Daniel Knauf would probably forgive you for thinking that he’s the king of the ‘paranormal drama’ genre. After all, he’s the creative genius behind the epic, esoteric period piece Carnivàle, he’s written for Eric Kripke’s Supernatural series, and his latest ground-breaking project is BlackBxx: Haunted, a pioneering crowd-sourced media project designed for the new broadcast medium of choice: the Internet. However, he will quickly point out to you that’s not exactly the case. “I don't think you could name a genre I haven't dabbled in at some point,” he clarifies. “I've also written on straight-up contemporary cop dramas. Romance. My Own Worst Enemy was a spy show. Blind Justice was a Western; The Phantom a superhero. I have very broad interests.”

But even if Knauf wanted to leave the paranormal genre behind, it may just be that the weirdness could follow him. During the recent shoot for BlackBxx: Haunted, he noted that “weird stuff” happened without the slightest need for special effects; in one instance, the cast praised the convincing nature of a pot flying across the room, only to find that wasn’t one of the designed effects. Though Knauf wasn’t overly surprised that such things happened: “With all the energy crackling in that house, I wouldn't be surprised if the cast had generated some parakinesis”.

Knauf says that he is open to the idea of genuine paranormal experiences, confessing that he’s personally seen “compelling evidence that there are some phenomena that cannot be explained.  Whether it's ghosts or aliens or interdimensional anomalies is anybody's guess.” Nevertheless, he describes himself as a skeptic – just not of the knee-jerk kind. “I’m very leery of people slapping labels on [paranormal experiences] or leaping to conclusions simply because it gives them the comfort of context. To a lot of people, false knowledge is preferable to accepting a mystery - especially an unknowable mystery.”
 
So what about the central topic of his latest project, hauntings? “Personally, I believe in an afterlife,” he says. “I believe we have incarnate souls that survive physical death. I believe that there is an invisible world that is inhabited by souls. I also believe that the phenomena we know collectively as 'hauntings' may have absolutely nothing to do with my beliefs. When I see a T.V. medium telling some guy that his dead Aunt Eunice misses her tabby, Buttons, I think, ‘So wait. Aunt Eunice has gone to the trouble of actually breaching the wall that seperates the living from the dead, and she wants to talk about her fucking cat?’ That doesn't wash. When I see an object move, after ruling out a physical explanation, I'm willing to accept the cause may be supernatural. But was it moved by a ghost? Not necessarily.”

“Once the possibility of a hoax can be ruled out, there's certain evidence that can only be accurately classified as a mystery. It demands to be accepted as such. On the other hand, just because a piece of evidence is accepted as supernatural, it would be a mistake to use it as proof validating someone's religious or spiritual beliefs.” ... Read More »

Ron Cole's In the Fall of Gravity is an award-winning, fantasy stop-motion-animation short film that explores the deeper issues of life, consciousness and free will. Cole, following in the footsteps of the legendary Ray Harryhausen, created every aspect of the 11-minute-long film himself (apart from the score) on a non-existent budget, in his own basement. In the process he had to overcome several technical difficulties (not least, going from 35mm film to digital halfway through the project), but the end result is something wonderful. Anyone who has attempted stop-motion animation will be staggered at what Cole has achieved here - and, rather than aiming for a wide market via 'lowest-common-denominator entertainment', he has instead dedicated all those hours into creating a work of art that contemplates the mysteries of existence:

Upon a journey to the Takakjian Castle, the wizard Isomer and his traveling companion Trevor Verity discuss the nature of Life and the Universe. What Isomer describes is a philosophy that traces all the energies of the world back to one fundamental force, Gravity. But this philosophy is disturbing to Trevor as it also implies that even the workings of the mind are completely logical and predictable, over which we have no real control. The notion of free will is challenged and debated between the two.

The wizard goes on to explain there is more to this philosophy than is commonly understood and that Life is a force of nature that is non-physical and when properly understood, we will find our individual lives are but extensions of the life of the Universe. Trevor struggles to understand this concept as Isomer demonstrates this meaning, through the strings of a marionette whose performance mimics the wizard's words.

