No Simple Flight of UFO Fancy

I generally try to not say anything about UFO sightings because the vast majority is characterized as a light in the sky.  In fact, they appear to be phenomena that are self emitting which makes visualization tricky at best.  It is like looking at a light bulb and trying to see any detail.  There are thousands of such reports recorded to date yet I have already told you all that there is to know for most.

 

This report is much different.  It is fifty years old and it was well handled by a large group of observers.  Most importantly, it was close and ample detail became visible, to say nothing about the observation of working individuals on the craft.  It behaved just like a visiting ship coming up to a tropical island, yet standing offshore while they did their business.

 

Far more important, is that the operators made no attempt whatsoever to hide their presence from observers.  The elusiveness of most UFO events had left me with the distinct impression that they prefer to avoid disturbing us.  This situation is telling us quite the opposite.  It makes it pretty clear that the operators have no such general avoidance rule or this clear interaction would have been very different even if their presence at the time was necessary.

 

It is worth knowing that the numbers of UFO sightings consisting primarily of a light in the sky, presently are in the tens of thousands.  Their limitation has always been the fact that their luminescence wiped out any fine detail.  In short a hundred thousand reports of a light in the sky left you holding the evidence bag.

 

On the other hand, when we review data from the ten thousand Sasquatch sightings, we get plenty of comparable detail and predictable behavior with confirmation.  And if you get close and downwind, you get the appropriate body odor.

 

This particular report goes a long way to ending that difficulty.  In fact, if this were the only UFO report in existence, its natural credence would establish the phenomena clearly.  We can relate to an alien exploration vessel sailing in and looking us over.  Our problem has been the fact that they practically ignore us.

 

I leave purported interaction reports alone because they pass through a shocked observer and become profoundly interpretive, in the same way that an illuminated device obscures itself.  It is difficult to establish certainty.

 

Yet with an observation such as this one, the observers and the observed have stood off and inspected each other in broad daylight with ample witnesses.  It could not have been more ideal.  Even more importantly the occupants made themselves visible so that no mystery remained regarding their nature.  Tellingly, they were interpreted as human.  This means that their movements were human bipedal just as are the movements of the Sasquatch.  Again this broadly conforms to my conjecture regarding the presence of space adapted humanity in space habitats.

 

There are other equally strong UFO reports, but this is the one that confirms that they are not much bothered by us seeing them, although they would obviously avoid disturbance as much as possible as normal operating procedure, particularly since they do not wish to directly communicate.

 

 

No simple flight of fancy

Rowan Callick  From:The Australian 

January 01, 2010 12:00AM

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/no-simple-flight-of-fancy/story-e6frg6z6-1225815076210

IT is now 50 years since a 31-year-old Australian Anglican missionary in Papua New Guinea, William Gill, and 37 parishioners and staff made the best attested and least explained sighting of unidentified flying objects in the long, otherwise kooky history of the genre.

The day before the celebrated encounter of a mystifying kind, Gill had written a letter to David Durie, acting principal of St Aidan's College, which trained teacher-evangelists at Dogura, then the headquarters of the church in PNG.

Gill, who was priest in charge at Boianai, a large village on the mountainous north coast of Milne Bay province, about 25km west of Dogura, told Durie of a UFO sighting by Stephen Moi, then an assistant teacher.

He wrote: "There have been quite a number of reports over the months from reliable witnesses.

"The peculiar thing about these most recent reports is that the UFOs seem to be stationary at Boanai or to travel from Boianai," a beautiful location brilliantly captured by pioneer Australian photographer Frank Hurley in 1921. "I myself saw a stationary white light twice on the same night on April 9 . . . the assistant district officer, Bob Smith, and Mr Glover have seen it. I do not doubt the existence of these things, but my simple mind still requires scientific evidence before I can accept the from-outer-space theory. I am inclined to believe that probably many UFOs are more likely some form of electric phenomena or perhaps something brought about by the atom bomb explosions etc.

"That Stephen should actually make out a saucer could be the work of the unconscious mind, as it is very likely that at some time he has seen illustrations of some kind in a magazine.

"It is all too difficult to understand for me; I prefer to wait for some bright boy to catch one to be exhibited in Martin Place.

"Yours, Doubting William."

The following day, he wrote again: "Dear David, life is strange, isn't it? Yesterday I wrote you a letter, expressing opinions re the UFOs. Now, less than 24 hours later I have changed my views somewhat.

"Last night we at Boianai experienced about four hours of UFO activity, and there is no doubt whatsoever that they are handled by beings of some kind. At times it was absolutely breathtaking. Here is the report.

"Cheers, Convinced Bill.

"P.S. Do you think P. Moresby should know about this? If people think it worthwhile, I will stand the cost of a radio conversation if you care to make out a comprehensive report from the material on my behalf!!"

What had Gill and his parishioners seen?

The notes he made following his encounter describe a bright white light appearing in the northwestern sky, approaching the mission station, then hovering about 100m in the air.

Gill, Moi, another teacher, Ananias Rarata, and 35 other people who all later signed a confirming document, watched what they described as a large, disc-shaped, solidly constructed object, with a wide base tapering up to a higher deck, and with what appeared to be four legs beneath, and four brightly lit panels in the side.

It occasionally emitted a shaft of blue light at a 45 degree angle.

Then what they described as men emerged on to a deck on the top, four at most, but in various configurations. Clouds, which were at about 600m, then eventually obscured the vessel as it drifted higher.

It had been stationary through most of the 25 minutes of this encounter.

Gill then wrote his letter to Durie. That evening, the visitation returned in an extraordinary manner. He first saw it at 6.02pm, as the sun was setting.

Gill's account states: "We watched figures appear on top - four of them - no doubt that they are human.

"Two smaller UFOs were seen at the same time, stationary. One above the hills west, another overhead.

"On the large one, two of the figures seemed to be doing something near the centre of the deck . . . were occasionally bending over and raising their arms as though adjusting or setting up something (not visible).

