Dr Cecil Keen research into UFO UAP CUFOS and a curious lecture

mark dickson

Dr Cecil Keen research into UFO UAP CUFOS and a curious lecture

Abstract

This short article is a recollection of my brief friendship with Dr Cecil Keen in Cape Town, South Africa in the late 1970’s and 80’s. I first met him through a lecture he gave at the University of Cape Town on his experiences of UFO activity. This was my first introduction to an academic side of the subject because Dr Keen brought his training and critical thinking skills as a meteorologist and climatologist to bear on this topic.

Belgium in UFO Photographs – Volume 1 is a research book that makes no concessions to literature. It is a scientifically oriented inquiry into a collection of supposed UFO pictures taken in Belgium in the period from 1950 to 1988. But the reader will certainly find more than descriptions of UFO sightings and detailed analyses of UFO images. For instance, the included catalog not only has numerous examples of how normal folks can be deceived by common phenomena, it also reveals the dubious background against which some photographs that received worldwide endorsement made their way into UFO history. The book is a documented history of four decades’ worth of UFO incidents that involved witnesses who provided photographic evidence (be that negatives, prints, slides, films, or videotapes), on top of their own testimony. The authors have investigated every event weighing the evidence for real anomalies occurring in our atmosphere. Though only a small country in Central Europe, Belgium’s rich UFO patrimony serves as a representative sample of UFO phenomenology worldwide. The book has over 400 pages, 366 illustrations (pictures, diagrams, maps, sky charts, etc.) and contains a statistical review of the cases that were studied. This is FOTOCAT Report #7 and, like the rest of the series, it is available free online. For book collectors, printed book lovers and libraries, a printed edition in full color and large format has been published by UPIAR (Turin, Italy) and can be purchased through the publisher’s website at the following link: http://www.upiar.com/index.cfm?language=en&artID=191&st=1 The book’s foreword has been contributed by James Oberg, one of the world's leading popularizers and interpreters of space exploration. Oberg had a 22-year career as a space engineer in Houston, where he specialized in NASA space shuttle operations for orbital rendezvous. Excerpts from his foreword follow: Vicente-Juan Ballester-Olmos and Wim van Utrecht have been practicing a methodology of research that—were it far more widespread—could help determine the better theories from the more extreme ones . . . Ballester-Olmos and Van Utrecht, like me, believe that ‘IFOs’ have lessons to teach ‘ufologists’ that are crucial to making sense of cases that remain in the ‘true UFO’ data bases . . . The newfound power of combining GOOD records keeping with Internet tools and search engines can be seen in specific cases discussed by the authors . . . In case after case, the authors apply wide knowledge of geometry, optics, meteorology, human perception, and human cultural context, to illustrate that plausible explanations often are found . . . The approach shown by Ballester-Olmos and Van Utrecht should serve as an example and as an inspiration to other ‘citizen scientists’ who have played a crucial role in providing the resources that will allow theorists with more data and wider insight to someday make more sense about what lies behind this mysterious phenomenon. You are kindly requested to extend this information to other colleagues, organizations, scientific institutions, and/or libraries. In addition, any mention on your blog, website or magazine will be greatly appreciated, as well as any book review you might want to submit to any scientific or specialized UFO journal.

Foreword: History is often concerned with heritage and origins. The question applies as much to UFOs as any other subject. For example, where in time do genuine UFOs begin? Was 1947 the beginning or a turning point in UFO history, as opposed to human perceptions of the phenomenon? We all know that anomalous aerial phenomena have always been with us, as the portents and prodigies of primeval and medieval times, the Fortean anomalies of the scientific age, the phantom airships, ghost fliers, foo fighters and ghost rockets that predate Kenneth Arnold. But is there a genuine continuity in the phenomenon? Folklorist, Thomas Bullard affirms, “UFOs as the experiential phenomenon and UFOs as the popular cultural myth entangle in a knot of confusion. I suspect that this entanglement stands as one of the greatest impediments to understanding the nature of UFOs, and scientific acceptance of UFOs as a subject worthy of serious attention. A historical perspective offers a grip on the end of the string, a chance to untangle the mess to some degree.” Behind this perplexing UFO history is a whole history, or mythology of modern science, less well known, stretching back to the sixteenth century. What Karl Guthke terms “a heritage of Copernicanism; the modern myth, or the myth, of the modern era, [without which] the image of man since the Copernican revolution would be decidedly poorer.” The fact is, the question of extraterrestrial life, rather than having arisen in the twentieth century, has been accepted by the majority of educated persons since, at least, the Scientific Revolution, and in many instances was employed to formulate philosophical and religious positions in relation to it. As William Whewell observed, in his 1853 treatise, Of A Plurality of Worlds: An Essay, popular ideas about a multiplicity of inhabited worlds “are generally diffused in our time and country, are common to all classes of readers, and as we may venture to express it, are popular views of persons of any degree of intellectual culture, who have, directly or derivatively, accepted the doctrines of modern science.” So as Professor Michael Crowe put it, “even if no UFOs hover in the heavens, belief in extraterrestrial beings has hovered in human consciousness for dozens of decades.” UFOs, and, the experiential aspects of UFO history are, seemingly, inextricably entangled in the myth of the modern era. This then, is simply an attempt to grab hold of the end of the string.

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