We're all familiar with the story from watching such programs as The FBI Files or The New Detectives. A smooth operator, who has no desire to work, but enjoys wine, women and song, targets a widow who owns her own home and has been left large cash deposits in retirement accounts by a loving, but overworked husband. Our Lothario chances to run into the widow at one of her habitual locations and sweeps her off her feet by creating in her mind an illusion of himself. He paints a picture of himself as a successful businessman, recently widowed, lonely, looking for the second love of his life. The illusion eventually becomes delusion in the widow's mind as she sees herself once again happily married to a caring and loving husband.
Of course, he is financing his lifestyle from the proceeds of the last wealthy widow he deluded, and with her funds running low, he needs a new source of money to continue his merry life of enjoying the finest of wine, women and everything else life has to offer. So he doesn't wait too long, just long enough after the marriage to suggest that his accountant has told him that for tax reasons, it would save a fortune on their joint return if she put the title to the house, car and even the retirement accounts into his name as joint holder. If he has done a competent job of creating an illusion that produces total delusion, then he is now free to relieve the poor lady of all her assets and move on to his next target.
But every once in awhile, the poor lady starts to see past the illusion, starts to shed her delusion. What's a man to do? Well, make up more lies, of course. He tells her he had a temporary set back, but that it has paid off big, and to celebrate, he wants to take her to the Grand Canyon, or Yosemite or maybe even the Northern Rockies. On the trip, the widow somehow takes a fall off a five hundred foot cliff and that's the end of that little story, the danger of the delusion being busted cutting into the income and lifestyle of our vagabond dying with the falling widow.
And the delusion doesn't even have to be about stealing money. It might just be about maintaining reputation. We all read in the papers the absolutely astounding story of the guy who had created the delusion in his wife that he was a medical student. When Lori Hacking accidentally got notice of the deception and Mark found out the delusion he had created was busted, he simply killed her and stuck her in the county landfill.
What does all this have to do with scientists scorning UFOs? Thought you'd never ask.
Newton invented empirical science for one simple reason. He produced unfounded conclusions on subjects for which we could never know a definitive answer, and then when he ran into criticism that his unfounded conclusions were unfounded conclusions, he needed some way to turn those conclusions into fact. He is the originator of the scientific method in which a set of hypotheses, made up thoughts and notions, can be considered to be fact if they mathematically predict an outcome that is mathematically found to exist.
Newton made up a law of motion with no basis in reality, that objects travel in a straight line unless a force acts to change that motion. Nowhere in nature does this condition exist, but that did not stop Newton from claiming that it was a law of nature. He next made up the notion that the planets and the moons were all made up of a single uniform particle, and that particle uniformly filled the planets and the moons. Not only is this not a fact, it actually opposes the reality in which we find rocks strewn among the sand on the beach. Even if there were a uniform particle, which there was no evidence for, and which atomic theory claims there isn't, that particle was not uniformly distributed.
The reason that Newton needed a uniform particle, of course, was that he needed to mathematically compute the amount of gravity in the Earth and the moon to prove his assumption that gravity was proportional to, and therefore a property of matter, and the only way that he could do this was to assume that the Earth and the moon were uniformly made up of the same matter so that he could substitute volume for gravity.
So, right at the start of the empirical adventure, its founder, Newton, created two falsehoods. Why did he do this? Well, science was a pretty competitive operation during the last half of the 17th century. Newton, while the son of a Yeoman, had to get by on a Professor's salary and, as a result, reputation was everything. The greater Newton's claim to original discovery was, the greater his reputation, and the greater his take, his slice of the pie, his ability to participate in the good life, in his case, wine, men and wantonly torturing the multitude of counterfeiters his agents herded into the dungeons of the Mint, where his reputation had procured him the sinecure of Master.
Once Newton was able to create the delusion that he had used mathematics to prove that gravity was proportional to and therefore a property of matter, he was able to foist off a set of additional fantasies, that white light was made up of all colors and that the frequency of the colors were lined up the way they came out of the spectrum. By using his reputation for uncovering the secrets of the universe to take over The Royal Society, Newton was not only able to perpetuate his lies, the delusions he was weaving, but he was able to perpetuate the ridiculous notion that mathematics could be used to turn concepts, notions, mere theories, wisps of the mind, the winds of imagination, into facts.
And not only facts, but laws, because Newton believed that God created the universe using mathematical laws, and God had imbued him with the godlike ability to use mathematics to discover just what those laws were. Once mathematics discovered the laws, there was nothing that could oppose them. The laws became immutable, unquestionable, and therefore became the facts upon which all other made-up notions of reality had to rest.
What about the fact that Newton never proved that gravity was proportional to, and therefore a property of matter because his assumption that the Earth and the moon were made up of uniform particles uniformly distributed throughout each was patent foolishness? And I don't even mention here that the prediction never worked, that the moon never had enough particles to make Newton's mathematical equations balance. What happened to the empirical science community, now a collection of men whose lifestyles rested on their ability to explain the secrets of the universe to the masses, and more important, to the Lords and Kings who held the purse strings and lined everyone up at the trough according to contribution, when it realized that Newton was dead wrong, that he had not proven that his predicted fact was true because his underlying assumption about the uniform make up of the Earth and the moon was flawed?
Was this collection of men, whose lifestyles depended on their ability to explain the unexplainable using a procedure that turned fantasy into fact, whose stock in trade was delusion, was this collection of fantasists about to stand up and proclaim, "Hey, wait a minute, everyone, we got it all wrong, we don't really know what gravity is because Newton made a massive mistake."
