Sometimes you can learn something even from a rejection letter. And sometimes things get a little weird. Keith Basterfield reports results from successive FOIA requests to “Australia’s national science agency,” the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. Luis Cayetano tackles a different knotty problem in The Role of Consciousness in the UFO and Alien Mythos. Cayetano weaves together numerous constructions about UFOs’ nature and meaning. Considerations include physical and consciousness theories, human psychology, biases, yearnings, history, and individuals. It’s a controversial, thought-provoking essay. Micah Hanks focused more specifically on the mechanism underlying consciousness in his Solving the Hard Problem of Consciousness: Physicist Nir Lahav Ph.D. on a Relativistic Theory of Consciousness. Co-author of a (referenced) paper with Zacahariah Neemeh, Lahav answers questions on “what, precisely, gives rise to the subjective phenomenal experiences that humans have as we observe reality around us.” From the concrete issues raised by Basterfield and theoretical musings about how we perceive and transmute “reality,” Richard Dolan invites us to contemplate two basic ufological questions: How much UFO activity is going on in our world? and How Many UFOs are there REALLY? The number of assumptions, guesstimations, and speculations here would horrify a “real-world” statistician, and Richard himself allows that viewers are free to come up with their own calculations. Interesting differences in how we humans approach intractable problems. (WM)
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