"One figure seemed to be standing looking down at us (a group of about a dozen). I stretched my arm above my head and waved. To our surprise the figure did the same.

"Ananias waved both arms over his head then the two outside figures did the same.

"Ananias and self began waving our arms and all four now seemed to wave back. There seemed to be no doubt that our movements were answered. All mission boys made audible gasps (of either joy or surprise, perhaps both).

"As dark was beginning to close in, I sent Eric Kodawara for a torch and directed a series of long dashes towards the UFO. After a minute or two of this, the UFO apparently acknowledged by making several wavering motions back and forth.

"Waving by us was repeated and this followed by more flashes of torch, then the UFO began slowly to become bigger, apparently coming in our direction. It ceased after perhaps half a minute and came no further.

"After a further two or three minutes the figures apparently lost interest in us for they disappeared below deck. At 6.25pm two figures reappeared to carry on with whatever they were doing before the interruption. The blue spotlight came on for a few seconds twice in succession."

The situation remained unchanged, so Gill returned to his regular routine and went to have his dinner at 6.30.

By 7pm, the main object had moved slightly away and the observers went into the village church for evensong, as usual.

By the time they emerged, at 7.45pm, visibility had become very limited with the sky covered in cloud. At 10.40 pm, Gill wrote, an "earsplitting" explosion woke up the mission-station inhabitants. Gill said it did not feel like a thunderclap.

Later, Gill said, he was always asked why he had reverted to his usual routine when there was a flying saucer apparently hovering overhead. This was partly because, he said, "there was nothing eerie or other-worldly about any of this. It was all so ordinary, as ordinary as a Ford car.

"It looked a perfectly normal sort of object, an Earth-made object. I realised, of course, that some people might think of this as a flying saucer, but I took it to be some kind of hovercraft the Americans or even the Australians had built. The figures inside looked perfectly human."

Gill's report caused quite a sensation at the time, when PNG was an Australian colony. A Liberal federal MP from Western Australia, E. D. Cash, asked the then air minister questions in parliament, without receiving a substantive answer.

The Defence Ministry deployed two RAAF officers to investigate. Although they found Gill "a reliable observer", they attributed the sightings to "natural phenomena", the result of cloudy, thunder-prone weather and light refraction from Jupiter, Saturn and Mars.

Gill was educated at Trinity Grammar School in Melbourne, then studied theology at St Francis College, Brisbane, and education at the University of Queensland. He was ordained as a priest in 1950, then worked in PNG in parish work and as a teacher and education administrator. In Port Moresby, he also did some radio broadcasting.

After returning from PNG, he taught at Essendon Grammar, Camberwell Grammar and St Michael's Grammar, all in Melbourne, and undertook sociological research at La Trobe University. He died at age 79 in 2007.

Gill appears an exceptionally unlikely figure to have been readily caught up in the flying saucer craze, at its most intense in the 1950s. Few phenomena would have appeared more remote to high-church Anglican missionaries in PNG, many with considerable educational attainments.

Among those most intensely interested in the sightings was Englishman Norman Cruttwell, an outstanding exemplar of the long tradition of priest-botanists, who discovered and named - after his mother Christian - a rhododendron in PNG and had an orchid named after him in tribute.

Gill wrote to Cruttwell, who was also running a parish in northern Milne Bay: "Here is a lot of material the kind you have been waiting for, no doubt; but I am in some ways sorry that it has to be me who supplies it. Attitudes at Dogura in respect of my sanity vary greatly, and like all mad men, I myself think my grey cells are OK."

Among the hypotheses later considered to explain Gill's sightings was that he was pulling Cruttwell's leg. But, if so, when Cruttwell became excited, and helped inform the world about the events, Gill might then have been expected to stay quiet and wait for the embarrassment to pass. Instead, Gill accepted invitations to speak widely about what he had seen, with no apparent reluctance.

Australian author Randolph Stow, who worked at an Anglican mission station for Aborigines in northwestern Australia, then as assistant to the government anthropologist in PNG, where he was based in Milne Bay, framed an acclaimed novel in 1979, Visitants, around the Boianai sightings.

"Be not afeard," Stow cites from Shakespeare's The Tempest: "The isle is full of noises . . ."

The writer knew both Cruttwell and Moi - by then a priest - when he worked in PNG.

Cruttwell famously missed out on a sighting of bright lights over his own mission station because he was ensconced in the "smallhaus". The following day, he had the roof replaced with a clear glass panel, just in case . . .

I add here another report opn the same sighting.

In 1959 Papua New Guinea was still a territory of Australia. June of that year saw the spectacular "entity" sightings of Reverend Gill and members of his Boainai mission.

Reverend Gill made notes about the experience and sent a copy of his own report - 8 closely typed foolscap pages - to Rev. Crutwell at Menapi Mission, who in turn sent a copy to Mr. D. H. Judge, a Brisbane member of the Queensland Flying Saucer Research Bureau. The report was released to the media and accounts appeared in the media during mid August, 1959, causing a sensation.

I was privileged to have had two extended opportunities to interview Reverend Gill and discuss the events at Boianai. I was impressed with his quiet and certain manner in relating the events.

To maintain the integrity of the original events I have quoted from the Reverend William Gills own account. Only the day before he had composed a letter to the Reverend David Durie, Acting Principal of St. Aidan's College, Dogura, to accompany a report and statement regarding a UFO sighting made by Stephen Moi, an assistant teacher at the mission on June 21st, 1959:

Dear David,

                    Have a look at this extraordinary data. I am almost convinced about the "visitation" theory. There have been quite a number of reports over the months, from reliable witnesses. The peculiar thing about these most recent reports is that the UFO's seem to be stationary at Boianai or to travel from Boianai. The Mt. Pudi vicinity seems to be the hovering area. I myself saw a stationary white light twice on the same night on April 9th, but in a different place each time. I believe your students have also sighted one over Boianai. The A.D.O., Bob Smith and Mr. Glover have all seen it, or similar ones on different occasions - again, over Boianai, although I think the Baniara people said they watched it travel across the sky from our direction. I should think that this is the first time that the "saucer" has been identified as such.

