Anomaly and Aperture

The key to insight — is introducing multiple lenses, and adjusting the apertures to allow you to understand what was previously unknown. Every major advance in knowledge, language — and technology — proceeds in this fashion.

What are anomalies?

Features of experience, or testable reality that violate our previous understandings, reflections, suppositions, and knowledge.

Whether intellectual, philosophical, religious or technological… anomalies are the most common origin of insight because they provide the initial hint that there’s something beyond our common ideas, beliefs, methods and certainties…

“Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly, i.e., with the recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science. It then continues with a more or less extended exploration of the area of anomaly. And it closes only when the paradigm theory has been adjusted so that the anomalous becomes the expected. Assimilating a new sort of fact demands a more than additive adjustment of theory, and until the adjustment is complete — until the scientist has learned to see nature in a different way — the fact is not quite a scientific fact at all.”

— Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Lately, some of us have been spectating at the strange situation arising from the slow transformation in the canonical story regarding UFO/UAP/Anomalous phenomena and the US Government.

A group of Senators has become insistent that branches of the US Military that are in possession of information related to the operation of non-human intelligences, UFOs, UAPs, (etc.) in the US and abroad over the span from 1947 to the present, ‘disclose’ relevant data to the Senate, Congress and the Public (to whatever degree is reasonable within the context of National Security).

The standard story is that ‘there’s no evidence’ of anything unusual going on. Some 200,000 reports are framed as ‘fundamentally inconclusive’.

For the past ~75 years, the standard operating procedure of the USGM on this topic has been: deny, discredit, shame. And add noise to the channel.

Meanwhile, some factions within the USG have clearly been collecting data. They may also have collected artifacts, intelligence, bodies, and perhaps vehicles.

But there’s no ‘there’ there.

Wait, Who is Overseeing the Situation?

It should be blatantly obvious that the Military branches of the USG are entirely the wrong organ to evaluate or manage anything related to nonhuman intelligence.

[ Day of the Dolphin was a painfully ironic cautionary tale about actual intelligences with us here on Earth, and how the USM would ‘operationalize’ them for military purposes. John Lilly realized that we were in the presence of an advanced nonhuman intelligence. He was unable to convince our existing societies of the crucial importance of this fact. ]

The US military is employing the wrong lenses for this endeavor, and they’re absolutely committed to sustaining these; war is the source of their power and funding… so everything looks like an enemy to them.

But it’s also a problem of aperture: what they are looking for, and why they are looking at all.

As it relates to nonhuman intelligences, the lenses the US military is likely to employ are mostly blind.

Break it Down

Regardless of the origins and natures of the phenomena involved, it comes down to two questions:

1. Are nonhuman intelligences operating (para)technologically local to the Earth?
2. If the answer to the first question is ‘no’, what are we capturing in photographs, material traces and radar?

Something is actually going on. And it’s clearly been going on for thousands of years, in whatever forms it has been going on. There’s a vast ancient literature oriented around beings from the sky. It spans cultures and times in a dramatic and obvious way. It’s probable that human religions have their origin in this matter — or are, at the very least, closely related.

It’s not nothing. Even if it isn’t ‘aliens’.

But let’s return to the first question. If we’re asking the question while assured of the negative answer, we’re not asking the question. It’s a ruse.

To pose the question meaningfully, we have to be honest at the outset and admit we do not really know the answer. Opinions are welcome, to a degree. But those need to be sequestered off to the side of the question.

We have to honestly ask this question in a serious way that’s oriented toward discovery, not dismissal. And in order to do that, we have to introduce new ‘lenses’ (perspectives, motivations and concerns), and then we have to adjust the apertures of these lenses so that we can ‘scrub the data’, and filter off the data that comprises noise.

This is how science itself proceeds.

Intelligent people like Avi Loeb, Diana Walsh Pasulka and Gary Nolan are trying to get societies to realize that look, we’ve been lying. We haven’t been doing science about this, except where it doesn’t threaten ‘present understanding’.

Avi speaks of a situation in astrophysics where something that didn’t fit in our neat boxes of traditional expectation was dismissed as ‘bad data’ according to this circular argument: it doesn’t fit what we already know, so pretend we’re just confused and get on with knowing what we already know.

That’s the wrong way to use an aperture. Especially as it relates to such a momentous topic.

