DISTORTION: DIVERSITY IS THE KEY

The Distortion Theory claims that everything observed in the staging orchestrated by the phenomenon, that is, the UFOs and their elusive occupants, follows a very similar development, even if it is something else, to that manifested in dreams. And what would be the main conclusion of this fact? Well, that close encounters have no real and lasting existence (continuity) beyond these ephemeral contacts. There is neither before nor after, we can only quantify and evaluate the during. And this singular fact would explain, from the outset, one of the great questions of the UFO subject: Why are there so many types of flying saucers and extraterrestrials? And the fact is that these manifestations would be the result of a highly "creative" and "malleable" process that would be adapted to the private and non-transferable information of each witness, with hardly any previous information occurred in another ufological case because the phenomenon is incapable of preserving aesthetic contents beyond the most common and foreseeable elements. For this reason, we have been unable to obtain a fixed or coherent photograph of the UFO paradigm or even to extract a shared plot among thousands of events that would clearly indicate that we were before the same craft and the same crew members. Therefore, if UFO incidents are the consequence of an individual parapsychic mechanism to be executed, with unsuspected consequences, it is indisputable that the resulting episodes should be unpredictable, random and chaotic.

JOSE ANTONIO CARAVACA

WHEN UFO LANDINGS WERE IGNORED

In the decade of the sixties of the last century a substantial fact happened to understand the evolution of ufology, two bastions such as NICAP and Dr. Joseph Allen Hynek did not end up accepting the close encounters with UFOs and their crew members despite the multiple episodes that were occurring worldwide. And all because this type of incidents and their display of absurdity and incoherence endangered the stability of the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) before the public opinion and especially before the scientific community. A communiqué from the famous group stated: "NICAP neither accepts nor rejects this type of reports". But in the face of the strength of the evidence of such incidents, finally both sides had to admit, however reluctantly, that these cases, however anomalous, were an intrinsic part of the UFO phenomenon. And this made other kinds of theoretical approaches begin to gain strength in the ufological territory, with Jacques Vallée and John Keel at the forefront. From those key years onwards, aliens lost some of their prominence, at least in the eyes of the scholarly community. Subsequently, the contributions of Michel Monnerie, Jerome Clark, Freixedo and others, managed even more to corner the idea that the flying saucers were only ships of sheet metal and screws piloted by excellent scientists arrived from unknown planets. However, after decades of ostracism, and in the heat of the so-called Pentagon's UFOs, the extraterrestrials have come back to life. The history seems to want to restart from scratch, completely ignoring, as in the past, the cases of landings and close experiences with UFOnauts. Nowadays, for some, only pilot sightings and radar detections are important (without assessing whether they could belong to phenomena other than flying saucers). But what many of these HET advocates ignore is that the same promoters of this resurgence of "extraterrestrials" are not convinced of this approach, and openly point out that the UFO phenomenon is related to paranormal and fortean facts of all kinds as well as to the human psyche, leaving the door open to an implicit admission of the same precepts defended by paraufology (a term that agglutinated the most heterodox ideas within the study of UFOs). Therefore, a new turn of the screw is expected soon, which will leave us in the right place in the investigation.

JOSE ANTONIO CARAVACA

IMAGINATION, SCIENCE FICTION AND UFOS

 

1940

The UFO phenomenon is a "mirage" produced by our mind trying to decipher the content of an unknown but highly immersive reality. Our unconscious, in line with the paradigm, reconstructs a scenography based on our sociocultural stereotypes. Science fiction prior to 1947 is evidence that these manifestations are based on the human imaginary. They only show a distortion of our own reality transferred to a fictitious scenario of extraterrestrial visitation. Nothing shown is really alien to the human mind.

 

1934

1942

JOSE ANTONIO CARAVACA

ARCANE ENCOUNTERS WITH UFOS

The interpretation of the genesis of ufology has undergone a remarkable evolution over the years, from the extraterrestrial hypothesis (Keyhoe, Friedman), to a redefinition of the origin of the phenomenon, with the possibility of UFOs coming from parallel universes or unknown dimensions (Vallée, Keel, Michel), all in an attempt to find a place for the anomalous and paranormal component present in many of these experiences. However, both positions still shared the same general points: the existence of intelligent entities alien to human beings, and the presence of strange unknown airships interacting in our environment. Subsequently, the possibility arose that flying saucers were a phenomenon radically different from everything we had established to date, and as a result of the approaches of the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung, other approaches arose that contemplated that UFOs were neither vehicles nor extraterrestrial intelligences behind these appearances (collective unconscious and psychic phenomena). The Distortion theory follows to a certain extent this last stele by considering UFOs and their occupants as a sort of artificial sociocultural screen raised by our psyche and that hides, in an involuntary and not premeditated way, a mysterious and disconcerting paradigm of cognitive order.

