Ufology Research

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.

Labels: UFOs Persinger tectonic strain hypothesis TST earthquakes seismic Manitoba Carman thesis geology geophysics science