Jose Caravaca supplements material in the posting previous to this (below)...

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

In my posting (below this one) about UFOs being treated shabbily, I note a brief aside in an article by Clark and Farish [UFO Reports, 1975]; an encounter that was, they admit, "most interesting" with which I concur.

Noted Spanish UFO researcher, Jose Antonio Caravaca, saw my mention and has been kind enough to provide more details:

The case is from 1925, and based on an anonymous letter, received by the researcher Antonio Ribera in 1968. (No investigation was conducted.)

We only have the testimony of an anonymous informant.

The letter was sent from the town of Quero (Toledo, Castilla La Mancha). Information obtained from the book "ENCUENTROS CON HUMANOIDES" Antonio Ribera 1982.



Textual content of the letter:

"Sir, informed of your interest in collecting data about flying saucers and aliens, I am writing to you to let you know a fact, not a dream.

It occurred to me over 40 years ago.

Somewhere in La Mancha [sic], very close to a church building, suddenly I found myself with a very strange being.

Its height was approximately 1.20 meters, clothing, like a green uniform.

His arms and legs were stiff and stuck to the body.

In his hands he held a blower circle of about 20 cm in diameter, flexible, with a pinging sound.

His legs and feet rigid, united to an axis, which by turning a small wheel, he “walked” in my direction, driven by the effects of the blower which he carried in his hands.



I watched at a distance of 2 meters, for a short time.

We looked at each other, but did not come to speak. I hope you forgive my anonymity."

There is no more information. Only a letter which begins, like Don Quijote..."somewhere in La Mancha."

Ballester Olmos, included the case in his catalog of 200 landings in Spain.

But he took it back for lack of more evidence or information as to the authenticity of the case.

Meanwhile Mr. Ribera, explains in his book that as bizarre and absurd as the event seems, it does appear to be credible, when taken into account with other stories of encounters...

There is no more documentation about the letter. Ribera, himself, was the first to write about the incident.

N.B. The "blower" is a hand tool used to fan the embers of a fireplace or charcoal. I do not know its name in English.

In the book by Ribera, the date is given as 1924, and in the book of Iker Jimenez, ENCUENTROS; EL ENIGMA OVNI [2000], it also appears as 1924.

Jose Antonio Caravaca/RR

UFOs treated shabbily...

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

The Fall 1975 issue of UFO Report [Volume 2, Number 5] contained an article by George Eberhart [Flying Saucers over the Arctic, Page 34 ff.] from which this excerpt comes:

Click HERE for an enlarged, readable image

It’s an interesting item, but has no provenance or anthropological credibility and has been sitting, unnoticed in the magazine for thirty-six years.

Why?

(Nick Redfern has promised us a piece about hairy dwarves and UFOs, so maybe we’ll get more about these little people, in the arctic wastelands, from him)

UFO compiler Jerry Clark – we don’t consider Mr. Clark a UFO historian, although he and others try to apply that epithet to him; he has never employed historical methodology to his sighting lists, only presenting a litany of sightings with no historical exegesis – and the late Lucius Farish had an article [Unsolved Mysteries from UFO archives – Part VII, UFOs of the Roaring ‘20s, Page 48 ff.] which had this brief paragraph:

“By far the most interesting report of 1925 occurred in La Mancha, Castilla, Spain. Unfortunately we have few details, only this short account from ‘Survey of Iberic Landings’ in DataNet Report, March 1971.

A man suddenly met a strange being, 1.20 m. [approximately four feet tall], wearing a greenish uniform. The entity had rigid arms and legs, held a disc in his hands, and was propelled by another disc on which he was standing. The witness observed it from a distance of 2 m. [six-and-a-half feet]. No word was exchanged.” [Page 60]

(Perhaps Jose Caravaca, an authentic UFO researcher, might be able to find out more about this intriguing, little encounter. I’ll ask him.)

These examples tell us why UFOs have been dismissed by science, academia, and media: they are teasers, without journalistic substance or referential detail.

Clark is old now, and left with a legacy that some of see as wanting. His compilations have never taken us into hypothetical or theoristic territory. He just gives us icing on the cakes, but no cakes.

