Archives of the Impossible conference | First plenary session, March 3, 2022: Jacques F. Vallée

Transcript

good evening to everybody I am uh here today to introduce Dr jacqu Valle uh and it is my privilege to be able to do so uh Dr jacqu Val was born in 1939 in France in the midst of World War II as German bombs rained down upon his neighborhood Val's first academic interest was astronomy in 1958 when he was only 17 years old the French as Astronomical Society published his report of an object seen in the sky which was according to Val most likely a piece of the Sputnik satellite booster rocket an impressive achievement for a young astronomer yet as he writes in his journals Forbidden Science some years before he had seen something else in 19 54 Europe experienced a wave of UAP sightings and media coverage Val's father scoffed but the young man was intrigued in 1955 he and his mother saw an unidentified object hovering over a church the next day Valle talked to his friend who lived half a mile away and learned that his friend too had seen an object consistent with fet's and his mother's observations Valle began working for the Paris observatory in 1961 he connected during that time with researchers such as Amy Michelle who were interested in unidentified flying objects however vet's boss at the Paris Observatory derided efforts to conduct statistical UAP research Valle immigrated to the United States in 1962 that year at the University of Texas in Austin he helped develop the first computer based map of Mars he developed a working relationship with Jay Allen heinik an astronomer at Northwestern University who had also advised the US Air Force on various Pro projects related to UFO research in the 1940s 1950s and 1960s project sign project Grudge and Project Blue Book Val was frustrated to find however that the military seemed to have no real idea what was going on valet went on to complete a PhD in computer science at Northwestern and began to publish books related to uaps such as anatomy anatomy of a phenomenon in 1965 and challenge to science in 1966 his 1969 book passport to Magonia became a landmark work in ufology in particular due to Val's articulation of the thesis that so-called UFO sightings were related to earlier ancient medieval and even 19th century accounts of fairies monsters and angels valet continued to travel around the world collecting information about uaps which formed the basis for several more books to numerous to name here in the 1970s valet worked with SRI International in Meno Park California some of these SRI programs involved remote viewing and telepathy we'll hear more about them later this weekend at this time valet participated in the creation of the arpanet which was the precursor to the internet the same decade the film director Steven Spielberg made close encounter to the Third Kind with a character played by franois truo which was based on jacqu Valle Valle has always emphasized the need for critical thinking he researched new UFO religious movements in the 1970s such as the group that would became infamously known as Heaven's Gate he has extensively documented hoaxes and media manipulation related to UFOs such as in his book messengers of deception and Revelations Valle is careful in his assessments and warns not to jump to conclusion writing in his Forbidden Science journals sooner or later ufologists are going to fall for a new belief system that will fill the void and absolve them from the need to come to grips with real research Valle thus avoids easy explanation his intent he is intent on tracking down possible mundane explanations for instance he noted in an oral history with Rice University that one of the most infamous UAP events in history which occurred in 1948 when the airplane pilot Captain Thomas mentel chased a UFO to a high altitude before a fatal crash could very possibly have been caused by a government balloon called Skyhook which the pilot was not aware of yet despite such explanations Valle has consistently returned to data that exceeds explanations arguing that apparently anomalous or bizarre characteristics are a core feature of the UA phenomenon it is this critical and creative work that makes his writing and research so intriguing he has continued to publish research on computer science uaps and biomedical technology working with people such as entrepreneur Robert Bigalow of Bigalow airspace historian of religions Dr Jeff kple at Rice University scientist Dr Gary Nolan at Stanford University of medicine and groups such as the Galileo project at Harvard University J fila's donation to Rice contains many boxes worth of material these contain in particular the materials that form the basis for his books research gathered from around the world for several decades including places such as Argentina and Brazil there are witness testimonies radar reports a host of UFO Publications written in many languages and Dr Val's correspondence with researchers such as Dr heinik these papers have now been archived but they at present will be embargoed for a few years before becoming available to researchers the collected papers of Dr jacqu fet offer insight into the life of an intriguing intellectual and scientist and an invaluable window into the global development of the U phenomena and computer computer technology his papers were the first donation a fantastic beginning to the archives of the impossible please help me in welcoming Dr jacqu filet thank you very much and good evening uh you know you came to the right place when Professor kryo talks about radar and I talk about great mythology we are here in Houston thanks to Jeff to his gifted staff and students and to the vision at the school of the humanities of what the continuing UFO mystery means for our models of reality this invitation to us revolves around the phenomenon in its many incarnations and GES at the same time the overall purpose of this project and the ambitious plan the team is developing