EDITORIAL

SCIENCE AND ANOMALISTICS

        This RB issue deals with three different subjects: the famous—at least in Russia—Vashka find as a possible extraterrestrial artifact (paper authored by V. N. Fomenko—the first technical report of this investigation ever published in any language), the enigma of the Tunguska meteorite (paper by S. V. Dozmorov), and the problem of paleovisits—ancient ET visits to the Earth (a review by Y. N. Morozov of two issues of the Scientific Ancient Skies journal).

        The main common trait of these themes is their off-mainstream position in science, even if not identical in every case. The Tunguska explosion of 1908 has produced a lot of publications in scientific journals; the theoretical possibility of paleovisits is generally admitted by SETI specialists; ET artifacts are considered by scientists as the only possible proof of direct interstellar contacts. At the same time, each of the above-listed problems has an essential anomalous component, especially where concrete empirical investigations (and not just theoretical considerations) are concerned. It seems as if mainstream science deliberately pushes them out, carefully forming a gap between itself and uncomfortable" questions to which scientists have no definite answers. In this way another sphere of human thought is however enriched, namely anomalistics.

        Generally, anomalistics is an open expression of doubt (and sometimes of irony) in respect to constantly renewing pretensions of man to learn the final truth. But what is it from the viewpoint of the philosophy of science? Certainly, anomalistics cannot be called a scientific discipline. The lack of common methodological standards (apart from doubt) prevents it from being named even as an interdisciplinary area of scientific research. As a matter of fact, it is rather a loose field of cognitive interest, whose foundations were laid by Charles Fort, and which has gradually evolved, due to work of many enthusiasts all over the world, into something substantial. Just as the scientific community is the heart of real science, the "anomalistic community" with its researchers, associations, periodicals and data arrays (even systemized, particularly, in the works by W. R. Corliss¹) constitutes anomalistics as an actual socio-cultural system in its own right. Of course, this system cannot be compared with science as far as its influence on the society is concerned, but nonetheless it dares to criticize some sides of the scientific picture of the world.

        However, there exist not only "negative" interrelations between science and anomalistics, but "positive" ones as well. The latter pay attention either to those (intra-scientific) anomalies which science tends to neglect, rating the safety of a current paradigm above these minor problems, or those (extra-scientific) anomalies which are not incorporated into science at all. Anomalistics tries, with varying success, to have these facts absorbed by science, not worrying too much about the possible results... In other words, serious anomalists are not inclined to substitute science for anomalistics. The latter is rather meant to be a mirror for "scientific drawbacks", a reproaching gaze and a moralizing sermon from the empyrean of the "epistemological ideal" of science (where the only aim is scientific truth) to the bottom of its social reality, where the scientist not only perceives the laws of nature, but maintains thereby his family and himself.

        It is significant, however, that a response to this reproach comes rather from off-mainstream ("alternative") science than from "normal" science. This fact hardly can be enigmatic, though. When compared to normal science, the alternative one does look much more "altruistic". It has to be more altruistic—conducting investigations in spite of the lack of necessary funds. It is therefore alternative science that preserves under current social conditions the early ideal of the "disinterested quest for truth" placed by mainstream science at a literally unattainable height.

       The late Dr. Sergey Dozmorov (he died a few years ago having accidentally poisoned himself in his laboratory) was performing his studies of rare earth contents in Tunguska samples in his spare time; after his death the samples were thrown away by his colleagues as having no value for the regular studies the laboratory was engaged in. Tunguska investigators (especially those associated with IITE—the Interdisciplinary Independent Tunguska Expedition²) are not fanatics at all—but their aspiration for truth is certainly above the average level.

        This aspiration manifests itself, particularly, in their noticeable reluctance to jump to conclusions regarding the nature of the Tunguska Space Body (TSB) too soon. In fact, the longer one studies this problem, the better (as a rule) he or she understands its complex character. Unfortunately, some representatives of big science prefer to live in the refined theoretical clouds, practically ignoring the "crude" factual data. Compare, for example, such directly opposite models of the TSB as the hypothesis about the "cosmic snowflake" (put forward by G. I. Petrov and V. P. Stulov³) and the conception of a black hole (proposed by A. A. Jackson and M. P. Ryan⁴). Both these models are as rigorous as professional mathematical calculations can be. But at the same time they are as naive as should be the same calculations when they are based on a very limited factual evidence. Meanwhile, the amount of reliable information on the traces of the Tunguska explosion is very onsiderable, and any theoretical constructions which ignore it may be regarded at best as a play of mind.