I do not doubt the existence of these "things" (indeed I cannot now that I have seen one for myself) but my simple mind still requires scientific evidence before I can accept the from-outer-space theory. I am inclined to believe that probably many UFO's are more likely some for of electric phenomena - or perhaps something brought about by the atom bomb explosions, etc. That Stephen should actually make out a saucer could be the work of the unconscious mind as it is very likely that at some time he has seen illustrations of some kind in a magazine, or it is very possible that saucers do exist, but it is only a 50/50 chance that they are not earth made, still less that they should carry men (more likely radio controlled), and it is still unproven that they are solids.

It is all too difficult to understand for me; I prefer to wait for some bright boy to catch one to be exhibited in Martin Square.

Please return this report as I have no copy and I want Nor. [Rev. Norman Crutwell - B.C.] to have it.

Yours,              

    
Doubting William

---

Anglican Mission

Boianai
27/6/59

Dear David,

                    Life is strange, isn't it? Yesterday I wrote you a letter, (which I still intend sending you) expressing opinions re the UFO's - Now, less than 24 hours later I have changed my views somewhat. Last night we at Boianai experienced about 4 hours of UFO activity, and there is no doubt whatsoever that they are handled by beings of some kind. At times it was absolutely breathtaking. Here is the report. Please pass it round, but great care must be taken as I have no other, and this, like the one I made out re Stephen, will be sent to Nor. I would appreciate it if you could send the lot back as soon as poss.

Cheers,             
                        Convinced Bill

P.S. Do you think P. Moresby should know about this? (N. Cruttwell is at present in the Daga country and will not be returning home until 16th July at earliest.) If people think it worth while, I will stand the cost of a radio conversation if you care to make out a comprehensive report from the material on my behalf!! It's interesting Territory news if nothing else.

W.B.G.

---

26/6/59	U.F.O.	Boianai
	DATA (1)

Sky		Time (p. m.)
Patches of low cloud; clear over Dogura and Menapi		6.45		Sighted bright white light from front direction N.W.
		6.50		Call Stephen and Eric - Langford
		6.52		Stephen arrives. Confirms not star like other night. Coming closer, not so bright. Coming down 500 ft?, orange?, deep yellow?
		6.55		Send Eric to call people. One object on top, move - man? Now three men - moving, glowing, doing something on deck. Gone.
		7.00		Men 1 & 2 again.
		7.04		Gone again.
Cloud ceiling covered sky c. 2000'		7.10		Man 1, 3, 4, 2 (appeared in that order.) Thin elct. blue spot light. Men gone, spot light still there.
		7.12		Men 1 & 2 appeared - blue light.
		7.20		Spot light off, men go.
		7.20		UFO goes through cloud.
Clear sky here, heavy cloud over Dogura		8.28		UFO seen by me overhead. Call station people. Appeared to descend, get bigger. Not so big, but seemed nearer than before.
		8.29		Second seen over sea - hovering at times.
Clouds forming again		8.35		Another over Wadobuna village.
		?		Another to the east.
		8.50		Big one stationary and larger - the original (?) Others coming and going through clouds. As they descend through cloud, light reflected like large halo onto cloud - no more than 2000', probably less. All UFO's very clear - satellites? "Mother" ship still large, clear, stationary.
		9.05		Nos. 2, 3, 4 gone
		9.10		"Mother" ship gone - giving red light. No. 1 gone (overhead) into cloud.
		9.20		"Mother" back.
		9.30		"Mother" gone across sea towards Giwa - white, red, blue, gone.
		9.46		Overhead U.F.O. re-appears, is hovering.
		10.00		Still there, stationary
		10.10		Hovering, gone behind cloud.
		10.30		Very high, hovering in clear patch of sky between clouds.
		10.50		Very overcast, no sign of U.F.O.
		11. 4		Heavy rain
				1 Q A. !!!
				Data sheet of observation of U.F.O.'s 6.45 - 11.4 p.m.
				26/6/59
				(Sgd.) William B. Gill

---

As indicated by his notes made at the time and in numerous interviews, Rev. Gill saw a bright white light in the north western sky. It appeared to be approaching the mission. The object appeared to be hovering between three and four hundred feet up. Eventually 38 people, including Rev. Gill, Steven Gill Moi (a teacher), Ananias Rarata (a teacher) and Mrs. Nessie Moi, gathered to watch the main UFO, which looked like a large, disc-shaped object. It was apparently solid and circular with a wide base and narrower upper deck. The object appeared to have 4 "legs" underneath it. There also appeared to be about 4 "panels" or "portholes" on the side of the object, which seemed to glow a little brighter than the rest. At a number of intervals the object produced a shaft of blue light which shone upwards into the sky at an angle of about 45 degrees.

What looked like "men" came out of the object, onto what seemed to be a deck on top of the object. There were 4 men in all, occassionally 2, then one, then 3, then 4. The shaft of blue light and the "men" disappeared. The object then moved through some clouds. There were other UFO sightings during the night.

Rev. Gill described the weather at variable sky - scattered clouds to clear at first, becoming overcast after 10.10 pm. He estimated the height of the clouds at about 2,000 feet. The first sighting over the sea, according to Rev. Gill, seemed no more than 500 feet above the water at times. When the main UFO was at its closest point, Rev. Gill determined that the relative size at arms length was a full hand span or about 8 inches. He modified that estimate to 5 inches. It was clearly visible and seemed mostly stationary during 25 minutes of observation.

