Diana W. Pasulka - aliens & religion & other dimensions (JRE podcast #2091)

[Bronek]

I listened to one of the recent episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience (#2091 -
Source: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4sGLqsYOSb2HMxk2NUThIE?si=64ac5adb543d44b7
) podcast with Diana W. Pasulka, and there were really quite a few strange topics there, which I haven't yet riserched well, but I'll note here (along with my brief commentary.) so that they don't slip away

- I present one by one an interesting claims Pasulka made during the conversation:

1) PLATO VISITED THE DIFFERENT LEVEL OF REALITY: The ancient Greek philosopher Plato is supposed to have claimed that the world of ideas is accessible to man and one can find oneself there (spiritually). By keeping one's body in good physical condition and proper meditation techniques, one can find oneself in an altered state of consciousness and see in it that other dimension where these other entities are, where there is truth, wisdom and one can derive knowledge from there. Plato was supposed to know this and practice it, and teach it to his students. Similar techniques are supposed to be used today by people who have devoted themselves to the study of the UFO phenomenon.

Comment: Caring about physical development and education was a model of good education for elites in Plato's time. I don't know Plato's works well, but from what I'm vaguely familiar with his works he was indeed concerned with the study of the essence of things, he created the concept of the world of ideas, of which reality is a reflection, and Plato's cave metaphor, but I don't remember a story about him moving into some state of higher consciousness and visiting these places, it was more of a metaphor showing his philosophical views.

2) UFO PHENOMENON IS OBJECTIVE, AND COMES FROM OUTSIDE OF HUMANITY Pasulka claims that the UFO phenomenon affects the consciousness of experiencers, and here the options are two: either the phenomenon has a subjective character and comes from within the human being (some kind of imagination resulting from cultural backgroudn) or it has an objective character and comes from the outside, i.e. from an external intelligence that affects the human consciousness. Pasulka claims that, according to her, this phenomenon has an objective character and it is simply something that has access to our consciousness and sometimes contacts us. At the same time, Pasulka does not think that these beings are from another planet, nor from another place, but from another dimension - they are simply somewhere else not here but far away. As for the objects we can observe, she claims that they have characteristics of both our reality (which is why they can be recorded, seen, touched), but in addition to that they have characteristics of another dimension, so they can ignore our physics and logic.

Comment: In my opinion, the interdimensional aspect of UFOs works like a card from the well-known board game Monopoly "you walk free from the prison [of logic]". As far as I know it was created in response to the shortcomings of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, i.e. at first it was thought that UFOs and aliens were simply beings from other planets, but over time case studies showed such a huge number of quirks, inconsistencies and fantastic features that no single explanation could be fashioned from it. Then, among others, Jacques Vallée (I don't know if he was the first) proposed an alternative solution, that these entities come from places different not locally, but also temporally and dimensionally. In short: pure magic that can be used to explain anything. A classic example of explaining the unknown by the unknown - we can't explain the UFO phenomenon on the basis of the elements of reality that are known to us, so we bring to life vibrant and intelligent multiworlds that we don't have the faintest idea about, and thanks to them we explain all the inaccuracies that exist in the UFO phenomenon - after all, multiworlds can be governed by their physics, time, logic, etc. so we can't exclude anything as impossible. It is worth noting in passing that Pasulka knows Jacques Vallée personally and spoke with him on the occasion of her book while visiting him at home.

3) THERE ARE CRASH SITES FROM 40s WHERE YOU CAN STILL FIND A META-MATERIALS FROM UFO: Perhaps the strangest story concerns her visit to the site of an alleged spacecraft crash in New Mexico. Pasulka claims that she was taken there by a millionaire involved in the Space Force and Gary Nolan was also there with her. They were blindfolded and taken somewhere in the desert, but it wasn't Roswell, somewhere in the area, but that wasn't it. When the blindfold was removed she said she knew the place, and her host said it was in the X-Files series because someone with insider knowledge of the UFO program was supposed to be working on the series. The incident was said to have occurred in the 1940s and was one of several similar ones (similar to Roswell), about four at a similar time. The site is not guarded, but once the government extracted what it was supposed to extract from here, they carted away the rubble here and the place where the object hit is covered with piles of rusted rubble. According to Pasulka, the government wasn't sure it had excavated all the fragments so they brought the rubble here to mix it with possible UFO pieces. They spent about 10 hours there where they dig the ground looking for UFO remnants - and of course they found them. According to their host, these fragments are meta-materials, which are of unknown origin and have a completely different structure from terrestrial metals, but fortunately the host had invented something like a meta-material detector which made it easier for them to find this and dig it out of the ground (Nolan dug it up with his own hands) - they recovered material similar to frog skin, among other things, which could be easily crumpled and then returned to its shape (a story as old as Roswell). Interestingly, UFO researchers do not treat these sites as crash sites but as a "donation", as if these aliens were specifically leaving us material to study.

Comment: It's hard for me to imagine that the almighty government excavated a UFO, but since they didn't want to fully search the area they covered the desert with rusted rubble and left it, and now if you know where, you can go and poke around. I'm intrigued by this meta-material detector - on what principle does it work to detect unknown materials so as to distinguish them from known, human ones?

4) UFO PROGRAM DATES BACK TO EARLY XX CENTURY, AND IS MANAGED THROUGH ORAL TRADITION BY PEOPLE, WE DON'T EVEN KNOW: The UFO Program is real and has been going on for many years. It is older than Roswell, having been created most likely as early as the beginning of the 20th century. However, it is deeply hidden from the public. The Blue Book Project, ufologists and well-known names from the UFO world are just a show, while the real program is run by people that no one knows and leave no traces, because they rely on oral tradition. They pass on knowledge and talk about UFOs without recording anything, so it is impossible to find evidence of this. They even have a saying that when they start talking about the Program, they use the phrase "pencils up," which means that it is not recorded or written down. On the subject of doubts about effective transmission, Pasulka says that people underestimate oral transmission, which is not at all a game of deaf telephone, but has much more historical truth in it, and there are known cases that oral tradition has been preserved for more than 10,000 years.

Comment: basing the Program on people unknown to anyone, who leave no trace in writing, is another way to make the Program independent of facts. You won't find anything or anyone, because these people are unknown and don't write about it. The lack of written evidence, as it were, confirms that the Program is masking itself well. I'm also curious what Pasulka means when she talks about an oral tradition that has survived unchanged for over 10,000 years. I don't know of any such tradition, and if any oral stories arrive from the time before writing (usually from a few thousand years, not 10,000) they just arrive in fragments, in mere motifs or just in many different versions.

That's it for now, but Diana Pasulka looked like a person who is totally down the rabbit hole up to her ears during this conversation,

 

[RTM]

How receptive was Rogan to her claims, any tough questions etc.?

 

[Bronek]

How receptive was Rogan to her claims, any tough questions etc.?

Rogan was rather open-minded and did not ask very difficult questions, but some disagreements arose on two issues:
1) JR seems to be strongly skeptical of abductions, claiming that because most of them take place at night or when people are heavily fatigued, that these experiences are the result of brain activity during sleep, particularly DMT production by the pineal gland. In general, he often referred to this DMT and mentioned his own experiences that after taking DMT one gets into this alternate reality full of strange alien-like beings and that one has a feeling of immense peace and that has been there before (It seems similiar to NDEs). Pasulka had a different opinion here, claiming that quite a few of these abductions also take place during the day, so from her point of view abductions are not only dreams.

2) JR promoted the hypothesis that all religions and originated from experiences with psychedelics, especially mushrooms - this came up all the time in the course of the discussion, that every religion had rituals associated with some kind of psychotropic drugs and generally this is where these fantastic descriptions of gods and paradise come from. JR even claimed that all of Christianity is built on experiences with mushrooms - Pasulka (rightly) cooled him down here, that it's not that simple and the formation of religion is a more complicated process than drugging oneself and writing down experiences.