here at Rice only use this one topic as a template for intellectual questions that are even deeper and as a springb to their future research ala who is a Greek goddess of Truth and disclosure would agree here we are trying to discuss scientific and cultural truth in a situation that has already been sanitized by a principle of Authority for its own purpose and bias ala would find that amusing if this was exclusively a presentation before scientists we should address the history of the observations the qualifications of witnesses and the reality of what was reported preferably supported by track loads of Statistics indeed you will find all that in the archives over the next 3 days from that we can build new interpretations of reality and find New Paths but the phenomenon whatever it turns out to be quickly overflows the crucibles of science it raises larger questions and those must be addressed head on at the beginning our poster says it plainly the truth is in here so the real issue today is not so much the identified or the anomalous but the social academic and psychic construct that Society has erected around them to enforce veracity that's why we're assembled here if it was about radar and chemistry the scientists at NASA or at the Pentagon would have solved it a long time ago but they have failed I happen to think that failure is the most interesting thing in science when scientists fail at something their first instinct is to hide be behind the nomenclature and the vocabulary and that's exactly what happened here take UFOs as one example they have now been officially diluted and renamed unidentified atmospheric phenomena or uaps for the sake of euphemistic beautification the Pentagon immediately came out with its own version UAV for vehicle but even that leaves Harvard's Galileo project in a quander because a cosmic object known as umu amua never touched our atmosphere and wasn't either a phenomenon or as far as We Know a vehicle and those of us who have material fragments recovered from Crash sites or Reliable Reports of living entities associated with UFO events are left to come up with our own three-letter cryptograms I want us to take note of this subtle linguistic displacement invented by Washington because it elegantly blurs the reality physical and psychological of what good people have been reporting around the world for the last century and more and it unfairly biases future research again ala would find that amusing but the real issue again is indeed truth herself not simply UFOs or uaps I hope to show you why and in the process I invite to deconstruct the very notion of truth truth raises two corollaries first Truth For Whom the disclosure of Truth cannot be amorphous or Universal it assumes that people will pay attention and apply critical thinking to important situations will understand what it is that is true and will realize why it is of value to them if we succeed in discovering ala how do we convey her reality to our audience at any given time truth cannot be more specific than the people looking for her or they miss her you end up with useless truth common experience is not very encouraging here not only is today's public kept in a state of permanent confusion and bewilderment by the mass media to which it is exposed but government officials with the best intentions are often equally confused Advocates of the reality of UFOs clamor for disclosure but disclosure is a political expediency not a scientific concept what makes us think that a formal statement by Authority will reveal the truth when we already know how limited and biased Government research in this field has been and when we can see that a large majority of the extent data is heavily biased or irrelevant to the subject through nobody's fault let me use a simple anecdote to drive the point home please look more closely at this poster widely used in California and elsewhere to guard the public from Catching covid still a practical concern of everyday life the poster has been on the screen since I began speaking it was designed by the state to convey one very important fact if you get closer than six feet away from a person who is sick with covid you may die that is true this has been stated on the door of every shop for well over a year A and D I need that there we go A and D are somewhat protected from each other and so are B and C because they follow the distance rule at the same time pagor theorem which all of us had to learn as little kids tells us that is if a and d are six feet apart then A and B are only a little over 4 feet apart that is also true for B and D and A and C and C and D because this is a square Pythagoras was teaching this 500 100 years before Christ it's the truth potentially everybody on this poster could get very sick if they follow directions here in lies our first disappointment ala cannot be smarter than the people she's dealing with the official poster intended to tell us a very important Truth for our own good with no intention to deceive still ends up lying to us with gross mistakes an average student wouldn't make because she would know about squares the point may be mov here since nobody really knows how far the live virus can travel but we can see that truth is Elusive and we rarely recognize her in the face of ignorance she turns deadly when we find her and try to apply her lessons we often fail even the attribution to pitagoras isn't completely adequate obviously the ancient world knew about the square of the diagonal a thousand years before him or they couldn't have built Babylon so even this theorem is only a later restatement of the truth a thousand years later this is a situation you will encounter again and again when dealing with UFOs and history in general those are the things to keep in mind before we start this conference much of what we know is an approximation and many of the rules are wrong that lesson too is implied in the archives these are two clay tablets from uh