Astonishingly the aerial visitor put in a repeat performance the following night, June 27th. Rev. Gill prepared a statement:

Saturday, 27/6/59

Large U.F.O. first sighted by Annie Laurie at 6 p.m. in apparently same position as last night (26/6/59) only seemed a little smaller, when W.B.G. saw it at 6.02 p.m. I called Ananias and several others and we stood in the open to watch it. Although the sun had set it was still quite light for the following 15 minutes. We watched figures appear on top - four of them - no doubt that they are human. Possibly the same object that I took to be the "Mother" ship last night. Two smaller U.F.O's were seen at the same time, stationary. One above the hills west, another overhead. On the large one two of the figures seemed to be doing something near the centre of the deck - were occassionally bending over and raising their arms as though adjusting or "setting up" something (not visible). One figure seemed to be standing looking down at us (a group of about a dozen). I stretched my arm above my head and waved. To our surprise the figure did the same. Ananias waved both arms over his head then the two outside figures did the same. Ananias and self began waving our arms and all four now seemed to wave back. There seemed to be no doubt that our movements were answered. All mission boys made audible gasps (of either joy or surprise, perhaps both).

As dark was beginning to close in, I sent Eric Kodawara for a torch and directed a series of long dashes towards the U.F.O. After a minute or two of this, the U.F.O. apparently acknowledged by making several wavering motions back and forth. Waving by us was repeated and this followed by more flashes of torch, then the U.F.O. began slowly to become bigger, apparently coming in our direction. It ceased after perhaps half a minute and came no further. After a further two or three minutes the figures apparently lost interest in us for they disappeared "below" deck. At 6.25 p.m. two figures re-appeared to carry on with whatever they were doing before the interruption (?). The blue spot light came on for a few seconds twice in succession."

Reverend Gill has described how he and the mission people called out to the men, even shouting at them, and beckoned them to descend, but there was no response beyond what has already been noted. Two smaller "UFOs" higher up remained stationary. By 6.30 p.m. the scene had remained largely unchanged. Rev. Gill records that he went to dinner. At 7.00 pm, the "No.1 UFO" was still present "but appeared somewhat smaller". The group of observers went to Church for Evensong. After Evensong (about 7.45 pm) visibility was very limited with the sky covered in cloud. Nothing else was seen that evening. At 10.40 pm, a very penetrating "earsplitting" terrific explosion woke up people on the station. It sounded like it had come from just outside the window of the mission house. Rev. Gill felt it did not sound like a thunderclap. Nothing had been seen, but the whole sky was overcast. Other less compelling activity occurred the following night. Then it seemed the Boianai visitants had gone. The controversy had just begun.

Reverend Gill was at the time of his sightings already scheduled to return to Australia. This presented civilian groups with an excellent opportunity to assess the bonafides of the reports. All investigators found Gill to be very impressive. His credibility was enormous. This lead one of the leading civilian groups, the Victorian Flying Saucer Research Society, to view the Gill reports as constituting the most remarkable testimony of intensive UFO activity ever reported to civilian investigators in the entire history of UFO research. VFSRS indicated that they were unique because for the first time, credible witnesses had reported the presence of humanoid beings associated with UFOs. The VFSRS report concluded that the Boianai UFOs were advanced craft, manned by humanoid beings, capable of a fantastic aerodynamic performance. VFSRS now felt that UFO researchers no longer needed to enquire as to the nature of UFOs, now only their origin was to be determined.

The major civilian groups of the day, in a spirit of new found cooperation inspired by the significance of the Boianai observations, distributed copies of Reverend Gill's own sighting report to all members of the House of Representatives of Australia's federal parliament. A circular letter accompanied the report, signed by the presidents of the participating civilian UFO groups, urging members of parliament to press the Minister for Air for a statement about the attitude Air Force Intelligence had of the New Guinea reports.

On November 24th, 1959, in federal parliament, Mr. E.D. Cash, a Liberal politician from Western Australia asked the Minister for Air, Mr. F.M. Osborne, whether his department (specifically Air Force Intelligence) had investigated "reports of recent sightings of mysterious objects in the skies over Papua and New Guinea." The Minister's reply did not address this question, but instead he focused on the general situation indicating that most sightings were explained and "that only a very small percentage -- something like 3 percent -- of reported sightings of flying objects cannot be explained".

Peter Norris, VFSRS president, was advised by the Directorate of Air Force Intelligence that the Department was awaiting "depth of evidence" on the New Guinea sightings. However the department hadn't even interviewed Father Gill. Given the growing political fallout, the Minister for Defence requested a report on "the alleged sightings of UFOs in the Boianai area of NG by Rev. W.B. Gill." The RAAF finally visited Rev. Gill on December 29th, 1959. Rev. Gill's recollections of the visit were that the 2 RAAF officers from Canberra talked about stars and planets and then left. He indicates that he heard no more from them. The interviewing officer, Squadron Leader F.A. Lang, AI1 DAFI, concluded after what could have only been best described as a cursory investigation that:

"Although the Reverend Gill could be regarded as a reliable observer, it is felt that the June/July incidents could have been nothing more than natural phenomena coloured by past events and subconscious influences of UFO enthusiasts. During the period of the report the weather was cloudy and unsettled with light thunder storm. Although it is not possible to draw firm conclusions, an analysis of rough bearings and angles above the horizon does suggest that at least some of the lights observed were the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Mars. Light refraction, the changing position of the planets relative to the observer and cloud movement would give the impression of size and rapid movement. In addition varying cloud densities could account for the human shapes and their sudden appearance and disappearance".

A close analysis of the reports argues powerfully that the RAAF "explanation" of "either known planets seen through fast moving cloud, or natural phenomena" was unsatisfactory.