Rogan also mentioned a hypothesis that the pineal gland was known to be shaped like a pinecone already in antiquity, and because it is the pineal gland that is responsible for the production of DMT, which allows access to the other reality of the "gods., then it is supposed to be the origin of the universality of the pinecone symbol, which can be traced from Sumer to the Vatican - a longer text would have to be written about this, because it's not that simple (like everything in mythology)

 

[Tezcatlipoca]

I listened to one of the recent episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience (#2091 -
Source: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4sGLqsYOSb2HMxk2NUThIE?si=64ac5adb543d44b7
) podcast with Diana W. Pasulka, and there were really quite a few strange topics there, which I haven't yet riserched well, but I'll note here (along with my brief commentary.) so that they don't slip away

- I present one by one an interesting claims Pasulka made during the conversation:

1) PLATO VISITED THE DIFFERENT LEVEL OF REALITY: The ancient Greek philosopher Plato is supposed to have claimed that the world of ideas is accessible to man and one can find oneself there (spiritually). By keeping one's body in good physical condition and proper meditation techniques, one can find oneself in an altered state of consciousness and see in it that other dimension where these other entities are, where there is truth, wisdom and one can derive knowledge from there. Plato was supposed to know this and practice it, and teach it to his students. Similar techniques are supposed to be used today by people who have devoted themselves to the study of the UFO phenomenon.

Comment: Caring about physical development and education was a model of good education for elites in Plato's time. I don't know Plato's works well, but from what I'm vaguely familiar with his works he was indeed concerned with the study of the essence of things, he created the concept of the world of ideas, of which reality is a reflection, and Plato's cave metaphor, but I don't remember a story about him moving into some state of higher consciousness and visiting these places, it was more of a metaphor showing his philosophical views.

2) UFO PHENOMENON IS OBJECTIVE, AND COMES FROM OUTSIDE OF HUMANITY Pasulka claims that the UFO phenomenon affects the consciousness of experiencers, and here the options are two: either the phenomenon has a subjective character and comes from within the human being (some kind of imagination resulting from cultural backgroudn) or it has an objective character and comes from the outside, i.e. from an external intelligence that affects the human consciousness. Pasulka claims that, according to her, this phenomenon has an objective character and it is simply something that has access to our consciousness and sometimes contacts us. At the same time, Pasulka does not think that these beings are from another planet, nor from another place, but from another dimension - they are simply somewhere else not here but far away. As for the objects we can observe, she claims that they have characteristics of both our reality (which is why they can be recorded, seen, touched), but in addition to that they have characteristics of another dimension, so they can ignore our physics and logic.

Comment: In my opinion, the interdimensional aspect of UFOs works like a card from the well-known board game Monopoly "you walk free from the prison [of logic]". As far as I know it was created in response to the shortcomings of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, i.e. at first it was thought that UFOs and aliens were simply beings from other planets, but over time case studies showed such a huge number of quirks, inconsistencies and fantastic features that no single explanation could be fashioned from it. Then, among others, Jacques Vallée (I don't know if he was the first) proposed an alternative solution, that these entities come from places different not locally, but also temporally and dimensionally. In short: pure magic that can be used to explain anything. A classic example of explaining the unknown by the unknown - we can't explain the UFO phenomenon on the basis of the elements of reality that are known to us, so we bring to life vibrant and intelligent multiworlds that we don't have the faintest idea about, and thanks to them we explain all the inaccuracies that exist in the UFO phenomenon - after all, multiworlds can be governed by their physics, time, logic, etc. so we can't exclude anything as impossible. It is worth noting in passing that Pasulka knows Jacques Vallée personally and spoke with him on the occasion of her book while visiting him at home.

3) THERE ARE CRASH SITES FROM 40s WHERE YOU CAN STILL FIND A META-MATERIALS FROM UFO: Perhaps the strangest story concerns her visit to the site of an alleged spacecraft crash in New Mexico. Pasulka claims that she was taken there by a millionaire involved in the Space Force and Gary Nolan was also there with her. They were blindfolded and taken somewhere in the desert, but it wasn't Roswell, somewhere in the area, but that wasn't it. When the blindfold was removed she said she knew the place, and her host said it was in the X-Files series because someone with insider knowledge of the UFO program was supposed to be working on the series. The incident was said to have occurred in the 1940s and was one of several similar ones (similar to Roswell), about four at a similar time. The site is not guarded, but once the government extracted what it was supposed to extract from here, they carted away the rubble here and the place where the object hit is covered with piles of rusted rubble. According to Pasulka, the government wasn't sure it had excavated all the fragments so they brought the rubble here to mix it with possible UFO pieces. They spent about 10 hours there where they dig the ground looking for UFO remnants - and of course they found them. According to their host, these fragments are meta-materials, which are of unknown origin and have a completely different structure from terrestrial metals, but fortunately the host had invented something like a meta-material detector which made it easier for them to find this and dig it out of the ground (Nolan dug it up with his own hands) - they recovered material similar to frog skin, among other things, which could be easily crumpled and then returned to its shape (a story as old as Roswell). Interestingly, UFO researchers do not treat these sites as crash sites but as a "donation", as if these aliens were specifically leaving us material to study.

Comment: It's hard for me to imagine that the almighty government excavated a UFO, but since they didn't want to fully search the area they covered the desert with rusted rubble and left it, and now if you know where, you can go and poke around. I'm intrigued by this meta-material detector - on what principle does it work to detect unknown materials so as to distinguish them from known, human ones?

4) UFO PROGRAM DATES BACK TO EARLY XX CENTURY, AND IS MANAGED THROUGH ORAL TRADITION BY PEOPLE, WE DON'T EVEN KNOW: The UFO Program is real and has been going on for many years. It is older than Roswell, having been created most likely as early as the beginning of the 20th century. However, it is deeply hidden from the public. The Blue Book Project, ufologists and well-known names from the UFO world are just a show, while the real program is run by people that no one knows and leave no traces, because they rely on oral tradition. They pass on knowledge and talk about UFOs without recording anything, so it is impossible to find evidence of this. They even have a saying that when they start talking about the Program, they use the phrase "pencils up," which means that it is not recorded or written down. On the subject of doubts about effective transmission, Pasulka says that people underestimate oral transmission, which is not at all a game of deaf telephone, but has much more historical truth in it, and there are known cases that oral tradition has been preserved for more than 10,000 years.

Comment: basing the Program on people unknown to anyone, who leave no trace in writing, is another way to make the Program independent of facts. You won't find anything or anyone, because these people are unknown and don't write about it. The lack of written evidence, as it were, confirms that the Program is masking itself well. I'm also curious what Pasulka means when she talks about an oral tradition that has survived unchanged for over 10,000 years. I don't know of any such tradition, and if any oral stories arrive from the time before writing (usually from a few thousand years, not 10,000) they just arrive in fragments, in mere motifs or just in many different versions.

That's it for now, but Diana Pasulka looked like a person who is totally down the rabbit hole up to her ears during this conversation,

Just on 4) alone, this flies in the entire face of the global history of the practice and development of covert and clandestine activities, just no. No program has ever been documented in the entire history of the globe being ran that long, by anyone, ever. UFOs being it, is not it, the first would be something insanely mundane, such as the old school black chambers in Europe like the French Cabinet Noir (the pre-Louis XV iterations, post XV wasn't necessarily operational based and represented a govt body of its own)
In reality the only things that continuously exist this long are groups representative of activities at large (ie govt agencies, relevant companies, cause based networks, etc), rather than dedicating to a specific activity.

 

[JimJam]

Just on 4) alone, this flies in the entire face of the global history of the practice and development of covert and clandestine activities, just no. No program has ever been documented in the entire history of the globe being ran that long, by anyone, ever. UFOs being it, is not it, the first would be something insanely mundane, such as the old school black chambers in Europe like the French Cabinet Noir (the pre-Louis XV iterations, post XV wasn't necessarily operational based and represented a govt body of its own)
In reality the only things that continuously exist this long are groups representative of activities at large (ie govt agencies, relevant companies, cause based networks, etc), rather than dedicating to a specific activity.

It's worth clarifying I don't think Pasulka is claiming that the UFO Program oral Tradition is 10 000 years old, just that there are Oral traditions that old. I don't think Bronek is making the argument that she is saying that either, it's confusingly phrased but the claim of a UFO Oral tradition is separate to the claim of 10000+ year old Oral traditions.

