Problems of Interpretation. Column in KomputerraOnline #37

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Dmytro Shabanov

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Protopopov and Instincts

Problems of Interpretation

The Reasons for Our (Im)perfection

Column in "Komp'yuterra Online" No. 36

Column in Komp'yuterra Online #37

Column in Komp'yuterra Online #38

Thanks to Dmytro Vibe's most recent column, I found myself recalling my own encounters with UFOs. I will recount those memories here: they may serve as an illustration of the difficulties involved in interpreting such observations. Story No. 1. Autumn 1986. I am a sailor (senior sailor!) in naval aviation in the Far East. Since my documents noted that I had been drafted from a reputable university, I was slotted into a vacancy not normally filled by enlisted personnel. I served as assistant duty officer at a strategic aviation regiment. The garrison is squeezed into a small patch of land between the hills. It houses our regiment and several other units. In the nearby hills are classified installations — one holds a unit storing "conventional" weapons for our aircraft, another holds a similar unit with nuclear weapons. A Sunday morning during the autumn lull, when aircraft are being transitioned from summer to winter operations. On such days an entire twenty-four-hour duty shift may pass without a single incident. Then — a call from the weapons unit. First the duty officer, then the unit commander. They are roaring with fury: an Mi-8 helicopter is circling over their storage facility, hovering, and lowering some kind of hose. We call every post: no flights anywhere. No airspace-use requests have been filed in our area. Neither our flight controller (who switched on all his equipment at our direction) nor the air-defence units detect any helicopter. By the time we reported to senior command, the weapons unit said the helicopter had climbed and flown off — in a direction where radar operators simply could not have failed to see it. But they did not see it. Half an hour passes. We are writing explanatory reports, citing in the duty logs what information we received, from whom, and when, and what we transmitted, to whom, and when. Then a call comes from the second unit — the nuclear one. A helicopter over their storage facilities as well. Senior command is furious. The nuclear-weapons personnel are ready to fire on the helicopter with assault rifles. We receive orders to deploy the anti-aircraft machine-gun positions (which are, of course, not ready). The on-call fighter pair at the neighbouring airfield — the unit that provides air cover for ours — is placed on alert... and then it transpires that the helicopter has again flown off, and again no technical means registered it. That is the whole story. The parties involved submit explanatory reports, which are forwarded to the appropriate agencies. Story No. 2. July 1990. My friend Dima and I are flying from Kharkiv to Alma-Ata. We will soon make an intermediate stop in Tselinograd. It is night. Dima is asleep in the left-hand window seat; I am next to him. The public-address system comes on, and the pilot says: "Attention, passengers: a UFO is accompanying us on the port side." And indeed — a UFO! A hazy, luminous patch. It is at roughly the same altitude as the aircraft. Dima is upset that he checked his camera in the hold. We try to sketch it... A searchlight switches on aboard the object. The aircraft is flying at altitude — perhaps ten kilometres — yet the beam from the object flying alongside us illuminates the ground clearly. Pressing our faces to the porthole, we can make out the steppe below, fields, some roads... This goes on for about ten minutes. Then, suddenly, the object beside us extinguishes its searchlight and moves off somewhere ahead, to the left and upward, at a speed far exceeding that of the aircraft. We land in Tselinograd. The Soyuzpechat kiosk is closed. Behind the glass is "Tselinogradskaya Pravda." Only the headline is visible — something like "UFO over the Tselinograd Region." We are not the first... Story No. 3. 2007, Kharkiv region, the vicinity of the village of Shestakovo, the night of 30–31 May. My colleague Oleksiy and I are driving his Niva to water bodies of interest to us. That journey and many, many others — a great number of them made together — eventually produced a doctoral dissertation on the distribution of population systems of green frogs. Oleksiy defended it in 2010; I was his academic supervisor. By that time we calculated that in such journeys he had covered a distance exceeding the circumference of the Earth. That particular night, following an evening of hurricane-force winds, torrential rain, and thunder, a quiet night had settled in. Crossing a wide steppe ravine along the highway, we stopped to listen and heard frog song from a distant pond. We drove toward the sound, entered a horticultural cooperative through an open gate, found the pond, collected a sample of frogs, were walking back to the car — and suddenly: "Dmytro Andriyovych: a UFO!" Above us is a small light, at roughly the altitude at which low-flying aircraft travel. It moves fairly quickly, going this way and that — tracing strange trajectories against the starlit sky. We stood and watched... Time to go. We tried to leave the way we came in — and ended up somewhere wrong. We drove around — no exit. Completely bewildered, we circled this horticultural cooperative for about thirty minutes. Olyosha is an elite driver, and my own qualifications as navigator are not poor either — yet we could not find the way out. Again and again we got out of the car or simply leaned out the windows: was it above us? It was above us! At one point we tried to force a path through a thicket of shrubs, pressing them down with the Niva's grille and underguard. We could not. We drove on and imagined what the car with its headlights on must look like from above. A certain feeling begins to arise, you understand... Do you recall Dürrenmatt's story "The Tunnel"? Then the light vanished, and we easily found the gate — which no one had closed. What is the net result? The second and third stories fit the standard format of UFO accounts. But can they be used to support the theory that ships from another civilisation fly in our midst? I doubt it. Incidentally, the behaviour of their pilots is somehow strange. Ah — you will say I should not measure them by a yardstick tailored to ourselves? Quite so. But then what allows us to speak of the observed phenomena as technical devices piloted by representatives of another intelligence? Nothing: there are no grounds whatsoever. To clarify what is, in my view, the principal factor in