AWS and UFOs

Author(s):  
Michael Heim

Something....-What? —A phenomenon. Something intrusive, something vague but insistent, pushing itself upon us. — Something outside? From afar? Something alien? — Something descending in the night, standing in the shadows at the foot of the bed. —An illusion? Hallucination maybe? A quirky twist of imagination? — No, definitely a presence, something that might be a someone, a someone with wires and electric sensors, probing, penetrating, exploring private parts. Something lifting us off the familiar face of the planet we thought we knew so well, beaming us outside the orbit of our comfortable homes. Definitely something indefinite . . . or someone. —We hear about them only from others who speak about sightings of unidentified objects in the sky, because we do not allow ourselves to be counted among the unstable few who acknowledge the possibility of something outside the circle of our sciences. Those unstable few accept belief in something standing in the shadows at the door. We listen closely to those speaking about incidents of the phenomenon. We do not look. — Something IS out there. We’ve seen and heard it in the night. It’s contacting us. The phenomenon certainly exists in late-night chat like the above. It exists as metaphysical hearsay, as an internal dialogue between what we believe and what we think we are willing to believe. Popular descriptions of “the incident” waver between child-like awe and tongue-in-cheek tabloid humor. Here is where our knowledge, as a culturally defined certainty, becomes most vulnerable. Here we discover the soft edges of knowledge as an established and culturally underwritten form of belief. What a thrill to feel the tug of war on the thin thread of shared belief! A blend of religious archetypes and science-fiction imagery supplies the words for those who tell about the incident. The stories often float up through hypnosis or “recovered memory” hypnotherapy, as in the famous case of Betty and Barney Hill who experienced abduction one September night in New Hampshire in 1961. Researchers have recently plotted consistently recurring patterns in thousands of stories, and the mythic dimension of the story line has not been lost on Hollywood.

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
Md. Shafiqul Islam

This paper attempts a cybercritical reading of William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984) to explore the genesis of cyborgs in the novel, address issues pertaining to cyberpunks and scrutinize the portrayal of a cyberculture set in the futuristic dystopian city of Chiba. The relationship between humans and machines has gone through multiple phases of changes in the recent past. That is why instead of satirizing machinized-humans, science fiction writers have embraced different dimensions of man-machine relationships during the past few decades. ‘Cyborg’ is no longer represented as the ‘mutation of human capabilities’, but as ‘machines with Artificial Intelligence’. Gibson’s Neuromancer, a landmark piece of literary work in the sphere of Sci-Fi literature, specifically predicts a new height of man-machine relationship by employing both human and cyborg characters at the center of his story line. This paper shows how Gibson accurately prophesizes the matrix of machine-human relationship in his novel. It also explores Gibson’s depiction of female characters through the lens of cyberfeminist theories. In view of that, this paper uses contemporary critical and cultural theories including Donna Haraway’s idea of cyberfeminism, Baudrillard’s simulation and simulacra, Foucauldian discourse analysis, Jeremy Bentham’s concept of tabula rasa and other relevant theoretical ideas to examine and evaluate the transformative changes.


The Damned ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 103-108
Author(s):  
Nick Riddle

This chapter discusses the legacy of Joseph Losey's The Damned (1963). Unlike many cult films, The Damned has not become a staple of late-night screenings or the subject of internet memes. But it does strike a spark or two of recognition, when it is not being confused with Village of the Damned (1960) or Children of the Damned (1964). By 1970, Joseph Losey was played out, his health deteriorating after years of heavy drinking and mental strain. Nevertheless, imagery from The Damned sometimes resurfaced in his later work. Meanwhile, Hammer's science fiction output dwindled after The Damned, as its gothic horror productions took over.


2012 ◽  
Vol 110 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-132
Author(s):  
Fredrick James Woodard

This paper presents a phenomenological study using the methodology of Woodard's phenomenological and perceptual research. This method examines individuals' internal meanings during spontaneous spiritual and paranormal experiences, as described from their point of view. A group of 40 adults was phenomenologically interviewed after they responded to a newspaper announcement in New Hampshire asking for volunteers who had had spiritual and paranormal experiences. Using the method, Six Individual Situated Structures and a General Structure were identified and examined. Nine major themes were explicated during the participants' spontaneous experiencing: unexpectedness, contrariness to belief, certainty, contradictory experiencing, language as a barrier to expression, external influences, internal dialogue, evil as separateness, and some social psychological influences. Several themes observed in hypnotic experiencing, such as the characteristics of the Adequate Personality in Perceptual Psychology, are interpreted and discussed. This research illustrates how subjective experience can be adequately researched in a qualitative manner outside the confines of the laboratory setting. Limitations of the study and suggestions for further research are given.


1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 204-205
Author(s):  
Megan Cleary

In recent years, the law in the area of recovered memories in child sexual abuse cases has developed rapidly. See J.K. Murray, “Repression, Memory & Suggestibility: A Call for Limitations on the Admissibility of Repressed Memory Testimony in Abuse Trials,” University of Colorado Law Review, 66 (1995): 477-522, at 479. Three cases have defined the scope of liability to third parties. The cases, decided within six months of each other, all involved lawsuits by third parties against therapists, based on treatment in which the patients recovered memories of sexual abuse. The New Hampshire Supreme Court, in Hungerford v. Jones, 722 A.2d 478 (N.H. 1998), allowed such a claim to survive, while the supreme courts in Iowa, in J.A.H. v. Wadle & Associates, 589 N.W.2d 256 (Iowa 1999), and California, in Eear v. Sills, 82 Cal. Rptr. 281 (1991), rejected lawsuits brought by nonpatients for professional liability.


2010 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliana Yordanova ◽  
Rolf Verleger ◽  
Ullrich Wagner ◽  
Vasil Kolev

The objective of the present study was to evaluate patterns of implicit processing in a task where the acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge occurs simultaneously. The number reduction task (NRT) was used as having two levels of organization, overt and covert, where the covert level of processing is associated with implicit associative and implicit procedural learning. One aim was to compare these two types of implicit processes in the NRT when sleep was or was not introduced between initial formation of task representations and subsequent NRT processing. To assess the effects of different sleep stages, two sleep groups (early- and late-night groups) were used where initial training of the task was separated from subsequent retest by 3 h full of predominantly slow wave sleep (SWS) or rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. In two no-sleep groups, no interval was introduced between initial and subsequent NRT performance. A second aim was to evaluate the interaction between procedural and associative implicit learning in the NRT. Implicit associative learning was measured by the difference between the speed of responses that could or could not be predicted by the covert abstract regularity of the task. Implicit procedural on-line learning was measured by the practice-based increased speed of performance with time on task. Major results indicated that late-night sleep produced a substantial facilitation of implicit associations without modifying individual ability for explicit knowledge generation or for procedural on-line learning. This was evidenced by the higher rate of subjects who gained implicit knowledge of abstract task structure in the late-night group relative to the early-night and no-sleep groups. Independently of sleep, gain of implicit associative knowledge was accompanied by a relative slowing of responses to unpredictable items suggesting reciprocal interactions between associative and motor procedural processes within the implicit system. These observations provide evidence for the separability and interactions of different patterns of processing within implicit memory.


1974 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-48
Author(s):  
ALICE M. PADAWER-SINGER

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