4) UFO PROGRAM DATES BACK TO EARLY XX CENTURY, AND IS MANAGED THROUGH ORAL TRADITION BY PEOPLE, WE DON'T EVEN KNOW: The UFO Program is real and has been going on for many years. It is older than Roswell, having been created most likely as early as the beginning of the 20th century. However, it is deeply hidden from the public. The Blue Book Project, ufologists and well-known names from the UFO world are just a show, while the real program is run by people that no one knows and leave no traces, because they rely on oral tradition. They pass on knowledge and talk about UFOs without recording anything, so it is impossible to find evidence of this. They even have a saying that when they start talking about the Program, they use the phrase "pencils up," which means that it is not recorded or written down. On the subject of doubts about effective transmission, Pasulka says that people underestimate oral transmission, which is not at all a game of deaf telephone, but has much more historical truth in it, and there are known cases that oral tradition has been preserved for more than 10,000 years.

Comment: basing the Program on people unknown to anyone, who leave no trace in writing, is another way to make the Program independent of facts. You won't find anything or anyone, because these people are unknown and don't write about it. The lack of written evidence, as it were, confirms that the Program is masking itself well. I'm also curious what Pasulka means when she talks about an oral tradition that has survived unchanged for over 10,000 years. I don't know of any such tradition, and if any oral stories arrive from the time before writing (usually from a few thousand years, not 10,000) they just arrive in fragments, in mere motifs or just in many different versions.

That's it for now, but Diana Pasulka looked like a person who is totally down the rabbit hole up to her ears during this conversation,

As an Australian this jumped out at me. Indigenous Australian culture was and is maintained by oral tradition, some of this is incredibly old with estimations of Indigenous presence in Australia being at least 10 000 years and possibly as far back as 50-60k years. It would take some time to do a fuller amount of research on the subject, but with a brief quote from Wikipedia I can hopefully demonstrate that there at the very least Oral traditions that have claims of going back that far

Article:

Cultural traditions and beliefs as well as historical tellings of actual events are passed down in Aboriginal oral tradition, also known loosely as oral history (although the latter has a more specific definition). Some of the stories are many thousands of years old. In a study published in February 2020, new evidence produced using radiometric dating showed that both Budj Bim and Tower Hill volcanoes erupted at least 34,000 years ago.[1] Significantly, this is a "minimum age constraint for human presence in Victoria", and also could be interpreted as evidence for the Gunditjmara oral histories which tell of volcanic eruptions being some of the oldest oral traditions in existence.[2] An axe found underneath volcanic ash in 1947 was also proof that humans inhabited the region before the eruption of Tower Hill.[1]

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_culture

 

[Calter]

As an Australian this jumped out at me. Indigenous Australian culture was and is maintained by oral tradition, some of this is incredibly old with estimations of Indigenous presence in Australia being at least 10 000 years and possibly as far back as 50-60k years. It would take some time to do a fuller amount of research on the subject, but with a brief quote from Wikipedia I can hopefully demonstrate that there at the very least Oral traditions that have claims of going back that far

There's an important difference between organizing secret operations deep in the government purely through non-recorded meetings and passing down a story. It's pretty hard to know when an oral tradition maintains fidelity, which is why writing stuff down is so important.

Maybe the general idea that a volcano erupted 34,000+ years ago survived through a story, but who knows how many little details were added and/or removed through the countless generations between, you can't exactly go back to the start and hear the first time the story was told. Maybe if two different group of people heard the story at the start, then separated and then met up you would be able to confirm nothing of the story changed,

For an historian, the fact that the idea of the volcano erupting survived thousands of years is notable enough and gives value to oral tradition, it doesn't matter if it was a cloudy or a sunny day before it happened.

For a super secret organization, the fact that aliens crash landed on Earth is not good enough, they need to know and keep track of every single detail. Someone making a simple mistake is always at risk of blowing the entire operation apart since every mistake builds up as nobody can corroborate with written records.

-"Hey Johnson, how are the details coming up for the operation on the fifth"
-"The fifth? I think you mean the sixth..."
-"No, we discussed it in last meeting, the sixth couldn't be done for XYZ reasons"
-"... we really should be writing this stuff down"

Another example is the bible itself, which even though it is written text, it was constantly rewritten by different members of the clergy. In just the span of a thousand years the bible is full of inconsistencies and differences due to mistakes by those that rewrote it, different interpretations of translations or even different interpretations of what the message should be. One of the most known cases of this is the wicked bible, which instead of saying "Thou shalt not commit adultery" it says "Thou shalt commit adultery", a single word and suddenly you are now morally obligated to cheat on your partner.

These are mistakes that happen when you constantly retell complex things, even when written down, the difference is that we can now read old versions of the bible, you can't rehear an old version of an oral tradition. A secret organization operating without any sort of records is just begging to collapse.

 

[NorCal Dave]

However, it is deeply hidden from the public. The Blue Book Project, ufologists and well-known names from the UFO world are just a show, while the real program is run by people that no one knows and leave no traces, because they rely on oral tradition. They pass on knowledge and talk about UFOs without recording anything, so it is impossible to find evidence of this. They even have a saying that when they start talking about the Program, they use the phrase "pencils up," which means that it is not recorded or written down.

If nothing else, this is the classic UFOlogy conspiracy theory taken to its ultimate extreme and as such is enlightening.

• The government coverup of aliens goes back at least 100 years and maybe longer.
• Nobody knows who any of the people involved are, despite this secret cabal having existed for at least 100 years or longer.
• The evidence is impossible to find. (sounds like the congressional hearings and SCIFs)

So, no witnesses and no evidence. Ever. What's the point? I've heard her on another more skeptical podcast, and I don't remember her going that far out. @Bronek was she actually claiming this is how it works or was she saying this is how UFOlogists THINK it works? As in, this is like a religion and here is the cannon. I've said before, I'm one of 5-10 middle aged, middle of the road, heterosexual males in the US that does NOT listen to Joe Rogan. It just seems like an hour of "bro" chat with no real questions or insights, so I don't see myself going and listening to this one.

IF she is making these claims as if they are real, it begs the question: How does she know any of this? If there is a secret cabal that leaves no trace, is totally unknowable and there is no evidence for them or what they do, how did a professor of Religious Studies find this out?

Here she is being interviewed by Toby Ball for season 3 of Strange Arrivals. It's just a random interview that he included after not using her stuff in the actual podcast series:


Source: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bonus-episode-diana-pasulka/id1502150213?i=1000615970373

 

[Ann K]

Nobody knows who any of the people involved are, despite this secret cabal having existed for at least 100 years or longer.

"Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead". And if nobody gets senile and tells the kids all about their experiences. And if nobody falls on hard times and decides to write a tell-all book to raise money. And if nobody gets drunk and decides to impress the boys in the bar with the secret programs they've worked on.
And the more people who work on a program, the more people can pass it on. An oral tradition, as in Australian Aboriginal lore, works well in the open, but is useless at keeping secrets.

OT: One of the stupidest concepts in "The DaVinci Code" (yes, I read it when it was on the best-seller list, and yes, that's a few hours of my life I'll never get back) was the notion that a secret could possibly exist for centuries with only one person knowing it, only to pass it on to a descendant on his deathbed. Given the number of ways in which a person could die (now, and in the Middle Ages), what's a person to do, tell the guy with the sword/knife/gun to wait a minute, he can't die yet until he passes on a message?

 

[NorCal Dave]

OT: One of the stupidest concepts in "The DaVinci Code" (yes, I read it when it was on the best-seller list, and yes, that's a few hours of my life I'll never get back) was the notion that a secret could possibly exist for centuries with only one person knowing it, only to pass it on to a descendant on his deathbed. Given the number of ways in which a person could die (now, and in the Middle Ages), what's a person to do, tell the guy with the sword/knife/gun to wait a minute, he can't die yet until he passes on a message?

OOT: The wife and I were just discussing The Davinci Code on the morning walk! Yeah, we read back in the day, but no I wasn't thrilled with it. He does have the Micheal Chritton style of rapid-fire storytelling, but as I had slogged through Umberto Ecco's Foucault's Pendulum a few times prior. Both books were takes on Holy Boold, Holy Grail, with Brown straight just coping the main premise and novelizing it while Ecco's much more difficult read was more of a musing on historical conspiracy thinking.

But yes, the notion that a small group of people have been accurately passing down information about UFOs for 100 years or more seems unlikely.....Wait a tick! As I was typing that, I realized that's actually MORE accurate. The current UFO flap with Grusch and congress and the rest is just what Pasulka described. There is NO evidence. The is NO files or writings. There is just the oral continuation of stories from a small group of people passing said stories around and taking them as gospel.