such strange stories, let me recount one more episode, even though it has no connection to UFOs. Story No. 4. Late September 1990, Turkmenistan. Together with two companions — a young woman and a young man, both biologists but, unlike me, not herpetologists — I set out from Ashgabat to the north, heading toward the settlement of Bakhardok, lost in the Karakum Desert. A bus runs there and back once a day. We ask the driver to let us off at a section featuring a mosaic of semi-fixed and unfixed sands, about four-fifths of the way to Bakhardok. My first task is to select a campsite. In general, a camp should be situated so that it is easy to find oneself but inconspicuous to outsiders. I began to value the invisibility of a camp after an incident in Turkmenistan — at a place called Karadamak, literally "Black Backside" — where a group of people who were sleeping at the town dump chased my companion and me for half the night. What they wanted I never learned, since they did not catch us. For our own purposes, good landmarks for returning to camp are essential: it is simplicity itself to get lost in the desert. Fortunately, at night in the dry desert air the stars are always visible, and the saving North Star with them. Here was the plan: we would catch snakes to the left of the highway running south to north. Then we would head east and inevitably reach the asphalt road. Along the road there are kilometre posts. Between the 81st and 82nd kilometre, a sand dune rises to the west, with a hollow at its summit. The dune is always visible from the road against the sky, and a fire burning in the hollow would be invisible from the road or from any other direction. At first that hollow struck me as somehow unpleasant, but logical reasoning prevailed. We made camp — placed a piece of canvas there and left our gear — in that hollow. That was a mistake. We caught snakes and lizards (without great success). We returned, ate, lay down to sleep. Above our heads — a wonderfully beautiful sky, and, strangely enough, some mosquitoes whining. Foolishly, I played around with a slight alteration of my state of consciousness (I was engaged in certain meditations at the time). And then it began... The first signs were physiological: an overwhelming thirst came over me. I fastened onto the canister and drank from it without being able to stop, even though the water supply for three people the next day was not large. I barely tore myself away, tried again to lie down... When I looked straight ahead I saw nothing particular, but at the edge of my vision gaunt, emaciated shadows flickered. My ears heard nothing, but in my head — voices. "Come with us." "Please, come here." "Why don't you come — you called us yourself?" "Hurry, hurry, run to us!" I struggled with all my strength to return to normal — and could not. My companions saw and heard nothing unusual, but complained of a strange malaise and an inexplicable fear. I told them I had developed a strong urge to run off into the sands away from the road, to the west. They said, with alarm, that they would not let me go anywhere. I understood as well that I should not. I forced myself to lie down and close my eyes, and suddenly felt as though someone had leaned over me and was touching my shoulder. I leaped up — no one was there... The night was singularly unpleasant. In the morning, when it was all over, I noticed that even the character of the soil in our sleeping place differed from the surrounding terrain. For instance, it bore no traces of rodent or lizard activity, though those animals were abundant everywhere else. What was it? I categorised it for myself as a temporary clouding of consciousness, probably caused by some local physical anomaly. Of course, it was my own fault: I forgot caution and played with something I could not control. And I read Brodsky's great "Admonition" ("Traveling through Asia...") much later. It contains this stanza: Stopping in the desert, build from stones an arrow, so that, waking suddenly, you may know at once in which direction to move. Demons by night in the desert torment the traveler. One who heeds their words can easily lose his way: a step aside — and it is over. Phantoms, spirits, demons — are at home in the desert. You will see this for yourself, shuffling through sand, when nothing remains of you but a soul. This describes the very same experience! Brodsky's life included, among other things, work with a geological survey party, so he knew what he was writing about. Moreover, similar things are mentioned by Carlos Castaneda, by Marco Polo, and by many other people who have slept in the sands on various continents. They too encountered spirits beckoning them to walk deeper into the desert. How is this to be explained? No, I am not prepared to accept the theory that the souls of the dead wander and rustle through sand in the desert. The version involving demonic temptations does not appeal to me either. But I have every reason to suppose that in the psyches of different individuals who spent the night in similar conditions — in different places and at different times — the same altered states of consciousness arose, leading to similar experiences. So: I encountered an unstudied phenomenon. It is probably a rare but recurring event. Its causes and mechanisms must be sought somewhere in the depths of our psychophysiology, by examining the "non-standard" functioning of our psyche under unfamiliar conditions — the attempts of perception to process something that our consciousness is not prepared to process. We are not cameras that mechanically reflect reality. What we expect, we channel through ready-made cognitive schemas. But what happens when we perceive something entirely unfamiliar? We try to fit it into some schema as well. Might such an approach help in making sense of the UFO stories I have related? Certainly not the first one. The second — I do not know. The third — very probably. A certain sense of enchantment, of bewitchment in the third case reminded me of the experience in the fourth story. And in the first case there were surely some external grounds in the category of classified military exercises. When seeking to understand the causes of anomalous observations, one must analyse not the constructs themselves — created by the psyches of surprised, and sometimes frightened, observers — but rather (insofar as possible) the underlying, non-obvious causes that produced them. I believe that, proceeding in this way, one can find explanations for our experiences that require neither mysticism nor extraterrestrials. Yet for some reason a chill still runs down my spine at the memory of that night near Bakhardok.

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