the human factor comes in. Every one of us will make mistakes on a case here and there, because we don't have all the information, or have an erroneous document, or have mis-read something innocently, etc. But the community of good scholars has general agreement usually on the facts of most cases. That's when I've noticed differences arising among us. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------Most of my UFO buddies are "human" [as far as I can tell---just a joke, folks] and they want to, at greater or lesser degrees of urgency, to speculate on what's going on behind these cases. What has been interesting to me is that almost all of them think that, with very small exceptions in the case pile, what is going on is just one thing. The favorite "one thing" is, of course, the extraterrestrial hypothesis, but an extraterrestrial hypothesis that speculates that it is one civilization that is here. And an extraterrestrial hypothesis that sees all these cases as incidents of variations of that one civilization's technology. There are exceptions to this [like Jacques Vallee with a parallel reality hypothesis] but these exceptions tend to be relatively tightly defined around some unitary reality or agency. I've read, generally, the same pile of cases that everyone else has, and it just doesn't "feel" that way to me. I think---it's a "soft" sort of non-conclusion---that there are many civilizations involved. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This unpopular thought [unpopular because most people are stretched beyond their capacity for tolerance by one civilization let alone several] arises NOT from the phenomenon showing itself with a slightly different "UFO Hot-Rod" design for every next encounter, but from reading cases which are just as "solid" as most in the pile, but don't seem quite to fit with the rest. Once that "feeling" occurs, I believe that a certain "logic" arises to the speculative imagination that supports it. [I'll unravel some thoughts on why we should seriously consider multiple civilization types as reasonable, from non-UFO considerations in a later post]. There are many of these different "feeling" sorts of cases. Today I'll tell of one type: the "windows". -----------------------------------------------------------------------We have well-witnessed incidents of what seem like "openings" in the environment, through which the reporters can see humanoid forms [sometimes] or just bright light [see a few illustrations above]. On occasion the humanoids even egress the "window" and physically interact with the outside. But the "window" cases are all quite different. They have the "feel" of different technologies. Could they be the experiments or the travel techniques of different technical paths, and different civilizations? The Cazalla de la Sierra [Spain] incident was a well-witnessed [4 and two furiously barking dogs] one of an apparently two-dimensional bright-lighted rectangle, about ten feet wide and three feet tall. They described it as a "panel of light". [top left]. The Rosedale, Alberta incident was seen by one adult woman [and a cowering dog] and appeared to be a rectangle with a sliding opening, within which one could see two humanoids inside and one outside who had apparently egressed. [top right]. The Kimba, South Australia incident [four witnesses] had a brightly orange-lit "door", again a rectangle, within which "stood" a bright white form of a humanoid, which did not move. This thing was hovering about three feet off the ground. [middle drawing]. The Albufeira, Portugal incident [two adult witnesses] had a manifestation which hung in the air near their hotel room looking like a great TV screen with no depth. Unfortunately nothing ever showed on the screen. These things are not the normal UFO case, some people would not like to put them in the UFO pile at all, but the four above certainly do not stand alone [in 1978, for instance there were four cases in Tasmania, where, fortunately we have one of UFOlogy's best field researchers]. But the cases don't feel particularly like the "flying disk" aspect of the phenomenon, and they are not exactly like one another either. What might they be?---------------------------------------------------------------------What is allowed by Nature and what is discoverable by intelligence often results in many ways of accomplishing [relatively] the same ends. You can fly to Europe, boat there, send an e-mail, or a video conference, etc. If one wanted to explore some distant world [or whatever reason you wanted to "be"there], you might grind out a long real-space odyssey, punch a wormhole to save the time, or open a "window" and look out. And you can fill in your own imaginative concepts. The point is, there may be different ways of doing even "visitation". One thing I believe Carl Sagan, Frank Drake, and the SETIans have right: there are a very large number of highly advanced civilizations "out there". Many might want to have a look-in here. Why the variety of "entries"? Here is something to meditate upon: when a technology arises it has usually gone through an evolution of stages. There usually is an "accidental discovery". Then there is a series of "trials-and-errors", wherein something works some of the time, but matters are largely out-of-control. Then there is an "almost fool-proof" stage where the experimenters risk deliberately going-for-it. Then there is a "smooth-sailing" stage where the inventors and their bosses have a rather exclusive monopoly of a functional technology. Then sometimes the technology becomes "commonplace" and a lot of possible operators are in action. And lastly, it becomes susceptible to the wild ideas and messings-about of Joe-in-the-Garage. Who knows how much control different civilizations insist on exercising over their hi-tech or what stage any of these things might be at? Occasionally will come a case where there seems to be a particular meaninglessness to it, as if someone did not quite have their act together. One wonders. Maybe they didn't.