Ancient Astronaut Theories
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The Heritage of Non-Theistic Belief in China
The Heritage of Non-theistic Belief in China Joseph A. Adler Kenyon College Presented to the international conference, "Toward a Reasonable World: The Heritage of Western Humanism, Skepticism, and Freethought" (San Diego, September 2011) Naturalism and humanism have long histories in China, side-by-side with a long history of theistic belief. In this paper I will first sketch the early naturalistic and humanistic traditions in Chinese thought. I will then focus on the synthesis of these perspectives in Neo-Confucian religious thought. I will argue that these forms of non-theistic belief should be considered aspects of Chinese religion, not a separate realm of philosophy. Confucianism, in other words, is a fully religious humanism, not a "secular humanism." The religion of China has traditionally been characterized as having three major strands, the "three religions" (literally "three teachings" or san jiao) of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. Buddhism, of course, originated in India in the 5th century BCE and first began to take root in China in the 1st century CE, so in terms of early Chinese thought it is something of a latecomer. Confucianism and Daoism began to take shape between the 5th and 3rd centuries BCE. But these traditions developed in the context of Chinese "popular religion" (also called folk religion or local religion), which may be considered a fourth strand of Chinese religion. And until the early 20th century there was yet a fifth: state religion, or the "state cult," which had close relations very early with both Daoism and Confucianism, but after the 2nd century BCE became associated primarily (but loosely) with Confucianism. -
INVESTIGATING the SIRIUS "MYSTERY" Ian Ridpath
INVESTIGATING THE SIRIUS "MYSTERY" Ian Ridpath Did amphibious beings from the star Sirius visit the earth 5,000 or more years ago and leave advanced astronomical knowledge that is still pos- sessed by a remote African tribe called the Dogon? This astonishing claim was put forward in 1976 by Robert Temple in his "ancient astro- naut" book, The Sirius Mystery. An astronomer, familiar with the Sirius system, would say no, because astronomical theory virtually precludes the possibility that Sirius is a suitable parent star for life or that it could have habitable planets. But most of Robert Temple's readers would not know enough astronomy to judge the matter for themselves. Neither would they find the relevant astronomical information in Temple's book, most of which consists of brain-numbing excursions into Egyptol- ogy. (Isaac Asimov has been quoted by Temple as having said that he found no mistakes in the book; but Temple did not know that the reason for this, according to Asimov, was that he had found the book too im- penetrable to read!*) Even the BBC-TV Horizon investigation on an- cient astronauts (broadcast as part of the PBS "Nova" series in the United States), which did an otherwise excellent demolition job on the more extreme fantasies of Erich von Daniken, left the Sirius problem unanswered because of its extreme complexity. Yet an answer is needed, because the Dogon legends about a companion to Sirius are claimed to originate before any terrestrial astronomer could have known of the ex- istence of Sirius B, let alone its 50-year orbit or its nature as a tiny, con- * E d i t o r ' s note: See Asimov's essay, "The Dark Companion," in his Quasar, Quasar Burning Bright (Doubleday, 1978), in which he says he is embarrassed by his stupidity in not specifying that his comment, made only "to get rid of him [Temple] and to be polite," not be quoted. -
Pseudoscience and Science Fiction Science and Fiction
Andrew May Pseudoscience and Science Fiction Science and Fiction Editorial Board Mark Alpert Philip Ball Gregory Benford Michael Brotherton Victor Callaghan Amnon H Eden Nick Kanas Geoffrey Landis Rudi Rucker Dirk Schulze-Makuch Ru€diger Vaas Ulrich Walter Stephen Webb Science and Fiction – A Springer Series This collection of entertaining and thought-provoking books will appeal equally to science buffs, scientists and science-fiction fans. It was born out of the recognition that scientific discovery and the creation of plausible fictional scenarios are often two sides of the same coin. Each relies on an understanding of the way the world works, coupled with the imaginative ability to invent new or alternative