Time, Memories and Myths.
When I was a boy, my Father sometimes talked of his experiences while in the army in France during WW1. To me they seemed so far in the past that I could not comprehend why he even wanted to mention them, after all they occurred four years before I was born. Then some years ago I was reminiscing about my service in the Royal Air Force during WW2. It was only later when the conversation was finished that I suddenly realized we were discussing something that had happened more than 50 years ago. At that moment to me it seemed to have happened only yesterday. I now understood a little better the mysteries of time and memory.
When writing this article I also came to realize just how easily experiences can become changed with time in our memory . Faint indistinct memories can slowly but surely turn into clearly remembered reality, that may be far from what actually happened. In laying out this web site, I have from time to time had to erase sentences because on reflection they did not truly define the experiences as they actually occurred. It is easy to see how the many myths of mankind originate. Not from deliberate lies or falsification but from the distortion of time that can turn the faintly remembered memories into clear facts and distorts the truth to fit into the beliefs and wishes of the story teller. Throughout this web site I have tried to assure that everything that I describe occurred exactly as it is written.
When I was a boy living in the English Countryside, all the villages had their mysteries and myths of some sort. In one village there was a barn which was said to be haunted because of some dreadful occurrence in the past and one of its doors would slam shut every night at midnight. I asked my Father if this was true as in the course of his duties as the village policeman he was very frequently around the village late at night. It was accepted as fact by many of the people in the area but he laughed and said he had never seen or heard anything happen but it made a good story. My Father was a very practical man. Because his duties called for him to be out alone at night he had several experiences that many people would have called supernatural.
On one occasion he was cycling to meet another policeman along a long straight road with no turnings or openings bordered by thick woods and hedges. It was late at night and there was no traffic of any kind. Then he heard a horse coming up behind him and saw it was a pony pulling a two wheeled trap. The trap had two candle lamps and by their light my father saw that it contained a man in a long black coat and top hat and a woman also in black. My father called out a "Good evening" but the occupants neither spoke nor looked at him. The pony and trap soon disappeared into the distance. Shortly afterwards my father met the other policeman and asked him if the couple in the trap had spoken when they passed him. The other officer had seen no one, and the two of them immediately turned to see if they were hiding somewhere along the road as poachers were a problem in that area. They could not find the pony and trap or the occupants and returned the next day to search in daylight. They could find no tracks of any kind and no one in any of the villages knew of anyone fitting the description.
There was talk of ghostly figures among the villagers but my Father merely accepted the fact that these were perfectly natural occurrences, but they had happened in such a way that he could not explain them. Perhaps I have inherited his skepticism, as I too find it impossible to accept the paranormal as anything but faulty observation. He may in fact have contributed to the tales. A farmer had complained that he thought someone was stealing his chickens, one at a time, and asked my Father to watch for anyone going to the field where he kept his chicken. My Father had a good idea who it was, a poor man with a family to feed, and my father did not want to see him going to prison. So this night he stood and waited and after a while he heard two people walking towards the gate. They were talking and one said that they had to watch out for "Old Woodgate" as he put out his hand to open the gate. My father just placed his hand over the man's hand on the gate and squeezed. He was invisible behind the hedge and the man just stood still for a fraction of a second then let out a scream and the two of them ran shouting down the road. There were no more chickens stolen.
However it seems that mankind is simply incapable of admitting that there are some things that we cannot and never will understand. Time is one of these. We can understand our immediate time span, today and tomorrow and hours and minutes, but then our understanding fails. When did time begin? Will time end? Is time infinite? We are told that if we could travel at the speed of light then time is compressed. We hear discussions on the possibility of traveling through time. Then what happens if we go back to a time before we were born, will we still exist? Suppose other entities move much faster, so that their lifetime is compressed into a few seconds. To them we would appear stationary, like the rocks in the earth while they would almost certainly be invisible to us. These are just a few of the questions that arise when we begin to discuss time. I have talked to scientists who have said that they can mathematically explain some of these questions, but when I have asked if they can visualize these things, I have been told that mentally this is impossible.
There is this inborn desire in mankind to find an explanation for the unknown, no matter how complex or unlikely. The "Crop Circles" affair is a fine example of this innate refusal to look for the obvious cause of a phenomenon. When they were first seen we had a rash of "experts" who explained that these were obviously the work of extra terrestrial beings, the circles and scrolls were messages from outer space and so on. Some of the more practical observers looked to whirlwinds and weather patterns as the cause. Then some of the perpetrators owned up to forming the circles and went to some lengths to demonstrate just how easy it was for a few people to make these complex patterns. Yet we still have people who do not want to accept the proven facts but prefer to look for the descending "flying saucer", in spite of the lack of any hard evidence that these mysterious devices have ever truly existed. It seems that we will accept the most devious arguments to sustain the "saucer" legend rather than consider rationally all the evidence and accept the fact that in most cases there is a sound practical explanation, while in a few cases we just "do not know". It is so easy to become confused and see things that do not exist.
I had a fine example of this a few years ago. One night my wife thought she saw strange lights in the sky and sure enough to the east there were two mysterious lights that shimmered as they swung rapidly back and forth over a small arc in the sky. They were certainly not on any airplane as they moved much more rapidly and erratically than any man made aircraft. They also had a rapid shimmer that was unlike any light we had seen. Obviously they must be from an alien space ship. We watched them for some time until we realized that they were caused by the reflection of the new moon on the plastic covers of two solar panels on the roof of a house across the road.. The night was very dark and there was a high wind making the plastic vibrate. The panels themselves were not visible. and if we had not known of their existence we would have been convinced that there were strange unexplained lights in the sky hovering for a long time in the same place.
As part of the search for "alien life" we are constantly looking for intelligence on other planets. Yet we have not found a single piece of evidence that there exists any form of life as we know it. Could there be intelligence somewhere out in space? Perhaps, although it seems extremely unlikely, and for all our searching of the radio spectrums we have found no signals that suggest such a thing. We also have to consider that life may exist in such a different form that we would be completely unable to communicate with it or even determine that it exists. Then of course we have to define what we mean by "life". If we received signals from another planet could we assume intelligence as we know it, or could they be caused by other interaction of natural forces? Added to all of this are the enormous distances involved. While we may eventually be able to send one or two explorers to Mars and some of the closer planets, even if this is ever achieved it will be extremely costly. It is much more likely that any space exploration will be carried out by robotic machines.
The myth is constantly being repeated that we will one day move all our human race to another planet and thus avoid the catastrophe that overpopulation will bring down on us. First of all we have no place to aim for within our solar system and travel beyond it is practically impossible. Second we do not have the technology to accomplish the years of travel that would be necessary even if we knew where we were going. It all makes fascinating stories and movies, but we have to look at these things rationally and with the knowledge that we posses. No matter how much our science and technology advances we have to accept the fact that there are many things we do not and probably never will understand.
In spite of all of this, mankind has an overwhelming sense of self importance, a feeling that we cannot adequately explain. We feel that our civilization is superior to any other that may exist. So superior that it is vitally important that our civilization continues, even if any others are eliminated. Science tell us that our planet will inevitably be totally destroyed as the sun grows older, yet our stories all too often tell of our overcoming other life forces of different times and sending our entire civilization to another world. Scientists forecast our eventual end with confidence in their findings. Man however refuses to accept these findings unless they agree with their desired lifestyle.