The Ghost and the Brain

This is another response to a recent article by CJ, a very long-time psychical researcher and member of the paranormal research group ASSAP. Over the past few days he has written a two-part article discussing the Psycho-Social Hypothesis of the UFO experience and its possible flaws, which I have also responded to. Now he has put up a similar thought-provoking essay on the possible neurological origins of the ghost experience.

CJ states that we don’t just see with our eyes, but with our brains. There are particular sections of the brain devoted to turning the electro-chemical impulses from our peepers in to vision, and our conscious visual perception of the world around us. Among other parts of brain mentioned by him is the visual cortex located at the rear of the skull. People who have received an injury to this section of the brain may become cortically blind. There’s nothing wrong with their eyes or optic nerves, but the blow to the visual cortex means that they cannot translate the impulses from the eyes into images in their brains. There also a related phenomenon in which the cortically blind nevertheless seem to have some kind of vision subconsciously. When these people are asked to point to a person or object, they are perfectly able to do so with accuracy, even though they aren’t consciously seeing anything. To them, it’s all guesswork, even though something more than this is operating.

This leads to the thorny question of what is actually going on when people see ghosts. Scholars, theologians and spiritualists have been discussing the nature of spooks since the days of the Greek philosophers. And many people, who believe that scepticism only arose in the 18^th century Enlightenment, would probably be astonished how much scepticism towards ghosts, demons and magic there was in the Middle Ages and before. Theologians had to wrestle with the problem of how ghosts could be seen, if the soul was immaterial. They concluded that there was a third form of material between the soul and ordinary matter. This was spirit. It was extremely tenuous, but nevertheless could be seen, and so could souls when they were embedded or cloaked in it. In the 19^th century some Spiritualists suggested that the deceased were made of matter as we are, but this was at a higher vibration and so usually invisible to us. This followed 19^th century theories about the ether and how atoms were some kind of whirlpool within this attenuated stuff that pervaded the entire cosmos.

A similar explanation has been used by Contactees and members of UFO-based New Religions to explain their contacts with the space brothers. These religions arose before humans had sent probes to the neighbouring planets and discovered how hostile they were to organic life like ours. George Adamski, dubbed by UFO Magazine ‘the great pretender’ because of his notorious hoaxes, claimed that he had met and interacted with men and women from Venus and Mars. Mars, unfortunately, is not the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs full of beautiful alien princesses, feudal warlords and alien creatures. Nor is the world of canals of Schiaparelli. It is an almost-completely airless world more like the Moon, and any life existing there is probably microbial. Venus is not C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra either, or the various primordial swamps suggested by previous scientists. It’s a hell world of sulphuric acid rain, a mean temperature of 400 degrees and an atmospheric pressure 40 times that of Earth. Any life departed from its rocky surface many millions of years ago. But several decades ago, a gentleman from the Aetherius Society tried to explain away this divergence from his religion’s teaching on Wogan. Debating the issue with astronomy presenter and broadcaster Patrick Moore, the presenter of the Sky at Night, this said that the aliens on Venus with which his religion claimed to be in contact, had not been detected because they were at a higher vibration.

Back to ghosts, CJ appears to be following the view of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research that ghosts are hallucinations, though of a different nature from that experienced by schizophrenics and others with mental health problems. They suggested that ghosts were hallucinations caused by other minds, living or dead. Crisis apparitions are one example. These are when a person suddenly sees an image of a friend or loved one on the verge of death. The SPR believed that they are caused by the dying individual telepathically sending out an image of themselves to the percipient. The theory that ghosts were telepathic impressions from other minds is the central premise behind L. Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic ghost story, The House and the Brain.

There is clearly something to this. There are ghost encounters that do indeed suggest that the experience is in some sense hallucinatory, but nevertheless also objective, generated by something or someone. In one of the cases investigated by Tony Cornell, an academic and veteran paranormal investigator, he and a colleague were called out to a haunting in a woman’s house. Their car broke down along the way, and so one of them stayed to get this sorted out while the other went on to talk to the woman. When he arrived, she explained to him that there was a red-headed woman by the fireplace. His fellow turned up a few minutes later, having heard nothing of the previous conversation. When he came in, he asked who the woman by the fireplace was. This suggests that there was an objective element to the experience, in that there was something or someone there generating the image of the woman seen by the house’s occupant and one, but not both, of the ghosthunters. This has given rise to the Stone Tape theory, based on the ideas of T.C. Lethbridge, in which there is something in the environment that records mental impressions, and which replays them to certain sensitive individuals. These people then experience them as ghosts.