UFO Reports, like other UFO magazines merely titillated. They didn’t satisfy, least of all those who need substance and credible sources for the so-called information imparted.

Kevin Randle tells, in his latest book, how he slipped articles into such magazines, on the fly, for a few bucks, without having to do any real digging for facts or details that might edify.

The UFO topic has been ill-served by the “writers” of such dreck.

And that’s why UFOs are the scourge of almost anyone with a sense of scholarship and/or journalistic acumen.

RR

Anti-Semitic Socorro?

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

One of our readers discovered a United Press article [4/20/64] about the Socorro sighting which you can read by clicking on the link here:

UPI
From UFO Digest

In that article, the false Socorro symbol is proffered:



This is the symbol that Hynek, the Air Force, and Ray Stanford tried to foist off on the public and media as the insignia that Lonnie Zamora saw.

Their contrived insignia didn’t fly as ufologists and researchers subsequently discovered the original drawing that Officer Zamora provided:



But there is an interesting aspect of the concocted, fake insignia:



The contrived symbol resembles an image used by anti-Semitics, as in the cover for the despicable Protocols of Zion:



Why did they select and promote use of the Zion symbol they wanted the public to see as the insignia of an unidentified craft?



Or is this just a mere coincidence?

RR

UFO UpDates and Magoniax

We sneak into UFO UpDates now and then to see how the lower half lives.

Surprisingly, the site for “list members” – the mantle readers and users of the site like to be known by – has become a link source for newspapers, magazine, and internet sites, losing it’s previous cachet as a source for UFO news and ideas by ufology’s “best and brightest.”

Errol Bruce-Knapp has lost his site’s dominance for unique UFO ideas and news, mostly because most UFO mavens seek more dynamic sites and blogs about UFOs.

UpDates is really old school, using a format that was good for the 1970s but not anywhere near what the trends are for 2012.

UpDates is so over…

Our friend Chris Aubeck allowed us back into his Yahoo sited Magoniax (once Jerry Clark departed), where “members” provide UFO and UFO-like observations from archived sources mostly.

Chris’s forum is a repository more than anything, used by such oldsters as Ray Dickenson and Martin Shough (both are also UpDate “contributors”), who like to gather UFO materials, just to have them.

They don’t do anything, as far as we can tell, with the stuff they collect. They are hoarders.

We’ve touched on this before: the collection of sightings, just to collect then.

What Chris is planning is not known by us, but we hope it’s something more than a litany of old observations that have a UFO patina.

Getting rid of the hoarders and encouraging theoretical UFO hobbyists would go a long way toward cleansing Magoniax and saving UFO UpDates.

Is Technology the Indicator of an Advanced Civilization?

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

Revisiting Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery (about the African Dogon tribe’s alleged contact with extraterrestrials 5000 years ago), some questions came to mind.



Why would extraterrestrial visitors visit a small, primitive tribe in the isolated, at the time (and even now), heart of Africa.



Yes, the Sumerians and other cultures on the rim of the Mediterranean Sea are said by some, including Carl Sagan and I.S. Shklovskii in 1966’s Intelligent Life in the Universe, to have been contacted by extraterrestrials, that left intimations of writing, agriculture, math, and other accoutrements of civilized living.



Oannes, the being from the sea who supposedly proffered these gifts is not unlike the Dogon visitors who told those peoples about their place of origin, a planet in the Sirius star system.

Click HERE for an online precis of the Dogon story.

But extraterrestrials would have to be significantly advanced to get here from the Sirius planetary environment, and one would think that such emissaries would seek out cultures and peoples who were much more advanced than the Dogon tribe, to whom they would communicate the locale of their home planet(s).



The chatter between the Dogons and the Sirians would have had to be something beyond difficult.

Even today, the Dogons do not represent an advanced element of Earth’s global society.



Either the Sirius visitors were inept at furthering the cultural evolution of the Dogons or the Sirius visitors represent a civilization that doesn’t regard technolocial advance as a sine qua non of their existence; technology is a prosaic tool, and other considerations make up the essence of their existence.

Or the visit never occurred at all.

For the sake of rumination, I’d like to address the second option above; that is, civilizations do not need technology to be advanced.

Perhaps it’s the music, the art, or social intercourse that is the high point of “advanced” civilizations, not the attributes of the ships that transport them hither and yon.

