There are now two Probe International conferences. Sam Wright is continuing in St. Anne’s, near Blackpool; his son, Paul is running another in Bolton. This is Paul Wright’s September conference:

PROBE INTERNATIONAL PRODUCTIONS (Bolton)

Details for Sam Wright’s March conference will be posted as soon as I have them.

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The Fake MATRIX Illusion We Are Trapped In…..
Richard Heath: Sacred Number and the Lords of Time…..
Rh-Negative Blood: An Exotic Bloodline or Random Mutation?…..
The Wild Hunt of 1127…..
Fairy Investigation Society…..
Dangerous knowledge…..
Dangerous knowledge II: Wrong knowledge about the history of science…..
Dangerous knowledge III: Wrong knowledge about science…..
Dangerous knowledge IV: The vicious cycle of wrong knowledge…..
Black skin, blue eyes and curly hair: DNA tests reveal the extraordinary face of the first ancient Briton and 10,000-year-old Cheddar Man is directly related to one in ten people in the UK today…..
Divers Found The World’s Largest Underwater Cave, And It’s Full of Maya Secrets…..
Yikes!: Face To Face: An exercise in “Stream of Conciousness Art”…..
What They Don’t Teach You About the Most Famous Scientists…..

 

Event Horizon: Dear Readers, I’ve been thinking about a lot of things in recent days, weeks and months, to the extent that I have written very little for a long while now.

Permit me to explain.

After a certain point, it begins to seem as if there were not much more to be said, the more so as I have more or less reluctantly arrived at the following realization:  we are in a sort of virtual reality, karmic lesson simulator being run by or dominated by a PURE EVIL A.I. governor or lord. I don’t know if the entire galaxy and the rest of the Universe are caught up in this, but it increasingly looks to me that for the most part we don’t even know what “reality” actually is. We’re immersed in a malevolent, A.I. directed horror show called Earth.
The Fake MATRIX Illusion We Are Trapped In

 

 

Most people who have the Rh blood type are Rh-positive. There are also instances, however, where people are Rh-Negative. Health problems may occur for the unborn child of a mother with Rh-Negative blood when the baby is Rh-Positive. This has led some to suggest that Rh-Negative blood must be of a non-human origin. Theories range from supernatural ones such as being of divine descent or membership in a divinely chosen people-group, to more scientific or pseudoscientific explanations such as interbreeding with extraterrestrials. The majority of scientists who have studied the blood type have concluded that it is most likely just a random mutation. This explanation seems to be the one most consistent with available evidence and the one that is most able to withstand Occam’s Razor.
Rh-Negative Blood: An Exotic Bloodline or Random Mutation?

 

In spring 1127, in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire strange things happened. At night locals heard repeated horn blasts and some, who were foolish enough to be out in the dark, saw ghastly sights: men appeared on black horses and on black goats riding through the woods following black hounds. It goes without saying that this was not some local form of carnival: the locals repeatedly came into contact with what folklorists call the ‘Wild Hunt’.
The Wild Hunt of 1127

 

For hundreds of years, a belief in fairies across Ireland, the UK and Scandinavia has enabled the rationalization of the dark, the mysterious or the inexplicable. Otherwise known as ‘The Good People’, the meddling mischievous creatures of the other world have caused abductions, unfortunate accidents and financial ruin. The fairies have also been the alleged creators of talent, fame or great fortune.

But is there any evidence at all that they actually existed?

‘Listen now’ button at top of the page:
Fairy Investigation Society

 

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.
It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

That’s very true.

In a mild way, the quote also illustrates itself since it is so often attributed wrongly; perhaps most often to Mark Twain but also to other humorists — Will Rogers, Artemus Ward, Kin Hubbard — as well as to inventor Charles Kettering, pianist Eubie Blake, baseball player Yogi Berra, and more (“Bloopers: Quote didn’t really originate with Will Rogers”).

Such mis-attributions of insightful sayings are perhaps the rule rather than any exception; sociologist Robert Merton even wrote a whole book (On the Shoulders of Giants, Free Press 1965 & several later editions) about mis-attributions over many centuries of the modest acknowledgment that “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”.

No great harm comes from mis-attributing words of wisdom. Great harm is being done nowadays, however, by accepting much widely believed and supposedly scientific medical knowledge; for example about hypertension, cholesterol, prescription drugs, and more (see works listed in What’s Wrong with Present-Day Medicine).

The trouble is that “science” was so spectacularly successful in elucidating so much about the natural world and contributing to so many useful technologies that it has come to be regarded as virtually infallible.

Historians and other specialist observers of scientific activity — philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, various others — of course know that science, no less than all other human activities, is inherently and unavoidably fallible.
Dangerous knowledge

 

Knowledge of history among most people is rarely more than superficial; the history of science is much less known even than is general (political, social) history. Consequently, what many people believe they know about science is typically wrong and dangerously misleading.

General knowledge about history, the conventional wisdom about historical matters, depends on what society as a whole has gleaned from historians, the people who have devoted enormous time and effort to assemble and assess the available evidence about what happened in the past.

