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Chapter 1
The Dream Life of Prototypes Colin Bennett continues developing his idea of a New Ufology in terms of the development of prototypal forms
Part 2: Prototypes as Intermediate Forms of Life
Pilot Mike Melvill celebrates after Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer landing SpaceShipOne.
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SpaceShipOne: 62.5 miles high, June 3rd, 2004
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In our world torn apart by savagery and horror, such magic birds as SpaceShipOne and the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer represent perhaps the last of our innocence and wonder in the West. Such things symbolise all the impossible midsummer night dreams of the prototypal folk. If there had been a failure of nerve along the lines of inspiration, these quite impossible wonders would never have driven SpaceShipOne to the fringes of space. But of course in the infinite welter of deadly poisonous Roman accusations around us at the present time, it is almost inevitable that such unsullied youth and love will be turned into weaponry, losing all innocence and beauty. Such things will be dug out of our Western ruins as a reminder that for some brief moments in history parts of us at least were capable of living in the fullest sense.
But though both SpaceShipOne and the Global Flyer are exotic prototypes, they are nowhere near exotic enough for the gung-ho fully-circular-craft addicts. For such folk, brilliant cleverness and beautiful achievement smack of rational compromise, and that is not the name of the saucer game. As a symbol the circular craft pulls together many threads of modern conspiracies whose often demoniac complexity would no doubt have frightened the wide-eyed rustic designers of pre-Fall America whose innocence allowed them to imagine travelling to the stars riding on big lawn mower fans. Therefore the search for the circular machine is not over. As an archetype of perfect circularity it still arouses hypnotic inspirations. Though no circular aerofoil has ever flown effectively, the form continues to lead a spectral life of varying degrees of substance in films and fiction, inventions and dreams. There are still patents being issued for circular machines, and the claims for the performance of such are just as amazing as any we have seen made here.
There have of course been updates in the saucer world since the innocent days of Streib and Leggett, and in this sense, the circular flying machine has, over the past forty years created indeed a new form of advertising life all by itself. It is as if, being a form of intelligent life, the phenomenon were aware of its need for adaptation, a life that consists of hints and glimpses, rumours and suspicions. This is not the “noise in the system” of mechanical thinkers but the rainforest seedbeds for all creative thinking. The English poet William Blake would have understood that hallucinatory poetry which breaks the barriers of the impossible. Without it, such a privately built device as SpaceShipOne would never have taken off over the Mojave desert, where George Adamski said he met Orthon, a spaceman from Venus in 1952.
Whether we like it or not, we live now in a world where the examination of Michael Jackson’s underwear for court evidence can wipe out momentarily all analogue considerations regarding that that decayed and harassed concept called the profound. Seriousness and objective factual assessment appear to belong to Agatha Christie’s “butler found the vital clue in the potting shed” world of Sherlock Holmes. Such rigid and mechanical world-models are concepts whose cultural shelf life has been in decline since the advent of such invading golems as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presely. In this hothouse media fluid of powerful advertisements, the saucer-shape with the exotic power-supply thrives.
Pure suggestion within media constructs could be seen as the new building material of the 21st century. This intermediate state between matter and spirit has more flexibility that fact or fiction, certainly. In the fortean sense, this state lives between the two Platonic limits. In this sense Plato understood TV 1600 years before it was invented. We are all watching the image-shadows of TV whether or not we possess a set. There is no OFF switch for the advertisement, and all advertisements are eternal prototypes of one sort or another that have no final mechanical form. As such, the advertisement is the ultimate prototype, making any concept such as objective accuracy smack of the Victorian railway timetable and an age that looked upon the working out of current flow, and the painstaking design of postal and drainage routes as part of some final “reality” of mentality and universal structure.
But Fuzzy mentality is here. Whether we like it or not, our media-dominated minds give us lots more “reality” options. Our almost total entertainment culture evaluates things in terms of character, personality and performance, sees the way the light falls across a face as moral synthesis, not hard structures. We have smells and atmospheres, sounds, situations, opinions replacing point-to-point wiring. We recognise now that individuals, like nations, navigate mentally by self-deception and hallucination; the State machine operates in terms of image, symbol and metaphor; “fact” has almost nothing to do with anything except shoe-size and avoirdupois. As such, information no longer “travels” along hard-wired points in the late-Victorian sense. The pure information state models changing configurations of being. Personality and performance are the new measures and constructs of that old box of input=output cultural frauds we used to call “reality.”