If this is correct, then it raises the question of what changes or features in the visual cortex or other structures of the brain involved in vision, that allow genuine mediums and clairvoyants and ordinary people to perceive ghosts. The brain, it has been said, is the most complicated organised structure in the cosmos. At the moment there are controversies over the possible existence of neurological differences between certain sections of humanity. There has been a long-time debate over whether there is a difference between the brains of men and women, and whether this is the cause of different mental abilities between the sexes. Obviously this is intensely controversial. A few decades ago one neuroscientist discovered that the corpus callosum, the bridge between the two hemisphere’s of the brain, was thicker in women. This discovery was received with fury by some, and there have been demonstrations against the neurologist, including physical assault, one of which left him with a fractured skull. See the relevant article in the volume The Human Brain Evolving. Differences in brain structure have also been claimed as the origin of homosexuality. A Californian doctor, LaVey, claimed after extensive dissection of the brains of gay men, that one section of their brains was more similar to heterosexual women than to hetero men. And it has also been claimed that gay women’s brains are similarly more like that of heterosexual men than heterosexual women. This appears to be the accepted view. But some neurologists have questioned whether men’s and women’s brains are all that different. These doctors and surgeons point out that you can’t immediately tell the sex of a brain from its appearance. There may be immense problems examining the question of a neurological origin of the ghost experience.

And it is questionable whether the theory that ghosts are some form of hallucination actually explains all the varieties of the ghost experience. Looking through Hillary Evans’ excellent Seeing Ghosts, it is clear that people’s experiences of seeing and encountering ghosts is extremely varied, and often doesn’t simply consist of seeing or hearing them. Some of the encounters in the book are about instances where the percipient had eaten with a supposed ghost in a café or restaurant, only to find out later that this person had been dead for days before. Yet when they met them, they behaved like a fully embodied, corporeal being. And what about poltergeists, the noisy ghosts that throw objects about? These appear to have a physical reality, at least in their effect on the homes and property of the people haunted by them. They aren’t hallucinations, although the entity responsible for the hurled plates or whatever may also be invisible and immaterial in itself, just as the ghost causing the hallucinatory experience in that model is also objectively invisible and immaterial. It is possible that there is no single ghost experience, but a variety of related or apparently similar phenomena, and so no single explanation is possible. Or it may be there is a single ghost phenomenon, but that it involves a number of factors and processes, including hallucinations, but that these may vary according to types of experience. CJ has stated that this is the first part of his discussion of ghosts and hallucinations, and promised that in his next piece he’ll return to the subject of UFOs. I await both with interest.

For further information, see: https://jerome23.wordpress.com/2024/05/09/ghosts-working-notes-part-one/

Was UFO Contactee George Adamski Really a Hoaxer?

This might interest some of the peeps here who are into ufology and the question of whether aliens really are visiting the Earth. I’m a member of ASSAP, the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomenon. It’s an amateur psychical research group, which was set up in the 1980s to investigate spontaneous cases of ghosts poltergeists, UFOs and so on in the field, as opposed to the laboratory work of the Society for Psychical Research. It differs from other psychical research and ghost hunting groups by using scientific protocols in its investigations as well as mediums. It’s membership comprises wide variety of people, from those with backgrounds in science and medicine, professional investigators like the police, and ordinary people fascinated with and keen to explore these bizarre phenomena for themselves. It has two magazines, Seriously Strange, which is the more popular of the two and similar in tone to the Fortean Times, and Anomaly: the Journal of Research into the Paranormal, which is rather more academic with articles properly referenced. The most recent edition of Anomaly, for May this year, carries an article by Dr John Tate, ‘George Adamski: The Luxury of Disbelief’ (pp. 172-181). And it’s truly perplexing as it questions whether Adamski was the fraud everyone, or nearly everyone, thinks he was.

Adamski was a Polish-America restauranteur, owning a hot-dog establishment on Mount Palomar. He was the first of the UFO contactees, men and women who believed they’d met aliens, who had given them special knowledge and messages for humanity. They emerged in the 1950s, and many of these messages were naturally warnings from the ufonauts about the threat of nuclear weapons. Adamski was deeply interested in eastern mysticism, and claimed to have met a Venusian out in the Californian desert and observed and photographed his spacecraft. The alien, Orthon, also left a footprint from his boots in the sand, of which Adamski and his fellows took a plaster cast. He seems to have been a dubious figure, at least. There’s a suggestion that he made have been bootlegging and smuggling hooch during Prohibition. He’s supposed to have told his cronies one evening that the end of Prohibition had been bad for him, as he had made money selling wine and telling the authorities it was for religious purposes. Presumably this was as part of the sacrament in Christian holy communion. His photographs have been analysed professionally. One of the alien ships was really his chicken hutch, while there have been claims since that the photograph of the classic UFO he made, which appears on the poster in Mulder’s wall in the X-Files with the slogan ‘I want to believe’, was really the top part of a kerosene or similar lantern. It’s so much taken for granted that Adamski hoaxed his encounter that the late British UFO Magazine, which wasn’t particularly sceptical, titled an article about him ‘The Great Pretender’. There was a little spat a few years ago between the Fortean Times and Colin Bennet, who at that time was the webmaster of a site claiming to be the ‘real Fortean Times‘. Bennet was an enthusiast of Postmodernism and had just then published a book about Adamski, Looking for Orthon. Bennet frequently denounced on his website what he called ‘the cult of the real’ and seems to taken the view of the extreme Greek sceptics and contemporary Postmodern philosophers that there was no objective reality. He had appeared on a panel at the Fortean Times Unconvention that year, where he got annoyed with the Fortean Times crew who tried to get him to say if he really thought Adamski was genuine. Hence there was a lot of ranting and personal attacks on his blog against Lance Sieveking and the rest of the Gang of Fort.

