Tuesday, April 09, 2019
The Tectonic Strain Theory of UFOs
Going back a few decades, one of the proposed theories to explain UFOs was "earth energy." The late Michael Persinger was one of its advocates, and he wrote literally dozens of papers on why UFOs and seismic events were related, and published them in several scientific journals.
[In other words, scientific papers on UFOs have been published quite often over the years, and are nothing new.]
The trouble with Persinger's Tectonic Strain Theory of UFOs (TST), as it was known, was that it took someone with a knowledge of geology and psychology, and with an interest in UFOs, to understand it. Such people were few and far between. But as luck would have it, that was exactly my expertise while doing my undergrad work at university. I even had a geology prof who was curious about UFOs and was willing to entertain discussions about the phenomenon.
When started taking a close look at what Persinger was proposing, I found it seriously lacking. What he was suggesting made even less sense than assuming UFOs were alien spaceships, since it distorted geophysical principles. In fact, I managed to track down Persinger's PhD thesis advisor (who, by amazing synchronicity, was teaching at my university!), who when shown Persinger's published papers, was thoroughly appalled. In fact, he encouraged me to publish a rebuttal in the same scientific journals. And I did, becoming one of the few ufologists to publish papers about UFOs in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
As part of one of my geophysics courses, I needed to do an undergraduate thesis. I decided to do it on the TST, and spent the better part of a year researching and collecting data and others' works relevant to the issue. The result was a long, detailed, and sometimes equation-heavy analysis that explained why the TST didn't make any sense.
I managed to recover my original text, piecing it together from ancient floppy disks and computers, and am able to make it available for anyone who is interested in reading it through. The mathematical characters didn't translate well, and the figures had to be recreated, but it's relatively perusable.
To read the entire thing (good luck!), it's here.
Tuesday, April 02, 2019
Going deep into the UFO archives
In preparation for moving much of my collection of books
and other materials about UFOs, I have been going through my files in detail.
I’ve been finding many things I had completely forgotten about, as well as many
things I had thought had been lost over the years.
And I’ve found some gems. Like letters from contactees
imparting to me the true nature of the universe and the name of the planets
their aliens come from (“Excelsior” and “Zanthar-3” were my favourites.) Or programs
from scientific conferences where I had been invited to present papers on the
taboo subject of UFOs.
Among them was the original invitation from 1977 to speak
at the University of Manitoba at a colloquium in the physics department “to
faculty and students.”
This was the talk that had to be moved to the largest
lecture hall on campus because so many people wanted to attend from beyond the
campus community, including media. It led to my becoming “the UFO guy” and to
my encouragement to speak widely on the subject across Canada.
The colloquium
was even reviewed in the university newspaper, allowing even more people to find out
about me.
I did numerous TV and radio interviews that year, likely damaging my
reputation among my physics peers but making me realize that the general public
needed some serious education on the subject of UFOs.
This wasn’t my first media appearance regarding UFOs.
That was actually Uforum, the cable TV show on UFOs that I was involved with in
1975. It lasted one season of six episodes, all of which have been lost to
time.
[Aside: I only predated Tom DeLonge and his media push for UFO
programming by about 45 years.]
Labels: UFOs ufology media physics lectures university
