UFOs and how these discoveries change our perceptions

This lecture formally begins the UFO course. We start in 1947 in Roswell. Over 77 witnesses either are on record as seeing the crash site, the bodies, the caskets,  or the debris. Here we also review one piece of debris found, the Roswell Foil, a mysterious piece of metallic material with was virtually indestructible. Over 46 people world-wide have come in contact with it, including the professor of this course, who had a chance to interact with it in 1965.  The remainder of this lecture looks verbal testimony from experts about UFOs (pilots, navigators, scientists,) and also looks at the work of skeptic and debunkers.

This is the second lecture that takes the student through the most highly corroborated UFO stories in history. While the text, The Roswell Foil, mentions many more, this lecture covers the Phoenix Lights, the encounter over Iceland, all the way up to the recent Pentagon releases of 2020. The conclusion is that there are over 500 witnesses to UFO phenomena, and, if there were an honest and open congressional hearing, the conclusion that extraterrestrials have visited Earth and continue to visit would be just north of incontrovertible.

This lecture takes us on a deeper journey. As we start to see how thick the academic bias is against the UFO phenomenon, we realize that our perceptions of the world are all set to change.  Archeological, biological, and historical implications are explored. We look at the pyramids of Egypt, Mexico and China, their alignment to the constellation of Orion; we journey to Baalbek, to rock paintings, and to myriad other references to ancient visitors. This lecture is an exciting journey of discovery.

This lecture begins by taking us to a place we have not explored. "If UFOs are real, and we accept that, then what other questions should we be asking?"  The answer is "Who are they?" and "Why are they here?"  These questions have rarely been asked by serious scholars. Surely the National Enquirer has played this game with us, but serious minded scholars are few and far between here. We investigate three, two tenured professors and one storied Ames research scientist for answers.  By the end of this lecture, we have a much better idea. This area is called "Close Encounters of the fourth and fifth kind," and it is altogether captivating and compelling.

In this last lecture of the class, we look at a few gnarly questions like "Why aren't they helping us? Why are they just watching as we destroy our habitat?"  The answers are not at all simple. One proposition is that we may have overlooked the fact that they are indeed trying to communicate with us through crop circles, but the scientific and popular biases against these pictographs make us simply ignore the messages and plow them under. Some riveting crop circles are presented which might make intelligent people finally take notice. But this class ends on a sour note, namely that we (that is, our scholars, scientists, and the academic worlds as a whole) are living in the dark ages, and that once we accept that the phenomenon of UFOs are real, everything about our lives changes.  There is a major paradigm shift coming in archeology, anthropology, mythology, history, and even biology, but we are not there yet and  are still living in denial continuing to pretend we are alone in the universe.