x - 42 Louis Sheehan

Notes of Louis Sheehan

On April 16, 1178 B.C. a total eclipse blotted out the sun at high noon; astronomers know that much for certain. The other events of that day are considerably less definite, but researchers say the date may also figure large in Homer’s Odyssey, the epic tale of Odysseus’s journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. Using astronomical clues from the text, researchers say that Homer may have indicated that the day of the eclipse was also the day that Odysseus finally reached home–arriving just in time to slaughter his wife’s persistent suitors.

While the researchers believe they’ve arrived at the proper date for Odysseus’s homecoming in the Odyssey, they don’t claim to have proven that all the events in the epic are real; it is, after all, packed with gods, monsters, and magic. But researcher Marcelo Magnasco says his findings could at least demonstrate Homer’s astronomical erudition. “Under the assumption that our work turns out to be correct, it adds to the evidence that he knew what he was talking about,” Magnasco said. “It still does not prove the historicity of the return of Odysseus,” he said. “It only proves that Homer knew about certain astronomical phenomena that happened much before his time” [AP].

Researchers looked for references to constellations and planetary positions in the text, and tried to make them match up with known astronomical patterns of past centuries. As they report in the forthcoming issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [subscription required], they found references to the positions of Mercury and Venus during the final months of Odysseus’s journey, as well as a description of two constellations, Pleiades and Bootes, being both visible at sunset. Magnasco and his coauthor, Constantino Baikouzis, says these conditions all existed in the early spring of 1178 B.C.

The evidence that Odysseus’s homecoming occurred on the day of the eclipse is somewhat circumstantial. The researchers note that there are references to a new moon on the day of Odysseus’s return, which is a precursor for a solar eclipse. But the poem contains no direct reference to an eclipse on the day when Odysseus returned to his faithful wife, Penelope, and struck down the suitors.

Instead, there’s a literary flourish that could be interpreted as a reference to the sun’s disappearance. As the suitors are sitting down for their noontime meal, the goddess Athena “confounds their minds” so that they start laughing uncontrollably and see their food spattered with blood. Then the seer Theoclymenus prophesies their death and passage to Hades, ending with the phrase: “The Sun has been obliterated from the sky, and an unlucky darkness invades the world.” The Greek historian Plutarch interpreted this as signifying a total solar eclipse, and many others have agreed [Los Angeles Times].

Trying to reconcile ancient literature with historical fact is a risky proposition, and even the researchers advise taking their hypothesis with a grain of salt. “The notion that the passage could refer not just to an allegorical eclipse used by the poet for literary effect but actually to a specific historical one,” they agreed, “seems unlikely because it would entail the transmission through oral tradition of information about an eclipse occurring maybe five centuries before the poem was cast in the form we know today” [The New York Times]. Homer is thought to have put the legends of Odysseus into poetry around 850 B.C.

1  Summertime, and the tiltin’ is easy. Summers are hot not because Earth is closer to the sun, but because the tilt of the Earth’s axis lets rays of sunlight hit one hemisphere more directly.

2  During the Northern Hemisphere’s summer, we’re actually farthest from the sun, receiving 7 percent less sunlight than the Southern Hemisphere does during its summer.

3  The summer solstice—June 20 this year—is the Northern Hemisphere’s longest day, with 24 hours of unbroken sunlight north of the Arctic Circle.

4  For obsessive-compulsives: The site www.archaeoastronomy.com maintains a second-by-second countdown to each solstice.

5  Supporters of Seattle’s Solstice Parade, an annual fixture of the city’s artsy Fremont neighborhood, proclaim that it will “cast a spell of joy, hope, and rebirth that spreads from Fremont to the entire universe.”

6  Helping cast the spell are the Painted Cyclists, a clothing-optional group of bike riders who wear intense body makeup.

7  Watch out for those solstice rays: The Painted Cyclists’ organizers instruct participants to slather on the sunscreen, encouraging newbies to “ask Rob about his plaid sunburn from Solstice 2002.”

8  Modern-day druids, taking a more traditional approach, gather at England’s Stonehenge to mark the summer solstice. Many still don Celtic attire, even though a civilization known as the Beaker People finished Stonehenge a millennium before the Celts turned up.

9  The Tropic of Cancer—the latitude on Earth where the sun is directly overhead at noon on the summer solstice—got its name because when the ancients established it, the sun appeared in the constellation Cancer.

10  Oops. Due to subsequent shifting of Earth’s axis, the Tropic of Cancer is now misnamed. On the current June solstice, the sun actually appears in the constellation Taurus.

11  Worse than the full moon? On the solstice of June 20, 2001, Andrea Yates killed her five children. Three years before that (June 18, 1999—also near the solstice) she tried to kill herself with an overdose of pills.

12  Galileo was forced to recant his theory that Earth revolves around the sun on the summer solstice of 1633.

13  Other planets have solstices too. By cosmic coincidence, this year Mars and Earth have solstices that fall within a few days of each other, with the Martian solstice occurring on June 25.