This would explain, perhaps, why UFOs have appeared in various guises, some not so futuristic as we imagine: the airships of the 1890s for example.



This would also explain, perhaps, why flying saucers have had a propensity to crash; they are not technologically refined, nor meant to be.

They are constructed to get here from there, much as Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci did with their rudimentary, by modern standards, ships.



If visitors sought out this planet, for whatever reason, they would impart elements of culture – music, art, writing, mathematics, and the like – rather than methods with a technological bent.

Technology wasn’t and isn’t their primary incentive or objective.

The artifacts touted by Ancient Alien theorists are esthetic not technological: the pyramids of Egypt and Middle/South America, Stonehenge, the Easter Island moai, et cetera.







What the Dogon were and are mimics the alien races and beings - the alien cultures –that seem to have visited the Earth in the past and today.

UFO researchers, governments, military constructs have missed the point.

UFOs visit to impart refinement, high culture.

And that refinement or culture is so foreign to our understanding, we humans can’t grasp it, although one might find hints of it in such workings as that of the Dogons, or the Egyptians, or the Inca, the Olmecs, the Mayans.



The message of UFOs isn’t about nuts and bolts or plasmatic ships.

It’s about existence as a thing rarefied, transcendental, or, shall we say, spiritual?

RR

A resource for UFO sightings. overlooked by aficionados of the phenomenon

Intellectually scourged “academic” Immanuel Velikovsky developed a theory about how our planetary (solar) system and Earth were formed and subject to catastrophes that were recorded by humans in many histories and works, such as The Bible, (Asian) Indian hymns and stories, Greek myths, Egyptian hieroglyphic remnants, Homer, and many, many more ancient accounts.

His theory may be found in two works, Worlds in Collision [1950] and Earth in Upheaval [1955].



Science has eschewed Velikovsky’s theory, but his insights keep popping up as NASA and cosmologists scrutinize the planets in our system.

While Velikovsky insisted that cosmological events were what humans saw and recorded, one can look pass his interpretations to find what could be UFO sightings.

For instance, this…

In The City of God by Augustine it is written:

“From the book of Marcus Varro, entitled Of the Race of the Roman People, I cite word for word the following instance: ‘There occurred a remarkable celestial portent; for Castor records that in the brilliant star Venus, called Vesperugo by Plautus, and the lovely Hesperus by Homer, there occurred so strange a prodigy, that it changed its color, size, form, course, which never happened before nor since. Adrastus of Cyzicus and Dion of Naples, famous mathematicians, said this occurred in the reign of Ogyges’” [Worlds in Collision, A Delta Book, 1965, Page 158]

Velikovsky supplemented his theory in later books, Oedipus and Akhnaton [1960], Peoples of the Sea, Ages in Chaos, Ramses II and his Time, and Human Amnesia.







Astronomers made it a point to suppress Velikovsky’s views and have been rather successful.

But that’s not what we should be concerned with.

Our interest is in the cited works and accounts that seem to be sightings of UFOs.

Velikovsky’s books provide sources that resonate in ways that might – might! – support Ancient Astronaut theories.

The difference is that Velikovsky’s “catastrophic” intrusions don’t interfere with or interact with humans; his events remain observational, not intercessional.

Also, many of Velikovsky’s cited events were eschewed, it seems, by the Vallee/Aubeck book, Wonders in the Sky, probably because Chris Aubeck’s resource venue (Yahoo Magonia X) for many of the sightings in his and Vallee’s book was controlled by the machinations of UFO stalwarts such as Jerry Clark, who held sightings and input hostage to his (Clark’s) view of the UFO phenomenon.

I suggest you get your hands on Velikovsky’s books. Overlook the catastrophic theory if you like – a mistake, as I see it – and cull the events that bespeak UFOs in days of old.

If UFOs were as prominent as they appear to have been, their appearance belies current hypotheses about military misidentifications, mental aberrations, or trickery by entities out to flummox modern humanity.

The brilliance and edification of Dr. Velikovsky will enlighten you, in a number of ways; that is certain.

RR

Quantum Non-locality and UFOs

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.