explanations—and even other worlds. Authored by practicing scientists as well as writers of hard science fiction, these books explore and exploit the borderlands between accepted science and its fictional counterpart. Uncovering mutual influences, promoting fruitful interaction, narrating and analyzing fictional scenarios, together they serve as a reaction vessel for inspired new ideas in science, technology, and beyond. Whether fiction, fact, or forever undecidable: the Springer Series “Science and Fiction” intends to go where no one has gone before! Its largely non-technical books take several different approaches. Journey with their authors as they • Indulge in science speculation—describing intriguing, plausible yet unproven ideas; • Exploit science fiction for educational purposes and as a means of promoting critical thinking; • Explore the interplay of science and science fiction—throughout the history of the genre and looking ahead; • Delve into related topics including, but not limited to: science as a creative process, the limits of science, interplay of literature and knowledge; • Tell fictional short stories built around well-defined scientific ideas, with a supplement summarizing the science underlying the plot. -
Issue-05-9.Pdf
THE COMMITTEE FOR THE SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION of Claims of the Paranormal AT THE CENTER FOR INQUIRY-INTERNATIONAL (ADJACENT TO THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BUFFALO| • AN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION Paul Kurtz, Chairman; professor emeritus of philosophy, State University of New York at Buffalo Barry Karr, Executive Director Joe Nickell, Senior Research Fellow Massimo Polidoro, Research Fellow Richard Wiseman, Research Fellow Lee Nisbet, Special Projects Director FELLOWS James E. Alcock,* psychologist York Univ., Toronto Saul Green. PhD, biochemist president of ZOL James E- Oberg, science writer Jerry Andrus, magician and inventor, Albany, Consultants, New York. NY Irmgard Oepen, professor of medicine (retired). Oregon Susan Haack, Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts Marburg, Germany Marcia Angell, M.D., former editor-in-chief, New and Sciences, prof, of philosophy, University Loren Pankratz. psychologist. Oregon Health England Journal of Medicine of Miami Sciences Univ. Robert A. Baker, psychologist. Univ. of Kentucky C. E. M. Hansel, psychologist. Univ. of Wales John Paulos, mathematician. Temple Univ. Stephen Barrett, M.D., psychiatrist, author, Al Hibbs, scientist, Jet Propulsion Laboratory Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist. MIT consumer advocate, Allentown, Pa. Douglas Hofstadter, professor of human Massimo Polidoro. science writer, author, execu Barry Beyerstein,* biopsychologist. Simon Fraser understanding and cognitive science, tive director CICAP, Italy Univ., Vancouver, B.C.. Canada Indiana Univ. Milton Rosenberg, psychologist Univ. of Chicago Irving Biederman, psychologist, Univ. of Southern Gerald Holton, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics Wallace Sampson. M.D.. clinical professor of medi California and professor of history of science, Harvard Univ. cine. Stanford Univ.. editor, Scientific Review of Susan Blackmore, Visiting Lecturer, Univ. of the Ray Hyman,' psychologist. -
Augustine Responds to the Editor
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 235 Augustine Responds To the Editor: Having presented a comprehensive three-part critique of survival- ist interpretations of near-death experiences (NDEs) and defended it against multiple commentators, I am generally inclined to allow readers of this Journal to reflect upon the entire exchange and take from it what they will without offering further comment. However, I feel compelled to point out a number of fallacies that Neal Grossman commits when, ironically, accusing me of fallacious reasoning. Although Grossman prefaces his letter with the disclaimer that it "will not be a response to anything [I] wrote," he explicitly implicates me along with "other debunkers" in customarily employing fallacious reasoning, and in any case there is no point in him bringing up errors "that Augustine and his fellow materialist ideologues frequently commit" if he does not mean to imply that my critique contains them. 236 JOURNAL OF NEAR-DEATH STUDIES Right from the start, Grossman stereotypes those skeptical of survivalist interpretations of NDEs as ideologues plagued by "unwa- vering certainty" in