14  Stock up on DVDs and fire up the sunlamp: Uranus’s axis of rotation is nearly aligned with the plane of its orbit, meaning that each pole on Uranus experiences a 42-year-long summer of steady sunshine—followed by a depressing 42 years of winter darkness.

15  At the other extreme, Venus’s and Jupiter’s poles are almost exactly perpendicular to their orbits. Because of that, their solstices—hence their seasons—are barely noticeable.

16  Then again, you would have difficulty noticing any kind of season on Venus because you would be simultaneously suffocated, crushed, and cooked at 870 degrees Fahrenheit. On Jupiter it would be worse: You would be killed by radiation long before you got close.

17  Even without seasons, changes in the sun affect the planets. Sunspots wax and wane on an 11-year cycle; at times of peak sunspot activity, such as the year 2000, the sun is 0.07 percent brighter than during periods of low activity.

18  And the sun keeps getting brighter. Models of stellar evolution estimate that the sun is about 40 percent more luminous today than it was when the Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago.

19  No more summer beach vacations. Some 1 billion to 3 billion years from now, the sun’s increasing intensity will boil away Earth’s oceans, turning our planet into an endless desert.

20  So maybe the ancient Greeks had the right idea, pulling out all the stops for the winter solstice instead. On the festival of Lenaea, according to legend, a band of women would seize a man representing Dionysus (the god of wine-fueled revelry), rip him to shreds, and eat him.

For a nerve cell, it’s all about making connections and dropping the duds. Harvard neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman has been keeping an eye on nerve networking by observing how one neuron reacts when another grows silent. In a phone interview, he described the situation by analogy: “It’s like if I’m talking to you and you stop talking back to me. After a while I’ll hang up and walk away.”

Nerve cells grown in petri dishes are known to act this way — abandoning cells that ignore the chemical messages they send.

But now Lichtman and his colleagues, reporting online June 22 in Nature Neuroscience, document the phenomenon in a living animal, using a technique that allowed them to watch cells grow and change in real time.

The team shows how nerve cells from the brain stem (stained yellow in image) of a living mouse make connections with nerve cells (stained blue) near the salivary gland.

When the team injured the blue-stained cells, rendering them mute, the yellow-stained neurons first stopped sending chemical signals and, over time, pulled back. “Literally,” Lichtman says, “we watched connections get weak and disappear.”

Throughout life, connections are made and subsequently lost. Pruning unnecessary connections is an essential part of precise wiring, Lichtman says.

Doctors test the “wiring” in their patients’ nervous systems by tapping knees, expecting the strike to signal the brain and the brain to wire back down a “kick” response to the leg. But in this study, the team examined salivary connections — the type that make animals drool at the scent of something scrumptious. They weren’t interested in salivation per se, but rather in understanding how neural connections are molded as an animal grows and experiences life. This malleable process, called synaptic plasticity (synapses are the places where two nerve cells meet), occurs throughout the brain. For example, in the hippocampus, memories form as connections are strengthened and may be lost when connections diminish.

“This is a terrific study because they watched real things in a real animal, in real time,” comments Darwin Berg, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego. “These mechanisms are almost certainly employed in other systems such as learning and memory.”

Mary Jane’s got more goodness in her buds than Cheech or Chong ever imagined. A compound found to ease swelling, pain and inflammation has now been extracted from marijuana. The compound, structurally different from anti-inflammatory medication now on the market, provides new avenues for drug development to help those who suffer from diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis and Crohn’s disease, a new study reports. And unlike THC, the other Cannabis compound with a similar anti-inflammatory outcome, this chemical has nothing to do with feeling high.

“We were stunned to find a totally different compound within the same plant with anti-inflammatory properties,” says Jürg Gertsch, a biologist at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences in Zürich, Switzerland, and lead researcher on the study, published June 23 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The team extracted the compound, called beta-caryophyllene, from oily resin in Cannabis sativa L. buds and fed it to mice that were in the midst of an induced immune attack. After the mice ate the extract, their inflammation went down. The team then demonstrated that beta-caryophyllene works by turning on CB2 cannabinoid receptors, molecules that THC acts on and that are also known to reduce swelling, pain and inflammation.

THC works its anti-inflammatory magic by activating both CB2 and CB1 receptor molecules; CB1 receptors are concentrated in the brain and lead to the psychological effects of marijuana. Beta-caryophyllene, however, has little or no effect on CB1 and, therefore, might be used to ease inflammation without the psychological side effects, the authors suggest.

Though its anti-inflammatory effect hadn’t been proven before this study, beta-caryophyllene has previously been isolated from a number of plants and spices including black pepper, oregano and cinnamon. In fact, essential oils from the pepper plant contain more beta-caryophyllene than marijuana plants do. But the amount of pepper one would have to ingest to get the desired benefit might also lead to a nasty stomachache, Gertsch says.

Doctors often steer away from prescribing herbs and spices to patients because the dose of active ingredients can’t be controlled. “Most physicians don’t want to administer drugs where the amount of the compound goes up and down between 1.5 to 200 milligrams,” says Raphael Mechoulam, a medicinal chemist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem whose team identified THC from Cannabis in 1964.