Metaquestions

This is a foundational question for human beings because it’s nature is enmeshed with the nature of Everything. Anything that changes the nature of the Universe in human conception, changes everything else that it encompasses in thought. It turns out that what I call ‘the supercontainer’ is a set-theoretical construct that determines and informs all other concepts, models, maps, lenses, and apertures. If we get something this fundamental wrong, the implications are literally staggering.

The religious answer to question 1 is something like: ‘yes, there are divine beings involved with humans and our evolution (and there are perhaps evil beings as well)’.

The atheistic answer opposes that specific explanation, but, if intelligent, remains open to discoveries related to the nature of life on Earth, consciousness, and the origins of human intelligence (however misguided its common applications may be at the scale of societies).

And the agnostic… if actually intelligent, goes looking to find out. It doesn’t merely rest in ‘I don’t know’.

In this case, it seems relatively obvious, or at least likely, that the phenomena in question here have some intrinsic association with human religions and their origins.

Not to mention our own.

The Universe Expresses itself as Intelligences

Let’s be clear about a simple fact. Humans exist on Earth right now. It appears that we have done so for vast stretches of human time, even if that represents a tiny portion of geological time.

This means that the Nature of timespace itself, produces localized intelligences. Earth isn’t some special bubble of timespace that ‘accidentally’ got twelve billion variables in exactly the right mechanical form to create organisms or intelligence in complete opposition to the actual nature of the extended context in which it arose.

Yet, strangely, this appears to be part of the bizarre array of ‘traditional’ suppositions of much of ‘modern’ thought.

Even if this is the only planet in spacetime with ‘intelligent life’, it’s still true that the Nature of timespace produces intelligent life as an expression of its own nature, origins, character and potential.

Because it did so here.

( Whether or not that was ‘assisted’ is a distinct, but related question ).

Let me illustrate this by an analogy I have found useful. Suppose that, one day, you find a glass of water on your kitchen table. You didn’t put it there, but you allow it to sit there for the time it takes for the water to evaporate. When this happens, you find crystals in the bottom of the glass. You test them. They’re salty. Turns out to be sodium carbonate. So you know that the ‘water was salty’.

Now substitute the Earth for the glass of water. Once it cooled, it appears that Life started fairly rapidly, and what we got was billions of forms of organisms, synergies between them, and myriad forms of intelligence spanning the gap between the physical (i.e. Bees) and the representationally intellectual (humans).

So if there are wings on Earth, timespace makes wings. That’s what made wings, here. If there are eyes, timespace makes eyes. There isn’t any feature of life on Earth that doesn’t resemble its actual origins.

All organisms are modes of timespace. Just like stars, moons, comets, nebulae, black holes, quasars, pulsars and so forth.

Human minds are an expression of the Nature of timespace.

Hopefully, we can forge some capable of actually entertaining the crucial questions of origin, nature, and intelligence… together.

Even if ‘the Government’ says: ‘there’s no there, there’.

Three theres in a four-word sentence doesn’t sound like intelligence to me.

Let’s adjust our aperture together for a moment. Suppose that the Earth, rather than being a one-off experiment in timespace, was actually something far stranger: a condensate of the Nature of the Universe, Time, Space, Form, and the intelligences that pervade it.

In such a case, we could learn about the nature of other living worlds, and timespace itself, simply by the study of organisms and their synbiotic relationships. Everything we’d need to understand the entire Universe… would be right here in front of us.

As life forms.

But only if we’re capable of setting aside the strange biases that have for so long inhibited our thought, expectations… and intelligences.

Our lenses are confused. And our apertures are way too narrow to encourage insight.

[ I am not even going to mention that the entire order of life we call insects resemble the visages of ‘aliens’ in many accounts. Nor will I note the striking resemblance of ants, wasps, and preying mantids… to the reports of those who have encountered ‘aliens’ directly.

Did it ever occur to anyone that the phenomena we call insects might actually be a direct repercussion of the nature of other intelligences in timespace? And their historical relationship with the Earth and her organismal library?

