The Extraterrestrial Mind - UFO Conjectures

Rich Reynolds and friends debate how far one can extrapolate from a sample of One (Earth-humans), in the sense of how "humanly similar" an intelligent extraterrestrial (or even ultraterrestrial) race would be, and what, indeed "intelligence" itself constitutes. Fun stuff, though in the absence of "certainty" perhaps it wouldn't hurt to prepare for anything. Yet how could that be done? On a more finite level, Rich's The UFO Explanation is Only in the Sightings basically attacks UFO research that adds "noise" to whatever is the pure "signal" of a witness report. Rich has a point here; as Dr. Thomas Bullard has comprehensively established in his The Myth and Mystery of UFOs, every step in the progress of an initial UFO experience to its societal understanding is a filtering, interpretation, and transmutation of the original sensory experience, itself subject to issues. And then the received opinion itself becomes a distorting filter for the next UFO report. Historians have to deal with this "primary source" versus interpretation/analysis issue all the time, and it's one of the reasons why "history" tends to get rewritten upon occasion. There's more, too, in the Comments dialogue which, while interesting, somewhat strays from Rich's core general point, which is that concentration upon "extraneous" details is Not Seeing the Forest for the Trees. Here Rich reiterates his stance upon original reports and their various interpretive accretions, the latter being--well, unhelpful. In this Comments section Bryan Sentes and Rich come to an agreement of sorts that distinguishes between, in Sentes' words, "investigations-in-the-first-instance" and "returns-to, rehashings, [and] reviews." Glad they're happy, but the result seems a bit unfair to most historians, who don't have access to the original "crime scenes." (WM)

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from THE ANOMALIST http://bit.ly/2LBuF6u