JOSE ANTONIO CARAVACA

ARE UFOS TECHNOLOGICAL OR SOME OTHER KIND OF PHENOMENA?

To date we have no evidence that the extraordinary and unknown capabilities and properties exhibited by the UFO phenomenon are due to the existence of an extraterrestrial technology deployed before our eyes. In fact, the evolutions of strange luminous spheres in the sky, the appearance and disappearance of humanoids, electromagnetic interference, paralysis or that some objects or entities can pass through matter, have been described in many other supernatural contexts for hundreds of years without having been thought to date to be the product of an unknown science, but rather as the manifestation of a reality that normally seems forbidden to the ordinary senses. So it is clear that the similarity of UFOs with these other strange phenomena could indicate that we have been reinterpreting, perhaps influenced by our cultural filters, a series of paradigms that since the dawn of history have been present in different human cultures and that seem to react to our presence by changing and metamorphosing their external appearance. Curiously, telepathic communications are not an exclusive resource of UFO crews either, but practically all entities that have come our way, have used this means to communicate with us. But only from the second half of the 20th century experts began to consider that the anomalous manifestations could conceal a lavish alien technology, but are we sure about this?

Can we be sure that UFOs, their occupants and collateral phenomena are a consequence of the irruption of a science from other worlds on our planet? And even more taking into account that very soon the ufologists noted that, together with the manifes- tations of flying saucers and ufonauts, phenomena such as poltergeist, precognitions, strange dreams, etc., which were not unprecedented for the investigators of other heterodox subjects, were making an appearance. So, in reality, none of the UFO paradigm, except for its particular aesthetic scenography (with certain nuances), has been completely unknown to us, but obviously what has changed is the inter- pretation we have given to these apparitions. That an unexpected nocturnal visitor bursts into our bedroom has never been considered an extraterrestrial interference for scientific purposes until our civilization has contextualized these apparitions under a certain explanatory framework in line with a supposed technology that would allow extraterrestrials to go through walls to reach us. But obviously this approach ignores the fact that all kinds of entities have performed these same tasks since the dawn of history, in fields as diverse as the religious, the mystical or the philosophical. In the last seventy years thousands of people have described incredible apparitions that seemed to simulate in their appearance to be the result of an unattainable extraterres- trial science, although on the other hand, the similarity with our own evolutionary development (anthropomorphizing of the occupants) and technological development (scuba diving suits, autonomous respirators, ray guns, ladders, antennas, windows, control consoles, etc.) led many other researchers to suspect that it could be some kind of mirage or socio-cultural distortion of our own civilization raised by a phenomenon that we do not know how to decode properly.

Therefore it cannot be ruled out that what we have erroneously labeled to date as close encounters with extraterrestrial beings is the product of other types of phenomena or issues related to human perception of unknown chinks in our reality or our own mental universe that sometimes assaults us outside the walls of the psychic with a rapturous force.

JOSE ANTONIO CARAVACA

THE DICHOTOMY BETWEEN UFOS IN THE NEAR AND FAR DISTANCE

 

Since practically the beginnings of modern ufology, the behavior of the UFO cases has only made evident that distant sightings do not have many points in common with the so-called close encounters. It is in the closest experiences with the Unidentified that the paradigm reveals itself in a much more ambiguous and disconcerting way, moving away from our assumed presumptions about the origin of the phenomenon. And we cannot deny that there is an abysmal and substantial difference, in form and substance, between both facets of the UFO paradigm, and although both share obvious common features, it does not seem, after a thorough analysis of the issue, that they fit exactly the same phenomenon, at least in the way of experiencing it. But how is this possible, and did the distant sightings engender the birth of a different phenomenon? The doubts and questions that arise from the study of the ufological literature are wide and diverse, and until we do not get to delimit which is the true dimension of the close encounters with UFOs we will not advance in the understanding of the phenomenon. 

JOSE ANTONIO CARAVACA

WHEN ART LEADS THE UFO PHENOMENON

Someday, if we want to understand what is behind the UFO phenomenon, we should value the true role and influence exerted by many graphic artists who, in countless books, articles and illustrations, have captured their particular vision of the UFO manifestations based mainly on cultural and imaginative stereotypes rather than on what the witnesses actually described. The proposal of these cartoonists offers a defined and delimited image of the paradigm, almost photographic, that in the majority of occasions does not correspond at all with the reality contained in the reports, but that obviously transferred a series of very deep visual archetypes that fit with certain beliefs that could be sponsored, in a strange and paradoxical feedback, by these same images...

JOSE ANTONIO CARAVACA