a thousand years before Pythagoras that demonstrate the Pythagoras Theorem the square the square of the diagonal our second disappointment is that Ela although she is the embodiment of Truth is never naked there is no such thing as naked truth except in Maries Living Truth is forced to adapt to culture language tradition the environment and especially to the subject matter in which she is called upon to make a determination there is no absolute truth a software programmer would say that truth is never context free allow me a historical reference from the 60s that also applies to the present UFO situation and to the situation of the Pentagon in the days preceding the Vietnam War and the under President Kennedy an American spokesman held a press conference in Saigon about the political situation one journalist asked him why an American aircraft carrier had just dropped anchor in the harbor pretending he didn't know about it the Diplomat asked what American Carrier upon which a press took him to the window and pointed to the super structures of the enormous gray ship that towered over the city he turned back to them and calmly said I don't see an aircraft carrier back there gentlemen I am not authorized to see an aircraft carrier back there true story he had just stated a personal interpretation that denied the truth of others exactly as the US Air Force was under pressure to do for nearly three decades as it dealt uncomfortably with reports of UFOs by its own pilots and Project Blue Book which has left long-term painful scars not only has the discussion been biased to preserve a narrow concept of life in the universe but even the Believers in UFOs have only focused on reports made after 199 1947 with such well publicized observations as those of Kenneth Arnold in the state of Washington and Rell in New Mexico ignoring the large records of equally reliable but older cases preserved from the 19th century and far back in human records it is this false distorted concept of the phenomenon that these archives are challenging along with the current mistaken idea that long secluded military sightings can be taken as the basis of a fundamental reassessment of the whole phenomenon the archives here at the Woodson Research Center teach us that new approaches are not only possible they are overdue and they are essential to in a global understanding of the phenomena as we begin this work let us remember that we're standing across the street from the stadium where President Kennedy announced that America would land on the moon within 10 years truth in history is not truth in religion truth in intelligence or even truth in mathematics and that's why want to speak in terms of the four garments of aletea they Define the lessons we can apply to the material we plan to study over the next 3 days the first Garment of ala is religious tradition so if we were in Hollywood in a studio we would she would Glide from the rafters on a ray of light um Q tanous her opening instruction to wardrobe she wears a long silver dress we're here at rice at the invitation of the Department of religion so it is proper to start with the notion of Truth taught and transmitted in church coven Temple or synagogue whether we think it flows from self-evident principles or from the higher design of a Supreme Being this particular incarnation of her as revealed or uncovered has ruled the minds of humans for much of civilization so did the notion that we were only one Expendable race of creatures among a large and varied population created Among the Stars which included Angels both good and bad and such other entities as ghosts and Jin in that sense the concept of extraterrestrial intelligence came naturally along with many basic teachings in most parts of the world teachings we have forgotten when scientists in the 17th and 18th century became brave enough to question the dictates of religion they did so with arguments derived from observation rather than Doctrine or Revelation you will find parallels here when scientists challenge government in aptitude or church Authority or even common sense about the UFO phenomenon here is an early example from astronomy one of the difficult problems you find when you pay attention to the sky is to explain the movements of the planets while the Stars remain fixed highly visible planets like Mars Venus and Jupiter follow remarkable trajectories sometimes aligning themselves and often disappearing allog together no one can miss that no power can hide it it's a mess if the cosmos is a product of Divine Design is supposed to be perfect then this chotic picture Demands a serious explanation if the Earth is the Cent of the universe as common experience teaches us then the sun's movement itself needs to be explained as well as the moons they are complex in the Middle Ages religious tradition came up with an elegant response to this complexity all you had to do in order to explain the valious movements in the sky was to assume that God has assigned his angels to move the celestial bodies around according to a higher plan this is Illustrated very well in this slide where you can see two angels moving celestial bodies around since we know that Angels do exist their actual reality was reaffirmed by pus V 12 in the 1950s and again in the last few years by Pope Francis and it remains unchallenged then they are quite capable of moving the sun around with a special kind of mechanical Cosmic crank if angels are real and hardly cost anything this can also go along way towards explaining UFOs and uaps without invoking technological innovation by any foreign Nation or even bys several books are in print in fact already argu in for this Angelic explanation of UFOs the next slide is a detail of the process not only is it exquisitely beautiful it is as logical as complete as any conjecture in physics assuming that you accept the premise about angels and their powers as you do please remember that some angels are described in ancient