 

[RTM]

OOT: The wife and I were just discussing The Davinci Code on the morning walk! Yeah, we read back in the day, but no I wasn't thrilled with it. He does have the Micheal Chritton style of rapid-fire storytelling, but as I had slogged through Umberto Ecco's Foucault's Pendulum a few times prior. Both books were takes on Holy Boold, Holy Grail, with Brown straight just coping the main premise and novelizing it while Ecco's much more difficult read was more of a musing on historical conspiracy thinking.

But yes, the notion that a small group of people have been accurately passing down information about UFOs for 100 years or more seems unlikely.....Wait a tick! As I was typing that, I realized that's actually MORE accurate. The current UFO flap with Grusch and congress and the rest is just what Pasulka described. There is NO evidence. The is NO files or writings. There is just the oral continuation of stories from a small group of people passing said stories around and taking them as gospel.

It's not just the passing of stories, it is how doubters are treated. Looking at Mick's twitter feed is a bit depressing, constant accusations of psyops and being a paid government agent. Do they not have anything original to say for themselves?
There is also the underlying theme of doubters getting their comeuppance when the truth is finally revealed . . . . any day now.

 

[Bronek]

It's worth clarifying I don't think Pasulka is claiming that the UFO Program oral Tradition is 10 000 years old, just that there are Oral traditions that old. I don't think Bronek is making the argument that she is saying that either, it's confusingly phrased but the claim of a UFO Oral tradition is separate to the claim of 10000+ year old Oral traditions.

Exactly this. I am not a native speaker and for the longer text I often use translator (DeepL) so sometimes my expressions can be not so precise as I want, and maybe confusing, I am sorry.

As an Australian this jumped out at me. Indigenous Australian culture was and is maintained by oral tradition, some of this is incredibly old with estimations of Indigenous presence in Australia being at least 10 000 years and possibly as far back as 50-60k years. It would take some time to do a fuller amount of research on the subject, but with a brief quote from Wikipedia I can hopefully demonstrate that there at the very least Oral traditions that have claims of going back that far

I said:

I don't know of any such tradition, and if any oral stories arrive from the time before writing (usually from a few thousand years, not 10,000) they just arrive in fragments, in mere motifs or just in many different versions.

So yes, I know there are stories and oral traditions older than 10 000 years, but as I mentioned - they arrive in fragments, motifs or many different versions. Story about volcano eruption, great flood or comet impact can be stored, for sure, but I don't think you can store the details unchanged (that is why e.g. the belief in the veracity of the Platonic story of Atlantis is ridiculous, because it assumes that for about 6,000 years of oral transmission were to survive such details as the width of the various parts of the city.

IF she is making these claims as if they are real, it begs the question: How does she know any of this? If there is a secret cabal that leaves no trace, is totally unknowable and there is no evidence for them or what they do, how did a professor of Religious Studies find this out?

From an YouTube transcript:

33:34
to this is what I felt like happened to me so in 2012 after I started the study of UFOs I recognized that the management
33:41
of that that message of the UFO for the American public had been organized not
33:47
just from the 1940s but really from earlier from the from early 20th century
33:53
and once I started to recognize and even meet the people who were responsible for managing this in a very cohesive tight
34:01
way very specific that's when I recognized that it was that you know I
34:07
felt I felt it I guess that's the difference was that before I just saw it on the sideline you know like we talk
34:14
about it now you and I and it looks like we're talking about it from the sideline we're saying yeah this is really bad what they're doing and stuff but I was
34:20
part of it I I saw it I I know those people they talked to me about it they talked to me about why they were doing
34:26
it and they said Diana you you don't want to help these people they would
34:31
kill you if they if they you had something that they wanted like these are not good people is what they were
34:37
saying about these people specifically the general population they were talking about the general population the general
34:42
population would kill you that's what they were saying they were saying that these people only do good because they have to do good they are actually bad
34:50
and so this was the argument I was getting so it so it caused me to eject
34:55
these people from my life for one but also to to do you know to understand
35:01
more deeply and believe me I've already thought a lot about the problem of evil
35:06
you know I've spent my life reading about it and doing you know talking about it with people and you know what
35:12
can we do I recognize we can't do anything except work on ourselves and
35:18
that's where I had to reread some of those texts like the Plato text that I talked about who he talks about your
35:24
idea of evil that you know perhaps or calls it Injustice unjustice um and he
35:29
says that perhaps people are unjust just because you know there not needs to be
35:34
Injustice for other people to like recognize it and then to do this thing
35:40
you know how do we create a just Society that's his question right and I don't think he so he doesn't actually answer
35:46
that question with words but he does it through giving stories and one of the stories is the allegory of the cave
35:53
where you know that allegory it's it's like the Matrix right it's like like you know where people are in they're being
35:59
tied up and there's puppeteers who are showing them these Shadows on the wall and they take that for reality but
36:05
somehow some person gets out and they see well what he's talking about is this mystical tradition that you and I have
36:12
talked about early when we started talking we talked about if we do those
36:17
things that we love and we're carried away and we become you called you said it was obsessed you know you're obsessed
36:24
with it and I call it doing it because it's pretty awesome right that's my word for it yeah when you do that Justice
36:30
happens like you're not worried about you know so so we so it's almost like a an emergent phenomena from these
36:37
communities that do it and they're small communities so there is structural Injustice and they structural evil and
36:45
it doesn't seem like we can fight that's what I learned from doing the UFO I I learned that there were these things
36:50
UFOs but more intensely and more personally I learned that the government
36:56
was doing doing this and that's what was upsetting to me most so I want to take it back to that because a lot of this is
37:02
probably hard to follow for people that aren't like well read in this when you say that they have been
37:11
engineering or orchestrating public perception of this
37:16
experience from the beginning what's the earliest known instance of this okay so
37:21
the one that is unclassified is Project Blue Book and that's from 1950s
37:28
1952 but I know that and I and and I have to explain how one knows this so we
37:35
have documents that talk about Project Blue Book and that's the manage you know they're managing the perception the
37:41
public perception of UFOs goes back to like 47 even with Roswell and and that
37:46
kind of thing um there's another and this is what this is what I've found is
37:54
that there's an oral tradition that is part of the communities that run this run these
38:02
programs like the UFO programs right um and that it that information is carried
38:10
within people it's not written down they even have a word for not writing it down when they're going to have these
38:16
meetings they they have this special term and everybody puts down everything
38:21
you know what's the term I don't it's called it's called pencils up pencils up
38:27
yeah so pencils up means they're just going to discuss these things and then
38:33
the that's the only record of it it's yeah it's the oral tradition now why I
38:38
was able to look at this is because I had done work looking at Oral traditions in religious in religious communities
38:45
like oral Traditions go back 10,000 years whereas you know written Traditions are like 2,000 years old oral
38:52
Traditions are actually more accurate than we think they are we tend to think of it as telephone game um but you can get a lot of
39:00
information from oral traditions and this is actually how a lot of classified
39:05
information is kept through oral tradition especially in a very disciplined and structured environment
39:11
like highlevel military yeah so so they have a perception and one of the things
39:17
that you said earlier is that they think that the the the greater the the greater
39:23
population is not good and that they will turn on you that they're evil and well that's one faction so what I found
39:29
was that there were several different factions within the perception management of
39:35
UFOs and one of the factions was responsible for sadly harassing people
39:42
who do research and I found this out by being harassed how how so how were you harassed okay so you know here I am just
39:50
your average Professor doing their work and you know and doing it pretty well um
39:59
at my University uh I was the chair of my department um well regarded by my colleagues and students and never really
40:06
doing anything weird right um and then I start to study UFOs thinking that they're not real thinking that it's a
40:13
it's just a form a new form of religion and then quickly having people come into
40:19
my sphere research sphere who are you know part of CIA part of FBI that kind
40:25
of thing and then getting a shock that you know whoa this could be dangerous and maybe I shouldn't be doing this and
40:32
thinking you know but just simply because those people are contacting you or specific reasons why you would think
40:39
it's dangerous it indicated to me that there was something that I shouldn't maybe be doing that it could be
40:44
dangerous right that you could suffer consequences for your curiosity or for your research yeah and that they would
40:51
punish you or you could be punished or you be targeted yeah no most certainly I had done some research on UFOs by that
40:58
time of course and but what is it about the research and what is about what you
41:03
could possibly uncover that would be so dangerous okay so of course that's a
41:11
question that's loaded so I'm going to talk a little bit about I'll answer it in part okay so in
41:20
part this is before crash retrieval became a term that Congress used
41:26
right so I was um what year are we talking about so I started in 2012 okay

source:
Source: https://youtu.be/EK1-lkUtk4U?si=QDXBQGpveiLsbcYV

 