A work of 'cinematic poetry', In the Fall of Gravity is a film crafted to entertain the mind and eyes with new concepts for both.

Daily Grail interviewer Greg McQueen spoke to Ron Cole about the creation of his wonderful film and the art of stop-motion animation.

TDG: Ron, I appreciate that you've agreed to an interview for the readers of the Daily Grail website. Some readers may not be aware of who you are or what it is that you do. Would you like to tell the readers a little about yourself and also talk about what you do ? ... Read More »

Leslie Kean's recently released book, UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record, has been lauded as one of the best-ever presentations of the case for serious UFO research. Based on a ten-year investigation, investigative journalist Kean’s book ignores the 95 percent of sightings that can be explained as ordinary phenomena, and instead focuses on the remaining 5 percent, extracting the best cases for which investigators could find no conventional explanation. Along with her own excellent analyses and commentary, Kean brings together almost 20 highly credible military and government witnesses and investigators – including five generals, skilled military aviators, and a former U.S. governor – to give their own personal accounts of their own extraordinary encounters. Additionally, John Podesta - White House Chief of Staff to President Clinton and co-chair of President Obama’s transition team - provides the foreword.

UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record is available from Amazon US and UK. For more information about the book, go to www.UFOsOnTheRecord.com.

TDG: Leslie, UFOs comes with some heavyweight backing - John Podesta wrote the foreword, and the likes of Michio Kaku have described the book as being "bound to set the gold standard for UFO research". What sets it apart from other UFO books?

Leslie Kean: Here are four things that come to mind:

1. The book contains original pieces by 18 contributors (17 pieces) – first person accounts by some of the most credentialed people in the world, including five Generals. The fact that they are writing in their own words sets this book apart – these are not mere reports on cases, or quotes from those involved, these are actual chapters written by the key players describing what they saw, what they felt, what they learned, as only they can do…and the character of each writer is preserved through his writing. Instead of transcriptions of rambling interviews, these are carefully crafted narratives that went through many drafts. Working with the contributors took a great deal of time, focus and communication…they comprise about half the book.

2. The book includes only material that is well-documented and factual, at a high journalistic standard. It’s carefully reasoned and analyzed, and there are no untoward claims made or far-fetched conclusions drawn. Therefore, people like Podesta and Kaku can stand behind it. It’s also very readable, written by a trained journalist and writer with a publishing track record, and not by a UFO researcher, “ufologist,” self-proclaimed UFO expert, or a scientist. My job has been to discern what material is valid and what isn’t, by journalistic standards, and what would be interesting and convincing to the uninitiated reader. With a subject like UFOs, one has to be extremely careful how it’s presented, and I’m trying to reach government officials, so it’s crucial here. One also cannot overload the reader with extensive detail. Most mainstream journalists stay far away from this subject because it is a minefield. I’ve separated the wheat from the chaff, and I hope other journalists will now find it easier to make headway on the subject.

My book was not written for people who already know the UFO subject, although the UFO community has been very pleased with it and written rave reviews. In my narrative, I present the information as new and exciting, because that’s how it was to me when I first discovered it. For the average person, it’s breaking news. For those who already know the subject, some of it will be familiar, and some not. I worked hard to make the writing and the flow of material compelling for any intelligent skeptic or curious newcomer to this issue.

3. With the backing of a group of officials, I propose a plan for U.S. government policy change that I think is unique, at least at this particular time. The approach is explained in the book – and I believe it could be effective, and has a good chance of bearing fruit. I hope people can understand the logic of this plan when they read the book.

4. UFOs has been released by a major publisher – an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House – which is unusual for a book on this topic. My publisher has provided great editors and a full professional team, holding the work to high standard and helping to make it the best book possible. Crown also has an outstanding publicity and marketing department, which has been working on getting the book out there for months, and is well connected to the mainstream media. Since the finished work carries a certain added stature among the political/media establishment simply by virtue of its publisher, it has a good chance of reaching a wide, mainstream audience. ... Read More »

In 2004, author Mark Pilkington and film-maker John Lundberg set off on a journey to chronicle a darker side of the UFO topic - a history of the interest and influence of members of the intelligence community. Mirage Men takes a closer look at the last 75 years of ufology in the context of its interactions with the shadowy worlds of espionage, psychological warfare and advanced military technology. During their research Mark and John traveled across the US, meeting intelligence agents and disinformation specialists, in particular former Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) Special Agent Richard 'Rick' Doty. Doty was infamously involved in the duping of UFO researcher Paul Bennewitz as part of 'Project Beta', a psychological operation ('psy-op') that may have contributed to Bennewitz's gradual mental disintegration and subsequent nervous breakdown.

