Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times and Their Impact on Human Culture, History, and Beliefs

«we will examine 500 selected reports of sightings from antiquity to the year 1879, when the industrial revolution deeply changed the nature of human society» — el corte y su razón.

«a period that was entirely free of those modern complications represented by airplanes, dirigibles, rockets» — por qué el catálogo se detiene antes de 1880.

«While we make no claim that any of the events we have uncovered "proves" anything about flying objects from alien worlds, or influence by non-human intelligences, we have emerged with four major observations» — la reserva con que abren sus conclusiones.

«Throughout history, unknown phenomena variously described as prodigies or celestial wonders, have made a major impact on the senses and the imagination of the individuals who witnessed them» — primera observación.

«Every epoch has interpreted the phenomena in its own terms, often in a specific religious or political context» — segunda observación: la capa interpretativa es local.

«The lessons drawn from these ancient cases can be usefully applied to the full range of aerial phenomena that are still reported and remain unexplained by contemporary science» — cuarta observación.

«an unexplained phenomenon has played and continues to play a fantastically important role in shaping our belief systems» — la afirmación de fondo del libro.

«it questioned the simplistic "extraterrestrial" origin of the phenomenon» — así presentan *Passport to Magonia* (1969), y añaden que «the book was based on preliminary data and scanty documentary evidence».

«In selecting cases for inclusion in this Chronology we have paid special attention to such biases in order to steer clear of the suggestion that aerial phenomena intervened directly in terrestrial history» — criterio de sesgo declarado.

«The symbol CD denotes cases whose nature or source, in our opinion, needs new information because it is vague, unreliable, or insufficiently documented» — el único símbolo de cuarentena legible en esta fuente (ver Notas de carga).

«The study of such cases has to begin with the search for a primary source, often a chronicler, a historian, or an astronomer» — regla de partida para lo antiguo.

«in this initial section we have relaxed our selection standards in terms of date and contents, while providing critical comments when appropriate» — declaran haber bajado el estándar en la sección más antigua.

«where to find reliable information that can be further investigated and verified? And (2) how to select suitable material for presentation without biasing the reader towards pre-established conclusions?» — las dos preguntas con que plantean el problema de fuentes.

«we took a different approach: one that is strictly fact-driven, rather than belief-driven» — la declaración de método.

«we were often able to go back to original sources rather than citing popular trade books or contemporary compilations» — su reclamo de remonte a la fuente primaria.

«Early sources are plentiful, sometimes officially certified and verified, detailed and quite distinguished, even in the remote classical era» — sobre la disponibilidad de fuentes clásicas.

«the Annales Maximi that contained these "prodigies" is lost, but it is supposed that Livy, Pliny and Obsequens had access to these annals and drew from them» — consignan la pérdida de la fuente romana raíz.

«These Annals, which were lost even before the time of Livy and Pliny, are now lost.» — Explican la consecuencia: los prodigios romanos llegan datados solo por año, con yuxtaposición de sucesos inconexos.

«if they thought they were witnessing a divine manifestation or a contact with a creature from another world, we cannot censor that information, and indeed it is relevant to the way they color their testimony» — regla de fidelidad al testimonio.

«whenever we could not find compelling evidence to indicate the object was NOT a meteor, a comet or an atmospheric effect, we have generally excluded the case from our Chronology» — criterio de exclusión por defecto.

«Cases that we found, to the best of our estimation, to be fictional or fraudulent were excluded from the main chronology» — regla 1, *Credibility*; algunos quedaron como referencia de fondo en la sección de mitos.

«Cases must have a specific place and time associated with them» — regla 2, *Space and time*: descartan las afirmaciones genéricas sobre luces o tradiciones sin fecha ni lugar.

«We relaxed this rule somewhat for ancient cases and gradually tightened it as one got closer to the present century» — declaran el estándar variable en el tiempo.

«Cases must describe a specific phenomenon in sufficient detail so that common explanations (such as meteors, comets or illusions) can be recognized and excluded» — regla 3, *Description*.

«Cases where witnesses are cited (or, even better, identified by name and function) are given greater weight than general statements about an event» — regla 4, *Witness identification*.

«We have attempted to detect and eliminate hoaxes from our chronology, but we do see such stories as important social indicators rather than spurious narratives» — el fraude como dato, no como basura.