[NorCal Dave]

From an YouTube transcript:

It's still hard to get the context from this. I'll have to listen to it I guess. She's all over the place about people telling here about how UFO stories are managed, but they might be bad or evil and then Plato and the allegory of the cave and evil and I don't know what. If I take part of what she said and try to make it a bit more cohesive by omitting the various "ums" and "you knows" and reptations with ( ) to indicate where I removed stuff or added things to make it more readable we get this:

39:59
I was the chair of my department um well regarded by my colleagues and students and never really
doing anything weird right ( )

and then I start to study UFOs thinking that they're not real thinking that ( ) it's just a form a new form of religion and then quickly having people come into my ( ) research sphere who are you know part of CIA part of FBI that kind of thing and then getting a shock that you know whoa this could be dangerous and maybe I shouldn't be doing this ( )

(I was) thinking ( ) those people are contacting you or specific reasons why you would think it's dangerous it indicated to me that there was something that I shouldn't maybe be doing that it could be dangerous ( ) that you could suffer consequences for your curiosity or for your research ( ) and that they would punish you or you could be punished or you be targeted ( ) I had done some research on UFOs by that time of course and but what is it about the research and what is about, what you could possibly uncover that would be so dangerous ( ) of course that's a
question that's loaded so I'm going to talk a little bit about I'll answer ( ) so in part this is before crash retrieval became a term that Congress used
( ) what year are we talking about so I started in 2012 ( )

Content from External Source

Still not really clear, but we get the gist. She was teaching Religious Studies and decided to look into UFOs as a new religion and wrote a book about it, which is how I heard her in the afore mentioned podcast. Then at some point she gets contacted by or finds supposed ex-CIA and FBI folks that tell her that looking into this is "dangerous". Sounds like standard UFOlogy, and the MiBs. There's no evidence and if you try to find it you might get hurt.

It's very possible she is hearing from some of the same people involved in the Grusch case and AARO investigations.

 

[Mendel]

Then at some point she gets contacted by or finds supposed ex-CIA and FBI folks that tell her that looking into this is "dangerous". Sounds like standard UFOlogy, and the MiBs. There's no evidence and if you try to find it you might get hurt.

Grusch tells people it's dangerous, and he-s ex-intelligence. The problem here is that we know he intends this as a caution, when it might come across to others as a threat.

 

[Mendel]

Another example is the bible itself, which even though it is written text, it was constantly rewritten by different members of the clergy. In just the span of a thousand years the bible is full of inconsistencies and differences due to mistakes by those that rewrote it, different interpretations of translations or even different interpretations of what the message should be. One of the most known cases of this is the wicked bible, which instead of saying "Thou shalt not commit adultery" it says "Thou shalt commit adultery", a single word and suddenly you are now morally obligated to cheat on your partner.

Compare:

Article:

Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest Hebrew-language manuscripts of the Bible were Masoretic texts dating to the 10th century CE, such as the Aleppo Codex.[128]​ Today, the oldest known extant manuscripts of the Masoretic Text date from approximately the 9th century. The biblical manuscripts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls push that date back a full thousand years, to the 2nd century BCE.[129]​ This was a significant discovery for Old Testament scholars who anticipated that the Dead Sea Scrolls would either affirm or repudiate the reliability of textual transmission from the original texts to the oldest Masoretic texts at hand. The discovery demonstrated the unusual accuracy of transmission over a thousand-year period, rendering it reasonable to believe that current Old Testament texts are reliable copies of the original works.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls#Biblical_significance

The written bible has been transmitted very accurately.
There are different translations, which is why theologicians (and, in my country, clergy) must learn Latin and Hebrew.
The gospels were all written several decades after Jesus had died, likely not by eyewitnesses, and while there was some written tradition (e.g. like a presumed lost booklet of "Jesus's sayings"), much of it would've been oral.

Your example, in the "wicked bible", is a printing error that was caught, it did not affect the written tradition, and it was in a translation anyway. I don't think you can claim that the bible we have today deviates from the original.

 

[jarlrmai]

was she actually claiming this is how it works or was she saying this is how UFOlogists THINK it works?

This is what I can't work out with Pasulka, sometimes I read what she has said and it sounds like she's describing a belief system she studied, and sometimes she sounds like she's part of it.

 

[Skalman]

Exactly this. I am not a native speaker and for the longer text I often use translator (DeepL) so sometimes my expressions can be not so precise as I want, and maybe confusing, I am sorry.

I said:

So yes, I know there are stories and oral traditions older than 10 000 years, but as I mentioned - they arrive in fragments, motifs or many different versions. Story about volcano eruption, great flood or comet impact can be stored, for sure, but I don't think you can store the details unchanged (that is why e.g. the belief in the veracity of the Platonic story of Atlantis is ridiculous, because it assumes that for about 6,000 years of oral transmission were to survive such details as the width of the various parts of the city.

It is also ridiculous to believe in veracity of the story of Atlantis because it was clearly an invention of Plato, not meant to be taken literally but as a conceptual powerful enemy state to be compared to his ideal state of ancient Athens.

With regards to oral traditions, I am of the opinion that in societies that relied heavily on it until fairly recently (mainly indigenous people who were colonized), it is often more accurate than Western scholars used to give it credit to, something that seems to be changing slowly as more and more indigenous academics are given positions and resources to study their own history and culture at universities. You also have means of communication and record keeping that somewhat straddles the bridge between oral and written word such as quipu in Andean cultures and wampum amongst the Eastern Woodland indigenous peoples of North America, most famously in The Great Law of Peace of the Haudenosaunee.

But it is of course far from perfect, just as (and when it comes to exact record-keeping, in my opinion clearly inferior to) the written word and can be corrupted and changed intentionally for political reasons like any other information. Much of what we know of the Old Norse religion was written down by Christian scholars, mainly monks, and that antagonistic filter has to be considered when one uses those sources to make claims.

Oral (and written accounts of presumed oral) tradition can be many things: laws, history, propaganda, myth. But a method for passing down a closely guarded secret? No. Though there are traditions amongst some cultures to not share certain oral accounts with outsiders, that usually has to do with things seen as sacred, not secret per see. And it has also been influenced by a history of indigenous people feeling betrayed by historians and anthropologists who they shared the knowledge with on the presumption that they would respect their wishes on how the information should be handled.

Suffice to say, I believe that if any people had a secret ancient alliance with an extraterrestial species (who I assume would be vastly superior when it comes to their technology) they would have used it to not get conquered, or if it was more of an informal contact, someone would have leaked the information to someone else. Human history is awash with traitors, spies and collaborators. The already ridiculous idea of an oral secret-keeping cabal gets even more ridiculous if that is taken into account. People were willing to betray their people and change religion and their whole way of life, but no one back then, or since, has been willing to give up the ancient visitors from Alpha Centauri?

 

[Calter]

The discovery demonstrated the unusual accuracy of transmission over a thousand-year period, rendering it reasonable to believe that current Old Testament texts are reliable copies of the original works.
The written bible has been transmitted very accurately.
There are different translations, which is why theologicians (and, in my country, clergy) must learn Latin and Hebrew.
The gospels were all written several decades after Jesus had died, likely not by eyewitnesses, and while there was some written tradition (e.g. like a presumed lost booklet of "Jesus's sayings"), much of it would've been oral.
Your example, in the "wicked bible", is a printing error that was caught, it did not affect the written tradition, and it was in a translation anyway. I don't think you can claim that the bible we have today deviates from the original.

I wasn't trying to imply that the bible we have now suddenly has a completely new meaning, my point is that while the overall message still stands (love god, he did these miracles to these people and these plagues to these people, etc.). But there are still mistakes, biblical interpretations and translation interpretations that build up and cause confusion or just further mistakes. For example, the King James's bible was partially made because King James didn't like the current translation, I would recommend reading the history section of that Wikipedia article since it goes through different versions of the bible, some of which were banned (I don't want to quote it since it would clutter up my post).