writing as not as winged humanoids with long robes and wings but as flying Wheels with eyes like a sorer with Port holes since the 18th century scientists have become skeptical about angels instead they teach that there must be a single mysterious invisible agent they call gravity which somehow acts on all physical bodies and makes them go around not only is the earth a moving Planet like all the others they say but its trajectory is not a perfect circle as tradition demands it's an ellipse with ugly bumps this goes for all the other planets as well a different kind of Truth is introduced here in in contrast to the simple beautiful truth of planetary motion taught by the church and the truth of gravity is very weird indeed in a vacuum a Feather Falls just as fast as a 10 pound rock as Galileo has proven we all know what happened to him after that unfortunately science has made little progress explaining how gravity actually acts on matter while the angels and their powers have remained strongly defined from Millennia from Kepler and Galileo to Newton and Einstein the nature of gravity has been increasingly well described and its effects predicted but science still fails to provide the essential element that would give us control of the process in particular we haven't come up with an instrument that could fulfill the same function as the Angel's Cosmic crack if we did we would not need those huge expensive firecrackers that Elon Musk uses to send astronauts to the space station we might also be able to understand UFOs and we would have anti-gravity as you can see we're beginning to rise to meet our subject object to characterize its parameters and to redefine the archives and the problem itself in much wider ways than you're likely to see on television so where is the truth in all this you may have noted the parallel with the vexing problem of UFO propulsion can we explain it with the theories we have for example anti-gravity again in this case or do we have to result to Fantastic still unknown properties of the Multiverse including perhaps new theories of emerging reality that physicists like John wheer in 1955 have proposed here scientists begin to speak of information constructs beyond the space and time Dimensions we used in college within those new theories UFOs would not be anomalous at all or unidentified should we still talk about propulsion we find a similar challenge to both science and religion in another interesting astronomical story that I'm going to use as a link to the next section namely the coming of the three kings to worship Christ as a newborn baby the story told in the New Testament is beautiful it is also fundamental as an interpretation of the transition between the ancient world and the Christian era but as you grow up and think about it it doesn't make a lot of sense what is it that attracted the Magi to the manger and how did they know they were going to contact an emissary from the sky again where is the truth an extensive scientific literature including speculation by Carl Sean has tried to answer this in various ways maybe there was a comment about the time of year zero but the date of the birth of Christ is not known precisely enough to line it up with any known Comet by the same token it could have been Venus the brightest object in the sky night sky other than the moon but the argument is imprecise in any case how could you tell that Venus was pointing at Bethlehem rather than Rome or Athens why would the Kings follow a particular Planet which is in the sky much of the year when I complained about that Jeff told me to calm down and pointed out to me a possible solution in an ancient manuscript found at the Vatican which was incredibly difficult to translate because a later scribe had reused the parchment for other writing and the language itself was very Arcane fortunately there was a gifted historian actually he was a graduate student you know um of early Christianity Brent L brave enough to tack the task of translation he found that the tractatus taught that the three kings did not need to follow a star or a comet contrary to what car Sean was thinking the infant himself a baby within a luminous orb In The Sky Had revealed to them that he was about to Incarnate as the savior of the world once they were able to observe the orb which you can think of as the ultimate UFO the story says that they simply followed him to the place where he was actually born the scene is beautiful beautifully rendered here the 15th century painting preserved in New York at the cloter whether the story relates to the Nativity or is a recycle narrative derived from the life of Mithra is debated by Scholars the Mithra interpretation is compelling in line with what is known of the region where the Kings originated and it's on mystical traditions in particular Mithra was born on December 25 like Jesus at the winter solstice as we view FS here is a familiar story we may have to push back into history by hundreds or by thousands of years we deal with fundamental truths here not anecdotes in similar fashion a few writers such as Paul misraki in France himself a devout Catholic have deconstructed the 1917 Miracle of Fatima as a possible instance of extraterrestrial contact when I visited him in Paris Mr Miss raki told me that the Vatican when he officially consulted the Vatican neither challenged nor approved his interpretation but left him free to speculate less well known is the fact that the miracle of Fatima had been preceded two years before 1915 by repeated operations of a luminous orb before four Shepherds not the same same Shepherds except for 8-year-old Lucia in this important series of preliminary incidents rarely detailed in the literature the orb contained a young man a figure of light who stepped out and taught the kids a prayer the event induced them into a state of brain stuper again you will find such physiological reactions in contemporary reports of UFOs if you go through the