        Naturally enough, specialists in meteoritics have been treating the work of IITE with some reservations. These reservations are, I would say, even justifiable: either the TSB is a normal minor body from space (a meteorite, an asteroid, a comet), in which case it is meteoritics that must study its fall, or the TSB is something different, and then meteoritics remains just one of the disciplines involved in the investigation, being at best responsible for elucidation of some aspects of the TSB movement in the atmosphere. Hence, the "transfer" of the problem from the Committee on Meteorites of the USSR Academy of Sciences to IITE in the early 1960's was a very far-seeing step. Whatever the leading Soviet astronomers wrote in popular-science journals, this fact suggests that "for themselves" they solved the question of the TSB nature almost 40 years ago: the Tunguska "meteorite" is a sheep from another flock, it is essentially anomalous.

        Should such anomalous phenomena be studied using anomalous methods? Sometimes maybe yes, but only if the latter have been verified in normal scientific investigations—otherwise we will have no solid ground under our feet. For example, so-called "biolocation" (dowsing), being used by some Russian ufologists to investigate UFO landing sites,⁵ does not satisfy this requirement, producing therefore no data of scientific value. By contrast, the results of the investigations of supposed ET artifacts, performed by V. Fomenko, may be discussed (criticized, or not) inside the scientific community not generating any principal objections.

        Here we can notice what may be called the gradual mutual approach of science and anomalistics. Each of these cognitive systems may benefit borrowing from experience of the other one. After all, the Tunguska event would have been probably completely forgotten decades ago if it had not been reanimated in the ET hypothesis of Alexander Kazantsev. By the way, it was none other than the latter author who, immediately after the Vashka find was discovered and examined, assumed it could be a fragment of the Tunguska meteorite. Hardly so (as one can read in the paper by V. N. Fomenko, the age of this find seems to have been by the time of its examination less than 30 years), but the idea is not absurd in itself. The "rare earth parallel" between these objects may happen to be of significance.

        Publications in Scientific Ancient Skies, reviewed by Y.N.Morozov, also aim at "scientization" of the problem of paleovisits. Forty years ago, in 1959, Soviet mathematician Dr. Matest Agrest put forward the paleovisit idea as a scientific hypothesis. The learned community did not accept his considerations and the idea was practically pushed out from science. Now it gradually returns. Contrary to the widespread opinion, even such an extraordinary claim as the paleovisit hypothesis does not need an extraordinary proof—it needs a proof which would be serious, scientific, deeply normal.

        As a matter of fact, there is no alternative science—but there exists normal science (living, advancing, broadening its sets of methodological, theoretical and empirical tools—and surmounting the narrow-mindedness, not foreign to individual scientists and entire scientific communities), and there also exists abnormal science of many types—from socially-dependent ("Aryan", "Marxist", etc.) to, let's say, "too much established". Admittedly, real science combines at each stage of its development both "normal" and "abnormal" components. The former ones contribute to the advancement of science, the latter retard it, but it does not always happen that the latter can be clearly separated from the former. To err is human; scientific communities are also human-based systems.

        When "big science" digresses in its practice from its own ideal of objective cognition, it becomes abnormal and loses its right to call itself "science"; when "alternative communities", more or less loosely connected with "big science", maintain in their work this ideal, they obtain the right to be called "scientific", without such restricting epithets as "alternative".

        Ideally, science and anomalistics should comprise a single cognitive system—only then anomalies would be studied and neither ignored nor discredited. Being separated, they lose more than half of their potential strength. Hopefully, the papers published in this RB issue will contribute to some progress in this direction.

Notes and references

        ¹ See: http://www.knowledge.co.uk/frontiers/
        ² See: RIAP Bulletin, 1994, Vol. 1, No. 3-4, p. 2.
        ³ Petrov G. I., Stulov V. P. Motion of large bodies in planetary atmospheres. — Kosmicheskiye Issledovaniya, Moscow, 1975, Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 587-594.
        ⁴ Jackson IV A. A., Ryan M. P. Was the Tungus event due to a black hole? — Nature, 1973, Vol. 245, No. 5420, pp. 88-89.
        ⁵ See, for example: Studies of the Problem of Anomalous Phenomena in the Environment, Kharkov, 1990, pp. 17, 24, 41.

— Vladimir V. Rubtsov 

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