Article:

The newly crowned King James convened the Hampton Court Conference in 1604. That gathering proposed a new English version in response to the perceived problems of earlier translations as detected by the Puritan faction of the Church of England. Here are three examples of problems the Puritans perceived with the Bishops and Great Bibles:

First, Galatians iv. 25 (from the Bishops' Bible). The Greek word susoichei is not well translated as now it is, bordereth neither expressing the force of the word, nor the apostle's sense, nor the situation of the place. Secondly, psalm cv. 28 (from the Great Bible), 'They were not obedient;' the original being, 'They were not disobedient.' Thirdly, psalm cvi. 30 (also from the Great Bible), 'Then stood up Phinees and prayed,' the Hebrew hath, 'executed judgment.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version

These kinds of disputes are obviously made more common by the fact that the text also went through different languages and a lot of people and cultures, but there's also many "factions" if you will based on the many interpretations that people have over the same texts.

More importantly, my point is that these tiny mistakes or differences are completely unacceptable for a supersecret society lasting over a century, the mere possibility of this is a huge risk and it's just a matter of time until they tear each other apart due to mistakes or differences in how the phenomena is handled, not having the objective truth of events written somewhere will just speed up the process. As you note, we can tell the accuracy of biblical translations due to having access to older texts, this is not possible with a purely oral tradition and correcting past mistakes just becomes more and more difficult.


As a sidenote, here's an interesting video about mistakes in the bible caused by translation errors. As a notable example from the video, at (6:31), the phrase "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" may be the product of a typo and that instead of "camel" it should be "rope" because the greek word for each is just one letter away. There's another theory that "eye of the needle" was just a gate in Jerusalem which camels had to squeeze through, but it goes to show just how one mistake can suddenly cause people to invent the existence of a gate to explain it or simply that the possibility of mistake can make people not be sure what's actually true.

 

[Mendel]

But there are still mistakes, biblical interpretations and translation interpretations that build up and cause confusion or just further mistakes.

The point of my post was to explain that they did not "build up".

 

[Tezcatlipoca]

It's worth clarifying I don't think Pasulka is claiming that the UFO Program oral Tradition is 10 000 years old, just that there are Oral traditions that old. I don't think Bronek is making the argument that she is saying that either, it's confusingly phrased but the claim of a UFO Oral tradition is separate to the claim of 10000+ year old Oral traditions.



As an Australian this jumped out at me. Indigenous Australian culture was and is maintained by oral tradition, some of this is incredibly old with estimations of Indigenous presence in Australia being at least 10 000 years and possibly as far back as 50-60k years. It would take some time to do a fuller amount of research on the subject, but with a brief quote from Wikipedia I can hopefully demonstrate that there at the very least Oral traditions that have claims of going back that far

Article:

Cultural traditions and beliefs as well as historical tellings of actual events are passed down in Aboriginal oral tradition, also known loosely as oral history (although the latter has a more specific definition). Some of the stories are many thousands of years old. In a study published in February 2020, new evidence produced using radiometric dating showed that both Budj Bim and Tower Hill volcanoes erupted at least 34,000 years ago.[1] Significantly, this is a "minimum age constraint for human presence in Victoria", and also could be interpreted as evidence for the Gunditjmara oral histories which tell of volcanic eruptions being some of the oldest oral traditions in existence.[2] An axe found underneath volcanic ash in 1947 was also proof that humans inhabited the region before the eruption of Tower Hill.[1]

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_culture

I'm not speaking of oral traditions, I'm speaking of the claimed "UFO program" which is claimed as a literal program, not an oral tradition.

 

[FatPhil]

I don't think you can claim that the bible we have today deviates from the original.

I can, trivially. The bible of my upbringing deviates from the bible of my girlfriend's upbringing. And I mean it fundamentally differs - it has different books. One of them must have fundamentally deviated from "the original" (a concept you have not defined, and will find impossible to define in a non-contradictory way), else how could they be so different?

I'll go to a local church and try to find the prayer of Manasseh in the bible there. If you are so convinced bibles have such great commonality, can you tell me whether I will find the passage, and if so, where? To make things more fun, can I select the church after you've given your answers?

 

[FatPhil]

As a sidenote, here's an interesting video about mistakes in the bible caused by translation errors. As a notable example from the video, at (6:31), the phrase "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" may be the product of a typo and that instead of "camel" it should be "rope" because the greek word for each is just one letter away. There's another theory that "eye of the needle" was just a gate in Jerusalem which camels had to squeeze through, but it goes to show just how one mistake can suddenly cause people to invent the existence of a gate to explain it or simply that the possibility of mistake can make people not be sure what's actually true.

One word? That's a mere mote. If you want a whole 2-by-4, there's always the pericope adulterae.

 

[Ann K]

The written bible has been transmitted very accurately.

No, your source says

The discovery demonstrated the unusual accuracy of transmission over a thousand-year period, rendering it reasonable to believe that current Old Testament texts are reliable copies of the original works.

Content from External Source

"Reasonable to believe" does not mean "very".

The point of my post was to explain that they did not "build up".

Assumes facts not in evidence. We do not have originals. We have copies, many of them in extremely small fragments. It's impossible to determine from that whether or not errors accumulated (or indeed whether they were accurate reports in the first place).

Much the same can be said about UFO reports that consist of eyewitness testimony. They start as "what the person thought he saw", go through "what the person SAID he saw" (the first time, and in subsequent retellings), then the passing down of the story through the people he told, etc. There's no evidence, nothing to be analyzed, no facts or materials that can clarify the story, but a thousand ways it can be changed.

 

[Mendel]

The bible of my upbringing deviates from the bible of my girlfriend's upbringing. And I mean it fundamentally differs - it has different books. One of them must have fundamentally deviated from "the original" (a concept you have not defined, and will find impossible to define in a non-contradictory way), else how could they be so different?

Article:

The biblical apocrypha (from Ancient Greek ἀπόκρυφος (apókruphos) 'hidden') denotes the collection of apocryphal ancient books thought to have been written some time between 200 BC and AD 100.[1][2][3][4][5] The Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches include some or all of the same texts within the body of their version of the Old Testament, with Catholics terming them deuterocanonical books.[6] Traditional 80-book Protestant Bibles include fourteen books in an intertestamental section between the Old Testament and New Testament called the Apocrypha, deeming these useful for instruction, but non-canonical.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_apocrypha

The bible is a collection of books. Which books to include in this collection as orthodox teachings is a political decision by a church body; the books themselves didn't get "lost" or have deviations. This issue has nothing to do with the accuracy of written tradition.

Assumes facts not in evidence. We do not have originals. We have copies, many of them in extremely small fragments. It's impossible to determine from that whether or not errors accumulated (or indeed whether they were accurate reports in the first place).

Not really. All the evidence we have points to accurate tradition of the texts; none of the evidence points to errors accumulating over time. The fact that the evidence is not as complete you would wish does not detract from the fact that the claim "the bible accumulated errors over time" has no evidence going for it. Follow the evidence.
It is the "errors" claim that assumes facts not in evidence.

 

[Ann K]

The fact that the evidence is not as complete you would wish does not detract from the fact that the claim "the bible accumulated errors over time" has no evidence going for it. Follow the evidence.
It is the "errors" claim that assumes facts not in evidence.

I didn't make that claim; I said it was impossible to determine if that was the case. You were the one to claim errors did not build up, so the burden of proof is on you.

 

[Mauro]

I don't know much about the Old Testament, but in the case of the New Testament these are just the first examples of different textual traditions which came to my mind:

The Gospel of Mark has three different endings (Wikipedia), one ends at verse 16:8, the other two add two different endings:

The two oldest manuscripts of Mark 16 (from the 300s) conclude with verse 8, which ends with the women fleeing from the empty tomb, and saying "nothing to anyone, because they were too frightened".[note 1][2]

Textual critics have identified two distinct alternative endings: the "Longer Ending" (verses 9–20) and the unversed "Shorter Ending" or "lost ending",[3] which appear together in six Greek manuscripts, and in dozens of Ethiopic copies. Modern versions of the New Testament generally include the Longer Ending, but place it in brackets or otherwise format it to show that it was not part of the original text.