Also, beta-caryophyllene has a limited shelf life once it’s no longer in the living plant. When kept dry, it becomes oxidized and its activity diminishes. The fresher, the better, Gertsch says.

Rather than use plant extracts, drug companies often mimic botanical compounds. Synthetic THC has been added to Sativex, for example, a drug approved in Canada to treat multiple sclerosis pain.

This study is a testament to the fact that plants contain pharmaceutical cocktails that doctors have yet to dream of, says Ethan Russo, a neurologist and advisor for GW Pharmaceuticals in Vashon, Wash. “While it’s possible to manipulate the molecule, that may not be the best approach. The whole plant extract may be more efficacious,” Russo says.

Many current anti-inflammatory medications, such as Vioxx, come with terrible side effects. But here is a nontoxic compound, already a part of our diet, that appears to do the same job, Russo says. “It always amuses me when nature does it better.”

As the 2008 U.S. presidential election approaches, tens of millions of voters have to make up their minds. They face the task of sifting through media reports, televised debates, political advertisements, campaign literature and conversations with family and friends to identify a candidate who best reflects their political views.

That just may be too much to ask, though. As political scientists have long lamented, the general public knows depressingly little about politics. Most Americans can identify the president but barely half know the name of even one cabinet member and only one-third correctly identify their two U.S. senators or their congressional representative. In surveys, roughly half of registered voters display little understanding of how government works or of current political issues.

Even if a voter knew enough to evaluate each presidential candidate’s positions on diverse issues, he or she would still need to tally pros and cons on those issues for each candidate and determine who most deserved support. Decision researchers in various fields have long favored this exhaustive, coldly logical approach, even if only as an ideal that less methodical thinkers should strive for.

Yet according to many psychologists, people will never think that way. We shun rationality and seek as little information as possible when making judgments, the experts assert. Instead, individuals use strategic shortcuts, also known as rules of thumb or heuristics, to decide. The latter term, of Greek origin, means “serving to find out or discover.” Heuristics require minimal mental effort but prompt irrational and biased judgments — or at least so say some psychologists.

Political scientists generally assume just the opposite. They regard heuristics as tools for the average citizen to fashion reasonably accurate political judgments out of sparse civic knowledge.

A recent experimental innovation promises to better illuminate heuristics’ strengths and weaknesses. Researchers now can track how volunteers decide whom to vote for during mock presidential election campaigns. Results so far indicate that well-informed voters employ heuristics better than they do extensive information analyses to select a candidate who best reflects their own views. In contrast, poorly informed voters experience problems in picking appropriate candidates, especially when using rules of thumb.

In general, rational folk who seek as much information as possible about candidates’ positions on many different issues tend to make poorer decisions about whom to support in mock campaigns than do those who follow simple heuristics. These rules of thumb include choosing candidates based on what political party they belong to or which organizations endorse them.

“At least in politics, more information does not always result in better decisions,” says political scientist Richard Lau of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. “In fact, it often results in worse decisions.”

Other new research suggests that heuristics based solely on certain emotional reactions to candidates, such as admiration and contempt, also guide voting decisions surprisingly well.

12-minute campaigns

Although political scientists typically use surveys to examine voters’ attitudes about political issues and candidates, Lau and colleague David Redlawsk of the University of Iowa in Iowa City take a different approach. They use computers to model campaigns and track how people actually decide whom to vote for in mock elections.

Lau and Redlawsk revised the classic “information board” that has long been used in psychology and marketing to study decision making. An information board looks much like the game board for the television show Jeopardy, with a matrix of columns and rows of boxes that conceal information. Columns on the board are headed by various alternatives, such as a series of political candidates. Rows are labeled with different attributes, such as experience and stands on issues.

In the updated version, volunteers uncover information that they want to learn by clicking a box on the screen. Researchers record what information gets examined, the order in which it’s retrieved and how long it’s perused. Over the past seven years, the two investigators’ findings based on the method have stirred much interest at political science conferences.

Lau and Redlawsk’s “dynamic process-tracing” method uses the information board format to mimic the overwhelming flow of information during presidential campaigns. This approach features a mock primary campaign with six candidates, two Democrats and four Republicans or vice versa, followed by a general election campaign between each party’s nominee. Volunteers register with a party, vote in that party’s primary and then cast ballots in the general election.

The primary campaign lasts about 20 minutes. The general election unfolds over 12 minutes.

During a campaign, columns of boxes on what looks like an information board scroll down a computer screen and disappear, replaced by others at the top of the screen. Participants thus have access to only a fraction of the total information pool at any one time. As in real campaigns, some types of candidate information, such as poll results, appear more often than others do, such as endorsements and issue statements.

access

Voting Behavior and Emotional HeuristicsEmotions, specifically admiration and contempt for a politician, mirrored voters' stated preference better than political party affiliation in a study of 70 voters before the 2004 election, suggesting that these emotions are often used as shortcuts when choosing a candidate. Click on the picture to view a larger version.J. Korenblat (source: Wang, et al., J. Behavioral Decision Making, 2008

At regular intervals, a 20-second political advertisement from one of the candidates takes over the computer screen.