Discussions here indicate a loathing, by some, to accept UFOs (and flying saucers) as tangible objects; some interpretations centering on psychical manifestations, others centering on a mental interaction between percipient and the UFO (image).

There are other hypotheses, and one that should be addressed is the possibility that UFOs are intrusions of a quantum kind from other places in the Universe or psychic ether, if you want) that appear because of quantum non-locality.

To get a grasp of the thought and theorizing about quantum non-locality, click HERE for a 1997 paper about the topic by John G. Cramer of the Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.

One paragraph focuses on what Bruce Duensing and Jose Caravaca call “observer-created reality” (which I eschew). Here’s that paragraph:

The nonlocality of the quantum mechanics formalism is a source of some difficulty for the Copenhagen interpretation. It is accommodated in the CI through Heisenberg's "knowledge interpretation" which views the quantum mechanical state vector (y) as a mathematically-encoded description of the state of observer knowledge rather than as a description of the objective state of the system observed. For example, in 1960 Heisenberg wrote, "The act of recording, on the other hand, which leads to the reduction of the state, is not a physical, but rather, so to say, a mathematical process. With the sudden change of our knowledge also the mathematical presentation of our knowledge undergoes of course a sudden change." The knowledge interpretation's account of state vector collapse and nonlocality as changes in knowledge is internally consistent, but it is rather subjective, intellectually unappealing, and the source of much of the recent misuse of the Copenhagen interpretation (e.g., "observer-created reality").

I’m asserting that UFOs may become present when an object tangentially connected to our area of the Universe is made visible because an observer here is conveniently in situ to see the non-local inspired manifestation.

The UFO may even come about by a quantum intersect across dimensions or parallel universes, ours and theirs.



The quantum possibilities strike me as more reasonable (feasible) than the psychic hypotheses.

Psychical hypotheses are prosaic and mundane for me.

The human mind is given too much credence and power in the psychical response, and we all know, intuitively and intellectually, that psychism leaves a lot to be desired in repetitive and scientific experimentation.

UFO mavens want some control over the UFO phenomenon and applying a mind/UFO interaction allows that control to remain intact, somewhat.

This is akin to the Einstein approach about quantum mechanics, and John Cramer’s paper will take you through Einstein’s caveats and the quantum renunciation.



Einstein couldn’t accept the quantum quirkiness, and those in the UFO community can’t accept the UFO quirkiness, unless they keep control of the phenomenon by saying that it’s the human mind that is needed for a manifestation of UFOs.

That view is unimaginative and errant.

The human mind is hardly able to deal with practical reality, let alone incomprehensible reality (such as that in the quantum world).

(Schizophrenics and paranoiacs display examples of what happens when the human mind accesses realities outside the norm.)

While quantum non-locality is best represented by light photons, there are indications that quantum artifacts can exceed the atomic level and are manifested macrocosmically.

(I’ve provided some of that information online here earlier and at the RRRGroup blog.)

More importantly, perhaps, is the notion that UFOs may derive from intrusions, accidental or purposeful, across dimensions or between parallel universes, as string theory allows.



This would keep intact my preference for UFO tangibility, which is obvious and well-witnessed.

The psychic view of Jacques Vallee and his devotees is old-hat for me. It’s something like the hysteria of the Salem witch trials or the insanity of the Catholic Inquisitional thrusts.

More on this approach to the UFO phenomenon will be ferreted out from other sources and pertinent quantum theorizing, and will be presented here upcoming.

Meanwhile, you “UFOs as psychic phenomena” people can have at it.

RR

A Confluence of Coincidences or Something Significant?

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

We are, admittedly, smitten with the 1964 Socorro UFO sighting by Lonnie Zamora.



The reasons for our “obsession” are many, as noted here, at this blog (and others) over the past few years.

But one reason centers on the knowledge that other, similar, almost identical UFO sightings took place on the same day as Officer Zamora’s sighting [4/24/1964] or in the same time-frame.

For instance, a day after Officer Zamora’s episode, witness Orlando Gallegos saw an object, in La Madera, New Mexico [a few hundred miles north of Socorro] that was virtually identical to the Socorro craft.



