[twilight zone] where rationalization ends

Where to and why?

Some time back I asked an ultra-rationalist mate of mine about UFOs, knowing what his reaction would be.

Then I asked if he believed in G-d [he does] but he said the two things are completely different. Why, I wanted to know. A spirit world is a spirit world. If there be angels and all that stuff, why not UFOs?

The look I got - I changed the topic.

Michael Palin, in his Ripping Yarn Curse of the Claw [and I can't find an online script] is a boy sitting in the family living room and he asks about, I think, India. His austere Victorian father says it doesn't exist.

Palin answers back and says he's heard all about it and his mother cuts him short: "Your father has spoken, dear."

End of discussion.

I don't believe the receptors we have are capable of discerning the nether world and every so often something comes up which defies rationalization. In come the rationalists and say it had to be the light reflected from a plane or else it's hallucination or whatever.

Not for one second does the person stop and try to analyse the thing and admit - well, we just don't know. Then, in an attempt to come to terms with it, the cliched put downs begin - talk of little green men and so on.

This could be double exposure - or not

North of England

A group of us were on the side of a hill in the early 90s, looking across to a rocky point where a hotel had its lights on. I didn't see the thing come but there was a hubbub and everyone started looking at the hotel. Above it was an elongated light and I can't recall the colour - it was light and the shape from the side was cigar shaped.

Then, some twenty minutes later, it went up and then veered off to the right and disappeared. That was all. There had to have been twenty of us who'd seen it. Now I've been guilty in my time of perpetrating hoaxes like convincing a kid that Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy do exist but this was different.

Double exposure again or what?

Real, hoax or error

There was an article in the physics area in New Scientist which showed that many rational phenomena are equally inexplicable, e.g.

“Cold fusion would make the world's energy problems melt away. No wonder the Department of Energy is interested.”

It just doesn't seem sane to me to dismiss these things out of hand, just because one's mind can't come to grips with them. Roswell, Philadelphia, crop circles - possibly hoaxes, fevered imaginations or perhaps true.

Here are ten of them summarized.

I'm semi-sceptical about much of it - for example orbs or double-exposures in photos but some still seem a bit hard to fathom.

My favourite below - shots 4 seconds apart