As they looked for the fingerprints of the intelligence community in various aspects of ufology, the Mirage Men duo were confronted with a dizzying array of ever more outrageous claims and counter claims involving crashed UFOs, alien contact, secret underground bases and secret deals between Earthly governments and extraterrestrial civilizations (the most recent being the bizarre claims about Project Serpo). Digging deeper, they began to suspect that, instead of covering up UFO secrets as many UFO 'believers' claim, the US intelligence agencies had actually been promoting them all along for their own ends - not least as a cover for advanced aircraft projects, but also for other reasons as well which are explored at length.

Mark Pilkington and John Lundberg are no strangers to deception - John founded the crop circle-making group Circlemakers in the early 1990s, and Mark has been walking the shady corridors of Forteana as a researcher and writer for more than a decade. This makes them well-suited to walking the fine line of belief and skepticism, humour and gravitas, required to investigate such a liminal topic. I spoke with Mark this week about the book and the fascinating subjects it covers.

Mirage Men is available now from Amazon UK and as a pre-order from Amazon US (released September 13). For more information on the book and author, see Mark's Further blog at the Strange Attractor website, the official Mirage Men documentary website, and the Mirage Men blog.

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TDG: Thanks for taking time to have a chat Mark. For those that don't know about either yourself or the 'Mirage Men' project, can you give us a quick bit of background on your involvement in Fortean topics, and how Mirage Men came to be?

MP: Thanks for having me Greg! I live in London, England, and have been writing professionally for about 13 years now. I was staff writer and reviews editor at Fortean Times magazine for several years and wrote "Far Out", a fringe science column for the UK's Guardian newspaper for three years. These columns were collected in a neat book of the same name, published in 2007 by Disinformation in the US.

I've had a lifelong fascination with all manner of Fortean and anomalous phenomena, but UFOs always appealed to me the most. That's because they're probably the most commonly reported form of anomalous experience – anyone can see them! – they're very much 'living' and evolving as a phenomenon and the UFO umbrella incorporates a wide range of experiences and encounters that branch out into parapsychology and other areas of scientific, technological, psychological, political and sociological interest.

Mirage Men came about while my friend John Lundberg, who runs Circlemakers, was making a short documentary, called The Mythologist about Henry Azadehdel (aka Armen Victorian), a Nottingham grocery store owner and landlord who got involved with crop circle and UFO research in the early 1990s. A former CIA contact of Henry's mentioned the name Rick Doty to John, and he came to me asking who Doty was. And so Mirage Men was born... That was six years ago now!

TDG: Mirage Men - the book - is a travelogue about your experience in making a documentary of the same name about government involvement in the UFO phenomenon. When can we expect the documentary, and how is it likely to differ from what you've put forward in your book?

MP: When John Lundberg and I set out on the journey that became Mirage Men we initially planned to raise some production funds for the film before starting shooting. But when the Serpo story fell, literally, into our laps, in the form of Bill Ryan, we decided to go with it and follow Bill to the Laughlin UFO conference – where, by coincidence or not, we found that Rick Doty would also be.

This meant that we paid for the shoot ourselves, thinking that we'd get some production money on our return, but it never materialised. By the time we'd finished gathering material, over three shoots in total, John and I had spent a significant amount between us – although still probably not even a couple of days' catering budget on a studio film. We're now hoping to secure approximately £20,000 to finish the film with a professional editor. Until we have the funds, it's very hard to say when the film will be made available. (Naturally we'd be very happy to hear from anyone who would like to help us finish the film!)