«hoax to be credible to those who hear it, it must fit into the general belief system of the society that surrounds the author of the hoax» — corolario del anterior; la línea trae un número de página incrustado por el OCR y por eso el verbatim arranca aquí (ver Notas de carga).

«For this reason we have made a special effort to track down the sources of the stories we have related, to the extent that the background could be researched» — la consecuencia operativa.

«One of the secret pleasures and rewards of this work has been the study of the various "explanations" given by scholars of every era to dismiss the observations brought to them by common people» — así presentan su interés por la historia de las desestimaciones.

«We excluded most of these cases from our list, keeping only instances where the interaction had a special relevance to the overall phenomenon» — sobre las entidades; y admiten que «This decision may be challenged by our readers».

«we were concerned that, the moment we added superhuman beings by themselves» — el motivo: que todo el catálogo quedara teñido de intencionalidad deliberada.

«No known criteria helps us sort "ufonauts" from other kinds of creatures (such as a mermaid, or a sea serpent) when no aerial phenomenon is present» — el límite que declaran no poder trazar.

«The two authors have had many discussions and occasionally heated debates on this point» — sobre el material bíblico; y añaden «We dislike the idea of portraying aerial phenomena as having selectively aided one religious order or community above others».

«Events that were received within a religious context were better preserved simply because witnesses, priests and monks generally could read and write» — primer sesgo de conservación: es sesgo del registro, no del fenómeno.

«The fact that witnesses perceived transcendent images in the phenomena may be part of the mechanism of the phenomena» — tercer sesgo, y el más fuerte: la percepción trascendente podría ser parte del mecanismo.

«Paintings do not offer valid evidence about the periods they represent» — sobre el arte como fuente; sí dice cómo interpretaba el suceso la sociedad del artista.

«art reveals more about the painter, his (or her) patron and the audience than about the subject itself» — la formulación corta del mismo criterio.

«since pre-1800 texts cannot easily be read by optical character recognition scanning software, the amount of information available to us after 1800 has become mountainous in comparison to older records» — sesgo de digitalización, declarado.

«We are especially lacking in reliable data from Japan, China, and India» — el hueco geográfico que reconocen.

«as authors of this compilation, we have worked with the awareness that we could not escape projecting some of our own beliefs» — autodivulgación en la conclusión: proyectan a través de las selecciones que hicieron.

«Copyright © 2009 by Chris Aubeck and Documatica Research, LLC» — el copyright NO está a nombre de Vallée como persona; se consigna sin corregir.

La ficha catalográfica de la Library of Congress encabeza «Vallee, Jacques», fecha el registro en 2010 y clasifica la obra bajo objetos volantes no identificados en sus aspectos históricos, psicológicos y religiosos.

«I was thrilled, therefore, to find Jacques Vallee's book, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers (1969)» — prólogo de David J. Hufford, del Penn State College of Medicine; las pp. 10–15 son enteramente suyas.

«He recognized the difference between the core phenomenology of reports and the local language and interpretations that clothed that core in traditional accounts.» — Hufford sobre el método de *Magonia*, no los autores sobre el suyo.

«Using Vallee's approach I was able to immediately recognize in the Old Hag the "bedroom invader" experience that I had encountered in popular UFO literature» — Hufford sobre su propio trabajo de campo en Terranova y la parálisis del sueño.

«until you strip away the culturally elaborated language and secondary interpretations, leaving "anomalous aerial phenomena."» — Hufford, sobre el método que atribuye a Vallée.

«he implied that he was stripping away layers of cultural elaboration to find the "stable core" of the phenomenon» — Hufford sobre J. Allen Hynek y el gas de pantano, es decir sobre el método de los *debunkers*: el referente es opuesto al de la línea anterior y las dos no se sueldan (ver Notas de carga).

«To do this in an open-ended search for elusive truth without needing to offer a theory of their own is rarest of all» — Hufford sobre la abstención teórica de los autores.

«Julius Obsequens recorded 63 celestial phenomena, Livy 30, Pliny 26, Dio Cassius 14, Cicero 9» — cita en bloque de Raymond W. Drake, en *Flying Saucers* n.º 39 (dic. 1964), reproducida dentro de la sección de fuentes clásicas. Es voz de Drake.