Seen in this light, the prototypal form is one of the very few authentic modern art forms.
If this feels uncanny and not a little spooky, it is exactly the feeling experienced by pre-industrial folk in the early 19th century when they saw strange things called rails being laid across fields and they smelt coal-burnt steam for the first time. But the more profound disturbance was the realization that old Aunt Maud, once an obscure figure reached only by means of a long, arduous, risky and expensive journey was now a cheap twenty minutes away in a dead straight line. At once, Aunt Maud’s image has changed. She is seen through the new technological media of steam power. Aunt Maud is not now the same woman. She has been deconstructed and put together again. The information vectors that sculpt her conceptually have taken her from agrarian time to mechanical time. She is closer, more significant. A new information array has changed her image, and Hollywood was well over a hundred years away. The “objectivity” of Aunt Maud has vanished. She is in every sense a totally different person. Her expectancies, her social relations, her image of her very self and its unique destiny have changed by a re-arrangement of image and hence information.
Poor aunt Maud bless her soul, has been transmuted.
Similarly, “flying saucer” concepts have been reconstructing ourselves for a considerable time.
Here is an e-mail to a large American web discussion group of May 29th 2004:
“You need to be aware that the United States military has been in possession of these antigravity machines (UFOs) for generations! The Russians have them! The Queen of England has them! The Vatican has them and other evil governments and entities have them as well. Be advised that they are solidly in the hands of the evil ones around the world and they plan to keep them in their possession. All over the world, there is going to be a great increase in the appearances of these antigravity machines! They are in the hands of the totally evil and absolutely destructive elite Satanists! Many of you will be abducted and injected with poisons and amnesic drugs, just as they have done to me. What a perfect crime! Or, so they think! However, they totally disregard the Spirit of God! In fact, they totally disregard our Father in Heaven and His beautiful Son, who is our Savior!”
In these terms, another way of solving the problem of the ever-troublesome prototypal power supply is to assume that someone else has invented it and is keeping it a secret. Here again is a drama of prototypal mutation. This is philosophy as consumer mystique. The ideas can be managed, processed, and consumed like a genetically-modified soya-crop. Like Y2K, the idea of Nazi UFOs is another errant form of information “life” that is rapidly evolving in our image-conditioned society. In this sense it is difficult to separate mechanical objective truth about Nazi UFOs from their cyberspace transformations alone. Using modern means, within a very short time, we can make countless Nazi UFOs, all of different kinds. We can age the image, add weather, historical detail, and “authentic” background. We can make the Nazi UFOs look as if they were drawn on frayed bits of paper pulled from the bullet-holed wallet of a dead SS rocket expert at Peenemunde. Within a very short time such an image can be pasted into the world-mind with its capacity for infinite transformations over an infinite period of time. This mind will of course, whether we like it or not, begin immediately to work on its own variations of such an input. It will cast, film, and indeed direct and write a world script almost instantaneously in terms of pure information that requires no Euclidean space. In our concept of the New Ufology the idea of “information space” (and not Cartesian extension) well expresses how a web of stories will continue to be produced and developed through limitless information levels, this legend-net being indestructible.
As such, by means of technology dreaming of its very self indeed, “art” and “fact” merge into a live mythology against which common sense rationalizations and old-fashioned “objective research” science stands hardly a chance at all. For example, the Nazi UFO is now an actor on the world cyber-stage and as such its “reality” quota is at least equivalent to that of the Washington Monument, or Tom Wolfe’s Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.
The people who not believe this are the same people who did not believe that Aunt Maud could ever be reached in twenty minutes travelling time in a straight line. It appears that the need to disbelieve is with us always.