In terms of content, the book and the film won't duplicate each other, instead they will complement each other nicely – different animals, though clearly related. The way that we currently envisage it, the historical material in the book won't be in the film, neither will our own surreal experiences which are also central to the book. The documentary will be quite cinematic in feel - John is an admirer of Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War etc).

Whether the book will encourage any other Mirage Men to speak to us it will be interesting to find out – we'd love to hear from them, and if we did I'm sure we'd go and interview them for the film, so it may not be over yet!

TDG: In Mirage Men, you've done a wonderful job of presenting a very complex subject in a fun, readable manner - it must have been quite a job navigating the layers of deception and manipulation, the second-guessing as to intentions and the real truth, not to mention the liminal aspects of the UFO mystery itself. By the end of your journey, you must have felt as if every casual remark from Doty and others could be a ticking time-bomb. Given you are trying to 'expose' a story about the machinations of government agencies, did you fight any feelings of paranoia during the journey?

Julie Beischel, PhD, is the co-founder and Director of Research at The Windbridge Institute. She graduated magna cum laude and with honors with a BS in Environmental Sciences from Northern Arizona University and received her PhD in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Arizona. She served as Co-Director of the VERITAS Research Program with Dr. Gary Schwartz, investigating the alleged ability of mediums to 'talk to the dead', before moving the research of prospective research mediums to Windbridge in January of 2008. Her research interests center on the survival of consciousness hypothesis and include proof-focused studies on mediums' communication with discarnates and process-focused studies on mediums' experiences of that communication.

Q: Thanks for talking to The Daily Grail, Julie. To start off, can I ask how you ended up in this 'heretical' area of research that is certainly not known for its career-building potential? And can you tell us a little bit more about the Windbridge Institute and why it was formed?

Julie: Thanks for having me. Yes, I did commit a pretty severe case of professional suicide when I embraced this field of study. My PhD is in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology so my future was bright! But when I was in graduate school, my mom passed away and I started to wonder what science had to say about life after death. Through some strange coincidences, after I graduated I was able to take a position as the William James Post-doctoral Fellow in Mediumship and Survival Research and serve as Co-Director of the VERITAS Research Program with Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona. When the funding for that position ended and the VERITAS Program closed, my husband Mark Boccuzzi and I formed the Windbridge Institute for Applied Research in Human Potential in January 2008 in order to continue performing this important research into the survival of consciousness. At Windbridge, the primary methods for carrying out this research include: (1) investigating technologies that may be useful in enhancing interaction and communication with deceased individuals, (2) addressing reports of haunting and apparition phenomena using both field and laboratory methods, and (3) studying mediums (individuals who experience regular communication with the deceased) and the information they report as well as their experiences during the communication. Windbridge also screens, trains, and certifies the mediums who participate in research using a multi-step process that takes each medium several months to complete. ... Read More »

Mitch Horowitz is a writer and publisher of many years' experience, with a lifelong interest in man’s search for meaning. As the editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin in New York, Mitch has published some of today’s leading titles in world religion, esoterica, and the metaphysical. He has now authored his own book, Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, (Amazon US and UK) "an engaging, long-overdue portrait of one nation, under many gods, whose revolutionary influence is still being felt in every corner of the globe." This short Q&A discusses a number of the topics covered in Occult America, including Ouija, the occult symbolism on the dollar bill, and the influence of occult and New Age thinking on some of the biggest personalities in US history. You can find more on Mitch and his work at mitchhorowitz.com.

Q: Occult America traces the ways in which occult and magical movements shaped our nation—politically, intellectually, religiously, culturally, and even commercially. Why did the U.S. prove to be such fertile ground for occult movements? What are some primary examples of how the occult influenced American identity and vice versa?