Content from External Source

There are two versions of the Acts of the Apostles, differing in length. Only the shorter one was canonized (Wikipedia):

There are two major textual variants of Acts, the Western text-type and the Alexandrian. The oldest complete Alexandrian manuscripts date from the 4th century and the oldest Western ones from the 6th, with fragments and citations going back to the 3rd. Western texts of Acts are 6.2–8.4% longer than Alexandrian texts, the additions tending to enhance the Jewish rejection of the Messiah and the role of the Holy Spirit, in ways that are stylistically different from the rest of Acts.[17] The majority of scholars prefer the Alexandrian (shorter) text-type over the Western as the more authentic, but this same argument would favour the Western over the Alexandrian for the Gospel of Luke, as in that case the Western version is the shorter

Content from External Source

There is also a big number of textual variants in the original Greek manuscripts themselves (Wikipedia):

John Mill's 1707 Greek New Testament was estimated to contain some 30,000 variants in its accompanying textual apparatus[7] which was based on "nearly 100 [Greek] manuscripts."[8] Eberhard Nestle estimated this number in 1897 as 150,000–200,000 variants.[9] In 2005, Bart D. Ehrman reported estimates from 200,000 to 400,000 variants based on 5,700 Greek and 10,000 Latin manuscripts, various other ancient translations, and quotations by the Church Fathers.[10] In 2014 Eldon J. Epp raised the estimate as high as 750,000.[11] Peter J. Gurry puts the number of non-spelling variants among New Testament manuscripts around 500,000, though he acknowledges his estimate is higher than all previous ones.

Content from External Source

And, even if it's true that, in general...

Most of the variations are not significant and some common alterations include the deletion, rearrangement, repetition, or replacement of one or more words when the copyist's eye returns to a similar word in the wrong location of the original text. If their eye skips to an earlier word, they may create a repetition (error of dittography). If their eye skips to a later word, they may create an omission. They may resort to performing a rearranging of words to retain the overall meaning without compromising the context. In other instances, the copyist may add text from memory from a similar or parallel text in another location. Otherwise, they may also replace some text of the original with an alternative reading. Spellings occasionally change. Synonyms may be substituted. A pronoun may be changed into a proper noun (such as "he said" becoming "Jesus said"). Most of these variants are not of any importance, since the meanings do not really change.

Origen, writing in the 3rd century, was one of the first who made remarks about differences between manuscripts of texts that were eventually collected as the New Testament. He declared his preferences among variant readings. For example, in Matthew 27:16–17,[1] he favored "Barabbas" against "Jesus Barabbas"[2] In John 1:28,[3] he preferred "Bethabara" over "Bethany" as the location where John was baptizing.[4] "Gergeza" was preferred over "Geraza" or "Gadara".[5] At Hebrews 2:9,[6] Origen noticed two different readings: "apart from God" and "by the grace of God".

Content from External Source

...it's also true some of the variations may not be trivial at all (*). And, in any case, the existence of hundreds of thousand of variants is a sign, in my opinion, that the transmission of the New Testament texts was not accurate (**).

(*) For instance, the difference (see the wiki quote above about Origen) between the reading "Barabbas" and "Jesus Barabbas" is significant (no need to discuss this here in this thread).

(**) If this is the situation of the original Greek manuscripts, imagine what the innumerable translations have then done. As is said, "noone can say to have read the New Testament if he did not read the original Greek" (not that I can do that). And notice there is in fact no 'original' Greek: there are only lots of manuscripts, each differing from the others in some points.

 

[FatPhil]

The bible is ...

There you go using a singular noun again. Why?

 

[Todd Feinman]

I think the interdimensional hypothesis for UFOs wouldn't really hold up mathematically; at least with our current understanding of other dimensions. I think what many ufologists mean when they invoke other dimensions is some sort of other reality that somehow intersects with ours. Not from other universes in the multiverse either.

 

[Haliate2854]

I think the interdimensional hypothesis for UFOs wouldn't really hold up mathematically; at least with our current understanding of other dimensions. I think what many ufologists mean when they invoke other dimensions is some sort of other reality that somehow intersects with ours. Not from other universes in the multiverse either.

I'm not sure exactly how they think they work, but from what I can recall they have been suggesting and saying they're from another planet, but use interdimensional means of travel, which I don't even know if that makes sense.
Forgive me I don't remember where I heard it, but its basically giving "magic" as an answer as to how aliens could traverse such a vast distances.
There thinking of things like "warp drives", fictional speculative technology, IIRC they don't think they're from another dimension, but that they use interdimensional travel, but again I'm not even sure if that makes sense haha maybe somebody else smarter than myself could explain it.

 

[Todd Feinman]

I think the idea is that they are able to amplify gravity waves to t he point where spacetime is folded to such a degree that they are able to jump to a distant point, while using very little energy. I'm not sure how practicable that would be.

 

[NorCal Dave]

Just me, but arguing exactly how accurate various version of the Bible are seems a bit off topic. On topic, the Bible is an example of written record that can be examined over centuries to see how well it has fared over time, something that's much more difficult for oral traditions.

Additionally, I would argue there are 2 parts involved. 1. How accurate was something passed down orally or written and 2. How accurate was what was passed down. Assuming the Dead Sea Scrolls help indicate that the Old Testament (OT) was pretty accurately copied over the centuries, how accurate was the information that was passed down?

I'm going to summarize a bit here as this is tangential and I'd have open my Kindle for Mac app and try to find the relevant passages, but in

The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts​

the authors make the argument that most of the OT was compiled during the Babylonian exile, ~598-539 BCE, and the further back one goes time wise the less accurate or at least vague, it becomes historically. So, the stories of the Patriarchs and the Exodus have little to no archaeological or contemporaneous evidence related to them. By the later parts of the chronological books, I & II Samual, I & II Kings and I & II Chronicles there is increasing references and evidence in writings of the Egyptian, Assyrian, Hittite and other cultures of the area, as well as archaeological evidence that correspond to what is in the OT. Which makes sense as these events are closer in time to the Babylonian conquest and compiling of the OT.

So, with something like the OT, we can debate how accurate it was passed down as well as how accurate what was passed down might be. And this is with centuries of written records, that I would think make Pasulka's claim that oral traditions going back 10s of centuries are very accurate a bit dubious. How does one test any of that? And accurate how? The way they were transmitted or what they were transmitting?

 

[Tezcatlipoca]

I can, trivially. The bible of my upbringing deviates from the bible of my girlfriend's upbringing. And I mean it fundamentally differs - it has different books. One of them must have fundamentally deviated from "the original" (a concept you have not defined, and will find impossible to define in a non-contradictory way), else how could they be so different?

I'll go to a local church and try to find the prayer of Manasseh in the bible there. If you are so convinced bibles have such great commonality, can you tell me whether I will find the passage, and if so, where? To make things more fun, can I select the church after you've given your answers?

One could technically point out a lot of translations away from the Hebrew written version contain inaccuracies in translation too, since say, the English translations cannot have predated it, the points of deviation in the English translation can absolutely be held as fundamentally differing, especially since they tend to lack any notation of its original translation or its meaning.

Bit of a smaller example but you have a lot of English folks who take "Thou shalt not kill" very seriously, even to the extent of disconsidering things like self-defense (if it results in a death), and participating in military service that could involve combat. This is especially more true of the debate with military service, the self defense one is a much smaller view comparatively.
In Hebrew, the actual word used in reference to this matter is lo tirtsah, which is more accurately "Thou shall not murder" since -tsah roots from Ratsah (murder).
Christianized versions of the bible began to make the switch to reference "kill" and "killing" as early as the 1880s (earliest known was the Young Literals Translation)
Unless explicitly taught otherwise, a lot of people take this to a form that is inaccurate from the root writings, because the writing in the book itself fundamentally does differ without notation.

 

[Ann K]

And this is with centuries of written records, that I would think make Pasulka's claim that oral traditions going back 10s of centuries are very accurate a bit dubious. How does one test any of that?

As cited by @JimJam, aboriginal stories of volcano eruptions seem to have been corroborated by the age of the volcanic ash layer. That is a physical fact that allows the basic story to be tested. That, of course, indicates only that it happened, not that any narrative about the eruption has details that have remained unchanged.