And Gary Wilcox, in Newark Valley, New York, on April 24th, 1964, the same day as Officer Zamora’s sighting, reported a strange encounter with an egg-shaped craft that was accompanied by two “beings” (like those seen by Zamora), dressed in white, metallic coveralls.



Farmer Wilcox, who couldn’t have known about Lonnie Zamora’s encounter – Wilcox’s incident took place at 10 a.m. in the morning; Zamora’s incident took place about 6:50 p.m.

While Lonnie Zamora had no interaction with the two beings he spotted and Gallegos saw no beings during his sighting, Wilcox had a “conversation” with the intruders on his land; they said they were from Mars, and had “spoken to people before.”

Details of the Wilcox sighting can be read HERE and you will find our May 2011 note about the Wilcox sighting HERE

What is revelatory for me, is that it is strangely coincidental that such similar sightings took place around or on the same date, with timings that don’t allow confabulation.

Anthony Bragalia and Frank Stalter discount the Socorro sighting as a bona fide UFO incident, claiming the sighting was prompted by a raft of New Mexico Institute Technology students, out to embarrass Officer Zamora ostensibly because he “harassed” them. Bragalia also dismisses the Gallegos’ sighting as there were implications, by the police at the scene, that the smell of alcohol was present.

But how do Stalter and Bragalia explain the Wilcox sighting?

And how do we slide our Hughes lunar-lander prototype into the Wilcox scenario?

The problem with the Bragalia/Stalter conjecture – although circumstantially replete – and our Hughes Aircraft hypothesis lies in the distance between Newark Valley, New York and Socorro, New Mexico, the only concrete connection being the “New” sobriquet for the states.

(Of course, one can make a claim that the “New” in New York and New Mexico has meaning, paranormally, but that for another time.)

My point is that the prank explanation for Socorro and the Hughes testing hypothesis are tangential (and errant) when one takes into account the strange Wilcox tale, and also, somewhat, the Gallegos sighting.

Something bizarre happened in late April 1964, something that hasn’t been duplicated since.

Of course a lack of recidivism works against Socorro, La Madera, and the Newark valley incidents being relevant to the UFO phenomenon, in toto, but such similar incidents can provide a clue, as transient as hat clue may be, to what UFOs are or were.

That said (or, rather, written), the three sightings noted here allow us to downplay or even dismiss the prank theory for Socorro, along with our Hughes prototype conjecture….if we are being ufologically objective.

RR

Quirky 1947: Roswell, Rhodes, Arnold, and Solar Flares?

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.



Looking for a perturbation in the “force” for 1947, I stumbled upon an internet item by The Wanderling at the site of Anna Jones that states the Roswell “crash” was caused by solar flares:

Click HERE for that site and “article.”

It seems to me that solar flares are as good of an explanation as any for the 1947 upshot in flying saucer incidents, actual and fraudulent.



But it is only one explanation for the epidemic of flying saucer sightings and hoaxes.

What I am proposing is that the electrically charged bursts from the Sun caused some persons to conflate their observations of mundane things in the sky for concrete objects of an esoteric kind.

This is what happened to Kenneth Arnold; he saw a flight of pelicans, a flight of prototypical Navy jets, or a mirage and thought it was a bevy of “saucer skipping aircraft.”



The Maury Island episode was either a product of a misperception or the creation of addled minds that were afflicted by the 1947 solar flare anomaly. I prefer the latter.



William Rhodes (or Rhoades) either saw and photographed a strange object in the sky over his Phoenix house in 1947 or he contrived a photo because he was made mentally disturbed by the influx of electrical impulses caused by the excessive solar flare activity of 1947.



Ah, you scoff, but here are two passages on the affect of sun spots and solar flares on the mental capacity of humans:

International Journal of Biometeorology
Volume 43, Number 1, 31-37, DOI: 10.1007/s004840050113
ORIGINAL ARTICLE

The effects of extra-low-frequency atmospheric pressure oscillations on human mental activity
A. A. Delyukov and L. Didyk

Slight atmospheric pressure oscillations (APO) in the extra-low-frequency range below 0.1 Hz, which frequently occur naturally, can influence human mental activity. This phenomenon has been observed in experiments with a group of 12 healthy volunteers exposed to experimentally created APO with amplitudes 30–50 Pa in the frequency band 0.011–0.17 Hz. Exposure of the subjects to APO for 15–30 min caused significant changes in attention and short-term memory functions, performance rate, and mental processing flexibility. The character of the response depended on the APO frequency and coherence. Periodic APO promoted purposeful mental activity, accompanied by an increase in breath-holding duration and a slower heart rate. On the other hand, quasi-chaotic APO, similar to the natural perturbations of atmospheric pressure, disrupted mental activity. These observations suggest that APO could be partly responsible for meteorosensitivity in humans.