archives The Entity delivering a specific message The Familiar situation the records collected by Whitley striber and also by lesie Kean uh may have much to teach us about this kind of process of contact and transmission in the next few days running through all these experience since ancient times we observe versions of truth that challenge not only our understanding of the world but the methods through which we approach its teachings and learn its lessons now we can move faster the second Garment of aletea is historical truth wardrobe a simple red white and blue outfit and cue the marching hyn of the Republic at the beginning of this presentation which saw we saw that for truth to be effective we had to be able to recognize and comprehend her otherwise all we have is a nice story this is true about UFOs but it's true in other contexts and those are useful if only as thought experiments take the the important question of the reality of unicorns whenever people want to dismiss an unrealistic idea they compare it to a unicorn which is an Impossible Creature as we all know just like the bizarre entities people see about UFOs artists draw up unicorns as Horses with a horn and sometimes wings as a little pony you probably bought your seven-year-old daughter for Christmas I will now show you a picture I took of my wife Janine in discussion with our good friend Oberon zel near Yukaya in Northern California sometime in the 1970s the third character in this picture is a full-size living unicorn named sir Lancelot one of a small group of such creatures that graced the fields of Northern California among many other things in the 1970s and were occasionally celebrated in books and a few films that everybody has forgotten it turns out that there are not many live unicorns left in America but they were common in Mesopotamia in antiquity some students of esoteric tradition including several nurses I know were intrigued by persistent stories of ancient unicorns instead of dismissing them they started started asking how and why you might develop such an animal knowing full well that it wasn't a product of nature it turns out that if you take a newborn baby heot you can move the plur poent stem cells that will generate the horns as the animal grows up later and merge them very carefully in a single spot without harming him that's where the operating room nurses came in handy the resulting tissue will grow into a single long and Powerful horn obviously you could not do that with a horse or with a female goat but such a guardian would be more useful than a than a dog among a herd of goats somewhere near Babylon to Keep the Wolves at Bay several proud animals were created in that fashion by the group and they became quite popular once at a mosino County Fair my friends overheard two women admiring sir Lancelot as one said to the other oh yes it's a real one I've seen it on television most people ask no questions they just assumed that somebody had glued a plastic horn on the head of an ordinary Billy grat as an investigating geneticist would have concluded since there is no such thing as a unic he would add that such an animal if it existed could not father a baby un eorn which is true and therefore it could not exist and of course he would be right again he would be right again if he said that unicorns cannot be fancy Blue Horses I have quoted that actual story about true unicorns because it reads directly into the vast literature about aliens angels and Jin abduction pregnancy induced by contact with euphon and other areas in which all of us have made too many summary judgments over the years based on extrapolation from physics and biology that were unwarranted and wrong the mistakes with people at the fair were making in conversation find Echo in our scholarly debates every day we also make serious mistakes in my view when we discuss inj IES from UFOs as if they were only a recent phenomenon opening that subject which is discussed in the archives in reports and many letters would take too long but I invite you to consider this slide this event happened on 14th September 1224 near Mount Al in Italy and it was carefully recorded the monks were praying in the countryside when one of them brother Leo saw a ball of light suspended above St Francis of aizi while he conversed with an invisible being I am inded to Dr Diana pasulka for some of the details quote he heard voices which made questions and answers and he remarked that Francis who was prostrate often repeated these words who are you oh my God and my dear Lord and who am I a worm and thy unworthy servant he also saw him put his hand out three times into his bosom and each time stretched it out to the flame the light disappeared the conversation ceased uh Francis ofi died in uh atrocious um in a atrocious way uh within two years of that and there are some Jeff tells me that there are some uh remains of his clothing that are kept at in Rome this kind of narrative Bridges the gap between lights and objects that fly through the atmosphere reports of luminous orbs at ground level and Earth lights over special spots here we have a ball of light and a cated beam observed by an external witness over a man who appears in communication with it hence the relevance to our study where the religious interpretation is an interesting overlay this to me exemplifies the nature and purpose of the archives as they relate to human history the third Garment of ala is intelligence wardrobe a black body suit in her left ear a tiny space Communicator Q VZ anyone going through the rice archives in search of information about UFOs should in my estimation keep in mind that any cases dated after 1975 and certainly after 1985 must first be analyzed as potential fakes not necessarily hes mind you but products of classified projects of which there were hundreds that play on human expectations of things in the sky in order to hide or simply disguise new experiments with secret platforms this is true