I’d always assumed that Adamski was making it all up, though one of the great commenters on this blog has strongly argued that he was instead the victim of a hoax by the US military or intelligence services. I don’t know about that, but Adamski certainly was suspected by them of being a Communist. In the above article, Dr Tate suggests that there are good reasons for thinking Adamski may have been genuine. Firstly, unlike the popular myth, he didn’t own a hamburger stall on Palomar. It was actually quite large, and more like a restaurant. His account of his journey into space aboard the Venusian craft contains details that were only confirmed later during the manned spaceflight missions of later decades. He mentioned ‘fairylights’ surrounding the Venusian UFO, which was unknown at the time but later observed by astronauts. He also said that in space he saw no stars, which again is what the astronauts observed, contrary to expectations. Other experts have analysed his UFO photograph, to reveal details showing it definitely wasn’t part of a lantern and appears to have been a real object.

Furthermore, Adamski wasn’t alone when he met Orthon. He was accompanied by six other people, who also observed the Venusian and his craft. One of these other witnesses was George Hunt Williamson, a professional anthropologist, who carried out pioneering work excavating the remains of the pre-Columbian Amerindian civilisations in South America. Williamson was also into spiritualism and became an advocate of the ancient astronaut theory that claims humanity was visited in the past by aliens. These were responsible for the creation of the world’s ancient monuments like Stonehenge, the pyramids, Easter Island and so on. Later on Williamson changed his name to d’Obrenovic. I think he may also have become involved in far right politics. But at the time of the Adamski sighting he was a respected academic.

Tate says he has no idea what was going on, which I think is a fair description of ufology full stop. Some UFO sightings are hoaxes, misidentifications of ordinary objects seen under extraordinary conditions, hallucinations or confabulations produced by unusual psychological states, sightings of top secret military aircraft. Others, to me, seem genuinely paranormal in the sense they are more like a ghost sighting or similar supernatural event than nuts and bolts alien spacecraft. But who knows? Maybe a few UFOs have been of visiting spacecraft, or beings from the future or parallel worlds. And may be there isn’t a single explanation at all for the UFO phenomenon.

Tate’s article raises some interesting questions about Adamski, and certainly made me wonder if there was a kernel of truth in what he said. If anyone’s interested, I’ll post a longer piece about the article and some of the points it makes.

Video on the History of and Evidence for the Aurora Steal Plane

Here’s a very short video on the American SR-92 Aurora stealth plane from the Future Machine Tech channel on YouTube. This suggests that Aurora was developed as a black project by the American air force in the 1980s as a replacement for the SR-91 Blackbird spy plane. During the ’90s there were sightings of mysterious UFOs dubbed ‘black triangles’ because of their shape and colour. The Aurora fits this description exactly, and many of the sightings of such UAPs may be of this mysterious, but definitely not extraterrestrial, aircraft. The video mentions a tracking image of it flying across the Pacific on its way to America, probably to touch down at the very top secret research base at Groom Lake, Area 51. The aircraft leaves a very distinctive contrail, which has ben described as ‘doughnuts on a rope’ and may have been tracked flying over Belgium according to an article back in the 90s in the defunct UFO Magazine. I’m putting this video up because I and some of the great commenters on this blog have an interest in UFOs, although we differ in our views of the phenomenon. Some UFO sightings are almost certainly of top secret military aircraft. Others are hoaxes, some of which may be perpetrated by the intelligence agencies for their own purposes, one of which may be the deliberate destabilisation and discrediting of UFO research groups and investigators. Some, as suggested by French-American astronomer and computer scientist Jacques Vallee and the late journalist of the paranormal, John Keel, may be paranormal in origin, beings from other dimensions. Others may be real alien spacecraft. People over here have also had sightings of the Black Triangles, and so it’s quite possible that they’ve quite a glimpse of this classified plane.