Over the years there have been a number of attempts to explain the Boianai sightings, including astronomical misidentifications, hoax, cargo cult effects, and that Rev. Gill had myopia and astigmatism (Rev. Gill was wearing correctly prescribed glasses). None of these explanations have satisfactorily addressed the evidence. Astronomer and former US Air Force consultant, Dr. Allen Hynek, and his Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), went to great lengths to investigate and research the affair. Dr. Hynek and Allen Hendry, the then chief CUFOS investigator, concluded the "lesser UFOs' are attributable to bright stars and planets, but not the primary object." Its size and absence of movement over three hours ruled out an astronomical explanation. My own discussions with Rev. Gill led me to the same conclusion. Most recently there was an attempt at explaining the whole affair away as Rev. Gill and the other witnesses being confused by a false horizon, and that all they had been watching was a brightly lit squid-boat and crew too busy to do more than just wave at the people on shore. This idea is not tenable when one realises that Rev. Gill was certain that the object he saw was at a 30° elevation in the sky. Only a massive tidal wave might have elevated the horizon ocean line to have a boat high enough to fit that viewing perspective. I suspect Rev. Gill and the Papuans may have noticed that! A mirage is also not tenable given the circumstances of the event.

The Boianai visitations are even enshrined in a classic piece of Australian fiction. Award winning Australian novelist Randolph Stow's 1979 book Visitants, which has the Boianai visitations as a backdrop to a striking story of confrontation and disintergration, emerged from Stow's experience as a cadet patrol-officer in Papua-New Guinea. He was an assistant to the Government Anthropologist. His novel opens with this sentence: "On 26 June 1959, at Boianai in Papua, visitants appeared to the Reverend William Booth Gill, himself a visitant of thirteen years standing, and to thirty-seven witnesses of another colour."

The Boianai "visitants" still stand as remarkable evidence for an impressive aerial anomaly and are regarded as some of the best entity reports on record. At the time of writing I spoke again with Rev. Gill. He still remains puzzled by what he saw and was pleased that an authority like Dr. Hynek had independently interviewed him and some of the other witnesses and travelled to the site. While he accepts that the sightings remain unexplained, Rev. Gill questioned my characterisation of some attempts to explain them as "silly". He felt that these "explanations" were serious attempts to bring understanding to the events. I think that attitude encapsulates the integrity of Rev. Gill and the reality of the affair.

Sun Spot Ignition

It appears that our sun has finally woken up and considering their position, if that means anything, it is coming sully alive.  Of course, this has only been anticipated for months and it is a case of better late than never.  It still needs more rapid development before it hits a maximum, but at least this month’s activity is a good start.

 

Considering that the weak magnetic field gave us a cosmic ray high here on Earth this fall and early winter and that the predicted effect of that was a lousy winter, which we have convincingly had so far, this promising onset of solar activity is welcome.

 

Anyway this is convincing solar activity and obviously strong.  Thus , although we can be still tentative, the balance of probabilities suggests that the cycle is strongly on the upswing and will be as full as the last few cycles if possibly stronger because of the slower ignition that appeared to take place this time.

 

2009’s Sleepy Sun Finally Woke Up in December

 

By Alexis Madrigal 

December 31, 2009 

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/the-year-in-sunspot/

2009 will go down as the sun’s third quietest year on record, under-shone only by 1913 and 2008.

Two hundred-sixty of the year’s 365 days (71 percent) were sunspotless. Last year saw 266 sunspotless days, while the sun had no spots on 311 of the days in 1913. It was only a very active December that kept 2009 from falling below last year’s mark.

Sunspot activity waxes and wanes in a roughly 11-year cycle, so hitting solar minima isn’t surprising. But what the numbers underscore is that we spent much of the year still in the midst of the deepest, longest solar minimum in a long time.

People keep their eyes on sunspots because their frequency and intensity is correlated with the overall level of solar activity. Changes in the sun’s energy flows can seriously impact conditions on Earth and our immediate environment in space. While a particularly active sun can generate geomagnetic storms that damage satellites and electrical grid infrastructure, a sun as quiet as the one of the last few years could affect the Earth’s climate, although not by much.

“If you want to understand all the drivers of Earth’s atmospheric system, you have to understand how sunspots emerge and evolve,” Matthias Rempel of NCAR’s High Altitude Observator told Wired.com for an earlier story.

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2009/12/plot-300x232.jpg

The science of sunspots is still murky, despite new supercomputer simulations and theories about their formation. The sun remains filled with surprises.

It’s been an erratic year for sun watchers. At first, it appeared that 2009 might be even quieter than 2008. Eighty-seven percent of the days in the first three months of the year were sunspotless. In May, a big solar flare, the strongest of the new cycle, appeared to augur a return to normal for the sun. Then, August was nearly sunspotless. And in the final reversal, December has been far more active than the rest of the year.

Five regions on the sun were active at once on the 22nd, as seen above. Again assuming the current sunspot holds together until Thursday, there will have been at least one spot on 22 of the month’s 31 days.

But Tony Phillips, a NASA sky watcher who made the chart above and sketched the trend line, isn’t quite ready to declare the solar minimum over.

“If the trend continues exactly as shown (prediction: it won’t), sunspots will become a non-stop daily occurance no later than February 2011. Blank suns would cease and solar minimum would be over,”Phillips wrote on Spaceweather.com. “If the past two years have taught us anything, however, it is that the sun can be tricky and unpredictable. Stay tuned for surprises.”

Dolphins as Persons

For many years, the expectation of dolphin intelligence has been drummed.  Time and money has been spent.  So far the results have been rather slim.

This suggests that we need to try a lot harder.  The capability is there and the human need for an oceanic partner is obvious.

I think that the major difficulty so far is our inability to relate to the natural complexity of the dolphin environment.  They must be able to sense many types of water conditions and sonic signals.  These could be mapped with their own sonic generation in a way that is intelligible to them.  We need a device able to produce similar sounds that is highly nuanced in order to provide us with sufficient complexity and it should now be linked to our own voice recognition software to possibly develop even a minimum form of two way communication.

Our present technical skill makes such an arrangement plausible.  I have no doubt that once the dolphins can communicate they will enthusiastically.  They have been trying forever.