for aircraft prototypes whose capabilities shapes and material composition must legitimately remain secret but it also applies to biological experiments tests of remote paralysis special drugs and psychic manipulation in projects reminiscent of the old MK Ultra in such an environment some cancel projects never really die this is obviously a challenge to researchers like me like us and to any ethologist it is even more a challenge to researchers from the military and the intelligence Community because in spite of their SP status even they may not have the right clearance or access to the right data set in the programs whose acronyms they don't even know once a project grows dark duplication runs rampant and oversight becomes as tangled up as a game of Scrabble a project that was initiated at SRI in the early 1970s and continued in the 1980s at SRI and also at seic both contractors to the defense department with classified facilities is a case in point it made remarkable progress in assessing humans abilities to remote view reality in space and possibly also in time the techniques developed by the project and in part under the name Grill flame uh humorously demonstrated by this slide where we see a Russian officer telling a subject to concentrate on food while they go on discussing microfilm American remote viewers watching all this for from a nearby building correctly conclude the Russians are about to go to lunch a good part of the archives is concerned with the process and the results of this fascinating project in very small part from my own data but primarily thanks to Dr Edwin May fortunately much much of the project has now been Declassified which is definitely not the case for research about UFOs contrary to what you see on television conducted under various levels of secrecy by various parties in a series of invest instigations covering at least 77 years un counting from the point of view of scholarship which is our topic here this situation calls for a few observations before we move on to my conclusion as you will see from the archives index most of the UFO phenomenon consists in cases seen in the Countryside by civilians but those are not the cases you shown on TV or the cases that will now be the focus of the multi-million dollar studies being deployed as we're about to make the same glaring mistake I showed at the beginning with a poster intended to protect us from covid with the best intentions for our own good instead of dealing with the full extent of the problem the main focus is now on the 10% or so of the data universe that comes from the military and other government structures think about the Nimitz case so often we played on TV there are several reasons for that other than the thrilling display of our Mighty Jets chasing an elusive Invader the implied message to the public is that the phenomenon is novel and is a threat so the main data both biological and physical will be classified in the future just as it was classified in the past the cultural and spiritual issues we're discussing here will largely be sidh shows Academia window dressing the phenomenon has been recognized and the stigma has has been removed but essential parts of the study will still be secret not because it is a dangerous illusion anymore but because it is now a dangerous reality if asked mind you I would not disagree entirely with that assessment I was consulted at the very beginning of Grill flame at SRI before it was signed and approved by the board and I recommended that parts of the study be classified as they were when it was given a green light the UAP data warehouse development I architected during the bass project and the bigo Aerospace was classified and the product is a digital structure of some 200,000 cases all over the world that remains properly class ified today it's spent the largest part of the budget but the UAP situation in the future will call for a far more sophisticated approach a cautious but comprehensive open approach and here again the archives can throw lights on its complexity what has not been recognized in in the fullness of the global development and impact of UFOs is that the phenomenon does not behave as a system it is a meta system which makes it extremely perilous for logical reasons that have yet to be normalized in particular all the databases we have in their present form are the wrong tools and I get messages on my cell phone from a very bright uh very bright student somewhere at MIT who says nobody has done a database on UFOs I'm going to do one you know can you send me your records okay um with the deployment of um the new government projects in this field I've counted three so far and with their methodology relying on the traditional structures of the intelligence community that have failed in the past as stated publicly at the Washington Cathedral little over a month ago by the director of Central Intelligence herself we should be very concerned we would do well to remember what one master spy States eloquently in John L car's novel absolute friends quote in his profession he should know that the truth as he finds it is always a lie that has been true in the past and it's likely to be even more true in the future to go beyond the lies as the archives teach us we must rise in abstract thought to the level of the fine structures of the phenomena itself we must finally decide to deal with it as formally as we can the fourth Garment of aletea is truth in mathematics wardrobe she wears faded jeans glasses over her nose or hair in a bun Q Pacific 231 finally we come to rest in the garden of mathematics where theorems display their complete proofs and we can at last relax in the certainty of Truth after all 1+ one is always equal to two and the sum of all the angles in a triangle is always 180 degrees that is reassuring ala is a at home here we have always been taught that if a certain situation could be mathematically proven there was no more uncertainty to be discussed