If anything wanted to observe humans, they might just engineer a form of life that could constantly observe and symbiose with us directly. And report ceaselessly on our military and environmental activities. You don’t need ‘nanobots’ if you have a form of consciousness, a technology, or both that can directly inhabit ants, mosquitoes, bees, birds, bats, and dolphins. ]

“But I believe there is a core belief in our culture that is violated by the alien abduction phenomenon, namely the total separation of the spirit and the physical world. We have made that gulf inviolate, relegating to religion the spirit (subjective) world and assigning to science the material (objective) domain. We simply do not know what to do with a phenomenon that crosses that seemingly inviolable barrier. It shocks the foundations of our belief structure. Our minds have no place to put such a thing.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

Terracentrism / Anthrocentrism and Loss of Aperture

It’s clear there are a vast array of nonhuman intelligences right here on Earth, that we’re intrinsically related to.

We usually dismiss these because they are not representationally intelligent the way we are, but that mistake merely results in us becoming more blind. This is an example of the problems that infest our potential for actual intelligence.

There’s some bizarre feature of our species that is determinedly Earth-centric and anthrocentric. These features represent a collapse of the aperture of our directly available insight and intelligence. They literally blind us to anything and everything that would threaten the conceptual ‘supremacy’ of humans — a supremacy which is, in the face of Nature — abjectly nominal if not nonexistent.

This is noise in the channel of the question. We must begin by filtering off the strange habit of supposing that a: we are somehow separate from Nature, b: that we ‘dominate’ it, and c: that we’re ‘alone’ in Nature. None of these things are — or ever were — the case. Cancer can ‘dominate’ a human body for but a short period of time. Similarly, if our species at the group-level acts within the biosphere as a cancer (a putative fact), something will certainly intervene (if the biosphere is, itself, a being and intelligent).

Even in a purely mechanical situation this is so.

There are buffers against sudden transformation and catastrophe that must remain in place for complex animal life on Earth to exist at all. If we rip those apart, we will die with them. So part of what I am saying is that these two ideas, terra-centrism and anthro-centrism, should be filtered off. They represent ‘traditional’ noise, and literally obstruct any intelligent pursuit of the question.

The easiest way to ‘stay stupid’ is to presume knowledge that isn’t there. Our present technological hubris is going to end badly, quickly, because there are at least 50 things we literally don’t examine about it. Humans as a species are operating under the assumption that anything you can ‘get away with’ environmentally, gives you an ‘advantage’. This might have been mostly true 50 years ago. Today it’s absolutely false to facts.

But back to the question.

Is there evidence that nonhuman intelligences are or have been operating locally for some period of time? We need to add new lenses and open the apertures in order to honestly ask the question.

During the Senate Armed Services Committee on the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Dr. Kirkpatric, the Chief of the AARO, makes a variety of rather strange claims, including something that could be paraphrased as: ‘we have zero data to indicate nonhuman intelligences, or even aerial phenomena that appear to defy what we know of physics’. His claim is a ‘traditional’ one. ‘There’s no there, there’.

But let’s listen to a Air Force Major John R. King, FR 47113, writing his thesis The UFO Problem : Time for a Reassessment (1968):

“On the other hand, if some piece of information turns up which runs counter to current thought, which is unscientific, or which shakes the egocentricity of the scientific community or Man himself, then that piece of information or theory meets with particular non-objectivity. Man finds it extremely difficult to accept or even to objectively investigate anything which threatens to shatter his emotional equanimity or his high regard for himself.”

Now, one of the things stated in the SASC meeting by Dr. Kirkpatric was particularly interesting to me because it introduced the topic that I have titled this essay with.

He claimed that the USM’s sensors are effectively ‘tuned’ to primarily admit data that might be associated with balloons, human aircraft, and missiles. What he’s saying in code here is that no one is looking for anything else, and we’re filtering off anything else as noise.

The Senator from NY asked him if the need to resolve these phenomena will lead Kirkpatric to advise the armed forces to expand their sensor apertures so that we can get better data, he dodges this question with a distracting explanation of the functions of his office that amounts to ‘No, we won’t.’

Thankfully, there are people like Avi Loeb, Gary Nolan, and George Church are putting together organizations like Copernicus and the Galileo Project to actively investigate the questions.They are going to provide the lenses, senors and apertures that would allow us to actively pursue the question.

Kindly remain aware that are not arguing for or against anything at all. Rather, they feel there’s something to learn here, and they intend to go about it whether academicians or other scientists or the USG make discrediting noises or not.

That’s what actual science is truly about. The questions.

And suspending the urge to allow opinions or traditions of ignorance to dominate discovery.

