Will Our Curiosity Lead To Our Destruction?
An obscure researcher named Dwight Hammond has offered the thesis that most of the "U.F.O." sightings from the past are actually sightings of phenomena caused by the Imager's current gathering of past data and visual radiation.The Imager project management team said firmly that "there is no perceivable intrusion upon the past in witnessing it." Hammond rejects that. "How could we know that? It may not happen all of the time, but under certain conditions."
He offers that reports of U.F.O. sightings that were not in existence before, now exist after the Imager has gathered data from a specific area and time.The problem with proving any of this is the random predictability of the Imager's performance. Unlike science fiction this "time-machine" can not be dialed in to a specific moment of the past. It is dependent on natural space-time imperfections such as "wormholes" to function. Some of the data is thought to come from Universes other than our own!
There are many critics of the project and its huge cost. One of them, Quixley Churchill, claims that the Imager simply uses its vast parallel processing system to re-animate supposed episodes of the past. As one who has seen much of the raw data, I find this thesis hard to sustain. If the Imager could be dialed in to a specific place and time all researchers would have to do is examine historical reports before and after the Imager gathered data. If reports did not exist before the Imager gathered data, but existed afterwards, then Hammond's frightening assumptions are correct.
The current problem is much more complex to solve, as one would have to have direct knowledge of a time-event and this is subjective knowledge. We are also hampered by our recollections being supplanted by Internet archives which may be incorrect. Hammond claims to have this knowledge. He grew up in Gaithersburg Maryland and had no recollection of several curved and fiery shapes seen from Main Street one particular evening. --A time and place that Dwight Hammond will always remember, as it was his Birthday and it was his family's practice to look up at the stars at the exact moment of one's birth and make a wish. There was nothing in the sky that evening but a handful of stars.Hammond found a Google cache of archival data from Gaithersburg but even in that cache the "new" reports of the U.F.O.s were there. "If you don't have a specific, absolute personal knowledge of these things you will be at the mercy of past records, which by our recent actions we have changed!"--"How dangerous can this be?" I asked Hammond. "If your father took another moment to read the article and then discussed it with your mother, a mood might have been changed and your conception might not have happened. Think about that." Hammond said. I shuddered. "Tell me," I asked him. "What did you wish for upon that star at 8 PM on your birthday long ago?"He nodded seriously, "To preserve that perfect moment in my memory for all time... And now changing history wants to ruin it."