January 3, 2010

Scientists say dolphins should be treated as 'non-human persons'

Dolphins have long been recognized as among the most intelligent of animals but many researchers had placed them below chimps

Jonathan Leake

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6973994.ece

Dolphins have been declared the world’s second most intelligent creatures after humans, with scientists suggesting they are so bright that they should be treated as “non-human persons”.

Studies into dolphin behaviour have highlighted how similar their communications are to those of humans and that they are brighter than chimpanzees. These have been backed up by anatomical research showing that dolphin brains have many key features associated with high intelligence.

The researchers argue that their work shows it is morally unacceptable to keep such intelligent animals in amusement parks or to kill them for food or by accident when fishing. Some 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises die in this way each year.

“Many dolphin brains are larger than our own and second in mass only to the human brain when corrected for body size,” said Lori Marino, a zoologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who has used magnetic resonance imaging scans to map the brains of dolphin species and compare them with those of primates.

“The neuroanatomy suggests psychological continuity between humans and dolphins and has profound implications for the ethics of human-dolphin interactions,” she added.

Dolphins have long been recognized as among the most intelligent of animals but many researchers had placed them below chimps, which some studies have found can reach the intelligence levels of three-year-old children. Recently, however, a series of behavioural studies has suggested that dolphins, especially species such as the bottlenose, could be the brighter of the two. The studies show how dolphins have distinct personalities, a strong sense of self and can think about the future.

It has also become clear that they are “cultural” animals, meaning that new types of behaviour can quickly be picked up by one dolphin from another.

In one study, Diana Reiss, professor of psychology at Hunter College, City University of New York, showed that bottlenose dolphins could recognise themselves in a mirror and use it to inspect various parts of their bodies, an ability that had been thought limited to humans and great apes.

In another, she found that captive animals also had the ability to learn a rudimentary symbol-based language.

Other research has shown dolphins can solve difficult problems, while those living in the wild co-operate in ways that imply complex social structures and a high level of emotional sophistication.

In one recent case, a dolphin rescued from the wild was taught to tail-walk while recuperating for three weeks in a dolphinarium in Australia.

After she was released, scientists were astonished to see the trick spreading among wild dolphins who had learnt it from the former captive.

There are many similar examples, such as the way dolphins living off Western Australia learnt to hold sponges over their snouts to protect themselves when searching for spiny fish on the ocean floor.

Such observations, along with others showing, for example, how dolphins could co-operate with military precision to round up shoals of fish to eat, have prompted questions about the brain structures that must underlie them.

Size is only one factor. Researchers have found that brain size varies hugely from around 7oz for smaller cetacean species such as the Ganges River dolphin to more than 19lb for sperm whales, whose brains are the largest on the planet. Human brains, by contrast, range from 2lb-4lb, while a chimp’s brain is about 12oz.

When it comes to intelligence, however, brain size is less important than its size relative to the body.

What Marino and her colleagues found was that the cerebral cortex and neocortex of bottlenose dolphins were so large that “the anatomical ratios that assess cognitive capacity place it second only to the human brain”. They also found that the brain cortex of dolphins such as the bottlenose had the same convoluted folds that are strongly linked with human intelligence.

Such folds increase the volume of the cortex and the ability of brain cells to interconnect with each other. “Despite evolving along a different neuroanatomical trajectory to humans, cetacean brains have several features that are correlated with complex intelligence,” Marino said.

Marino and Reiss will present their findings at a conference in San Diego, California, next month, concluding that the new evidence about dolphin intelligence makes it morally repugnant to mistreat them.

Thomas White, professor of ethics at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, who has written a series of academic studies suggesting dolphins should have rights, will speak at the same conference.

“The scientific research . . . suggests that dolphins are ‘non-human persons’ who qualify for moral standing as individuals,” he said.

Additional reporting: Helen Brooks

Boskop Hominid

This is a new story to me and also to most of us.  It is a reminder that every odd fact or piece of evidence needs a human champion to keep it alive.  At least this was true before the internet.  Today I can find such an item and write it up and post on the subject.  This allows others to find it much more easily and it becomes possible for the necessary critical mass of human interest and scholarship to be applied.

 

I have already posted on the likelihood of humanity having migrated into outer space over thirteen thousand years ago in the form of space adapted humanity as popularly understood as something with a large head and eyes.  It was reasonably implied that precursors of some sort should be in the fossil record.  I did not follow up on that line of thought for the obvious reason of a complete lack of evidence.  This is certainly evidence.

 

I always knew that Childhood’s End had been inspired by Arthur C Clark’s investigation of ancient Indian writings.  The emergence of factual support for a space migration prior to having the Earth’s crust shifted thirteen thousand years ago is continuing.

 

It is noted that the average intelligence of the hominids would be around fifty percent greater than that of present humanity.  Yet it is noteworthy that a small fraction of humanity reaches that capability.

 

I will also make another comment.  What we perceive as IQ is highly responsive to educational stimulus.  We actually do pretty well and we are slowly learning to do better.  Our present weakness is that we lack an educational doctrine that optimizes human capability.

 

Obviously my answer to the title question is that they are living in space habitats and patiently waiting for us to make a visit.  As I have previously posted in my article on reverse engineering the UFO, this is now within our power.  We are at the threshold of the real space age, just as we were at the threshold of the internal combustion engine in 1900.

 

Once again we are handed hard factual evidence to chew on. I am sure it can be explained away with an application of some rare disease by those who need such a cover story.

 

 

What Happened to the Hominids Who May Have Been Smarter Than Us?

 

Two neuroscientists say that a now-extinct race of humans had big eyes, child-like faces, and an average intelligence of around 150, making them geniuses among Homo sapiens.

 

by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger

From the Brain special issue; published online December 28, 2009 

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/the-brain-2/28-what-happened-to-hominids-who-were-smarter-than-us

A sketched reconstruction if the Boskop skull done in 1918. Shaded areas depict recovered bone.