Society on the whole does not learn about history from the specialists, the primary research historians. Rather, teachers of general national and world histories in schools and colleges have assembled some sort of whole story from all the specialist bits, perforce taking on trust what the specialist cadres have concluded. The interpretations and conclusions of the primary specialists are filtered and modified by second-level scholars and teachers. So what society as a whole learns about history as a whole is a sort of third-hand impression of what the specialists have concluded.
Dangerous knowledge II: Wrong knowledge about the history of science

 

In the first post of this series (Dangerous knowledge) I pointed to a number of specific topics on which the contemporary scientific consensus is doubtfully in tune with the actual evidence. That disjunction is ignored or judged unimportant both by most researchers and by most observers; and that, I believe, is because the fallibility of science is not common knowledge; which in turn stems from ignorance and wrong knowledge about the history of science and, more or less as a consequence, about science itself.

The conventional wisdom regards science as a thing that is characterized by the scientific method. An earlier post (Dangerous knowledge II: Wrong knowledge about the history of science) mentioned that the scientific method is not a description of how science is done, it was thought up in philosophical speculation about how science could have been so successful, most notably in the couple of centuries following the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century.

Just as damaging as misconceptions about how science is done is the wrong knowledge that science is even a thing that can be described without explicit attention to how scientific activity has changed over time, how the character of the people doing science has changed over time, most drastically since the middle of the 20th century. What has happened since then, since World War II, affords the clearest, most direct understanding of why contemporary official pronouncements about matter of science and medicine need to be treated with similar skepticism as are official pronouncements about matters of economics, say, or politics.
Dangerous knowledge III: Wrong knowledge about science

 

Peter Duesberg, universally admired scientist, cancer researcher, and leading virologist, member of the National Academy of Sciences, recipient of a seven-year Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National Institutes of Health, was astounded when the world turned against him because he pointed to the clear fact that HIV had never been proven to cause AIDS and to the strong evidence that, indeed, no retrovirus could behave in the postulated manner.

Frederick Seitz, at one time President of the National Academy of Sciences and for some time President of Rockefeller University, became similarly non grata for pointing out that parts of an official report contradicted one another about whether human activities had been proven to be the prime cause of global warming (“A major deception on global warming”, Wall Street Journal, 12 June 1996).
Dangerous knowledge IV: The vicious cycle of wrong knowledge

 

The first ancient Britons had black skin, dark curly hair and blue eyes, according to DNA tests.

The ‘extraordinary’ findings were made by cutting-edge genetic tests and facial reconstruction techniques carried out for the first time on the bones of ‘Cheddar Man’ who died 10,000 years ago.

The bones, found in Somerset’s Cheddar Gorge, are the oldest near-complete human skeleton ever found in Britain and scientists said they were surprised to discover that the earliest Briton would be considered ‘black’ if he lived today.

The research suggests the first inhabitants of the British isles developed white skin later on than previously thought.

Experts also revealed that Cheddar Man is directly related to 1 in 10 people living in the UK today.
Black skin, blue eyes and curly hair: DNA tests reveal the extraordinary face of the first ancient Briton and 10,000-year-old Cheddar Man is directly related to one in ten people in the UK today

 

After 10 months of intensive exploration, scientists in Mexico have discovered the world’s largest flooded cave system – and it’s truly an underwater wonderland.

Spanning an incredible 347 kilometres (216 miles) of subterranean caverns, this branching, sunken labyrinth isn’t just a natural spectacle – it’s also an important archaeological find that could reveal lost secrets of the ancient Maya civilisation.

“This immense cave represents the most important submerged archaeological site in the world,” says underwater archaeologist Guillermo de Anda from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History.

“It has more than a hundred archaeological contexts, among which are evidence of the first settlers of America, as well as extinct fauna and, of course, the Maya culture.”
Divers Found The World’s Largest Underwater Cave, And It’s Full of Maya Secrets

 

I met two of ‘the Allagash Boys’, Charlie Foltz and Jim Weiner, when I attended the Laughlin UFO Congress in 2008. They were lights in the darkness for me, lovely guys. They had a traumatic experience, including missing time, with a UFO, while on a fishing trip; it changed all of their lives. Jim’s brother, Jack, was among them and he has now published a book with his artwork:

Almost every living person dreams during sleep; yet, few take their dreams very seriously, relegating them to a mixed salad of sights, sounds, and circumstances; if they are remembered at all. This book is about using “Art-Making” as a “Stream of Consciousness Process” to help recall more details of an extremely mind-expanding and potentially life changing “Dream” that I had…over twenty years ago. It was a dream which forced me to re-evaluate several preconceptions that I had concerning my place in the Universe. But, the part of the dream which affected me the most and has stayed with me for all these years, is the “Message” that was contained within the dream…meant not just for me, but for all of Humanity. With this book, I’m trying to put a “Face” with the “Message”.
Yikes!: Face To Face: An exercise in “Stream of Conciousness Art”