Sunday, February 14, 2010

The LAW of the TIMES: is there a Close Encounters Pattern?

Because my lifestyle will be changing shortly [going to WVA temporarily, but semi-permanently, to be with my Mother day-to-day as she makes a life transition to a new living environment], this blog is going to change alongside that shift. Due to the fact that I won't have my library/resource room handy, I'll not be able to be very "smart" anymore--most of my brains are in hardcopy afterall. So, I don't know how this is going to proceed. But I hope to keep it up in some form. Because there is little time in this current mode [fly out is Feb.27], I thought that I better at least put out the "Law of the Times", because, even if its significance is still in doubt, and therefore very debatable, it is a finding of great intrigue to me, and I think that it should be to all interested in UFOs. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Law of the Times is firstly a product of the statistical interests of Claude Poher [upper left] and secondly of the collaborative interests of Jacques Vallee [upper right]. It caught the early interest of Vicente-Juan Ballester-Olmos [lower right, talking to Hynek], who checked the findings of Poher and Vallee with his own Spanish data. Later, Ted Phillips [lower left] published a graph which also seems to show the phenomenon. I view these four [Poher/Vallee used two independent sets of data] findings to be pretty robust, and I believe the overall finding to be sound. What they all were studying were Close Encounters---this is important---this was not a study of any old UFO case set; this was study of very "concrete" close encounters of the "landing" variety. These cases, therefore, leave very little room for confusion, alternative hypothesizing, ordinary mistakes. The cases are either extremely anomalous or they are lies. In the briefest terms, what these graphs are about is a determination of WHEN during the "day" such close encounters took place. The results are rather stunning. The first, solid smack-in-the-face finding is that these types of cases occur almost always at night. [not 100%, but overwhelmingly.] Cases occurring in daytime scatter about like a background to the real statistical action. The second finding was weirder yet and harder to interpret.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is my redrawn graph showing the night-time peak vs. the day-time lull. The graphs, in FSR [vol. 21/ #3/4], are not numbered on the vertical axis, but reading the whole text indicates that the night-time "jump" is many times more powerful than the background. [I just looked up my "unofficial" Poher manuscript, and it seems to indicate that there is a six times increase of night-time observation even on mixed UFO cases--close encounters of the second kind seem to be much higher]. My graph shows two other things: a bifurcated peak, with its secondary peak at about two or three in the morning; and a yellow line. The yellow line shows what a good scholar Poher was/is. He went to the trouble of looking at sociological statistics to find when people in France [his stat sets were from French "landings"] were out and about, and, therefore, noting the "potential" for any humans to see an encounter at all. Note that in the graph [don't take my yellow line too seriously; it's there to illustrate the general relationship, not to be part of a college thesis], the potential human witnesses bottoms out at the time that this secondary bump of reports occurs--exactly NOT what you'd expect to happen if UFO close encounters were a random process.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is the checking done by Ballester-Olmos [in case anyone does not realize this, V.-J. is the leading UFO authority in Spain, and has been for 30 years]. Ballester graphs his own independent CE2 set and comes up with a generally good match with the two Poher-Vallee sets. The night-time dominance is there, as is the idea that during the early morning hours a secondary rising-up occurs. [don't know the primary source of Ballester's publication, but I got this graph from the newsletter, DATA-NET]. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1971, or so, Ted Phillips published a time-of-day graph for his landings [where an actual observation by witnesses of the object which made the trace was possible]. I don't believe that this graph was made with any knowledge of the "Law". Yet it does seem to show the Law [night-time dominance and an early morning secondary peak]. These four independent sets impress me. I don't know if I'm alone in this, but I doubt it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Because Jacques Vallee is a creative man, he wondered what would happen if he synthesized the two graphs that he and Poher knew [the actual time distribution of close encounters--the blue line to the left--and the "opportunity to see" graph--the yellow line in Poher's graph above]. The result of that mathematical synthesis is shaped like the red dashed line in the accompanying graph. [How "high" the curve would be in actual vertical reach is not known--i.e. you cannot put numbers on it without making some assumption as to what the "efficiencies of reporting" would be for UFO cases of the CE2-Trace kind]. What the synthesis said to Jacques was that there seemed to be a "deficit" of unreported