a materialist faith. But his comments reveal his own "unwavering certainty" that NDEs and other phenomena represent a smoking-gun falsification of materialism. One wonders if any evidence could ever persuade Grossman of the truth of strict materialism or a related view, such as David Chalmers's property dualism, in which mental states are nonphysical properties of the physical brain and thus irreducible to brain states, but existentially dependent upon the properly functioning brain in which they inhere (Chalmers, 1996). Indeed, one wonders if Grossman thinks that it is possible for anyone to hold a materialist or similar position rationally on the basis of the empirical evidence. -
LEASK-DISSERTATION-2020.Pdf (1.565Mb)
WRAITHS AND WHITE MEN: THE IMPACT OF PRIVILEGE ON PARANORMAL REALITY TELEVISION by ANTARES RUSSELL LEASK DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Texas at Arlington August, 2020 Arlington, Texas Supervising Committee: Timothy Morris, Supervising Professor Neill Matheson Timothy Richardson Copyright by Antares Russell Leask 2020 Leask iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS • I thank my Supervising Committee for being patient on this journey which took much more time than expected. • I thank Dr. Tim Morris, my Supervising Professor, for always answering my emails, no matter how many years apart, with kindness and understanding. I would also like to thank his demon kitten for providing the proper haunted atmosphere at my defense. • I thank Dr. Neill Matheson for the ghostly inspiration of his Gothic Literature class and for helping me return to the program. • I thank Dr. Tim Richardson for using his class to teach us how to write a conference proposal and deliver a conference paper – knowledge I have put to good use! • I thank my high school senior English teacher, Dr. Nancy Myers. It’s probably an urban legend of my own creating that you told us “when you have a Ph.D. in English you can talk to me,” but it has been a lifetime motivating force. • I thank Dr. Susan Hekman, who told me my talent was being able to use pop culture to explain philosophy. It continues to be my superpower. • I thank Rebecca Stone Gordon for the many motivating and inspiring conversations and collaborations. • I thank Tiffany A. -
John Edward: Hustling the Bereaved
INVESTIGATIVE FILES JOE NICKELL John Edward: Hustling the Bereaved uperstar "psychic medium" John by a local printer. He visited dieir spook The great magician Harry Houdini Edward is a stand-up guy. Unlike show and volunteered as part of an audi- (1874—1926) crusaded against phony the spiritualists of yore, who typi- ence committee to help secure the two spiritualists, seeking out elderly mediums S mediums. He took that opportunity to who taught him the tricks of die trade. cally plied their trade in dark-room seances, Edward and his ilk often per- secretly place some printer's ink on the For example, while sitters touched hands form before live audiences and even neck of a violin, and after the seance one around die seance table, mediums had under the glare of TV lights. Indeed, of the duo had his shoulder smeared with clever ways of gaining die use of one Edward (a pseudonym: he was born John the black substance (Nickell 1999). hand. (One method was to slowly move MaGee Jr.) has his own popular show on the hands close togedier so diat die fin- die SciFi channel called Crossing Over, gers of one could be substituted for those "which has gone into national syndication JOHN EDWARD of die other.) This allowed die production (Barrett 2001; Mui 2001). I was asked by of special effects, such as causing a tin television newsmagazine Dateline NBC trumpet to appear to be levitating. to study Edward's act: was he really talk- Houdini gave public demonstrations of ing to the dead? HI the deceptions. -
How to Cite Complete Issue More Information About This