Courtesy the American Museum of Natural History

The following text is an excerpt from the book Big Brain by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger, and it represents their own theory about the Boskops. The theory is a controversial one; see, for instance,paleoanthropologist John Hawks' much different take.

Copyright © 2008 by the authors and reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.

In the autumn of 1913, two farmers were arguing about hominid skull fragments they had uncovered while digging a drainage ditch. The location was Boskop, a small town about 200 miles inland from the east coast of South Africa.

These Afrikaner farmers, to their lasting credit, had the presence of mind to notice that there was something distinctly odd about the bones. They brought the find to Frederick W. Fitz Simons, director of the Port Elizabeth Museum, in a small town at the tip of South Africa. The scientific community of South Africa was small, and before long the skull came to the attention of S. H. Haughton, one of the country’s few formally trained paleontologists. He reported his findings at a 1915 meeting of the Royal Society of South Africa. “The cranial capacity must have been very large,” he said, and “calculation by the method of Broca gives a minimum figure of 1,832 cc [cubic centimeters].” The Boskop skull, it would seem, housed a brain perhaps 25 percent or more larger than our own.

The idea that giant-brained people were not so long ago walking the dusty plains of South Africa was sufficiently shocking to draw in the luminaries back in England. Two of the most prominent anatomists of the day, both experts in the reconstruction of skulls, weighed in with opinions generally supportive of Haughton’s conclusions.

The Scottish scientist Robert Broom reported that “we get for the corrected cranial capacity of the Boskop skull the very remarkable figure of 1,980 cc.” Remarkable indeed: These measures say that the distance from Boskop to humans is greater than the distance between humans and their Homo erectus predecessors.

Might the very large Boskop skull be an aberration? Might it have been caused by hydrocephalus or some other disease? These questions were quickly preempted by new discoveries of more of these skulls.

As if the Boskop story were not already strange enough, the accumulation of additional remains revealed another bizarre feature: These people had small, childlike faces. Physical anthropologists use the term pedomorphosis to describe the retention of juvenile features into adulthood. This phenomenon is sometimes used to explain rapid evolutionary changes. For example, certain amphibians retain fishlike gills even when fully mature and past their water-inhabiting period. Humans are said by some to be pedomorphic compared with other primates.Our facial structure bears some resemblance to that of an immature ape. Boskop’s appearance may be described in terms of this trait. A typical current European adult, for instance, has a face that takes up roughly one-third of his overall cranium size. Boskop has a face that takes up only about one-fifth of his cranium size, closer to the proportions of a child. Examination of individual bones confirmed that the nose, cheeks, and jaw were all childlike.

The combination of a large cranium and immature face would look decidedly unusual to modern eyes, but not entirely unfamiliar. Such faces peer out from the covers of countless science fiction books and are often attached to “alien abductors” in movies. The naturalist Loren Eiseley made exactly this point in a lyrical and chilling passage from his popular book, The Immense Journey, describing a Boskop fossil:

“There’s just one thing we haven’t quite dared to mention. It’s this, and you won’t believe it. It’s all happened already. Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth. He lived in Africa. His brain was bigger than your brain. His face was straight and small, almost a child’s face.”

Boskops, then, were much talked and written about, by many of the most prominent figures in the fields of paleontology and anthropology.

Yet today, although Neanderthals and Homo erectus are widely known, Boskops are almost entirely forgotten. Some of our ancestors are clearly inferior to us, with smaller brains and apelike countenances. They’re easy to make fun of and easy to accept as our precursors. In contrast, the very fact of an ancient ancestor like Boskop, who appears un-apelike and in fact in most ways seems to have had characteristics superior to ours, was destined never to be popular.

The history of evolutionary studies has been dogged by the intuitively attractive, almost irresistible idea that the whole great process leads to greater complexity, to animals that are more advanced than their predecessors. The pre-Darwin theories of evolution were built around this idea; in fact, Darwin’s (and Wallace’s) great and radical contribution was to throw out the notion of “progress” and replace it with selection from among a set of random variations. But people do not easily escape from the idea of progress. We’re drawn to the idea that we are the end point, the pinnacle not only of the hominids but of all animal life.

Boskops argue otherwise. They say that humans with big brains, and perhaps great intelligence, occupied a substantial piece of southern Africa in the not very distant past, and that they eventually gave way to smaller-brained, possibly less advanced Homo sapiens—that is, ourselves.

We have seen reports of Boskop brain size ranging from 1,650 to 1,900 cc. Let’s assume that an average Boskop brain was around 1,750 cc. What does this mean in terms of function? How would a person with such a brain differ from us? Our brains are roughly 25 percent larger than those of the late Homo erectus. We might say that the functional difference between us and them is about the same as between ourselves and Boskops.

Expanding the brain changes its internal proportions in highly predictable ways. From ape to human, the brain grows about fourfold, but most of that increase occurs in the cortex, not in more ancient structures. Moreover, even within the cortex, the areas that grow by far the most are the association areas, while cortical structures such as those controlling sensory and motor mechanisms stay unchanged.

Going from human to Boskop, these association zones are even more disproportionately expanded. Boskop’s brain size is about 30 percent larger than our own—that is, a 1,750-cc brain to our average of 1,350 cc. And that leads to an increase in the prefrontal cortex of a staggering 53 percent. If these principled relations among brain parts hold true, then Boskops would have had not only an impressively large brain but an inconceivably large prefrontal cortex.

The prefrontal cortex is closely linked to our highest cognitive functions. It makes sense out of the complex stream of events flowing into the brain; it places mental contents into appropriate sequences and hierarchies; and it plays a critical role in planning our future actions. Put simply, the prefrontal cortex is at the heart of our most flexible and forward-looking thoughts.