close-encounters, shown as an orange area above. If one made the assumption that one was dealing with a constant rate of reporting, and that the curve was generally symmetric, then the peak of that curve would be over the secondary observed peak at the 2-to-3AM area. AND it would be quite high. [higher than I've drawn it to fit it into the graph space]. [again the point is not academic accuracy for our purposes, but to show the qualitative situation]. Due to this apparent evidence of a severe deficit in reporting even the most spectacular encounters, Vallee assumed that a mind-bogglingly huge number of these must be occurring all the time. This seems to be one of the data-oriented reasons that he rejected the extraterrestrial hypothesis. The question is, of course, still open as to what these curves really signify.I have a few thoughts of my own, but since they are somewhere between All-The-Way-Fool and Out Proctor, you may want to get the trash can ready.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You can interpret the curves and the "deficit" the way Jacques does, that's an honorable idea. It is, I think, just one interpretation. Can one, therefore, think about the "deficit" in more ways. Guess#1: the ufonauts are performing these close encounters with human observers in mind, but are somewhat botching the job, and the humans are responding differently at different times, or missing the experiences entirely. I don't like this guess much because it makes the ufonauts more sociologically incompetent than I think they are. [remember folks, that I think that the evidence is overwhelming that the phenomenon is not Sci-fy explorer-dirt samplers, but rather some kind of sophisticated display aimed at the observers]. Guess#2: The ufonauts are performing events with human observers in mind, but for some reason is selectively blocking observer memories during the time-deficit period. I don't like this guess at all. Remember that these numbers refer to CE2-trace/landing cases not humanoid cases [primarily] nor "abductions". Plus, why would the blocking change pace/percentage from one moment/hour to the next--as the "bump" requires it to do? Guess#3: The ufonauts are performing these events with us in mind, but it is us that is weird between midnight and 4AM, and we cause them statistical troubles no matter how overt they try to ram their CEs down our throats. Well, I'm willing to admit that we're weird, and maybe not easy to control on anything, but even if this would have something to do with the curve, it tells us only about ourselves and not about UFOs. But I don't think it's much of an answer anyway. These cases are very concrete experiences. They should be well within the order of stimuli which would affect almost the entirety of our species [grossly] the same way. Guess#4: In the 1AM to 5am period the UFO agency is presenting close encounters which are not primarily or at least singly concerned with the human species, but are nevertheless aimed at some class of potential observers. Hmmmmm. Out Proctor? Guess#5: The ufonauts are not concerned with us at any times, and our presence is just accidental, and the curve is just what it is. Well, OK, in the sense that you can't directly argue with the possibility, but all my other study on the display nature of UFO cases says that this is wrong. I have an All-the-Way-Fool idea that shouldn't be viewed as anything more than that, but I like it anyway. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When I look at the bifurcated curve, and when I add my bias that I believe that these guys know almost exactly what they're doing, I'm tempted to see two independent curves. There would be an earlier curve peaking at 10-to-11PM, and a later curve peaking at 2-to-3AM. If so, they would indicate two different "agendas". For me, this would not be shocking, as those of you who have read the blog know, I think that it is likely that we have more than one type of super-civilization possible [see the entries on What Will They Be Like? for the differing philosophies of these types]. I could easily fit an agenda of one civilization type being "run" [by mutual agreement] in a separate "time-slot", for non-interference reasons, with a second agenda running later, into my hypothesis of differing philosophies of cultures. If that were true, we might have our first defensible hint that more than one supertech culture was on the scene. The idea that one of these civilizations might see Earth as residence to a type of intelligence other than our own, and more interesting to learn about/contact, is a thought I will keep in interest.
Whatever guess that you want to buy into, or construct on your own, I believe that The Law Of The Times is one of the most provocative findings in our research history. At the absolute least, the mystery that the vast majority of these CE2s happen at night should set your imaginations reeling. And then, going beyond to the curve--what explains it? What respectable assumptions might we make? And how "good" are these critters at what they are doing? And, far beyond that, are we the only game in town? Might it be the greatest of ironies, that what the ETs were most interested in were the folkloric entities that Jacques wants THEM to be? Well, all in speculation, my friends--but based on some pretty sound stuff from some of our finest.

