Thanks for the interesting book review, Richey, always (literally) commendable.
"I also have a bias towards coherence."
I share this, but I'm not sure it should qualify as a bias. The mutual compatibility of all true things should be a default position.
The potential for error comes in when I assume my *understanding* of one set of facts is much more certain than is warranted, and use that to rule out only apparently contradictory facts.
Ahhh yes, Annie Jacobsen.....Annie Jacobsen. I too encountered her after her more recent book on Nuclear War. The one I read was about Area 51.
The book had three streams. One was the history of the types of experimental planes developed, mostly for the CIA. There was the U2, flying higher and faster to justify the risk to pilots collecting intelligence. There was the story of how the US got its hands on the first Russian made Mig so they could study it. There was the first remote piloted planes, used mostly over China to avoid the Gary Powers fiasco.
Another was the institutional history of Area 51. The promises to develop planes immune to radar. Navigating how to interview people to work at Area 51. Incidents like what happened when a private plane had to make an emergency landing or a test plane crashed and civilian picked up the pilot along an empty road. The tension with the airforce, which didn't like the CIA having its own fleet of planes, plus the whole question of why use planes at all if space is an option? All good stuff.
But then there was her 'hook', which I'm just going to spoil.
She tied together several threads. An old man who was one of her main source: The War of the Worlds panic that she alleges Stalin made a mental note of. Nazi experiments with single wing aircraft, which included an effort to secure an aircraft designer who was briefly gotten first by the Soviets in Germany after the war.
Her 'idea'...... Stalin wanted to create a panic in the West. He used a Nazi aircraft engineer to design a single wing aircraft that could be remote piloted (think something advanced and vaguely UFO looking). He used Josef Mengele's experiments or possibly direct consultation from Mengele himself to produce deformed, misshapen children or adults that looked a bit alien and wouldn't survive long. This aircraft would fly into the US and land somewhere noticeable. With its futuristic look and unknown technology would appear alien and with the non-communicative people inside who'd die, an alien invasion panic would ensue. This plane, however, didn't make it to some place where it would be so easily noticed as it crashed in an obscure place called.....Roswell.
I was left for a serious loop with this book. On one hand here was a well done, readable history of Area 51 with a lot of good stories about development and challenges that seemed quite grounded. Yet out of left field we get this wacked out story whose primary source is an old retired officer who died not long after the book and, of course, hinted he could only give her 'some of the truth'. She, of course, asked none of the most obvious questions like how could the Soviets have a plane that could penetrate so far into the US? Why this 'saucer' technology was not incorporated either into the planes Area 51 worked on or used in Soviet aircraft? What exactly was the endgame of this 'publicity stunt'?
My working theory is that she knew an Area 51 book would sell a lot more if it had a good hook for the UFO crowd. Intelligence people, esp. old retired ones, probably have a habit of spinning tales and maybe enjoy trolling a bit. She combined the two, possibly arguing to herself she was simply reporting what this 'source' said so she technically wasn't violating any rules of journalism.
That leaves me with a credibility gap for her that I think is more serious than her Nuclear War book. Or maybe it's a gullibility gap.
I had some serious problems with her Nuclear War book, but I had forgotten how serious before reading this book. But I guess you can explain a lot if you just model her behavior based on the idea that she wants to sell a lot of books.
Perhaps I was too forgiving of her on Nuclear War, but I figured she was presenting a worst case so I assumed some of the decisions were intended to illustrate what could happen if a perfect nuclear storm happened.
"NDEs fit very well with most conceptions of God. ESP as a genetic gift, much less so."
That's what I intially thought as well, but this quote just popped into my head as I was reading the post: "If man were meant to fly, he'd have been born with wings." For the bulk of human history we knew next to nothing about areodynamics, but discovering how it works doesn't invalidate any conception of God, unless a core tenant of one's religion was that man cannot fly or levitate by any means whatsoever without divine intervention. If we were discover midiclorians and how to work the Force with them tomorrow, while I expect it would cause some big shifts between the religious and non-religious camps in the short term, in the long term it would be just another thing for religious and non-religious to fight over.
Even if we lived in a world where we ALWAYS knew about ESP and how to work it, I think we'd still contend with stories of feats that go beyond what's commonly accepted to be possible. "Sure, everyone knows how to bend spoons with your mind, but nobody has ever walked on water or raised the dead under controlled conditions."