Mitch: Alternative religious movements were entwined with America from its earliest days. In the mid-1600s, just as Europe was experiencing a backlash against occult and esoteric spiritual movements, the American colonies were developing a reputation for religious liberalism. When the town of Philadelphia was a cluster of only a few hundred houses, it hosted faiths ranging from Quakerism to the Mennonites to mystical offshoots of the Lutheran church. The year 1694 marked a turning point for the colonies (and, in many ways, the modern spiritual world) through what initially appeared a very modest event: At that time the first intentional mystical community reached North America when the esoteric scholar Johannes Kelpius led a small sect out of Central Germany to the Wissahickon Creek near Philadelphia. His magical brotherhood practiced its own forms of astrology, alchemy, numerology, Kabala, and esoteric Christianity. News of their “Tabernacle in the Forest” spread back to the Old World and served as a magnet for other occult and esoteric movements. By the early 1700s, admirers of Kelpius formed a new and larger commune at Ephrata, Pennsylvania. In 1776, the Shakers – who were once considered a very mysterious sect – broke ground on a settlement outside Albany, New York. That same year the nation’s first “spirit channeler,” a 24-year-old woman who called herself the Publick Universal Friend, began to preach across New England. Beginning in the early 1800s, a region of Central New York called the “Burned-Over District” became suffused with Spiritualism, Mesmerism, and various occult experiments. These movements helped solidify early America’s role as a safe harbor for religious innovation and eventually made the nation into a launching pad for the revolutions in alternative spirituality that swept the globe in the twentieth century. ... Read More »

In Darklore Volume 3 (Amazon US and UK) there's a fascinating article on the crossover between the infamous 'Philadelpha Experiment' and some of the greatest sci-fi authors of the 20th century, by our good friend The Emperor (from the Cabinet of Wonders website and blog). In that article, Emps mentions a modern group of sci-fi writers - which includes names like Larry Niven, Greg Bear, Ben Bova, David Brin - that goes under the name 'SIGMA', and which "provides a significant pool of talent for volunteer pro bono consultation with the Federal government and other organizations which need the imagination that only speculative writers can provide."

What's interesting is that the founder of SIGMA, Arlan Andrews, is a long-time TDG reader and has communicated with me personally for many years now. So I thought it would be interesting to chat with Arlan about the group and some of the issues which go along with working closely with government groups.

(Synchronistically, as I was posting this I noticed that the Washington Post has posted a story on SIGMA.)

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TDG: Arlan, can you give us a bit of background to your history with sci-fi, and how SIGMA came to be founded?

Arlan: I began reading SF (preferred term) with Robert A. Heinlein's Red Planet in 1950, and have been a fan ever since. My first sold writings appeared in the esoteric fields covered by TDG: Fate Magazine (1972), Ufology, Psychic Dimensions, and others, including tabloids.

I sold my first SF, a poem, "Rime of the Ancient Engineer" to Asimov's Magazine in 1979, and over the next 25 years published about 50 short stories and poems in a range of magazines, including Analog, Amazing Stories, Omni, Pulphouse, Science Fiction Age, Science Fiction Review, and others, plus anthologies How to Save the World, Amazing Stories Two and Nanodreams. I was a co-founder, playwright and occasional toastmaster for Inconjunction, the Indianapolis SF convention, for its first 20 years. I attended fifteen Worldcons and have been on dozens of panels at those and other cons.

In 1992 I was selected as a White House Fellow for the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers), serving as a staffer in the Engineering Directorate there. In that capacity, I often attended meetings where technology forecasting was the subject, and I was completely appalled at the lack of imagination demonstrated by government bureaucrats and invited industry representatives. I commented to a fellow attendee that I had seen much better futurism at any given science fiction convention than in all the futurism meetings in Washington, D.C. That evening, I wrote down that quote for future reference.

The final two steps in my disgust with the government came over two issues:

In one particular meeting, a forward-looking minor player suggested that MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) and nanotechnology would become very important in the time frame of the early 21st Century. The meeting's host laughed at him, and said they would be sure to create a footnote about his little robots. At the second meeting, this one in the Roosevelt Room of the White House itself, when President George H. W. Bush's science advisor suggested that virtual reality would play an important role in future computers, this same sarcastic bureaucrat laughed again an told him that his video games would never amount to anything.

That night I went back to the apartment and wrote a manifesto that began, "The future is too important to be left to futurists!" I further stated that since SF writers had been exploring the future, we owed it to humanity to report on what we had discovered there. I came up with the name SIGMA (not an acronym) to indicate that we writers would provide a summation of our visions for the good of civilization. We would offer these visions without cost to the U.S. government, which was in dire need of forecasting ability outside the hidebound Establishment.

