Are you a UFO tyro?

The UFO phenomenon today is being mobbed by a batch of illiterate newbies who have no sense of ufological history, nor any sense of who is really whom in the UFO pantheon.

UFO sightings, from the past right up to today, are so mucked up by tyros that the mysterious phenomenon has become a BIG joke, even among UFO cognoscenti.

The UFO community has become a wasteland of nonsense, cliquishness, backbiting, and self-glorification.



Web-sites and blogs are as numerous as the mosquitoes in a Florida swamp, and just as vexing and useless.

Now this mobocracy isn’t ruled by youngsters, since there is a plethora of old-timers mucking about also, sometimes more ruinously than younger folks. (Joseph Capp is one.)



The UFO phenomenon has been emasculated by errant early researchers, such as Stan Friedman, Ray Stanford, Bill Moore, Kevin Randle, Wendy Connors, J. Allen Hynek et al.; persons who have made a complex phenomenon even more complex by their outrageously inept investigations and intrusions into UFO events, including some significant sightings and episodes (Roswell, Socorro, The Ann Arbor/Dexter sightings of 1966, the Phoenix lights, et cetera).



But today’s UFO neophytes are even more inept, because they have no idea of the vast literature about sightings and who mucked them up in the first place. The newbies continue to add insult to injury with their amateurish attempts at UFO cognizance, as they offer superficial analysis and opinion about UFOs and the attendant sociology.

Moreover, today’s UFO hippies create blogs or web-sites with a jokey overlay or name, which dilutes the topic even further.

UFO bloggers are so anxious to steal material and replicate it on their blogs, as their own, that they further the mockery known as ufology. Ufology has become repository for malfeasance and emended materials, so distorted that even well-reported early sightings have become unrecognizable by early UFO researchers – those with research acumen. (Jerry Clark is one.)



Google UFOs or ufology and you’ll see our point.

The UFO manifestation has been so throughly captured by a group of unintelligent quidnuncs that serious UFO mavens have had to work sub rosa, although often the lack of attention forces those covert investigators to come out in the open to make sure they haven’t lost their UFO cachet. (Jacques Vallee is one.)



The UFO phenomenon is, today, a mess that has gone so far over the cliff of commonsense and scientific-like inquiry that one can write it off as a lost cause.

And those who have caused this sad state of affairs? The new UFO morons and the past UFO blunderers.

The Apotheosis of Mac Tonnies

Science Fiction writer and quasi-ufologist Mac Tonnies, who died prematurely in October 2009, is in the process of being deified by a few of his colleagues.

The mechanism by which Mr. Tonnies’ friends hope to raise him to the pantheon of the gods is through Mr. Tonnies’ posthumous book, The Cryptoterrestrials, a paean to the idea that a concom- itant, hidden civilization exists on Earth and is responsible for UFO sightings and all the tales of little folk, fairies, ghosts, and other fringe anomalies that have popped up during man’s life on the planet.

Mr. Tonnies was a regular guy, who drank too much coffee and engaged in bizarre musings about life and the peripheral elements that impinge on life.

He wasn’t a particularly original thinker but, rather, an accu- mulator of obtuse materials, which he re-arranged in such a way as to make new goods out of that material.

That’s what he did with Cryptoterrestrials, as Anthony Bragalia points out in a post at The UFO Iconoclast(s), April 9th 2010:

Bragalia's take on Tonnies' book

A cursory scan of Mr. Tonnies blog, Post Human Blues, will further clarify the derivative nature of his thought.

It’s nice that Mr. Tonnies’ friends and fellow-fringers are moving to exalt him, something they hope will happen to them when they pass on we think.

But the effort is futile and moot.

Mr. Tonnies doesn’t have enough cachet outside his inner circle for him to become a deity or even a saint.

Nonetheless, we imagine that Mr. Tonnies is having a good laugh at the idea that he is (or was) a man beloved for ideas that he stumbled upon, while under his perpetually caffeinated state of mind, which allowed him to search the internet in a way that mere mortals are unable to.

May he be remembered as a good man, oblivious to self-promotion and resting in peace, alongside his crypto-imagined race.