Antipoda. Revista de Antropología y Arqueología ISSN: 1900-5407 Departamento de Antropología, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de los Andes Santo, Diana Espírito; Vergara, Alejandra The Possible and the Impossible: Reflections on Evidence in Chilean Ufology* Antipoda. Revista de Antropología y Arqueología, no. 41, 2020, October-December, pp. 125-146 Departamento de Antropología, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de los Andes DOI: https://doi.org/10.7440/antipoda41.2020.06 Available in: https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=81464973006 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System Redalyc More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America and the Caribbean, Spain and Journal's webpage in redalyc.org Portugal Project academic non-profit, developed under the open access initiative The Possible and the Impossible: Reflections on Evidence in Chilean Ufology * Diana Espírito Santo** Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile Alejandra Vergara*** Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile https://doi.org/10.7440/antipoda41.2020.06 How to cite this article: Espírito Santo, Diana and Alejandra Vergara. 2020. “The Possible and the Impossible: Reflections on Evidence in Chilean Ufology.” Antípoda. Revista de Antropología y Arqueología 41: 125-146. https://doi.org/10.7440/antipoda41.2020.06 Reception: February 25, 2019; accepted: June 23, 2020; modified: July 31, 2020. Abstract: This article is based on a year of fieldwork with ufologists, contact- 125 ees, abductees, and skeptics in Chile, using methods including ethnography, media and website analysis, and in-depth interviews. Our argument is that the “UFO” serves as, what Galison would call, a theory machine, a multiplic- ity generating not simply heterogeneous interpretive frameworks through which to understand anomalous flying phenomena, in different ideological spheres, but thresholds of evidence as well. -
Jose Alvarez
Jose Alvarez THE KITCHEN In 1988, Jose Alvarez toured Australia channeling the spirit of “Carlos,” a 2,000-year-old shaman who held forth on Atlantis, “corrected” the date of Jesus’s birth, reported on the movements of UFOs, and divined other sundry matters before capacity crowds at the Sydney Opera House. In the voluble tradition of fundamentalist televangelists, healers, and cultish gurus of all stripes, Alvarez charismatically staged the visionary with the help of his mentor James Randi, himself a debunker of paranormal phenomena, who also appears in the recent video Dejeuner Sur Le Dish, 2007, playing chess with Carlos; besides conducting séances, Alvarez peddled vials of tears and potent crystals and proliferated his message via the mass media. But even stranger than Alvarez’s initial hoax was the fact that scores of people were persuaded by it. Indeed, so convincing was his act that its influence survived its debunking. In laying bare the structure of such presentations, Alvarez counterintuitively reaffirmed the possibility of conviction. Even though the aim of his deception was ultimately to enlighten, Carlos’s moral is that people believe against their better judgment in matters of both lesser and greater consequence. Taking this as axiomatic, Alvarez’s first New York solo exhibition, “The Visitors,” furthered his quasi-sociological research into mysticism and magic. Having quit live performance in favor of video and collage, in this show he expanded upon the promise of his earlier work through a range of media. Placed at the gallery’s vestibule, A Separate Reality, 2007, comments on the spectacle of the earlier communions— eventually executed in Europe, Asia, South America, and the United States, as documentary photographs of Alvarez in Italy and China installed alongside the monitor suggested as well—with Alvarez inhabiting the role of the medium and of the whistleblower in turn: Clips corroborating past Carlos embodiments alternate with others culled from CNN, the Today show, and 60 Minutes, where Alvarez affirms his position as a conceptual artist. -
Into the Storm Uncovering the Narrative of Qanon
Into the storm Uncovering the narrative of QAnon Ioana Frincu (s1904914) University of Twente BSc. Communication Science Supervisor Menno de Jong “I think that the people who approach the social sciences with a ready-made conspiracy theory thereby deny themselves the possibility of ever understanding what the task of the social sciences is, for they assume that we can explain practically everything in society by asking who wanted it, whereas the real task of the social sciences is to explain those things which nobody wants, such as, for example, a war, or a depression“ (Popper, 2002, p. 168) 1 Abstract The alarming growth of QAnon, a conspiracy theory group, is just the tip of an complex issue which is dividing the world. From conspiracy theories shared on internet to storming Capitol Hill and disrupting the public and political discourse, QAnon quickly become a major threat in the real world. Nevertheless, there is still a limited understanding of its anatomy, characteristic