Similar to most voters, no one in the study can read and consider every bit of information presented during these mock campaigns, much less compare candidates on every political attribute.

If a participant employs a particular heuristic, such as paying special attention to which groups endorse different candidates, then Lau and Redlawsk can see whether that person consistently clicks on endorsements during a campaign.

Before the mock campaign, researchers survey each volunteer’s political attitudes to determine the candidate that most closely aligns with each volunteer’s views — thus the best voting choice.

In a groundbreaking 2001 study that launched the real-time analysis of how people make voting choices, Lau and Redlawsk found that nearly all of 657 eligible voters, ages 18 to 84, used heuristics at least some of the time in determining which mock candidate to support. Available shortcuts included relying on a candidate’s party affiliation, making assumptions about a candidate’s ideology based on party affiliation, checking candidate endorsements, tracking poll leaders and judging candidates based on their physical appearance in photographs.

Using shortcuts — especially the tracking of endorsements — allowed most politically sophisticated volunteers, as determined in a survey, to choose and vote for the candidate who best represented their views. That proportion dipped to a bare majority among those who didn’t use heuristics.

Unlike informed voters, politically naïve volunteers usually failed to vote in their own best interests if they used heuristics. Uninformed participants did better when they avoided using rules of thumb, identifying the best-suited candidate about half the time.

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======    6/22/15 Notes of Louis Sheehan

“Heuristics aren’t a saving grace for apathetic voters,” Redlawsk says. “But voters who understand the political environment can use these shortcuts to their advantage.”

Even political sophisticates sometimes mess up, however. When presented with a choice between a stereotypical candidate from their own party, say a moderately liberal Democrat, and a free-thinking candidate of the other party, such as a Republican with a mix of conservative, liberal and moderate views, well-informed voters chose the wrong candidate almost half the time.

In this situation, the political environment suddenly became unfamiliar, Redlawsk holds. Decision making shortcuts that typically had worked now fizzled out.

In another study, described in their 2006 book How Voters Decide: Information Processing During Election Campaigns, Lau and Redlawsk find that voters get superior guidance from simple heuristics than from valiant attempts to account for lots of information.

For instance, volunteers who compared candidates on one or a few key attributes — such as the competitors’ stands on abortion and tax policy — frequently chose the politician who best matched their own overall preferences. Accurate choices steadily declined as participants considered more and more political material.

The latter, read-everything strategy overwhelms people’s limited capacity to remember and consciously manipulate pieces of information, Lau and Redlawsk theorize. Voters end up confused rather than enlightened.

That conclusion echoes the findings of psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Gigerenzer and his colleagues find that “fast and frugal” heuristics aid all sorts of uncertainty-drenched decisions, such as designing a stock portfolio based on choosing familiar versus unfamiliar companies. These rules of thumb tap into meaningful cues for the task at hand.

“Helpful intuitions can largely be explained by the use of simple heuristics,” Gigerenzer says.

Feel the vote

Simple but helpful heuristics may sometimes travel from the gut to the mind. New research suggests that gut-level emotional reactions to political candidates effectively guide voting decisions.

“Although emotional reactions to public events are rich and voluminous, voting preferences may be determined by only one or a few critical emotions,” says psychologist X. T. Wang of the University of South Dakota in Vermillion.

In a pair of experiments conducted two months before the 2004 presidential election between George W. Bush and John Kerry, Wang studied a total of 210 eligible voters. The first experiment required volunteers to list and prioritize the political issues that most concerned them. Each participant then rated how much candidates’ policies on each issue agreed with their own views, ranked whether they felt positively or negatively toward Bush’s and Kerry’s views on each issue and estimated the likelihood that each candidate would implement policies deemed critical by the voter.

Volunteers then voted for a candidate, and they revealed their own and their parents’ political parties.

Divvying up votes either according to each participant’s party affiliation or ratio of pros to cons for Bush and Kerry closely predicted the final vote breakdown, Wang reports in the January Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.

In the two trials, Kerry received about 60 percent of the vote. In contrast, a mathematical formula that accounted for all information obtained from participants incorrectly tagged Bush as the winner of the first experimental election.

After prioritizing their policy concerns, the 70 volunteers in the second experiment rated four types of emotional reactions to Bush and Kerry on a five-point scale. These “interpersonal” emotions consisted of admiration, contempt, envy and pity or sympathy.

Simply by noting whether Bush or Kerry received a higher admiration rating from each voter, Wang closely predicted the final voting breakdown of study participants. A prediction based on which candidate received a lower contempt rating worked almost as well. In fact, participants’ levels of admiration and contempt for candidates substantially outperformed their party affiliation in predicting their final vote.

Wang is now exploring whether people eligible to vote in this year’s presidential primaries used heuristics and favored certain emotions, such as ranking candidates according to admiration levels.

Political scientists have long used surveys to study whether voters like or dislike candidates, an approach that roughly corresponds to Wang’s focus on admiration and contempt. Analyses of survey data paint a darker portrait of voter decision making than Wang does, however. Voters typically overlook even sharp differences between their own views and those of favored candidates and political groups, contends political scientist Larry Bartels of Princeton University.