This is an interesting point, and I think the key thing is we know how flight works (when we do it, there’s the UAP discussion) and as you say just because we can fly doesn’t mean we don’t scratch our head at the UAP videos. And just because everyone can bend spoons, doesn’t mean we wouldn’t scratch our head at walking on water.
But given that we can’t explain, or most especially replicate, the phenomena described in the book they have to fall in the UAP, walking on water, category.
I find this stuff interesting, but really feel like this type of thing could be really easy proven if it was real. Grappling with this stuff kinda first requires the reader to develop an explanation why nobody just decided to walk down to their local college physics department handed a professor a spoon and then bent it with telekinesis.
She does touch on that point, in passing. There's this whole idea of resonance (my word not her's) within the psychic community where if you're surrounded by people who want to believe it works, and if you're surrounded by skeptics then it won't work.
I mean it sounds like bullshit, but once you're in the realm of magic, I suppose the rules could be different.
I, for one, am very thankful for the time you put into this! I'm preparing a summer camp on how we can approach claims of psychic phenomena from a Bayesian perspective; this pushes me into wanting to get a handle on Geller.
Geller is fascinating (at least for me) because he's either a powerful "talent" or he's a fantastic magician with zero ethics. (I suppose there's some chance that he's talented and extremely self-deluded.)
Funny enough I suppose the Carson appearance is the equivalent of the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud. Something of a stake in the heart (depending on your perspective). But of course I take opposite stances on both. While you view them the same...
A useful approach is assume the opposite. Say there's no ESP, what would we expect to see in this universe? Odd coincidences that people notice and document either because they happened or were selectively remembered after the fact? Occasional reports of things happening that can't be replicated or don't follow any predictable patterns that can be exploited? I'd expect to see all of that and we do.
Now what if someone held something was impossible? Say a claim was made it is impossible to transmit ideas and messages without sound heard by the ears. OK then two people trying to meet up in a large city could not coordinate a time and place by using messaging on their phones. Yet it's happening all the time.
To me both observations make for a very comfortable assertion a person can't 'remote sense' where a downed plane crashed appear quite accurate.
I personally enjoy your longer reviews although I don't particularly care about this particular guy. I'm more interested in the CIA programs and the Zaire plane finding thing.
Thanks for the interesting book review, Richey, always (literally) commendable.
"I also have a bias towards coherence."
I share this, but I'm not sure it should qualify as a bias. The mutual compatibility of all true things should be a default position.
The potential for error comes in when I assume my *understanding* of one set of facts is much more certain than is warranted, and use that to rule out only apparently contradictory facts.
Ahhh yes, Annie Jacobsen.....Annie Jacobsen. I too encountered her after her more recent book on Nuclear War. The one I read was about Area 51.
The book had three streams. One was the history of the types of experimental planes developed, mostly for the CIA. There was the U2, flying higher and faster to justify the risk to pilots collecting intelligence. There was the story of how the US got its hands on the first Russian made Mig so they could study it. There was the first remote piloted planes, used mostly over China to avoid the Gary Powers fiasco.
Another was the institutional history of Area 51. The promises to develop planes immune to radar. Navigating how to interview people to work at Area 51. Incidents like what happened when a private plane had to make an emergency landing or a test plane crashed and civilian picked up the pilot along an empty road. The tension with the airforce, which didn't like the CIA having its own fleet of planes, plus the whole question of why use planes at all if space is an option? All good stuff.
But then there was her 'hook', which I'm just going to spoil.
She tied together several threads. An old man who was one of her main source: The War of the Worlds panic that she alleges Stalin made a mental note of. Nazi experiments with single wing aircraft, which included an effort to secure an aircraft designer who was briefly gotten first by the Soviets in Germany after the war.
Her 'idea'...... Stalin wanted to create a panic in the West. He used a Nazi aircraft engineer to design a single wing aircraft that could be remote piloted (think something advanced and vaguely UFO looking). He used Josef Mengele's experiments or possibly direct consultation from Mengele himself to produce deformed, misshapen children or adults that looked a bit alien and wouldn't survive long. This aircraft would fly into the US and land somewhere noticeable. With its futuristic look and unknown technology would appear alien and with the non-communicative people inside who'd die, an alien invasion panic would ensue. This plane, however, didn't make it to some place where it would be so easily noticed as it crashed in an obscure place called.....Roswell.