most people lead normal productive lives without knowing that inside your computer 1 + 1 is equal to 10 and in astronomy it is Perfectly Natural for a triangle to have three right angles similarly when Skeptics argue about UFOs and say they cannot exist as material objects because they are often seen to disappear in midair as an image observed they forget that a continuous trajectory in five-dimensional space would allow such Maneuvers in and out of our awareness without so much as a sonic boom as Dr HCK used to teach at Northwestern there could be another Universe just 5 minutes ahead of us beyond the formal definitions however you should know that things are not going well at all behind the wall of the mathematics Department over there contradictions have been arising although they are not generally taught in college these days if you happen to meet a mathematician at a party you should not ask her if the truth is necessarily knowable when you look at The Archives flexible truth is going to come with the territory at the dawn of the 20th century things were going well it seemed that science was about to solve once and for all the totality of mathematical problems David Hilbert taught that a consistent and complete set of axioms could be drawn up from which you could derive all of mathematics in a famous lecture in the year 1900 he proposed a list of only 23 difficult problems that remained a call to arms that inspired several generations of researchers prominent among them John fman in the 1950 and 1960s when I studied at the San at the feet of baki this was still the dominant Vision the first man who pointed out that Hilbert's theory was flawed was G as early as 1931 he had opined that mathematics could not be consistent and complete at the same time more specifically he taught that if a system of axioms was consistent it would prove theorems that were wrong and therefore it was incomplete and if it was complete it would prove some theorems that were true to put it in simple terms consider the phrase this statement is unprovable if it turns out to be provable then we're proving something that is false and if it is indeed um unprovable then it is true then escaping our set of axum this in turn means that the aums are incomplete goodle had made an important point but he left a door open for a decision procedure that would check if a given assertion was true or not Alan touring closed that door in 1936 with his proof which was a springboard for even more radical work by a longtime IBM logician Gregory chatin chatin showed that some mathematical truths were only true by accident and that mathematics would no longer be called an exact science but an empirical science even an experimental science just like physics or biology of course this is a nightmare for the mathematicians of earlier Generations but for us however it's just an exciting new domain and that may be the domain where we meet euphology in our correspondence chatin has pointed out to me that quote the major breakthroughs in 21st century mathematics will be in formation theoretic and complexity based characterization of what is mind what is intelligence what is consciousness and why life has to appear spontaneously and then evolve in other words the same topics we tackle when we're research euphology the stuff that is lurking inside our Archives this suggest a link with the topics we will be studying in the next three days for example as early as the 1950s French philosopher Michelle reached the personal conclusion that the problem of alien contact was in the realm of the unknowable and would remain so until humans evolved a more complex brain or more likely as we look at television today uh humans were replaced by a creature who had one yet as it turns out um he was partially wrong the realm of things it is impossible to ever know is not necessarily a feature of human limitations things get worse from here Intergalactic aliens and all future AI machines are going to have the same difficulty Hilbert's first problem turned out to be an example of this the number of all the integers is represented by the Hebrew letter Alf subscripted by zero it's the simplest Infinity you can think of it's an infinite number called Alf Nal or Alf Z it can be shown than number two raised to the power Alf Z is another number which is greater than Alf null Hilbert asked a simple question is there an integer between these two numbers in 1963 a Stanford mathematician named Paul Kohan answered Hilbert's question in a way that Hilbert would not have liked he showed that you could not know if such a number existed it's not that you're not smart enough it's not your brain it's not the lack of mathematical tools you have it is simply indeci a super intelligent alien from an advanced civilization would be in the same situation as in a human at Stanford and we can't even rely on natural Evolution here when I attempted to follow that up the correspondent of mine from Los Alamos wrote to me that I should not look for implications Beyond logic quote I see no connection here to the existence of UFOs or the existence of God he observed but because I failed to see a connection this doesn't mean that there is no connection in the early 18th century M de set out to prove the existence of God and he ended up formulating the principle of least action which provides the underpinnings for much of modern physics so what should poor ala do at the end of the day if even mathematics are questionable or Beyond proof chaon has the best advice Li for her and also for us in my view at the end of his book exploring Randomness he writes be prepared to have many false breakthroughs which don't survive the glaring light of rational scrutiny the next morning you have to dare to imagine many false beautiful theories before you hit on one that works be daring Dare To Dream have faith in the power of new ideas and hard work get to work dream 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