“Most of the time, voters merely reaffirm their partisan and group identities at the polls,” Bartels and his Princeton colleague Christopher Achen concluded in a 2006 paper. “They do not reason very much or very often. What they do is rationalize.”

People indeed find it hard to change their long-held opinions about a candidate, even as information that challenges those opinions comes to light, Redlawsk says. During mock election campaigns, he finds that volunteers actually become more likely to vote for an initially liked candidate who suddenly starts to express opinions that differ from their own. However, policy conflicts eventually become so great — usually when 80 percent of information about a preferred candidate clashes with a supporter’s views — that people switch their allegiance to another candidate.

The generous leeway granted to initially favored candidates may, at least for political sophisticates, reflect the intuitive strength of heuristics that they used in the first place, in Redlawsk’s view.

Survey says

As early as 1960, four political scientists concluded that most voters use little knowledge to anoint a political candidate as their favorite. After analyzing national surveys conducted before and after the 1952 and 1956 elections, the researchers concluded that a person’s political party and socioeconomic background powerfully shaped voting preferences. Media reports, political discussions and other factors had noticeable but less pronounced effects on voting decisions, they wrote in The American Voter.

A follow-up to that book, titled The American Voter Revisited, reaches much the same conclusion. Political scientist William Jacoby of Michigan State University in East Lansing and his colleagues probed national surveys conducted before and after the 2000 and 2004 elections.

About 80 percent of the electorate reports only peripheral concerns with politics, the researchers find. Personal identification with one or the other political party remains a prime influence on voters today.

Typical voters use party affiliation to pick a candidate much as consumers use brand loyalty as a convenient way to make purchases, Jacoby says.

However, he adds, one-time surveys may not tap into the broad array of voting heuristics illuminated by Lau and Redlawsk’s “very creative” research method. Although still regarded by many political scientists as tools for ignorant voters to make adequate decisions, Jacoby suspects that heuristics may actually play to the advantage of political sophisticates, as Lau and Redlawsk find.

If that’s true, it suggests an intriguing voting strategy: Stay consistently informed about the political sphere so that you can bypass much of the information thrown at voters during election campaigns and cast a simply effective vote.

http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET

Stanton Terry Friedman (July 29, 1934) is a professional ufologist, currently residing in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada

Friedman graduated from the University of Chicago, earning a Bachelor of Science (1955) and Master of Science (1956) degree in nuclear physics.  http://louis-j-sheehaN.NETFriedman used to bill himself as "The Flying Saucer Physicist" due to his nuclear physics degrees. He currently refers to himself as a "scientific ufologist." (Moseley & Pflock 2002:201-2) Friedman was employed for 14 years as a nuclear physicist for such companies as General Electric, General Motors, Westinghouse, TRW Systems, Aerojet General Nucleonics, and McDonnell Douglas where he worked on highly advanced, classified programs on nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets, and various compact nuclear power plants for space applications. Since the 1980s, he has done related consultant work in the Radon-detection industry. Friedman is a member of the American Nuclear Society, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and AFTRA.

In 1970 Friedman departed full-time employment as a physicist to pursue the scientific investigation of UFOs. Since then, he has lectured at more than 600 colleges and 100 professional groups in 50 states, nine provinces, and 16 foreign countries. Additionally, he has worked as a consultant on the topic. He has published more than 80 UFO related papers and has appeared on hundreds of radio and television programs. He has also provided written testimony to Congressional hearings and appeared twice at the United Nations. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET(About the Author: (Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience) :)

He is the original civilian investigator of the Roswell and supports the hypothesis that it was a genuine crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft. (See Crash at Corona: The Definitive Study of the Roswell Incident.)His publications regarding Roswell have been criticized by skeptics, but his meticulous investigation has produced convincing evidence, including sworn statements by eye-witnesses and government documents to support his conclusions. Friedman has also been criticized among skeptics for refusing to accept that all of the Majestic 12 papers are fakes, although he has found evidence that some are hoaxes.http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET

Friedman has criticized the scientific SETI program to search for extraterrestrial life, and has successfully debated against its director on the extraterrestrial hypothesis. He has also threatened those who have slandered him with legal action.

In 1968 Friedman argued to a Committee of The House Of Representatives that the evidence suggests that earth is being visited by intelligently controlled extraterrestrial vehicles.

Dr. Bruce Maccabee, Ph.D. (May 6, 1942) is an optical physicist employed by the U.S. Navy, and a leading UFO researcher.

He is listed in Who's Who in Technology Today and American Men and Women of Science. In addition, he is a noted contemporary UFO investigator specializing in technical analysis and photoanalysis of UFO cases. The following information is derived primarily from his website's biography page.

Contents

[hide]

    * 1 Biography

    * 2 Media

          o 2.1 Books

                + 2.1.1 Nonfiction

                + 2.1.2 Fiction

          o 2.2 Recent articles

          o 2.3 Appearances

    * 3 References

    * 4 External links

[edit] Biography

Dr. Maccabee received a B.S. in physics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass., and then at American University, Washington, DC, (M.S. and Ph. D. in physics). In 1972 he commenced his long career at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, presently headquartered at Dahlgren, Virginia. He has worked on optical data processing, generation of underwater sound with lasers and various aspects of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) using high power lasers.