Chaotic solar cycles modulate the incidence and severity of mental illness
George E Davis Jr.a, , , Walter E Lowellb, 1,

Purchase a Augusta Mental Health Institute, Hospital Street, P.O. Box 724, Augusta, ME 04332, USA
b State of Maine, Department of Behavioral and Developmental Services, Augusta, ME 04332, USA

Received 18 August 2003; Accepted 10 November 2003. Available online 21 January 2004.
------------------------------
Abstract:

This paper hypothesizes that the intensity of ultraviolet radiation (UVR) from the Sun predisposes humans to polygenic mutation fostering major mental illness (MMI) and other disorders of neurodevelopment. In addition, the variation in the intensity of this radiation acts to stress immune systems, possibly mediated by cytokines, resulting in variable clinical expressions of mental illness and autoimmune disorders. Organisms can adapt to chronic high-intensity UVR by producing melanin and by retaining various pigments. We found that 28% of 11-year solar cycles produce particularly severe solar flares during which UVR is 300% more intense and hence more damaging than normal. Out of a total of six severe cycles in the past 250 years, four have occurred in the past 55 years, possibly explaining the apparent increase in the incidence of MMI in recent decades. UVR is 10 times more mutagenic than ionizing radiation to nuclear DNA, and especially damaging to mitochondrial DNA. However, variable light as manifested by seasons stresses adaptability to UVR, possibly through an immune mechanism. We show that the region of the Earth having the most UVR, relative to the most variation in that light, is at 54±~10° (N or S) latitude. Therefore, the most potential damage from sunlight occurs between the Equator and the Poles, not at the Equator itself. The human brain, our most important organ of adaptability, must be able to survive environmental variation, with successful matching to the environment resulting in adaptation. Unsuccessful adaptation to UVR (and possibly other types of radiation) results in mutation, which can produce neuro-chemical abnormalities manifested by MMI. We postulate that the combination of intensity and variation in UVR serves as a global modulator of MMI.

Copyright © 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Medical Hypotheses
Volume 62, Issue 2, February 2004, Pages 207-214
-------------------------
As for Roswell, it seems that something happened near that town in 1947, something not other-worldly necessarily, but something concrete – a military accident of some kind – or a confluence of mental disturbances caused by solar flare activity, mental disturbances that caused some Roswellians to act out and act upon the mental constructs and aberrations that were created by solar flare activity supported by the backdrop of an almost prosaic accident of some kind.



That is, some Roswell witness, overly stimulated by solar flare activity, ended up doing things and experiencing things that were not real in any objective sense. That, along with the mass hysteria or “group hallucinatory” possibilities, can account for the extrapolation that is now known as The Roswell Incident – a mythical meme based wholly on aberrant mental configurations and disturbances, underscored by a military incident that had nothing to do with an extraterrestrial intrusion or crashed flying disk.

One can take the data of solar flare activity for 1947 and other time-frames to see if solar flares or sun-busts might account for other hallucinated UFO episodes: The Hill abduction, the Pascagoula event, or the Travis Walton kidnapping.



Also, intrusions of hoaxed materials or confabulated videos, photographs, and stories might be traced to an influx of solar flare activity during the time such contrivances are conceived.

Two recommended reports/books on solar flares and two papers on solar flares:





Click here for Paper One – a PDF

Click here for Paper Two – also a PDF

RR

Early Airships that are now called UFOs

Photos of airships, from the turn of the 20th century and 1915, indicate flying machines that were mistaken in some quarters, by some people, for other-worldly craft or advanced human-created aircraft.


Here are some German Zeppelins that show the kind of light rays that Anthony Bragalia found in his research of the 1966 Wanaque UFO sightings. (Everything old is new again, apparently.)