and who are the followers, especially within academia. To address the gap, I will attempt to uncover the narrative of QAnon and its characteristics as the main focus of this research. Conducting a content analysis on 6, 432 posts from Q drops, 8kun, r/QAnon_Casualties and r/Qult_Headquarters implies taking into consideration two opposite perspective: the QAnon insider view and the outsider perspective that takes an anti-QAnon stand. The results are pointing out to an engaging “good vs evil” fight behind the movement as well as cult behavior and a goal to discredit any authority, among others. The conclusion contains several unexplored paths for future research and practical advice to the public and institutions about how to make sense of QAnon. -
Alan F. Alford
IMPORTANT FOREW0RD Around 200,000 years ago, the hominid known as Homo erectus suddenly transformed itself into Homo Sapien with a 50 per cent increase in brain size, together with language capability and a modern anatomy. How could this have happened so suddenly after 1.2 million years of no progress at all? It is anomalies such as these that have caused considerable discomfort to highly respected evolutionary scientists such as Noam Chomsky and Roger Penrose. When state-of the-art evolutionary principles are applied to Homo sapiens, the logical conclusion is that we should not be here! The religious view of Divine Creation suffers from equal scepticism. Who can take the Garden of Eden story seriously? Science and Religion are driving round in circles in a cul-de-sac. But mankind is here, and that fact needs to be explained. The evolution of mankind is only one of the many mysteries that conventional science cannot explain. In recent years, the best seller lists have featured an increasing number of popular books which have dealt with these mysteries. One of the factors behind this trend has been the series of discoveries coming out of Egypt. The discovery of a secret doorway inside the Great Pyramid and the independent dating of the Giza Pyramids and Sphinx to the era 10500-8000 BC have captured the public’s imagination. But these historical anomalies are not just confined to Egypt. All over the world we find sites such as Stonehenge, Tiwanaku, Nazca and Baalbek that do nor fit the historical paradigm. A shadowy prehistory seems to exist as a legacy in the form of stone, maps and mythology, which our twentieth century technology has only just allowed us to recognise. -
Images Re-Vues, 14 | 2017 Kapwani Kiwanga’S Alien Speculations 2
Images Re-vues Histoire, anthropologie et théorie de l'art 14 | 2017 Extraterrestre Kapwani Kiwanga’s Alien Speculations Gavin Steingo Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/imagesrevues/4051 DOI: 10.4000/imagesrevues.4051 ISSN: 1778-3801 Publisher: Centre d’Histoire et Théorie des Arts, Groupe d’Anthropologie Historique de l’Occident Médiéval, Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale, UMR 8210 Anthropologie et Histoire des Mondes Antiques Electronic reference Gavin Steingo, “Kapwani Kiwanga’s Alien Speculations”, Images Re-vues [Online], 14 | 2017, Online since 03 November 2017, connection on 30 January 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ imagesrevues/4051 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/imagesrevues.4051 This text was automatically generated on 30 January 2021. Images Re-vues est mise à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d’Utilisation Commerciale 4.0 International. Kapwani Kiwanga’s Alien Speculations 1 Kapwani Kiwanga’s Alien Speculations Gavin Steingo AUTHOR'S NOTE I would like to thank the editorial committee for excellent feedback on an earlier draft of this article. I am also grateful to Peter Szendy, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Jean-Loïc Le Quellec for helpful comments and discussions. Finally, I must offer a mighty thank you to Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet for seeing this project through from beginning to end. Introduction Images Re-vues, 14 | 2017 Kapwani Kiwanga’s Alien Speculations 2 1 Between the mid-nineteenth and mid- twentieth centuries, many European authors invested considerable effort to illustrate that Africans are incapable of genius and civilization. Unable to fathom that an African society might have constructed what we today know as Great Zimbabwe, German geographer Karl Mauch (1837-1875) and British archaeologist James Theodore Bent (1852-1897) developed fanciful historical narratives.