«Mirabilis Annus made clear its political point very early on» — cita de William E. Burns, *An Age of Wonders* (Manchester UP, 2002), introducida en la fuente con «William E. Burns notes:». No es voz de los autores.

«a classical scholar who tracked down and translated for us many hard-to-find references» — así acreditan a Yannis Deliyannis, con posgrado en arqueología por la Sorbona; sus traducciones se adjudican en las pp. 112, 115 y 257.

«has worked for seven years through the Internet to assemble and validate an enormous amount of raw sighting data» — sobre el Proyecto Magoniax, fundado por Aubeck con Rod Brock en 2003.

Los agradecimientos nombran a los colaboradores del grupo: Rod Brock, Jerome Clark y Thomas Bullard (EUA), Mikhail Gershtein (Rusia), Daniel Guenther (Alemania), Eduardo Russo y Giuseppe Stilo (Italia), Javier García Blanco y Jesús Callejo (España), Peter Hassall (Nueva Zelanda) y Fabio Picasso (Argentina).

Coleccionistas previos consultados: Desmond Leslie, Harold Wilkins, Guy Quincy, Aimé Michel, Jean Sider, Godelieve van Overmeire, Michel Bougard, Christiane Piens, Ion Hobana, Lucius Farish, Gordon Creighton, Matthew Hurley, Jean-François Boedec, Claude Maugé y Ron Brinkley; más Franck Marie, con una colección privada de unas 30 000 referencias.

«In addition to the sources and references cited throughout this book, we have found the following works important to verify the reliability of many cases» — encabeza la bibliografía, que por tanto es supletoria: no hay lista consolidada de fuentes, y el aparato vive entero en la línea `Source:` de cada caso.

«many items came to us through the general literature and the Internet with limited documentation about ownership» — nota de derechos que admite procedencia incompleta y pide corrección.

«gathered hundreds of rare documents, scientific reports, and newspaper clippings from the last four hundred years» — paratexto editorial en tercera persona, de la sección «About the Authors», sobre el Proyecto Magoniax. No es voz de los autores (ver Notas de carga).

«My primary interest was in what was called "folk belief." This term was, and still is, generally reserved for beliefs that are at odds in some way with the official modern worldview.» — prólogo de David J. Hufford: define el campo del que viene, y de paso el estatuto que la academia le daba a lo que estudia

«The experiences on which they claimed to be based were, to use the term popularized by Thomas Kuhn's landmark work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), "anomalies." From seeing a ghost to the alleged cures of folk medicine, the events described in folklore seemed to contradict the paradigm of science, the gold standard of modern rationality.» — Hufford toma de Thomas Kuhn el término con que la ciencia nombra lo que no encaja, y lo aplica a la creencia popular

«For this reason they were, as Charles Fort had said, "damned" (1919), forbidden entry to the corpus of valid knowledge.» — Hufford, con la palabra de Charles Fort, sobre la exclusión de esos datos del conocimiento válido

«In Passport to Magonia he continued to strengthen the case for there being real phenomena behind UFO reports, but linked these reports to older reports of fairies, ghosts, angels, demons, and so forth in a compelling and fascinating way.» — Hufford resume lo que Passport to Magonia le aportó en 1969: fenómeno real detrás de los reportes, y continuidad con hadas, fantasmas, ángeles y demonios

«Criticizing conventional UFO investigators for "confusing appearance and reality" he said that "The phenomenon has stable, invariant features, some of which we have tried to identify and label clearly.» — Hufford cita a Vallée de 1969, no a los coautores de este libro: es la formulación original del núcleo estable e invariante, y la crítica a confundir apariencia y realidad

«But we have also had to note carefully the chameleonlike character of the secondary attributes of the sightings: the shapes of the» — sigue la misma cita de Vallée 1969 dentro del prólogo, sobre los atributos secundarios; la enumeración continúa al otro lado del salto de plana y por eso el verbatim se corta aquí

«Among the stable core features of sleep paralysis is the anomalous presence of a frightening entity.» — Hufford sobre su propio hallazgo de campo en Terranova

«Anomalies are a threat to the intellectual status quo.» — Hufford, sobre por qué la resistencia recluta tanto al escéptico como al investigador

