Greg of The Daily Grail interviews Nick Redfern about his book “Body Snatchers in the Desert” , the thesis being the 1947 Roswell Incident wasn’t about aliens, Project Mogul or any other cockamamee story the Air Force has dreamed up:

TDG: The standard debunking line on Roswell is now the USAF’s Project Mogul explanation (along with the tangential ‘bodies’ explanation being crash test dummies from experiments in the ’50s). Why should this explanation be rejected in favour of more ‘exotic’ theories?

NR: Well, I’m not sure that the theory outlined to me is actually that exotic. For example, of the 7 or 8 experiments I was told were undertaken in New Mexico that had a Japanese link, most were just high-altitude type experiments using very large balloon arrays, but with people on board. In other words, aside from one very rudimentary experiment that was linked with the Nuclear Energy for Propulsion of Aircraft (NEPA) people, everything was balloon-based and glider-based experimentation, and not anything really advanced or exotic technology-wise. So, just like Mogul ironically, these balloons themselves weren’t classified – it was what the controversial nature of what they were allegedly being used for that was classified: namely, high-altitude flights to determine various effects on the human-body. And, as one of the sources who I interviewed for the book told me: what better way to hide a classified balloon-based experiment, than by hiding it behind another classified balloon-based experiment?

Ironically, all the people I interviewed agreed with the USAF stance that Roswell involved a secret balloon flight. But it was the nature of the secret balloon activity (Mogul vs Japanese) that they disagreed upon. As for the crash-test dummies: I think even a lot of the outright skeptics were puzzled by that theory. My own view is that the “dummy” report actually only served to make people (even the media) think that something else really was being hidden.

Basically Mr. Redfern’s theory is that the US government used old Japanese prisoners of war and severely disabled folks in high-altitude balloon experiments to study the effects of near-vacuum environments on the human body.

Pretty nasty eh?

Just like the Nazis using political prisoners and persecuted people in their scientific studies.

As Redfern said in his interview, “…as one of the sources who I interviewed for the book told me: what better way to hide a classified balloon-based experiment, than by hiding it behind another classified balloon-based experiment?”

And what better way to hide such a horrendous project than behind a UFO myth?

New Roswell Revelations

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Why do mainstream scientists dismiss claims of catastrophism as a part of nature in how our Universe works and say instead everything tends toward stability?

Folks at Thunderbolts.info say it’s an Aristotelian Hangover:

In his dialogues, Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, had happily speculated about cyclical episodes of destruction both on earth and on a cosmic level. One of his main interests was to incorporate ancient traditions about a reversal of the sun, a worldwide flood or a consuming fire into models that made scientific sense. For Plato, the realm of absolute, immutable perfection was not that of the stars and planets, but lay outside the material world altogether.

His junior, Aristotle, would have none of this. Downplaying any traditions about global floods and fires, Aristotle regarded the spheres of stars and planets themselves as unalterable, immune to any form of decay or change. To such lengths would he go that even comets were removed from their place among the planets and relegated to the ‘elemental’ region below the moon, where meteors and auroras belong! If Plato had no qualms to contemplate catastrophes, Aristotle was an out-and-out uniformitarian thinker – a contrast lucidly discussed by the British historian, Peter James, among others.

Intriguingly, this change in sentiments seems to have repeated itself on a larger scale among post-medieval scholars in Europe. When Renaissance savants first rediscovered Greek literature, Platonic philosophy was all the mode, often tinged with Gnostic or Hermetic notions. During this time, the likes of William Whiston and Sir Edmond Halley felt no compunction to entertain the thought of comets precipitating the global flood of Noah or the tilting of the rotational axis.

The seeds for change were sown when Gottfried Leibniz, a cardiac Aristotelian, declared with overweening confidence that natura non facit saltus, ‘nature does not make a leap’, and worked with zeal on the theory of a great continuous ‘chain of being’ that would join all forms of life. This anti-catastrophist attitude snowballed into a movement culminating in the 19th century in the paradigms of steady evolution championed by Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin and a host of minor figures, which overshadowed any remaining catastrophists completely.

Recently, classic Darwinism has been taken to task because the “steady evolution” paradigm evidence is lacking and a more chaotic “web” of evolution seems to be what the fossil record and DNA evidence indicates.

Times are a-changin’?

An Aristotelian Hangover

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