Mention the word 'Roswell' to most people, and one thing will automatically pop into their head: 'Crashed UFO'. Meanwhile, the U.S. Air Force says the "flying disc" recovered in July 1947 was actually the wreckage of a high-altitude balloon used in a top secret government experiment called Project Mogul, built to detect Soviet nuclear weapon tests. But new findings by researcher Nick Redfern suggest that neither of these explanations hold the real answer to the Roswell mystery. Instead, he believes that something very sinister, and very human, is at the heart of the case.

Redfern first presented his highly controversial theory in 2005, in his book Body Snatchers in the Desert. In short, over the course of a number of years he was informed by several sources that the 'Roswell Incident' was actually one of seven or eight ill-fated experiments on human subjects who were used in a range of secret, balloon-based flights. What's more, the humans involved were not volunteers - rather, they were Japanese prisoners-of-war and/or handicapped people secretly removed from asylums and mental hospitals.

Since the 2005 publication of Body Snatchers, Nick has come across a number of new (and older) leads which support this shocking theory, which he's just published in an article in the Daily Grail's Fortean anthology series Darklore (Volume 3), titled "Body Snatchers: Before and Beyond". I spoke to Nick about the new research and discoveries, and the Roswell topic in general, earlier this week. Rather than edit the discussion down, here's the full transcript (after the obligatory Darklore links):

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Purchasing information for Darklore Volume 3:

• Amazon US Limited Edition Hardcover
• Amazon US Paperback
• Amazon UK Limited Edition Hardcover
• Amazon UK Paperback

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TDG: Thanks for talking with us Nick. It's been almost 4 years since the publication of Body Snatchers. What's been the reaction to the book in that time, and how does the information in this new Darklore article - based on new revelations, and a review of previous research - affect your original conclusions?

Recently, I was lucky enough to chat with theoretical physicist Professor Michio Kaku. Professor Kaku is one of a rare breed; working at the cutting edge of complex maths and physics, but also able to talk about his research topics with a layperson, in their language. He specialises in string field theory, but is also an eloquent populariser of science, having appeared on nearly every major television network in the United States and hosted a number of documentaries. He also has written numerous popular books on cutting edge science and future thought, the latest being Physics of the Impossible (Amazon US and UK).

Our discussion covered everything from the UFO phenomenon, to whether consciousness defines reality, and also touched on some of the more controversial science stories about today (most notably, the LHC and Active SETI). Professor Kaku was quick to assure me that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will definitely not destroy the world, instead listing some of the benefits that science could reap from the project - not least, a refining of the current understanding of particle physics. He didn't shy away from the fact that in its current form "the Standard Model...is supremely ugly... It's like gluing together an aardvark, whale, and platypus and declaring it to be nature's supreme evolutionary creation."

We also touched on the 'mainstream' view that human consciousness is simply an epiphenomenon of the brain - which in many respects, does not match up with the supreme importance that some branches of quantum physics accord consciousness. Professor Kaku agreed that "consciousness is one of the great problems facing science," and stated plainly that despite the mainstream view, "most scientists cannot even define it, let alone explain it." To illustrate how consciousness is important to quantum physics, he discussed the well-known "Schrodinger's Cat" paradox, and then explored various theories which might explain it. One of those was put forward by Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner - he assumed that consiousness is the key factor in creating reality. Furthermore, extrapolating Wigner's theory means that, as Professor Kaku put it, "eventually, we need an infinite chain of observers, each watching the other... Wigner implied that this chain was a cosmic consciousness or even God."

One of the main reasons I was interested in talking to Professor Kaku was his openness to some of the more 'heretical' areas of science. One of those topics is the scientific investigation of the UFO phenomenon, something which he has gone on the public record as supporting. Professor Kaku said that generally UFOs were subject to the "giggle factor" with scientists, because most assume that the distance between possible civilisations is far too great. But he thinks differently.