«The initial response of a paradigm to anomalies is to ignore or, when reports become too numerous, to assimilate. Both of these strategies are facilitated by the distribution of anomalous reports across a large number of apparently disparate conceptual categories.» — Hufford describe el mecanismo: ignorar o asimilar, facilitado porque los reportes anómalos quedan repartidos entre categorías que parecen inconexas

«When Dr. Hynek invented the "marsh gas" explanation for UFOs (which he later recanted)» — Hufford advierte que el método de este libro se parece al de los desmitificadores, y pone de ejemplo la explicación por gas de pantano que Hynek inventó y después retiró

«That, I believe, is true science: to follow the data wherever they lead, and to move away from established theory when it fails to deal adequately with the data.» — Hufford define ciencia por seguir el dato y abandonar la teoría que no le da cuenta

«As philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend pointed out (1975), what he called the "consistency principle"—judging a theory or hypothesis on the basis of its fit with well established prior theory» — Hufford invoca a Feyerabend contra el principio de consistencia; la frase remata al otro lado del salto de plana diciendo que ese principio asegura la supervivencia de la teoría más vieja, no de la mejor

«just as skeptics have used "just sleep paralysis" to debunk UFO abduction reports» — Hufford extiende el paralelo: el mismo gesto de reducir al núcleo lo usan quienes despachan los raptos como simple parálisis del sueño

«The other beautiful innovation in Vallee and Aubeck's work is the combination of science and scholarship.» — Hufford, sobre lo que a su juicio distingue a este libro

«When Jacques asked me to write a foreword to the new book I felt the sense of completion when an aspect of life comes full circle.» — Hufford cierra su prólogo con el círculo autobiográfico que va de 1969 a este libro

«The importance and antiquity of myths was noted by anthropologist of religion Mircea Eliade in Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities: "What strikes us first about the mythology and folk-lore of the "magical flight" are their primitivity and their universal diffusion.» — voz de Mircea Eliade, citada en bloque; los autores la invocan por la antigüedad y la difusión universal del vuelo mágico

«Acacius, bishop of Constantinople, states, "The population of the whole city saw it with their eyes." And Baronius, commenting upon this report, adds the following words: "Such a great event deserved to be transmitted to the most remote posterity and to be forever recorded in human memory through its mention every year in the ecclesiastical annals.» — voces de Acacio de Constantinopla y de Baronio, citadas en bloque por los autores dentro del caso del niño arrebatado; el mismo bloque se reimprime en el asiento de la Cronología de la p. 69, con otra grafía

«When these phenomena were labeled as deities the "messages" were employed to initiate religious movements that changed the social fabric of society."» — voz de Michael Persinger, citada por los autores: el fenómeno como origen de movimientos religiosos que cambian el tejido social

«Couliano asserts on the basis of ethnosemiotics that "human beings had beliefs concerning other worlds long before they could write" and that "the most ancient documents of humankind and the study of its most 'primitive' cultures.. .both show that visits to other worlds were top priorities.» — palabras de Couliano citadas por los autores, sobre creencias en otros mundos anteriores a la escritura

«It is impossible to catalogue the information accumulated by Couliano, who cautions us that he barely scratched the surface: "To collect all historical documents referring to otherworldly journeys is a gigantic task, a task that has never been undertaken before.» — Couliano advirtiendo, citado por los autores, que apenas rozó la superficie de un trabajo nunca emprendido

«of the vision of the Chariot I saw a proud majesty, chambers of chambers, majesties of awe, transparencies of fear, burning and flaming, their fires fire and their shaking shakes.» — palabras atribuidas al rabino Nehuma ben Hakana, citadas por los autores; el bloque arranca en la plana anterior y aquí se recupera lo que quedaba del otro lado del salto

«In the words of Couliano, "All Jewish apocalypses (a word that means revelation, uncovering) share a framework in which the individual is accompanied by an angelic guide, the revelation is obtained in dialogue form, multiple levels of heaven are visited...» — Couliano citado por los autores sobre el armazón común de los apocalipsis judíos: guía angélico, revelación en diálogo, cielos en varios niveles

«Couliano adds that "a third one might have been abducted to heaven as well, for 'no one knows the place of his burial to this day', that one is Moses.» — Couliano citado por los autores a propósito de Moisés y el sepulcro que nadie conoce