19 comments:

  1. Super-cool agian, professor. Mind blowing and mind-boggling, really. I often wonder if this is how "they" communicate with us. They know that there are those of us who love crunching numbers, making graphs, and love the feel of a Sharpie marker between our fingers. They know that someone will look at the data and analyze it - it's their way of saying "Hi, we're intelligent and real." Stranger things have happened!
    That, and they have to know by now there's nothing good on TV at 3am.... unless they like infomercials. Did you ever see the movie "Explorers"? It plays with the idea of how an interstellar culture would perceive us based on TV signals they receive from us.

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  2. One sees this data and it becomes obvious that the UFO phenomena is real and not a figment of the imagination or a vast collection of hoaxes.

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  3. It occurs to me that the two different peaks in reported sightings seems to coincide with the times of the evening that most people are likely to be out and about, active in that time. From 10:00 to 11:00 PM people are often either coming home after a late day, or just going out for a late evening. Likewise, 2:00 AM is often the latest that people will stay out late, so the 2:00 AM to 3:00 AM time period is simply when people are on their way home. The intervening hours are normally a time when people gather, often in large groups (the bar, the late dinner, etc.).

    It seems to me the peaks might simply represent the times when it is most likely that people will be out to experience these things. Part of what you might be measuring in these graphs are human behavior patterns, but patterns as they interact with the actions of the UFOnauts.

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  4. To David, the data relate mostly to rural areas in France and Spain in the 1950s and 1960s. Poher was REALLY a sharp guy, and he deliberately wanted to avoid deductions like the {reasonable} one you made. But that deduction is not what's happening. The Time of activity of the people had been determined [independently] by French sociologists and it does not correlate to this. That, sound as it might seem to a citizen of basically urban modern society, is not the answer. And, on top of this, such a hypothesis would not explain anything about the dominant night-time effect. You should feel good about yourself, though, as many thinking individuals say what you said in response to this--it is the beginning of a "thinking man's" analysis. ------------------------------------------------------------To Steve: right with you. These things point to the non-randomness of what's going on, and thrash the "Coincidence", random fluke, meaningless blunder type of hypotheses. And, given that these are LANDINGS, the "misidentification" hypotheses get pretty strained. The fact that we are dealing with large numbers and people who are scattered far and wide, points also to Objectivity in the pattern. The "LAW" does not tell us what this is, but it does tell us that the anomaly is robust and very real.--------------------------------------------------------To "Willy": all I can say is that you're apparently off your meds, and the next time you come over you'll need a heavy dose of the NICAP files.

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  5. I wonder if any thought has been given to the supposed human "biological clock" as it pertains to rhythms in human brain activity, etc. Is it possible there are fluctuations within humans that correspond to these times of the 24-hour clock? Could the "visitors" know enough about us to have intuited that there are times our biological rhythms make it most amenable for whatever designs they are undertaking in relation to us to be their most efficacious?

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  6. I have no intelligent answer. Humans in the "state of nature" seem to begin a shift from a dopamine-dominated state of alert consciousness to a serotonin-dominated dream state of consciousness. This occurs in "natural light" cultures when the Sun goes down. I believe that it is true that 2to3AM is a minor change point in this, just as its opposite 2to3PM is a gear-down period for us in day. All this is off-the-top by me and should be taken as essentially rambling, until someone looks into it more "professionally". The problem that I feel about that hypothesis playing TOO great a role is that the stimulus of the level of a close encounter should blast away the Serotonin-dominated state and send us roaring into Dopamine land---just like a criminal break-in at your home gets you wide alert real fast. Still, I like the direction of the thought and there well could be something there.

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  7. Prof, to paraphrase Rumi, as far as I'm concerned - for a variety of reasons - the truth probably lies far more in "this AND that" than "this OR that", by which I mean I don't automatically go for the either/or type option of djinn versus extraterrestials, human astral travellers versus nuts and bolt spaceships, future/past based time travellers visiting the present versus parallel universe researchers but, rather, tend to favour some combination of all these and probably far, far more categories beyond our current points of cultural and scientific reference.

    Saying all that, I'd like to draw your attention to something about the data, (which, to go by your thoroughly through methodology, you've probably already well considered, but let's say I'm double-underlining it): the period concerned is not only the one when the FEWEST people in the hemisphere're awake, but also when the VAST majority're asleep.