Are you kidding me? Would our Lothario, when his suspicious bride discovered that he had not only been married twenty times before, but five of those twenty had died under suspicious circumstance and the other fifteen had hired detectives to try and find her newly minted husband, confess all and apologize, saying good-bye sweet lifestyle, I want to come clean and live a life of poverty, or worse, work? Did Mark tell Lori, "Oops, didn't mean to delude you."
Not on your, or anyone else's life. Once a delusion starts to pay off, the delusionists, the people who are profiting from the delusion, either through a superior lifestyle, or the rewards of reputation, or both, they are not about to proclaim the delusion. In fact, they are so dependent on the delusion, that they would rather delude themselves than examine the basis of their delusion.
And make no mistake about it, a science which claims it can create facts is a delusional operation.
So what did our empirical delusionists do when they realized toward the end of the 18th century that Newton's notion of uniform particles uniformly making up the Earth and the moon was simply nonsense? They couldn't proclaim the error because generations of empiricists, not to mention hangers-on who analyzed the process, philosophized the process, or even duplicated the process, depended on Newton being right for not only their reputations, but their very livelihoods. Much like the New York Times defended the forged CBS Rathergate documents by saying the documents might be forgeries, but their content was correct, the delusionists concluded that even though Newton's mathematical computations were erroneous, he discovered the underlying law that controlled the universe, that gravity was a property of and proportional to matter.
Now that the world knew the law, it made no difference that it had no empirical basis because it was, after all, an empirical law, and the law could now be used to determine what Newton missed. While Newton thought the planets and the moon were uniformly made up of a uniform particle, and that was clearly wrong because some matter is more dense than other matter, empirical science can still apply his law to the orbits of the planets and the moons to determine what the planets are made out of. "That can't be empirically proven?" you say. "All the better. If we have a law that no one can claim is not a law, and it predicts something that can never be verified, then we can go our merry way, spin any delusions we want, Jupiter is made out of gas, the Earth has an iron core, the moon is full of caves, and no one will ever be able to prove us wrong. We'll have the best scam in the world, because we will be able to give everyone the answers they want, they can be any answers because no one can ever check them, and we will live a life of wealth and repute for all our days."
What empirical science has done is to claim to answer our most important questions, the source of the force that causes the motions in our existence, with answers that provide no information. The current force that causes objects to drop is a property, like color and hardness. The current forces that causes movement in the universe, the planets to rotate and orbit, the stars and galaxies to move, are not current forces at all, they are historical forces out of the reach of analysis, a swirling mass of gas or a big bang. To misdirect our attention away from the fact that the delusionists are taking our money without answering our questions, they create answers for questions that don't exist, and which in any event, have no effect on us, answers dealing with black holes that will never be seen, dark matter that will never be seen, wormholes that will never be seen, the beginning and end of the universe, which will never be seen, the center of stars, which will never be seen.
Having failed to answer the basic questions of our existence, questions of force and motion, questions of what light, electricity and magnetism are, empirical delusionists keep the con game going by claiming everything is stranger than we can understand and then creating fantasies which we are incapable of grasping to prove their empirical assertions. After all, they want to keep the con going as long as possible so that the money will keep rolling in.
Ah, but there are some dangers involved. What if there are other people on other planets who have actually spent the effort, taken the time and trouble to figure out the nature of the forces that produce the motions in our existence? And what if some of those people all of a sudden showed up. There goes the gravy train right smack into the graveyard.
The first safeguard had to be one of distance, that the distances in space were so vast that they could never be traversed. Astronomers claim to use parallax measurements, measurements of stars taken when the Earth is on opposite sides of its orbit, to compute distance. Flammarion put the empirical solution to this problem best in 1894: "In the whole of sidereal astronomy there is, perhaps, nothing more difficult to determine than the parallax of a star. To think that among all the stars in the sky there is not one which shows a parallax of one second! Now, one second is a millimeter seen at two hundred meters, it is a hair of a twentieth of a millimeter seen at 10 metes (32.8 feet)! Well, it is in this width that the annual motion of a star is performed. The telescope magnifies it, of course; without this it would be absolutely imperceptible; but how easily it can be concealed by the imperceptible motions of the telescope, by the influences of temperature, by refraction, precession, nutation, aberration, and by the proper motion of the star itself in space! All these united influences amount to several seconds, and are themselves subject to some uncertainties, and instrumental errors must still be added to them. How, then, shall we extricate trustworthy indications of the minute displacement due to the effect of the earth's motion? Astronomers, however, succeeded in doing so for some stars."
So there we have it. Empirical science can't measure the distances to the stars, so it is simply claims to have done so and who's to claim otherwise. One more safeguard had to be put in place. Empirical science has no idea what causes movement so that whatever does could conceivably overcome the vast distances it had manufactured to protect its income and reputation. Thus, a speed limit had to be imposed on the universe. Nothing could exceed, or even come close to the speed of light, and thus, nothing could overcome the vast distances.
As a result, when craft started showing up in our skies that defied the sterile nonexplanations of force and motion empirical science provides, what do we expect our noble searchers for income and reputation, and nothing else, to claim?
Why, they simply don't exist, of course.
I wouldn't want to insult the gullible widows our suave Lotharios bilk and I certainly don't want to insult Lori Hacking, but we are all pretty gullible, aren't we?
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com