While your own prefrontal area might link a sequence of visual material to form an episodic memory, the Boskop may have added additional material from sounds, smells, and so on. Where your memory of a walk down a Parisian street may include the mental visual image of the street vendor, the bistro, and the charming little church, the Boskop may also have had the music coming from the bistro, the conversations from other strollers, and the peculiar window over the door of the church. Alas, if only the Boskop had had the chance to stroll a Parisian boulevard!

Expansion of the association regions is accompanied by corresponding increases in the thickness of those great bundles of axons, the cable pathways, linking the front and back of the cortex. These not only process inputs but, in our larger brains, organize inputs into episodes. The Boskops may have gone further still. Just as a quantitative increase from apes to humans may have generated our qualitatively different language abilities, possibly the jump from ourselves to Boskops generated new, qualitatively different mental capacities.

We internally activate many thoughts at once, but we can retrieve only one at a time. Could the Boskop brain have achieved the ability to retrieve one memory while effortlessly processing others in the background, a split-screen effect enabling far more power of attention?

Each of us balances the world that is actually out there against our mind’s own internally constructed version of it. Maintaining this balance is one of life’s daily challenges. We occasionally act on our imagined view of the world, sometimes thoroughly startling those around us. (“Why are you yelling at me? I wasn’t angry with you—you only thought I was.”) Our big brains give us such powers of extrapolation that we may extrapolate straight out of reality, into worlds that are possible but that never actually happened. Boskop’s greater brains and extended internal representations may have made it easier for them to accurately predict and interpret the world, to match their internal representations with real external events.

Perhaps, though, it also made the Boskops excessively internal and self-reflective. With their perhaps astonishing insights, they may have become a species of dreamers with an internal mental life literally beyond anything we can imagine.

Even if brain size accounts for just 10 to 20 percent of an IQ test score, it is possible to conjecture what kind of average scores would be made by a group of people with 30 percent larger brains. We can readily calculate that a population with a mean brain size of 1,750 cc would be expected to have an average IQ of 149.

This is a score that would be labeled at the genius level. And if there was normal variability among Boskops, as among the rest of us, then perhaps 15 to 20 percent of them would be expected to score over 180. In a classroom with 35 big-headed, baby-faced Boskop kids, you would likely encounter five or six with IQ scores at the upper range of what has ever been recorded in human history. The Boskops coexisted with our Homo sapiens forebears. Just as we see the ancient Homo erectus as a savage primitive, Boskop may have viewed us in somewhat the same way.

They died and we lived, and we can’t answer the question why. Why didn’t they outthink the smaller-brained hominids like ourselves and spread across the planet? Perhaps they didn’t want to.

Longer brain pathways lead to larger and deeper memory hierarchies. These confer a greater ability to examine and discard more blind alleys, to see more consequences of a plan before enacting it. In general this enables us to think things through. If Boskops had longer chains of cortical networks—longer mental assembly lines—they would have created longer and more complex classification chains. When they looked down a road as far as they could, before choosing a path, they would have seen farther than we can: more potential outcomes, more possible downstream costs and benefits.

As more possible outcomes of a plan become visible, the variance among judgments between individuals will likely lessen. There are far fewer correct paths—intelligent paths—than there are paths. It is sometimes argued that the illusion of free will arises from the fact that we can’t adequately judge all p ossible moves, with the result that our choices are based on imperfect, sometimes impoverished, information.

Perhaps the Boskops were trapped by their ability to see clearly where things would head. Perhaps they were prisoners of those majestic brains.

There is another, again poignant, possible explanation for the disappearance of the big-brained people. Maybe all that thoughtfulness was of no particular survival value in 10,000 B.C. The great genius of civilization is that it allows individuals to store memory and operating rules outside of their brains, in the world that surrounds them. The human brain is a sort of central processing unit operating on multiple memory disks, some stored in the head, some in the culture. Lacking the external hard drive of a literate society, the Boskops were unable to exploit the vast potential locked up in their expanded cortex. They were born just a few millennia too soon.

In any event, Boskops are gone, and the more we learn about them, the more we miss them. Their demise is likely to have been gradual. A big skull was not conducive to easy births, and thus a within-group pressure toward smaller heads was probably always present, as it still is in present-day humans, who have an unusually high infant mortality rate due to big-headed babies. This pressure, together with possible interbreeding with migrating groups of smaller-brained peoples, may have led to a gradual decrease in the frequency of the Boskop genes in the growing population of what is now South Africa.

Then again, as is all too evident, human history has often been a history of savagery. Genocide and oppression seem primitive, whereas modern institutions from schools to hospices seem enlightened. Surely, we like to think, our future portends more of the latter than the former. If learning and gentility are signs of civilization, perhaps our almost-big brains are straining against their residual atavism, struggling to expand. Perhaps the preternaturally civilized Boskops had no chance against our barbarous ancestors, but could be leaders of society if they were among us today.

Maybe traces of Boskops, and their unusual nature, linger on in isolated corners of the world. Physical anthropologists report that Boskop features still occasionally pop up in living populations of Bushmen, raising the possibility that the last of the race may have walked the dusty Transvaal in the not-too-distant past. Some genes stay around in a population, or mix themselves into surrounding populations via interbreeding. The genes may remain on the periphery, neither becoming widely fixed in the population at large nor being entirely eliminated from the gene pool.

Just about 100 miles from the original Boskop discovery site, further excavations were once carried out by Frederick FitzSimons. He knew what he had discovered and was eagerly seeking more of these skulls.

At his new dig site, FitzSimons came across a remarkable piece of construction. The site had been at one time a communal living center, perhaps tens of thousands of years ago. There were many collected rocks, leftover bones, and some casually interred skeletons of normal-looking humans. But to one side of the site, in a clearing, was a single, carefully constructed tomb, built for a single occupant—perhaps the tomb of a leader or of a revered wise man. His remains had been positioned to face the rising sun. In repose, he appeared unremarkable in every regard...except for a giant skull.