Here are just two irresistible depictions from that information-rich over-stimulated semi-conscious dreaming that we love so much and which defines human beings and their perverse love of danger, both moral and physical:
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Below are two pictures from which (like the people depicted) all trails have vanished: |
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Nuremberg 1935 |
Warsaw Ghetto, 1942 |
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Truth or fiction? All human groups work by means of the scaling of psycho-social filters, whether their work concerns funeral parlours or radar stations. or especially courts of law, where truth and fiction can change into one another in a very short time. We limit ourselves to what can be sensibly absorbed, otherwise society, and indeed ourselves risk collapse. The educated middle-classes spin their belief-system around the principle of “separating fact from fiction,” the working class define everything in terms of th e non-cerebral systems of media and entertainment, and the upper classes for the most part define themselves in terms of that fashionable and glamorous dream-theatre that only riches can bring about. Such clearly defined mythologies struggle for prime-time in consciousness where “truth” appears as a stage. For instance the “noise in the system” star act is a Victorian metaphor derived from mechanical engineering, and as an idea it has all the finite limitations of the mechanical view with its analogies of friction, input-equal-output. The prototypal form is not designed to “do work” in this simple sense. Indeed, it is a unique combination of glamour, entertainment combined with all the mock-cerebral elements of technology, science, and engineering. Should anyone not think that prototypes do not have a dream life, then let them consider the following. Here is a sample of a rejected report of one of our fabled circular craft. The utterly fantastic experience about to be described is, like the images above, a mixture of cartoon sketch, schlock fiction, horror, and child’s toy box. It rejects everything and anything that mature and intelligent people have ever been told, experienced, or expected. As an experience of what we call “reality” we will have undoubtedly very great intellectual difficulty in accepting the following experience as valid in any sense whatsoever. But this incident did not occur within the pages of the much-abused George Adamski’s book Inside the Spaceships. It occurred outside the windows of a children’s bedroom in the house of Mrs. Ann Sohn of Prospect Heights, Illinois, sometime in May 1952. Here is the full Report made by Captain Runser of CUFOS: “Mrs. Ann Sohn put on a pot of coffee and looked at the clock. It was 10:50 p.m. She walked into the rear bedroom of her one-story, ranch-style home to look in on her children, David and Lois, to see if they were covered and to check the window. It was a pleasant evening and the air felt so refreshing that she sat on the foot of her son’s bed to gaze out of the window at the stars. The sky was very clear that night. After about a minute, Mrs Sohn’s attention was drawn by a bright light toward the right, and she was amazed to see a brilliantly glowing, round object hovering over the vacant lot next door. The bedroom window faced north and the lot was to the east of her house. There was a screen on the window and Mrs. Sohn pressed her face against it to more closely observe the object, most of which she was able to see but for the extreme right portion, which was obscured by the corner of her house. The object, about 30 to 40 feet in diameter, was self-luminous and hovered absolutely motionless about 100 feet above the lot for three to five minutes, making no sound. From beneath the object, toward the left emerged a cloud of steam or vapor that drifted slowly along the bottom toward the right, giving the UFO an appearance of sitting atop a cloud. Mrs. Sohn was unable to tell where the vapor came from, seeing neither pipes nor any other type of opening. Because the object was above the level of the window, she could determine that the craft was round and not cigar-shaped. Along the side of the object was a row of about fifteen square windows and just below the windows was a line which Mrs. Sohn described as a seam where the top and bottom portions connected. On the top of the object was a dome which appeared to be made of plastic or plexiglass. The entire object glowed with a bright white light except for the windows, most of which were dark, and the dome, which has a pale bluish cast similar to the “color of the blue haze of a distant landscape.” Mrs. Sohn’s impression was that the dome was illuminated by the reflected light of the rest of the UFO. Two faint vertical objects similar to poles were visible inside the dome. Not all of the visible windows were dark; at the far right or ‘rear end’ were three windows interiorly illuminated by an intense white light the remaining row of windows was dark, except for some dim blue reflection from the glow of the UFO.” We now brace ourselves for the heart of the matter: “Inside each of the three illuminated windows, Mrs Sohn could see a ‘crewman.’ In the first two (moving left to right) the figures seemed to be looking out of the window toward the witness; the third occupant, at the far right, was seen in profile and appeared to be studying a panel of dials or instruments on the wall. As the UFO hovered, the men remained motionless in their positions. Mrs. Sohn tried to awaken her son by nudging him but he remained asleep; her father was asleep in another part of the house, but she was too frightened to yell for him and she was reluctant to leave the window for fear that when they returned, the object would have departed. Her husband was working nights and was not at home.” Next we have pantomime smoke and mirrors, with a touch of Jules Verne’s levers: “As Mrs. Sohn was wondering what to do, the figure in the first window (to the left) made a motion with his right hand as if he were pushing forward (toward the window) a lever of some sort. As he did this, a steam of vapor increased; almost at the same moment, he pulled backward on another lever with his left hand, and the color of the vapor changed from white to green with flecks of orange and then to orange with a few streaks of green visible.” This of course is all very much against our sober work-ethic instincts. It sounds like a joke, and it probably is, but not on the part of Mrs. Sohn. That aliens may have evolved from serious linear industrial intention to a form of play (from which all intelligence comes, after all) is deeply insulting to everything in which we believe. It disturbs our profoundly held moral conviction concerning personal and social worth, our cultural input = output equations, and our valued senses both of the serious and the profound. But perhaps our deepest fear is that someone somewhere is getting something for nothing. Fifty years ago of course there were few if any prophesying that the IQ of the common discursive concentration would drop dramatically, the education system would fail, and that whole parts of Western nations would live completely inside the web-like heads of major media, show business, and rock stars. Far fewer predicted that the Western world at least would become a virtual entertainment panorama, bits which looked indeed very much like the thing Mrs. Sohn was seeing. Mrs. Sohn concludes her story: “Immediately following this, while the figure to the right remained motionless, the figure in the center window pushed a lever forward with his right hand and the entire ship, except for the darkened windows and the dome, turned a brilliant reddish-orange color and departed in a shallow climb to the north at an ‘intense’ speed...the three occupants (one of whom never moved at all) were wearing what Mrs. Sohn described as a kind of jumpsuit or coverall with hoods or headpieces that appeared to be part of the suit, covering all of the head except the faces; she therefore saw no hair nor ears on the men...the only other thing she could see besides the figures was the panel of instruments of (sic) dials in front of the man in the window to the right. He appeared to be further from the window than the other two.”
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Prototypal People
Computers and Aeroplanes before 1880, the year of Disraeli’s resignation.
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| Charles Babbage | Alphonse Penaud |
Ada Lovelace1815-1852 |
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The people who make prototypes are prototypal people. As such, like our circular machine, they appear to be at the mercy of blind era-forces reaching out for one another in a kind of historical slow-motion act. I have referred to Darwin, but it is very hard to accept any concept of Darwinian efficiency or “survival of the fittest” in this process. It appears that the smallest sliver of coherency is only purchased at the expense of pain, disappointment, tragedy, physical affliction or indeed suicidal despair as in the case of Alphonse Penaud, the French designer of flying machines. Indeed, the metaphor of flight connects the lives and thoughts of many of our prototypal heroes and heroines. In 1828, Ada Byron, the daughter of a brief marriage between Lord Byron and Anne Isabelle Milbanke, produced a design for a flying machine. Five years later, showing signs of becoming a brilliant mathematician, she met Charles Babbage at a dinner party in 1833, when he was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a post once held by the great Isaac Newton. Even at this early age, Ada was enchanted by the talk about what Babbage called the Difference Engine, the world’s first programmable mechanical calculator. This machine was at least seventy-five years ahead of its time in concept and execution.
George Boole Babbage’s Difference Engine
In this same year, George Boole, the 13-year-old son of a Lincoln shoemaker, was working his way through Newton’s Principia, and the seminal works of the mathematicians Laplace and Lagrange. He is now regarded as the founder of modern information theory, and his book The Laws of Thought is regarded as a landmark alongside the Principia. Although Boole didn’t meet Lovelace or Babbage, all three led prototypal lives as regards quite revolutionary technology connected to computer programming concepts. A mentor of Ada Byron, Augustus de Morgan, enthused upon reading Boole’s 1847 paper, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, and soon afterwards Boole got a place in the Mathematics Faculty of Queen’s College, Dublin. Although Babbage and Ada Byron were from the upper reaches of 19th century society, they led as miserable life of rejection as did the self-educated working-class Boole and indeed many of our inventors discussed here. Both Lovelace and Boole died in a dreadful manner. Boole’s stupid wife threw buckets of cold water over him when he was in bed with influenza, causing his death in 1864. Ada Lovelace died of cancer, and her work has only just been recognised. In 1979 the world honoured its debt to her when the Pentagon named one of its main computer languages Ada out of respect for her achievements. A bitter angry face stares out from the many photographs and sketches of Charles Babbage in his old age. I prefer to show here sketches of himself, Boole, and Ada Lovelace as they appeared in the bloom of youth: young, handsome, and confident that their work would be recognised. It was not, of course. Their names were forgotten for almost a century until their work was re-discovered up by the likes of Turing, Shannon, and Konrad Lorenz.
Alphonse Penaud
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