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From: Luis R. Gonzalez <lrgm.nul> Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2004 12:22:18 +0100 Fwd Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2004 11:58:39 -0500 Subject: Re: Review Of 'Sight Unseen' By Hopkins & Rainey - The recent spate of laudatory comments about Sight Unseen has prompted me to put it at the top of my reading list. I got it last Christmas, read the dust covers, leafed through it, and put it back behind some other titles like Howe's Glimpses... (I finally decided to get them after the recent debate about that alleged Brazilian abduction's photos). But I disgress..... Those who have read my posts here would suspect (rightly) that my opinion about Sight Unseen is not as positive. Nevertheless, I will give you a detailed review when I finish it... if you are interested in my humble opinion, of course. But, taking advantage of Katharina Wilson's presence, I would like to learn more about her "airport incident". As presented in the book, Budd's "Strange Case of the Relictant Faucets" goes like this (please, correct me if I get something wrong): On October 5, 1995 Katharina flew to Chicago where she had been invited to speak at a local UFO conference. She began feeling strange aboard the plane, "agitated and confused". They arrived at O'Hare at 2:10 Portland time (or so she remember). She left the plane and walked straight up to the women's rest room near the gate. After coming out of one of the stalls, she put soap on her hands and tried to wash them, but the automatic water faucet wouldn't work. She began trying other sinks with the same results. There were other women around and for them the water came on fine. Several times, she tried using the same sinks the women had used, to no avail. She began to panic and thinking to herself, "I'm not registering on the sensors". She stood in the middle of the rest room and asked a young woman, "Am I invisible or something?". She looked in her direction but didn't respond, walked right past and left the room. Instead of insisting or trying another person, Katharina saw a baby-changing station and was finally able to wash her hands. She left the rest room and seeing some pay phones decided to call her husband. Curiosly, even if as she herself explains, Katharina usually called him after getting to her hotel room (one would suspect at least one hour after arrival), the first thing he said was, "I see your plane was late getting to Chicago". Katharina looked at her watch and it read about 3:20 Portland time. Around 1 hour missing! After a few minutes conversation, she said good-bye and decide to walk to the baggage claim area, but she doesn't remember much of anything about getting there until she was about ten yards from her hostesses Mary and Judy. She saw her big red suitcase still on the carousel, but nobody standing around it. The police person had just taken them off the carousel, so she walked up to the security officer and said "Those are mine" and then walked behind her hostesses who seemed to be staring out of the window. They were totally surprised, they had been waiting a long time. She looked at her watch again and read the time as 3:20. Teleported from the pay phones to the baggage carousel! Apparently, Katharina has not remembered anything that could have happened during that one missing hour. There are two questions to consider about all this: - The consistency and real strangeness of the alleged facts - Hopkins' interpretation and Rainey's attempt to scientific explanation. For now, I will tackle the second. Hopkins writes that only 4 or 5 minutes had passed between the two readings. I beg to disagree. As an infrequent user of airports (at least in Europe) it takes you at least 15 minutes to get from the landed plane to the luggage claim area, even running - without discounting the queues to get off the plane, etc. Unfortunately, the authors does not provide even with a simple layout of the O'Hare United Airlines terminal. He also mentions that Mary and Judy had waited for an hour or so, had watched everyone else picking their luggage and had even checked with United Airlines that she had disembarked along with the other passengers. So, his conclusion is that "at some moment just after her trip to the restroom she must have been rendered "unseeable", then they took her from the building, and the abduction itself must have ended before she made her phone call. But, it seem that her state of invisibility was still in effect, along with alien control, until she was quickly transported to a nearly vacant part of the baggage claim area, behind Mary and Judy. where she suddenly became fully visible again". I sincerely find it difficult to believe that in such a busy airport nobody bumped against an invisible Katharina while she was in the restroom or at the pay phones, so I would suggest a simpler scenario: She was abducted from her stall in the women's rest room, and returned there one hour later. Murphy's Law suggested that the aliens somehow forgot to disconnect their invisibility cloak and Katharina suffered her washing ordeal. She became visible at the baby-changing station and phoned home. Then, "they" discover their time-machine also did not work properly and teleported her to the luggage claim area. How does Carol Rainey try to explain Katharina, extrpolating from human known technology? She began, properly, trying to eliminate the mundane. Unfortunately, she was unable to identify which kind of automatic faucets were in use at the airport (some detect movement, some detect heat). If Katharina were invisible, a movement detector would clearly fail, so you cannot write several pages around the mystery. So Carol opted for heat sensors and got herself into a big problem. She decided that Katharina had become a blackbody, changed temporarily into a being with a radiation frequency similar to a blackbody's - almost completely absorbing light and then re-emitting it. Perfect. Not so. Carol shows she did not check with any physics expert. If a body completely absorbs light it does _not_ became invisible, it became black. Everybody would had seen a black silohuette. But, wait a moment, blackbodies give off their energy at _all_ wavelengths. That is why the automatic infrared sensors got confused and did not work properly. Sorry, wrong again. Infrared sensors are stupid. They only worry about getting (or not) infrared waves, so if Katharina was giving off at _all_ wavelengths, she also gave off at infrared, so the faucets should have work properly. Besides, she was also giving off at the visual spectrum, so she would be anything except invisible. The important point here is not if aliens really exist and use (or not) a recognizable technology. The real point is that Carol did not do her homework properly and _her_ extrapolations have no logic. After a succinct glance, the same can be said about her other proposals in the book. This is why I do not consider this book valuable in advancing a scientific Ufology. Yours, Luis R. Gonzlez Manso
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