"Once you imagine a civilization a million years more advanced (which is a blink of an eye compared to the 13.7 billion year age of the universe) then new laws of physics and technologies open up," Dr Kaku told me. "For such a civilization (a Type III civilization, according to the Kardashev scale), travel between stars might not be such a problem."

He also pondered on how we might struggle to relate to such technically advanced alien civilisations - or more correctly, how they might fail to recognise our 'sophistication'. "Imagine walking down a country road, and meeting an ant hill. Do we go down to the ants and say, 'I bring you trinkets. I bring you beads. I give you nuclear energy and biotechnology. Take me to your leader?' Or we have the urge to step on a few of them??"

Given the likely differences between us and alien civilisations, the next obvious question to me was to ask whether Professor Kaku thought SETI was worth the time and effort. His reply? "Yes, because it's all we have today. So by default, we should fund it, but not expect too much."

He wasn't as charitable, however, about the idea of Active SETI (beaming messages out to space, rather than listening). "I think it's an awful idea to advertise our existence in space, without understanding the motives and intentions of possible alien civilizations," he said, comparing us to the inhabitants of the New World encountering "Cortez and his band of cut-throats". Instead of David vs. Goliath, Professor Kaku suggests it would be more akin to "a fruit fly versus Goliath".

The full interview transcript is after the fold, click 'Read More' to view it. Also, there is plenty of wonderful reading on Professor Kaku's personal website, for those who want to explore these topics further. ... Read More »

As mentioned recently, Daily Grail Publishing has just released a reprint of Jacques Vallee's UFO classic, Messengers of Deception (Amazon US and Amazon UK). Last week I had a quick chat with Jacques about the book, and the controversy it created in ufology. It was intentionally short - I could talk to Jacques for a couple of days on all manner of topics, but in this case I just wanted to address the elements of his work which have made him, as he describes it, "a heretic among heretics" - namely, his concern about uncritical acceptance of the UFO phenomenon, and also the 'psychic' manifestations found in UFO reports which suggest that they may not be "nuts and bolts" craft.

Jacques' answers are succinct and incisive - here's a few pull-outs:

"Many erstwhile ufologists don’t want the deceptive reports exposed, just as the Catholic Church long denied instances of abuse in its ranks."

"People linked to the intelligence community of the major countries have been closely involved in studying UFO cases since World War Two. That interest is legitimate, whether it is purely personal (as most of them claim) or related to their official duties. The same is true in parapsychology."

"[T]he phenomenon comes in an environment of manifestations that include heightened awareness of synchronicities, paranormal sounds and lights and occasionally absurd coincidences similar to those described in the poltergeist literature."

"By denying the reality of the reports, brushing aside the witnesses...and treating them like fools or crooks, the academic skeptics are actually teaching the public that science is impotent at studying the phenomenon."

The full interview is below.

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TDG: Jacques, thanks for talking with us here at The Daily Grail. Let's get straight to the new release: the original publication of Messengers of Deception in 1979 marked quite a turning point in your standing with the ufology community. Your warning that we should be more careful about embracing the phenomenon, and that its underlying qualities could well be negative and deceitful in nature rather than benevolent, was rejected by many (and still seems to cause angst to this day). I'm keen to know what acted as the catalyst for the writing of Messengers of Deception, and if you have thoughts on why so many in the UFO research community paint it as a betrayal of sorts?

Jacques Vallee: The evidence for an “undercurrent” of deceit behind some alleged UFO cases only becomes visible when you spend time in the field interviewing witnesses and tracking down the evidence. It became annoying to me because it represented a waste of time and a distraction from studying genuine observations. Researchers who collect reports only through books or media accounts would not necessarily encounter this level of the phenomenon and would understandably resist the suggestion that the belief in extraterrestrial intervention is being manipulated to serve political or cultist goals.

Even people who are fully aware of this negative aspect don’t want to bring it up into the open because they think it will call disrepute to the subject. Many erstwhile ufologists don’t want the deceptive reports exposed, just as the Catholic Church long denied instances of abuse in its ranks. Whistle-blowing is never welcome. My own position has always been that, on the contrary, the best way to gain the respect of the intellectual community is to expose hoaxes, sloppy research and manipulation whenever we encounter them. ... Read More »