[extropy-chat] zero point fields, Bernard Haisch and, gulp, more

[Damien Broderick]

Here's something kinda zany and hairballish but hot damn this is Bernard 
Haisch, not some total dumbo:

http://www.ufoskeptic.org/

< ...the fact of the matter is, there does exist a vast amount of high 
quality, albeit enigmatic, data. UFO sightings are not limited to farmers 
in backward rural areas. There are astronomers and pilots and NASA 
engineers -- and others who have been around the block a few times when it 
comes to observing natural phenomena -- who have witnessed events for which 
there is no plausible conventional explanation.

Recently astrophysicist Ken Olum at Tufts University argued 
<http://www.arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0303070>(gr-qc/0303070) that anthropic 
reasoning applied to inflation theory predicts that we should find 
ourselves part of a large, galaxy-sized civilization, implying that the "We 
are alone" solution to <http://www.ufoskeptic.org/contact.html>Fermi's 
paradox is inconsistent with our best current theory of cosmology. Beatriz 
Gato-Rivera, a physicist at the Instituto de Matematicas y Fisica in 
Madrid, followed up on this 
<http://www.arxiv.org/abs/physics/0308078>(physics/0308078) with the 
hypothesis that Olum is correct, but that by design we would be kept 
unaware of a greatly advanced surrounding civilization. She also argues 
that modern superstring and M-brane theory further aggravate Fermi's 
"missing alien" problem.

There is another aspect to the UFO phenomenon that involves politics and 
secrecy rather than observational evidence. I do not currently have a 
ticket to any SCI program, but over the years I have gotten to know 
individuals who for one reason or another would be aware of the existence 
of relevant black programs. From such sources, certain possibilities have 
made it through my credibility filter and now reside -- like Schroedinger's 
cat -- in kind of an unresolved mental superposition of quantum states 
having both the eigenvalues "true" and "false" and no operator around to 
collapse the wave function. My credibility filter is a function of several 
parameters such as my own knowledge of physical laws, state of technology 
and history of its origin, some personal experience with government 
agencies and security classification systems, but mostly the filter is 
tuned to the questions: Which people have I learned over the years to be 
trustworthy, sensible and knowledgeable? How would they be in a position to 
know the things they do? Why and to what extent would they tell me 
anything, even based on long-time friendship? Do they have anything to gain 
by telling stories or making claims? What consistency and convergence is 
there among various people's claimed information?

I see myself a bit like the kid standing next to the kid looking through 
the hole in the big tall fence at the baseball game. This means that the 
closest I am getting to inside information will be a recounting of what is 
going on in there. I myself am definitely not an insider, but contacts I 
have acquired and/or befriended over a long period of time seem to be on 
the periphery of some kind of inside which appears to contain at least 
remarkable information, and apparently more than that. Let me be (somewhat) 
more specific. I now have three completely independent examples of 
individuals whom I trust reporting to me that individuals they trust have 
admitted to handling alien materials in "our" possession in the course of 
secret official duties. (The special access level in the one case for which 
I know it is R, a not widely known SCI level whose existence was finally 
verified for me by someone who himself had a very high access level, though 
short of that one, as being "reserved for someone at the very top." I do 
not know, however, whether it is specifically reserved or designated for 
this topic.) And in yet two mores cases, I am similarly one (trustworthy) 
step removed from a former head of a federal government agency who was 
involved with a special access program reporting decades-long 
extraterrestrial reverse engineering efforts and a head of state of a G8 
country who also said he had been officially briefed on that program. Now 
the Air Force Project Blue Book of the 1950s and 1960s did have both a 
public and a classified side. I suspect that after the public half of Blue 
Book closed up shop following the Condon Report, its classified half may 
have continued, existing today as a black special access program (see below).

Could such things possibly be true? While I am intrigued by what I have 
learned over the years, I can't be absolutely certain.  >

and so on.

Damien Broderick