And sights of balloons, such as this one, guarding the English coastline, surely provoked awe among the general population of Britain, causing speculation that the flying contraptions were something other than what they really were.

The human imagination has a tendency to run away with itself. as a mechanism against the reality and/or boredom of everyday life.

Such fevered imaginings may also account for many flying saucer sightings of the late 1940s and 1950s, and some even today, rooted in the need for people to be part of something beyond the routine of daily living.

UFO researchers would do well to separate the wheat from the chaff; that is, they (ufologists, to use that coined epithet) have to search out truly unique UFO events, those that represent something more than a light in the sky.

We'll concentrate more and more, here, on sightings, new and old, that speak to something truly unusual, including those sightings that appear to be induced by psychopathology or hallucinatory elements. (Such bizarre sightings have been eschewed, pretty much, by some early flying saucer/UFO investigators, such as the eminent Donald Keyhoe and the NICAP crowd, while others, such as John Keel and Brad Steiger, got sidetracked by paranormal aspects of sightings that had nothing to do with the UFO sightings themselves, but were merely appurtanances that their personalities were attraced to or attracted.)

RR

The Parallels Between Jesus Christ and Roswell

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.



Just as there were niggardly references to Jesus of Nazareth, after his death, there were niggardly references to Roswell after that 1947 incident (as noted in my post showing the 1967 LOOK issue, Flying Saucers and in a comment from Christopher Allen).

No substantive account about Jesus appeared or is extant earlier than the Gospel of Mark, about thirty years after Jesus’ death, allegedly “helped” by The Holy Spirit



No substantive account of the Roswell episode appeared earlier than the 1980 book, The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, covertly helped by Stanton Friedman.



Subsequent books or “gospels” about Jesus, centering on his meaning and mission, culminating in his death and resurrection, appeared later, 60 A.D. to 300 A.D., (with the sojourns of St. Paul, peripheral to Jesus life, showing up around 50 A.D).

These gospels derive from witness accounts, not first-hand information from Jesus or those in his circle.



Many books subsequent to the Berlitz/Moore work have appeared, all offering synopses of the Roswell event, culled from newspapers archives and alleged witness accounts, but no first-hand accounts of a flying disk crash.



Christianity eventually became, with the help of Roman Emperor Constantine, the prevailing religion in the West.



Roswell became, with the help of Stanton Friedman, the template for ufology’s extraterrestrial believers.



While the divinity of Jesus and his alleged miracles and resurrection have been grist for theologians, religious lay persons, and atheists (or agnostics), the supposed crash landing of a flying disk, piloted by extraterrestrial entities, in Roswell, has similarly become fodder for UFO’s ET believers and skeptics (or debunkers, as the UFO fanatics put it).

Jesus of Nazareth has generated more controversy and writings than any other religious oriented subject.

Roswell, in the UFO context, has generated more controversy and writings than any other flying saucer event.

Persons claiming to be Christians have provided a myriad of experiences related to the Jesus phenomenon.



Persons claiming to be Roswell witnesses or friends of same have provided myriad accounts tying them to the Roswell incident.



Both kinds of witnesses engage intellectual or superficial scrutiny by others, with fervant debate deciding nothing that can be substantiated by fact or empirical proof: Jesus remains an enigma for many, believers and non-believers alike; Roswell, remains an enigma, generally, for believers and skeptics too.

The Jesus story has an alleged artifact from his death/resurrection: The Shroud of Turin.



Roswell has artifacts from the alleged crash: misperceived debris.



Both Jesus and Roswell have produced a mythos, a mythology of significant proportions.

Neither is related to the other, but they do resonate as historical “fables” or historical realities.

The Jesus story appears to be transcendent but Roswell appears to be preternatural also.



Sociologists can work with the elements of both to determine the human interactions that provide the integration suggested here.

Jesus’ influence is much greater than Roswell, surely, but Roswell does mimic the vicissitudes that brought the Jesus movement to prominence, even if Roswell is a sociological canard.

But wait, the Jesus thrust has been just as fraught with fraud, falsity, or fallacious human interactions – the difference being that Roswell takes us nowhere theologically or philosophically relevant.

RR