I was left for a serious loop with this book. On one hand here was a well done, readable history of Area 51 with a lot of good stories about development and challenges that seemed quite grounded. Yet out of left field we get this wacked out story whose primary source is an old retired officer who died not long after the book and, of course, hinted he could only give her 'some of the truth'. She, of course, asked none of the most obvious questions like how could the Soviets have a plane that could penetrate so far into the US? Why this 'saucer' technology was not incorporated either into the planes Area 51 worked on or used in Soviet aircraft? What exactly was the endgame of this 'publicity stunt'?
My working theory is that she knew an Area 51 book would sell a lot more if it had a good hook for the UFO crowd. Intelligence people, esp. old retired ones, probably have a habit of spinning tales and maybe enjoy trolling a bit. She combined the two, possibly arguing to herself she was simply reporting what this 'source' said so she technically wasn't violating any rules of journalism.
That leaves me with a credibility gap for her that I think is more serious than her Nuclear War book. Or maybe it's a gullibility gap.
I had some serious problems with her Nuclear War book, but I had forgotten how serious before reading this book. But I guess you can explain a lot if you just model her behavior based on the idea that she wants to sell a lot of books.
Perhaps I was too forgiving of her on Nuclear War, but I figured she was presenting a worst case so I assumed some of the decisions were intended to illustrate what could happen if a perfect nuclear storm happened.
"NDEs fit very well with most conceptions of God. ESP as a genetic gift, much less so."
That's what I intially thought as well, but this quote just popped into my head as I was reading the post: "If man were meant to fly, he'd have been born with wings." For the bulk of human history we knew next to nothing about areodynamics, but discovering how it works doesn't invalidate any conception of God, unless a core tenant of one's religion was that man cannot fly or levitate by any means whatsoever without divine intervention. If we were discover midiclorians and how to work the Force with them tomorrow, while I expect it would cause some big shifts between the religious and non-religious camps in the short term, in the long term it would be just another thing for religious and non-religious to fight over.
Even if we lived in a world where we ALWAYS knew about ESP and how to work it, I think we'd still contend with stories of feats that go beyond what's commonly accepted to be possible. "Sure, everyone knows how to bend spoons with your mind, but nobody has ever walked on water or raised the dead under controlled conditions."
This is an interesting point, and I think the key thing is we know how flight works (when we do it, there’s the UAP discussion) and as you say just because we can fly doesn’t mean we don’t scratch our head at the UAP videos. And just because everyone can bend spoons, doesn’t mean we wouldn’t scratch our head at walking on water.
But given that we can’t explain, or most especially replicate, the phenomena described in the book they have to fall in the UAP, walking on water, category.
I find this stuff interesting, but really feel like this type of thing could be really easy proven if it was real. Grappling with this stuff kinda first requires the reader to develop an explanation why nobody just decided to walk down to their local college physics department handed a professor a spoon and then bent it with telekinesis.
She does touch on that point, in passing. There's this whole idea of resonance (my word not her's) within the psychic community where if you're surrounded by people who want to believe it works, and if you're surrounded by skeptics then it won't work.
I mean it sounds like bullshit, but once you're in the realm of magic, I suppose the rules could be different.
I, for one, am very thankful for the time you put into this! I'm preparing a summer camp on how we can approach claims of psychic phenomena from a Bayesian perspective; this pushes me into wanting to get a handle on Geller.
Geller is fascinating (at least for me) because he's either a powerful "talent" or he's a fantastic magician with zero ethics. (I suppose there's some chance that he's talented and extremely self-deluded.)
Funny enough I suppose the Carson appearance is the equivalent of the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud. Something of a stake in the heart (depending on your perspective). But of course I take opposite stances on both. While you view them the same...
A useful approach is assume the opposite. Say there's no ESP, what would we expect to see in this universe? Odd coincidences that people notice and document either because they happened or were selectively remembered after the fact? Occasional reports of things happening that can't be replicated or don't follow any predictable patterns that can be exploited? I'd expect to see all of that and we do.
Now what if someone held something was impossible? Say a claim was made it is impossible to transmit ideas and messages without sound heard by the ears. OK then two people trying to meet up in a large city could not coordinate a time and place by using messaging on their phones. Yet it's happening all the time.
To me both observations make for a very comfortable assertion a person can't 'remote sense' where a downed plane crashed appear quite accurate.
I personally enjoy your longer reviews although I don't particularly care about this particular guy. I'm more interested in the CIA programs and the Zaire plane finding thing.
Yeah I could tell that I was getting a little bit fixated... ;)