As far as the bible goes, I don't think we even have that much. Some aspects appear to agree with known historical events (although the precise dates may differ from that given in other sources), but that's relatively trivial; it's not really meant to be a history book. The only thing that is significant about the whole thing is the supernatural stuff, the miracles, and those are things for which there is not a scrap of evidence.

 

[Mendel]

The only thing that is significant about the whole thing is the supernatural stuff, the miracles

On the contrary, the significance (and staying power) of the biblical texts is the people. Every religion strives to answer questions that science can't, about meaning and the right way to live. These are human issues, very natural.

 

[Ann K]

On the contrary, the significance (and staying power) of the biblical texts is the people. Every religion strives to answer questions that science can't, about meaning and the right way to live. These are human issues, very natural.

It's not a sociology text, either. And if the "right way to live" is to stone your insolent children to death, or slaughter all of the enemies (but keep the virgin females for yourself), or send a bear to kill a whole gang of children for mocking your bald head, or any of a hundred of other gruesome anecdotes from the bible, these are NOT the way that I want to see modern society behaving.

 

[NorCal Dave]

As cited by @JimJam, aboriginal stories of volcano eruptions seem to have been corroborated by the age of the volcanic ash layer. That is a physical fact that allows the basic story to be tested. That, of course, indicates only that it happened, not that any narrative about the eruption has details that have remained unchanged.

As far as the bible goes, I don't think we even have that much. Some aspects appear to agree with known historical events (although the precise dates may differ from that given in other sources), but that's relatively trivial; it's not really meant to be a history book. The only thing that is significant about the whole thing is the supernatural stuff, the miracles, and those are things for which there is not a scrap of evidence.

I'm just going by the archaeological and contemporaneous evidence presented in the book I referenced, and trying not to get into a debate about the overall accuracy or moral (or lack thereof) teachings of the Bible, as that is decidedly off topic.

In this case the Biblical OT gives us a chance to compare how well the WRITTEN versions were passed down through history, something that is very difficult in ORAL traditions. Whether what is correctly or incorrectly passed down is historically accurate is another matter and the teachings contained therein are an entirely different matter.

Here, I would think, the Bible is being used as reference, giving that Paluska's claim is that oral traditions from 100s to 10,000s of years are reliably accurate. An oral tradition may pass along a veiled recollection about a major cataclysmic event, such as volcanic eruption, as does the Bible recount a, if not THE, flood. But as a written record one can compare how well it was passed on and how accurate, or not, it was historically.

There doesn't appear to be much archaeological or contemporaneous evidence for the OT stories about King Saul, King David or even King Soloman's "empire", much less the patriarchs, though the Dead Sea Scrolls indicate that those stories were passed down fairly accurately, at least from the 2nd century BCE. Likewise, the OT stories of the Northern Kingdom of Israel being sacked and overtaken by the Assyrians Sennacherib and/or Tiglath Pileser III (I might have these guys a bit mixed up), King Josiah engaging and being killed by Pharaoh Necho and the sacking of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar II were, more or less passed down accurately and seem to historically align with archaeology and the writings of other peoples in the area.

Aside from large environmental occurrences, like floods and volcanos, I don't see how one makes similar comparisons to oral traditions. Where does one even start, as everything is oral, all one can work with is the most current story, or the written version of oral stories gong back maybe a few hundred years? That means whatever written versions of said oral histories one is using, they are already colored by the people doing the writing.

All that to say, the idea that a cabal of unaccountable government hacks are reliably passing on secret UFO stories for 100s of years is nonsense.

 

[FatPhil]

One could technically point out a lot of translations away from the Hebrew written version contain inaccuracies in translation too, since say, the English translations cannot have predated it, the points of deviation in the English translation can absolutely be held as fundamentally differing, especially since they tend to lack any notation of its original translation or its meaning.

Bit of a smaller example but you have a lot of English folks who take "Thou shalt not kill" very seriously, even to the extent of disconsidering things like self-defense (if it results in a death), and participating in military service that could involve combat. This is especially more true of the debate with military service, the self defense one is a much smaller view comparatively.
In Hebrew, the actual word used in reference to this matter is lo tirtsah, which is more accurately "Thou shall not murder" since -tsah roots from Ratsah (murder).
Christianized versions of the bible began to make the switch to reference "kill" and "killing" as early as the 1880s (earliest known was the Young Literals Translation)
Unless explicitly taught otherwise, a lot of people take this to a form that is inaccurate from the root writings, because the writing in the book itself fundamentally does differ without notation.

Yup, there's plenty of misunderstanding that's crept in. Right near that example is another: the "thou shalt have no other gods before me" is not "thou shalt have no other gods", it's specifically "before me", i.e. "in front of me", or "in my presence", or more specifically "in my temple". Leave your other gods at the door, please.

 

[yoshy]

Responding a little late here but I have some recommendations relating to many of these above posts. William G. Dever, a critical scholar of the Bible and archaeology relating to ancient Israel, has written a book meant for lay people titled Has Archaeology Buried the Bible? The book details how archaeological evidence and literary analysis back up or refute the Hebrew Bible (primarily focusing on archaeology as you might suspect from the title). Spoiler: the answer is yes, no, maybe, sometimes. Many stories are shown to be completely false, likely false, possible and "true". I put true in quotes because the genre in much of the Hebrew Bible (outside of myths, allegories, poems, etc) is what Dever calls "propagandistic history", meaning there are stories in the Hebrew Bible that are partly true but reported with the bias from the authors.

 

[Landru]

Responding a little late here but I have some recommendations relating to many of these above posts. William G. Dever, a critical scholar of the Bible and archaeology relating to ancient Israel, has written a book meant for lay people titled Has Archaeology Buried the Bible? The book details how archaeological evidence and literary analysis back up or refute the Hebrew Bible (primarily focusing on archaeology as you might suspect from the title). Spoiler: the answer is yes, no, maybe, sometimes. Many stories are shown to be completely false, likely false, possible and "true". I put true in quotes because the genre in much of the Hebrew Bible (outside of myths, allegories, poems, etc) is what Dever calls "propagandistic history", meaning there are stories in the Hebrew Bible that are partly true but reported with the bias from the authors.

This probably deserves its own thread rather than drawing this one off topic.

 

[John J.]

Bit of a smaller example but you have a lot of English folks who take "Thou shalt not kill" very seriously, even to the extent of disconsidering things like self-defense (if it results in a death), and participating in military service that could involve combat.

Why specifically English folks?
I don't think of the UK as a particularly pacifist nation- probably rather less so than many other European states.
Like in many other nations, there are (some) Quakers, Jehovah's Witnesses, Bahais and committed humanists who are resolutely against the use of force, but they're (for better or worse) not numerous enough to shape national policy (although the example set by some Quakers in particular is widely respected).

 

[Bonky]

If nothing else, this is the classic UFOlogy conspiracy theory taken to its ultimate extreme and as such is enlightening.

• The government coverup of aliens goes back at least 100 years and maybe longer.
• Nobody knows who any of the people involved are, despite this secret cabal having existed for at least 100 years or longer.
• The evidence is impossible to find. (sounds like the congressional hearings and SCIFs)

So, no witnesses and no evidence. Ever. What's the point? I've heard her on another more skeptical podcast, and I don't remember her going that far out. @Bronek was she actually claiming this is how it works or was she saying this is how UFOlogists THINK it works? As in, this is like a religion and here is the cannon. I've said before, I'm one of 5-10 middle aged, middle of the road, heterosexual males in the US that does NOT listen to Joe Rogan. It just seems like an hour of "bro" chat with no real questions or insights, so I don't see myself going and listening to this one.

IF she is making these claims as if they are real, it begs the question: How does she know any of this? If there is a secret cabal that leaves no trace, is totally unknowable and there is no evidence for them or what they do, how did a professor of Religious Studies find this out?

Here she is being interviewed by Toby Ball for season 3 of Strange Arrivals. It's just a random interview that he included after not using her stuff in the actual podcast series:


Source: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bonus-episode-diana-pasulka/id1502150213?i=1000615970373

Hello fellow 5-10 non-JRE consumer.

I'm an archeology/paleontology addict and so between lectures on YouTube, the algorithm will serve up a little JoeBro content with a heaping helping of G. Hancock.

The one and only time I unbeknownst clicked, my blood pressure spiked and the neighbors were treated to an expletive tirade at deafening decibels through the walls and out the windows.

Never again.