A Recent Development...

I have begun uploading video comparisons to these blog posts. If you would like to watch them, I am told you can do so by visiting YouTube or clicking this link: http://www.youtube.com/user/ProfessorLamott?feature=mhee

Aliens and Divine Cults

In more recent years, there has been a push to connect UFO sightings to the spiritual world.

In believing that alien life forms have the ability to see beyond the scope of what’s possible for a human being, some secular and religious groups believe that if contacted they can be a conduit to a spiritual world, a divine world, that’s beyond our current ability to reach.  

In other words, some believe they are, or possibly are, our connection to God.  The possibility of such a connection though fascinating, and hopeful for some, can also be quite dangerous; as evidenced by the members of the Heaven’s Gate religious group who committed mass suicide in the late 90’s in order to board an alien spacecraft that they believed was following an eternal comet.

Although the comet was at its brightest, the promise of reaching a space ship in this manner is to me, at best, a reach.

Supernatural Skepticism

The scales are tipped in the favor of skeptics, simply because it is a lot easier to accept the unexplainable as a fraud or fake, rather than expending the effort to prove the veracity of a particular event, object or entity.  With the aid of archetypes, like those hypothesized by Carl Jung (see Wikipedia article), people are more apt to explain the causes of potential phenomena by chalking such results up to the images or concepts that already reside in their minds, as though the seeds have already been planted in their brains and the ensuing confirmation in reality is therefore deemed less-than-reliable.  It’s like the housewife who finds an image of the Virgin Mary burnt into her toast; it’s much less a sign, than it is an example of wish fulfillment of this particular person’s need to validate her faith.  I doubt, if she was say, Muslim, or Hindu, that she would see that same image in that same piece of burnt toast.  This is an extreme example, but nonetheless an example that skeptics of the “unknown” use often. 

The mind attempts to settle the unexplainable before it has a chance to use its mechanisms of logic to deduce a definitive root cause.

However, efforts to prove the unexplainable as fraudulent should be met equally with efforts to prove the veracity of the unexplainable.  Pursuits of either result should be equally weighed.  What is outside the realm of human comprehension is something that one cannot dismiss as not existing. This is basically a more complex version of that age-old question: “If a tree falls in the woods, and you are not present to see or hear it, does it make a sound?”  If you fall into the camp that believes this means the tree doesn’t make a sound, then you are most likely a skeptic, and perhaps also an individual who is likely to disregard claims of the existence of the supernatural or paranormal.  If you fall into the camp that believes the tree has most likely made a sound, even though you were not witness to the event, well, you are most likely a person who subscribes to logic, to deductive reasoning, and someone who is more likely to investigate claims of the supernatural and allow your mind to be open to the possibility of “something else” – something that exists beyond the scope of our comprehension, something that we are not readily aware of, or might never understand in our lifetimes, but it’s something for which you cannot deny the possibility of existing.