    Now, according to Schrödinger's Cat theory, the cat only dies - or whatever - when someone finally opens the box, at which point the infinite range of possibilities collapse down into one actuality, (ignoring the infinitude of divergent universes option).

    But what happens if the guy who witnesses the cat's state in the box, manages to somehow leave his memory of what he witnessed in the box with the cat - which in a sense is what happens with these people who only remember their contact experience at a later date - does this postpone the cat's fate?

    Yet even more than that - or so I'm suggesting - maybe the fact so many people're asleep might play some part in allowing such events to take place at all, in that the ostensible absence of the majority's waking consciousnesses possibly allows reality to be more elastic, making it far more difficult for the cat's infinitude of possibilities to collapse down into the single mundane, 'scientifically' predictable option of death.

    But, maybe even more than that, what if these events're engineered to take place at those times precisely so people's dreaming consciousnesses can assimilate them as a collective, much in the same way Lyall Watson's Hundred Monkeys concept might operate, whereby Japanese scientists, monitoring monkey populations spread across various islands noticed how, after the population on one particular island gradually reached a level where one hundred members'd finally started using a pioneering fruit washing technique, all of sudden the entire populations on all the other islands started simultaneously using the same technique in spite of never having been exposed to it?

    p.s.

    sorry to hear about your mum, and as one who, with his brother, has to look after his own mother, I can only commend you for your dutifulness but also commiserate with you for the restrictions it'll place on your existence, (unless you start working on your astral projection abilities, in which case I'll look out for you in Frankenstein's Castle, as I sometimes call it, or on board the giant spaceship invisibly parked somewhere 'above' the Earth, or the dome of 'higher learning' circling Sirius, [which're ultimately 'rooms' in the same thing, if their various frequenters and denizens only but knew it!).

    alanborky

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  8. I find that projecting the Schrodinger thought experiment to the macrocosm a slippery thing so I'll beg incompetence on that. The stuff about the majority being in a dream state has some intrigue, if the technology involved has a psychic component and may need a clear channel to operate--or some such idea. ----but don't get me started on the "hundredth monkey" concept--I am as much an enthusiast for such a thing to be true as anybody, but the actual people who did the scientific work say "no". I believe that our friend Lyall has got that one wrong. We don't need that anecdote to be true anyway to imagine some occasional "collective mindstate" or contact--I'll stand just fine with the results of Roger Nelson and the Global Consciousness Project.

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  9. There is a possibly interesting graph here that shows melatonin levels during the day for young men, elderly men, young women and elderly women. (Though it looks like you could only consider a young/elderly distinction.)

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  10. Very interesting. Thank you. I too am watching the Global Consciousness Project with interest...rickpetes

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  11. To Eric: thanks for the graph. Quite interesting. Some form of "altered state of consciousness" could play a role, as we've said, and all this change in powerful brain hormone activity could well be a factor, if so. It would be interesting to know if, just as we CAN shift our biological clocks [adjusting to jet-lag et al], whether the people who are up at the wee hours have shifted these sorts of graphs so that some of the hormonal changes aren't as great as the lab tests show, though. Ah well, no one said any of this would be easy, especially if we keep thinking. I appreciate the graph and its knowledge.

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  12. The curves shown seem to follow what you would expect in nature; some sort of bell curve distribution. For that reason I think this data is measuring humans much more than it is measuring aliens (although what exactly it is measuring in humans remains unclear).
    Wouldn't aliens doing visitations in an organized way, under some sort of master plan (as you theorize in your numbered guesses above) execute their visits very specifically? Why would they come down 'around 2 or 3 in the morning' instead of just getting it done at a precise and predetermined time? Am I assuming too much about how efficient and superior these beings must be to accomplish what it seems they have accomplished?
    I think if this was measuring alien activity it would show more of a neat on-off sort of distribution, not an organic, earthly, bell curve distribution.

