Showing posts with label Jacques Vallée. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jacques Vallée. Show all posts

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Jacques Vallée trolling the Web

Jacques Vallée seems to be hard at work to change our perception of the Paranormal, a perception he helped create all those years ago with his meme-generating Passport to Magonia. In a recent series of articles in BoingBoing he goes on to claim that all crop circles can be explained by army experiments on directed microwave weapons. Weird, right? After his first post generated a heated argument thread, his second post starts with this:
My previous post about crop circles could be considered, among other things, as a social science test of the role of belief systems in the manipulation of memes and factual data. One of the meta-questions that interest me has to do with the spontaneous rejection of new or unpopular ideas, even in the supposedly open, free and consciousness-enhancing environment of the web.
The general rule among UFOlogists, up until now was DON'T GENERATE FALSE MEMES, which means don't do to others what you have been suspecting the Government is doing to you.
If his plan was to create a heated debate, then he succeeded, but I just don't see the point. I cannot even begin to recite the counter-arguments to his ideas, and some of the best are in the comments below the posts.
So, in case you didn't know: all crop circles are created either by low-orbit satellites carrying microwave guns or by crazed mathematicians. There must be thousands of them around us. Check your local math club. I will.
That was really disappointing, but the disillusionment was refreshing.

Nice article on forgetomori and hat tip