He has been active in UFO research since the late 1960s when he joined the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) and was active in research and investigation for NICAP until its demise in 1980. He became a member of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) in 1975 and was subsequently appointed to the position of state Director for Maryland, a position he still holds. In 1979 he was instrumental in establishing the Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR) and was the chairman for about 13 years. He presently serves on the National Board of the Fund.

His UFO research and investigations (which, he often stresses, are completely unrelated to his Navy work) have included the Kenneth Arnold sighting (June 24, 1947), the McMinnville, Oregon (Trent) photos of 1950, the Gemini 11 astronaut photos of September, 1966, the New Zealand sightings of December, 1978, the Japan Airlines (JAL1628) sighting of November 1986, the numerous sightings of Ed Walters and others in Gulf Breeze, Florida, 1987 - 1988, the "red bubba" sightings, 1990-1992 (including his own sighting in September, 1991), the Mexico City video of August, 1997 (which he deemed a hoax), the Phoenix lights sightings of March 13, 1997, and many others.

He has also done historical research and was the first to obtain the secret "flying disc file" of the FBI (what he calls "the REAL X-Files"). In addition, he has collected documents from the CIA, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army, and other government agencies.

Maccabee is the author or coauthor of about three dozen technical articles and more than a hundred UFO articles over the last 30 years, including many which appeared in the MUFON UFO Journal and MUFON Symposium proceedings. Among his papers was a reanalysis of the statistics and results of the famed Battelle Memorial Institute Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, a massive analysis of 3200 Air Force cases through the mid 1950s. (See Identified Flying Objects (IFOs)). Another was a reanalysis of the results of the Condon Committee UFO study from 1969. (Like many others, Maccabee concluded that Edward Condon lied about the results.)

In addition, he has also written or contributed to half a dozen books on the subject of UFOs and appeared on numerous radio and TV shows and documentaries (some given below) as an authority on the subject.

Maccabee is also an accomplished pianist who performed at the 1997 and 1999 MUFON symposia. He lives in Frederick County, Maryland.

[edit]

The defining quality of great children's literature is persistence: It stays with the reader with undiminished vitality into adulthood. There is a certain type of gloomy old man who, for A.A. Milne's readers, will always be an Eeyore; children who read "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" understand her befuddlement at the curious ways of the world only more acutely as they grow older.

No children's book has had a greater influence on the minds and attitudes of young English-speakers than "The Jungle Book" (1894) and its companion, "The Second Jungle Book" (1895), written by Rudyard Kipling while he was living in Brattleboro, Vt. These exciting tales and thumpingly rhythmic poems tell of the childhood and coming of age of Mowgli, a baby lost in the Indian jungle after a tiger attacks his village, who is adopted and raised by a pack of wolves and grows up to become a great hunter. Baloo, the wise, patient bear, teaches the "man-cub" the Law of the Pack, the animals' code of chivalry in the bloody battlefield of the forest.

[Jungle Book image]

Christopher Serra

What makes "The Jungle Book" so absorbingly vital, the reason it has persisted, is its naturalism. In Beatrix Potter's "The Tale of Peter Rabbit," Mrs. Rabbit goes to the baker to buy brown bread and currant buns for her baby bunnies; Mowgli learns to hunt and kill for food, and to escape being hunted and killed by his implacable foe, the tiger Shere Khan. The architect of Kipling's jungle was Darwin, both in that it's governed by the principle of the survival of the fittest, and in its relative paucity of sentimentality for an age that had an insatiable sweet tooth.

Another fundamental reason "The Jungle Book" has maintained unsurpassed prestige in the competitive jungle of children's books is that it was literally institutionalized in 1916, when Robert Baden-Powell created the Cub Scouts based on "Mowgli's Brothers," the first story. The largest captive audience of boys ever created still adopts the names of Kipling's animals in their games, and recites a promise to do their best to do their duty to God and country, to help other people -- and to obey the Law of the Pack. Yes.

In tone, Baden-Powell's version of "The Jungle Book" veers closer to Beatrix Potter than to the original; yet the most significant departure of the Cub Scout's Promise from Kipling is its declaration of duty to God. Although Kipling routinely (in every sense) invoked the Christian God in his patriotic verse, he himself was an atheist. This passionate champion of the British Empire was just as hostile to Christian missionaries as he was to Hindu pandits; if there was a religion he admired, it was Islam. In conversation, he habitually referred to the deity as Allah.

God plays no part in Kipling's jungle; more crucially, neither does Empire, the principal theme of Kipling's life and work. Writing about animals, ironically, enabled him to observe humanity (for the animals in the stories are plainly people) without the strictures of nationalism, which eventually strangled and embittered his thinking.