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  13. Interesting approach, but i don't agree.{Well, not entirely, anyway}. Many agendas have a gear-up element and a gear-down element which one might graph roughly as a bell-curve. I wouldn't want to prejudice my thinking about what these "folks" were doing. Plus, there's this dominant time distribution, which I believe must be taken into account in any hypothesis. If there is something about "night"/opposite-side-of-the-Sun/darkness/state-of-consciousness/X that's going on [and there seems to be] then it's hard to place too many hypotheticals on whatever "they're" doing if one doesn't know what that factor is. Let me give a purely b_______ example, Pretend that there is something about the "force" environment when the "technology" is on the shielded side of the Earth that matters. There might be times when the "program" gears up and when it has to gear down. [this is just smoke-blowing so don't take it seriously]--my point is that "environment" may well matter in ways that we don't yet have much clue to. Individual encounters ARE probably well-controlled "on/off" displays, but they may still happen "statistically" as to their frequency because of some environmental condition. That condition could be entirely due to our own nature or the external physical one.

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  14. - Pope's star watcher to visit Nasa (12th February 2009) and talk aliens... The Vatican is to go head to head with Nasa over the possibility of life existing anywhere else in the Universe except Earth... VIDEO: Secrets of the Vatican: UFO's in the Ancient Art... Messiah - His Spaceships... Vatican and Planet X:
    http://cristiannegureanu.blogspot.com/2009/11/when-et-phones-pope.html

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  15. What does this have to do with the topic of the post? This is not a stream-of-thought billboard. Please refrain from posting random materials. This isn't even news. Catholicism responded to the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence way back in the 1950s. [both the papacy and a scientist at Catholic University in DC].

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  16. this graph is one of the major clue on who is really these entities are. as folklore shrink into the background and modern materialism rise up in western society, the spiritual manifestation of old beliefs like folklore faeries or ghost become a sort of superstition and ppl dont believe in them anymore than they believe in santa claus.

    i think humanity's belief is what drove these entities to assume the mask of aliens riding hitech spaceships, at least that mask is believable from the point of modern western culture or western educated men. Just as in Christianity you are required to have faith to believe in God, here the entities seems to seek humanity's belief in them so that they have some kind of power (?). Without it they will be pushed into myth and superstitious zone and more likely to be laughed at than to be believed.

    back to the graph itself, i think we all know who operate at that hours. In indonesia here, dusk and dawn are also a critical time where the saying says you have to be careful at that times because you are more likely to meet some entities at that time and i dont mean ET type entities. As i notice, there are very few UFO encounter case in indonesia compared to western educated world (father gill's case an exception i guess, but papua is far from java). but we got massive amount of ghost type and magonia type encounters here and i think its because of most ppl still believe in ghost encounters rather than ET.

    btw prof, one thing about these entities, they are territorial and they never cross waters. i mean if you have some kind of charm from some witchdoctor, it wont work if you take it across nations / over waters (some exception for very powerful charm). its like there are differend ruler for these entities and their powers also limited to their designated area.

    sorry im rambling, but that graph coincide very much with the time ghost or apparition or supernatural beings operates, these beings are said to avoid large crowds of humans as they cannot stand lot of humans. these im speaking from folklore and reality of today's belief and reality on how many of these cases still occuring today in indonesia.

    milomilo

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    1. One of the reasons why there are few "encounters" reported in the UFO literature from South and Southeast Asia is that there have been very few active and publishing UFO researchers there. There is an exception: Ahmad Jamaludin, who published [among other things] A Summary of Unidentified Flying Objects and Related Events in Malaysia, 1950-1980. 1981 [published privately]. This was a rather good piece of work. Jamaludin also, I believe, published at least one paper in FSR about Close Encounter of the Third Kind cases there, with drawings of entities.

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  17. Dear prof

    There is a local book here way back in the 80s about a person who seek UFO and after a while he got visited by some kind of small BoL in his house, and those continued to become stranger and stranger including seeing Nocturnal Dics above him and 8ft high hairy being inside his home. In the end it all terrorized him and he seek help from a Christian Minister. I cannot locate the book now and i cannot find a reference to it nowadays.

    The A.Jamaludin stuff i read from mostly from FSR and i am familiar with some of the high strangeness stuff like the little people cases he mention, that also exist here in Java with no correlation to UFO phenomena at all, i have a feeling A.J are trying too hard to fit in local mystical thing into the 'modern UFO' terminology.. kinda like magonia in reverse.

    regards
    milo

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    1. To your concern that Jamaludin might be trying too hard to force-fit things like the dwarf cases into the UFO phenomenon, you could well be correct. I "store" those cases in both my folkloric entity [i.e. "little people"] files and the UFO files, and tend to favor the folkloric interpretation about them.

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