Lens Game

Imagine you are visiting an indigenous tribe in the Amazon. You go to their world, and they allow you in. You are walking, every day, through the jungle with a few of their males who are hunting and foraging. You are familiar with cars, smartphones, math and computers. They have no experience of those. If you wanted to, you could show them how to use the lenses you use in order to make coherent intelligence from your relationships with machines. But in the jungle…you are effectively blind. Your senses are not orienting you in their universe. Left to your own devices, you’d either die or experience relatively immediate catastrophic misadventure.

They have 30 lenses where you have 2. And they intelligently adjust the apertures of these lenses in harmonize intelligence with their relationships in the living environment. Their people have lived there for perhaps thousands of years. You’ve been there for a week. And your people… never lived there.

We have a related problem with institutional science and the military. They’re not looking for what they have decided isn’t there. Either one of these telling us ‘there’s no there, there’, equates to nothing more than ‘we aren’t looking for that’.

Which, while largely true of science, certainly isn’t true of the US Military.

There’s zero chance of there being no branches of the military that deal with this. And nearly zero chance of there being no ‘black projects’ associated with the phenomena.

Even if it doesn’t exist, it’s still belongs to the branches of the USM tasked with Information Warfare as a psygenic weapon that can be deployed in non-kinetic conflict.

So something’s actually happening. Millions of people are not merely hallucinating, and cameras and radar are not capturing what isn’t there.

Question 2

The second question is even weirder. If all of this data doesn’t point in the direction of nonhuman intelligences or the nature of spacetime (that last one is impossible, since all phenomena fall under that umbrella), then what is the nature of what is being observed… and reacted to?

The list isn’t as short as we’d like because we’re talking about anomalies in general, even if we’re tuning the aperture to ‘events that appear to take place in the sky, in space, and on the ground’. The most prosaic explanations would be ‘natural phenomena we haven’t discovered’. This certainly would not encompass the entire range of related phenomena even if we discovered that there were features of the Earth or timespace or human consciousness that ‘could produce appearances that resemble this’.

Even if we only had photographs… and there are hundreds of thousands of them… the nature of the situation would be hard to collapse into even a few explanations. But it’s possible that something ‘appears this way’ and has nothing to do with other intelligences. Again, if we’re going to ask the questions, we have to be open to exploring them.

Personally, I have some skin in the game, and it’s relatively clear to me that the answer to question 1 is yes. But I’m interested in discovery, not opinion. I’m also interested in the humans as a group; I’m one of them, circa 2023. I have experienced direct contact with nonhuman intelligences in Nature, and I’ve had a long nonordinary experience with what certainly appears to me to be a non-terrestrial NHI.

As far as I can tell, timespace itself is permeated with various forms of advanced intelligence, and Earth cannot really be separated from that. But it can be silenced by human arrogance, greed, and military operations.

My view is that the intelligences operating local to the Earth have been here ostensibly forever. The organismal libraries of Earth reflect their influence, if not their technologies. We ourselves are probably directly related to some of them. But these are my personal perspectives, and I’m not trying to convince anyone of their veracity.

“Humans are just another form. You’re another lifeform of energy. You think you’re independent of life, and you can’t be that way. You’re causing death. You’re causing a lot of death and it’s your own. And we’re trying to help you, but we came and we were killed by many of you.”
― John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens

It is surprising to me that human beings are ‘afraid’ of other intelligences, when it is blatantly obvious that our societies are fundamentally not human, lethal, life-destroying, and overtly bizarre. They enslave us, rip the environment to shreds, and project alienation and war over the entire planet. There’s nothing as alien as our societies in our direct experience. But we seem to be almost completely helpless to transform them. Their history and momentum is profound. If we look carefully at them we will certainly see they are at the very least, terribly misguided, and at worst intrinsically anti-life. They will certainly lead to disasters that are intrinsically avoidable. But not for us.

What I think would be beneficial is this: if something, anything, could help modern humans to forge societies worthy of the concept of actual intelligence.

If we can’t do that, soon… our capacity to explore the deeper questions of our nature, origin and potentials will be gravely inhibited … if they are not silenced forever.

I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and the origins of our species.

As a cognitive activist, my dream is that my work may contribute to our ability to understand the origins of our strange situation as modern humans, and assemble effective replacements for what our modern cultures are but the broken remnants and falsified costumes of.

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