Written precisely on the cusp of the cinema era, "The Jungle Book" predicts that medium's power to move and excite -- a compliment returned in at least a dozen film versions. Events are narrated boldly, in a verbal equivalent of real time, and are often told from multiple points of view. Unencumbered by the need to proclaim the glory of Empire, "The Jungle Book" permitted Kipling to glory in pure storytelling, always his greatest gift. Henry James, an unlikely friend and defender, who once called him "the most complete man of genius" he had ever known, considered "The Jungle Book" to be Kipling's finest work.

In no way does the rationalist-nationalist genius more closely resemble Darwin than in the scientific accuracy of his observations of wildlife. The best-known story in "The Jungle Book" is "Rikki-tikki-tavi," one of the many non-Mowgli tales, about the doughty mongoose who does battle with Nag the cobra. Here, the snake makes his terrifying entrance:

"From the thick grass at the foot of the bush there came a low hiss -- a horrid cold sound that made Rikki-tikki jump back two clear feet. Then inch by inch out of the grass rose up the head and spread hood of Nag, the big black cobra, and he was five feet long from tongue to tail. When he had lifted one-third of himself clear of the ground, he stayed balancing to and fro exactly as a dandelion-tuft balances in the wind, and he looked at Rikki-tikki with the wicked snake's eyes that never change their expression, whatever the snake may be thinking of."

Kipling not only conveys a vivid sense of danger and wickedness but also describes the appearance and defensive behavior of Naja naja, the Indian cobra, with as precise an eye as any herpetologist.

He saw just as clearly into the workings of a boy's mind. (There are no girls in Kipling's jungle.) Boys, he knew, like to be petted by their mothers so long as there are no other boys around to see it, but they understand that the playground is the real world. The cruelty of Mowgli's code has been familiar to generations of children, who have instinctively felt the rightness of its central tenet: "The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack." That first moment of reading a home truth that one already knows but has never seen put down in words is where the life of a reader begins.

Even as a youngster, Rollie looked older and wiser than his years. His white mustache sprouted longer by the month, until it flamed from his cheeks like a German kaiser's. Sometimes, it all but hid his mouth.

In the last few years, though, the tribulations of age — not just the appearance of it — have begun catching up with Rollie. It wasn't immediately noticeable on the outside. But his keepers are reminded each time they get a look past the Emperor Tamarin's flowing whiskers, and into his jaws.

The tiny monkey, used to crunching away on raw sweet potato and celery, has surrendered all but 6 of his 32 teeth to the toll of time.

At 17, Rollie — a resident of Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo — is a senior citizen of his species. In the wilds of the Amazon, his keepers say, he almost certainly would never have made it this long.

In captivity, he's got plenty of company.

The Golden Years have arrived at the nation's zoos and aquariums, and that is taking veterinarians and keepers, along with their animals, into a zone of unknowns.

Do female gorillas, now frequently living in to their 40s and 50s, experience menopause?

Can an aging lemur suffer from dementia?

How do you weigh the most difficult choice — between prolonging pain and ending life — when the patient is a venerable jaguar who's been around so long she's come to feel like a member of the family?

All of those questions hang on a larger one that, until recent years, has been left to educated guesswork based on limited evidence.

"How old is geriatric? How old do animals really live?" says Sharon Dewar, a spokeswoman for the Lincoln Park Zoo, whose keepers have adjusted to Rollie's toothlessness by serving him a diet of soft-cooked veggies. "That's the million-dollar question."

Zeroing in on the answer takes years of tracking births, deaths and the age of animal populations. But zoos, which have pooled information on animal births and genealogy since the 1970s, are drawing some early conclusions. For example, records show that the median age of Siberian tigers living in zoos in the two decades ending in 1990 was a little over 11 years old. Since then, however, the median age of those tigers has topped 15 years old.

The increase in animal longevity is no mystery. Just as with people, health care for animals has become much more sophisticated.

At the San Antonio Zoo, keepers noticed that George, a 37-year-old tapir, was slowing down. In the mornings, his legs seemed stiffer, and he had trouble getting up. The diagnosis was clear: arthritis.

At first they put him on dietary supplements. They moved on to Adequan, a prescription that helped ease the discomfort further. Still, wasn't there more they could do? The problem is there's no textbook for how to treat a geriatric tapir.

Reasoning that tapirs are not so different from horses, the zoo called in a specialist who performed acupuncture on George, inserting tiny needles at various medians in an effort to ease the pain.

Since then, George "acts like he's five years younger," says Rob Coke, the zoo's senior staff veterinarian.

Even as San Antonio and other zoos have improved on health care, they've also become much more careful and cooperative in managing animal populations, tracking their animals to make decisions about breeding. Keepers focus on more than just keeping animals healthy, creating habitats and social environments that will make them happy and less-stressed.

The result is more robust animals, with the potential to live longer. That potential is realized because life in a zoo or aquarium grants animals an exception to nature's laws of survival. In the wild, weaker animals fall victim to predators, parasites and poachers before they ever have a chance to grow too old.

"Life as a wild animal is tough," says Steve Feldman of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

Without predators, and treated for disease, animals are far outliving their wild counterparts.

At the Minnesota Zoo, a pair of bottlenose dolphins have reached 44 and 42 years old, and in Florida a couple have reached their 50s.

"We know from studying the teeth of animals (dolphins) that have washed up on beaches, in studies I've looked at, that there are no animals that old," says Kevin Willis, an expert on animal life expectancy at the Minneapolis zoo, in the Twin Cities suburb of Apple Valley.

But old age subjects animals to wear and tear and changes in physiology that they would never have known otherwise.

On a recent afternoon at the New York Aquarium, the uncertainties of animal aging are evident in the case of a California sea lion named Fonzie.

For years, he was one of the top performers for the crowds in the stands of the aquarium's amphitheater. But at 21, he's definitely slowing down. He started hobbling. The corneas on his eyes turned cloudy. He lost interest in his trainers. His weight dropped to 552 pounds. Under the X-ray, veterinarians noticed subtle changes in his bone structure.

"You know how it is when you have arthritis and in the winter time your bones creek because it's so damp and cold?" says Kate McClave, who runs the aquarium's onsite hospital. "Well, it's a similar thing for a marine mammal."

To help, vets moved Fonzie to an indoor pool where the water temperature is a closely controlled 55 degrees and he is protected from winter winds, and put him on anti-inflammatories. Nearly three months later, the eggplant-shaped mammal lumbers in to the checkup room with all the grace of a sandbag, his breath fragrant with fish. In exchange for a finned snack, he submits himself to the probe of a stethoscope, a few eye drops, an ultrasound and a look inside his mouth.

"This is one of our few patients that will actually say 'ahhhh'," says Paul Calle, senior veterinarian for the Wildlife Conversation Society, which runs the aquarium.

Careful treatment appears to have eased Fonzie's discomfort and he's ready to rejoin the other sea lions. But his days as a performer are probably over. At the aquarium, his seniority is far from unusual. Immediately after his exam, keepers moved on to take a blood sample from Spook, a 43-year-old gray seal believed to be the oldest on record. Earlier in the week, the aquarium lost a sand tiger shark named Bertha who, at 65, also held an age record.

That longevity confronts zoo managers with mysteries and doubts they've never really had to deal with before.

"The simple question was: 'Does a 41-year-old gorilla need to be on birth control?' And nobody really knew," says Sue Margulis, curator of primates at Lincoln Park.

Years ago, there wouldn't have been much need to consider such a question. Even today, a gorilla that reaches 30 is getting up there. Now, though, the question applies to far more than the one gorilla at nearby Brookfield Zoo that provoked it. When Margulis and a fellow researcher set out to study the possibility of menopause in gorillas, they looked at 30 gorillas in 17 zoos around the country. Of those, 22 are considered geriatric, including one who's now 55.

They found that about a quarter were no longer going through monthly menstrual cycles, while others were in transition. But while gorillas in menopause spent much less time with the male silverbacks, most were quite healthy. In the wild, female gorillas typically leave the group in which they're born. In zoos, older female gorillas stick around, sometimes playing a grandmother role in childcare that is likely unique to captivity.

At the St. Louis Zoo, the uncertainties of aging have keepers wondering about the well-being of Ruffles, a black-and-white ruffed lemur. At 31, he's a sage.

Some of Ruffle's problems are easily identifiable and treatable. He gets an anti-inflammatory pill twice a day — he likes it tucked inside a grape — to combat the pain of spinal arthritis. When blood tests showed he had liver problems, he was put on medication for that, as well.

But there's no easy diagnosis for another symptom. At times, Ruffles seems to be staring off into nowhere.

"Dementia is one of those things that's very difficult to pin down just because we can't use the same sort of testing as we do with humans," says Joe Knobbe, St. Louis' zoological manager of primates.

Ruffles has good days and others that could be better. The best keepers can do is make him comfortable, including installing a tiny hanging platform where the lemur, who no longer climbs like a young primate, enjoys resting with a blanket.

Many zoos have been making similar changes to animal habitat to ease geriatric residents into retirement. At the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, a black bear named Spike and his sister Missoula are no longer youngsters. The 22-year-old siblings both have arthritis and Missoula has a problem with inner ear infections that makes it difficult for her to keep her balance. They struggled to climb to their den on the third tier of an exhibit featuring steep, rugged artificial cliffs.

"You start seeing these changes and you realize that if you just let it go, eventually it's going to be a problem where they can't get up there," said Craig Ivanyi of the museum, which is just outside Tucscon. "You realize it's just a matter of time."

So in December, keepers moved to the pair into retirement in a new, specially designed enclosure, with gently graded ramps and a large, sloping pool. Spike and Missoula will spend their lives there, off-exhibit, while the zoo renovates the old enclosure so that when new bears arrive, they will be able to age in place.

Ivanyi says that, even with the bears now too old to be exhibited, the zoo is obligated to take care of them and make them comfortable as long as their quality of life can be assured. The challenge for his institution and others is deciding what to do when quality of life begins to ebb away.

Even in old animals that appear healthy, examination after death often finds they "suffer from a range of health problems that may not have been apparent when they were alive," a group of mostly Swiss veterinarians wrote in an article published last year in the journal Animal Welfare.