UFO Provocateur(s)

UFO UpDates and Magoniax

2012-01-26T12:58:00.005-05:00

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?

2011-12-10T00:00:00.001-05:00

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

2011-12-03T17:18:00.001-05:00

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

2011-11-11T13:09:00.001-05:00

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?

2011-10-28T09:32:00.001-04:00

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?

2011-10-22T14:03:00.001-04:00

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

2011-10-21T00:35:00.001-04:00

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

2011-10-16T11:37:00.001-04:00

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

The Socorro/Rendlesham UFO symbols deciphered?

2011-10-14T10:21:00.003-04:00

.
Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

The United States Air Force and Ray Stanford tried to corrupt Lonnie Zamora’s Socorro sighting of 1964 by interposing the idea that Officer Zamora’s original description and drawing of the symbol he spotted on the egg-shaped craft was a substitution for the real symbol – to snooker any other alleged UFO observer who might try to report that he or she saw a similar symbol.

That is, the Air Force is said to have created the (well-known) Zamora symbol here:

Stylized

As a substitute for the real symbol here:

However, in the earliest reports of the Socorro incident, Officer Zamora described and drew the well-known and highly publicized symbol thusly:

This from the Hynek/Blue Book notes

This from the 1967 LOOK account

We believe the Air Force suggestion, abetted by Ray Stanford, was a diversionary effort – or disinformation tactic as ufologists like to say – to prevent interested parties from discovering the real source of the Zamora craft. (See Hughes reference below.)

Anthony Bragalia insists that the Socorro incident was a prank, created and carried out by students at the New Mexico Institute of Technology, and he’s mustered considerable circumstantial evidence for his hypothesis.

Part of his conjecture states that Zamora’s UFO was a construct, partially composed of paper, used at NMIT, from The International Paper Company, whose logo is this:

An Indiana University engineer has related that he read a piece in a still unlocated – we looked for it, seriously – magazine [circa 1968] about a paper company’s publicity-oriented hot-air balloon trek that descended in Socorro and was mistaken as Lonnie Zamora’s UFO. (The engineer’s contention has been excoriated but not totally refuted by a gaggle of ufologists, mostly residing at UFO UpDates.)

Here’s the logo of a paper company that possibly sponsored a balloon trip across country in 1964:

The RRRGroup has contended that Zamora’s UFO was a Hughes Aircraft/ToolCo Moon/Mars lander prototype, manufactured and tested under the auspices of the CIA.

Leon Davidson did a creative reworking of the Zamora drawing, showing how it displayed a convoluted and tricky reworking of the CIA sobriquet. (His paper is online here, via a previous posting.)

Matthew Gilleece did an evaluation for us a while back, and provided a logo from Hughes Toolco that is strikingly similar to Zamora’s drawing:

And during our Hughes interpretations we used Henry Dreyfuss’s Symbol Sourcebook [McGraw Hill Book Company, NY, 1972] to find symbols that look like Zamora’s drawing.

We found these mathematical and computing symbols, which Hughes’ engineers might have used on their prototype design or which can be seen as part of the Air Force instigated design:

Then we come to the 1980 Rendlesham incident(s), which provided a symbol, from one of the military witnesses:

We think that the Rendlesham UFO was a military prototype, which also used mathematical symbology as part of its designated creation:

Trigonometrical Point 1st order [Dreyfuss, Pages 95/186]

(The displacement of the black circle has meaning, and a cryptography expert should have at it.)

For us, the determination of the Zamora insignia’s creation or origin and that of the Rendlesham symbol will provide the source of UFOs witnessed, Earthly in our view – or unearthly maybe, as many die-hard ET believers have it.

RR

"Roswell" noted in 1967

2011-10-12T11:25:00.003-04:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

LOOK published this special edition, Flying Saucers, in 1967:

On Page 24 is this photo from the series taken in Roswell in 1947:

The blurb (enlarged here) refers to an alleged crash of balloon(s), mistaken for a flying saucer:

While Fort Worth, Texas is given as the site of the "mistaken" crash, rather than Roswell (or Corona) in New Mexico, the photo, shared with LOOK staffers, shows that someone knew about the Roswell incident in 1967, 10+ years earlier than the 1978 resurrection by Stanton Friedman.

Why the mistake in locale? Who provided the photo? Why a reference to the Navy?

Questions that Roswell researchers might follow up on...

RR

UFOs: The Wrong Psychological Aftermath

2011-10-09T12:09:00.000-04:00

A sighting of an unusual object or light in the sky provokes, or should, an emotional/psychological reaction that is not too far outside the normal parameters of
reactive behavior to a strange event.

But a reaction should be distinctly different from normal reactive states.

And the aftermath of an alleged UFO abduction has to be characterized by behavior that doesn’t belie the inherent elements of a terrifying or totally bizarre episode.

However, UFO sightings or UFO abductions do not evoke reactions, generally, that bespeak a completely unique or affective set of circumstances; that is, sighters and abductees, after their observation or alleged abduction, do not demonstrate behavior that falls within what psychology defines for the aftermath of events like an abduction (UFO related or not) or the observation of something anomalistic.

Seeing something in the sky (or on the ground) that is totally foreign to one’s normal experiences and frames of reference can evoke euphoria (depending upon the mind-set of the observer) or questioning of one’s senses, or provoke an astute querying. Sometimes fear is prominent (again, depending upon the sighter’s mind-set).

An alleged UFO abduction is another matter altogether. Such an episode, which is akin to a criminal kidnapping, should result in psychological and/or social behavior, after the fact, that mimics what is commonly referred to, currently, as post-traumatic stress disorder or post-traumatic stress syndrome.

But I know of no abduction account that provides a litany of behavior that duplicates or even approximates the post-traumatic stress etiologies.

One can find the kind of after-behavior that is missing in UFO encounters in the 9/11 event(s).

A UFO sighting is nearly, in this day and age, a prosaic event for most people; humans on this planet have seen or read about stranger things than an odd light in the night sky or a weird aircraft.

Nonetheless, the observation of either should provoke a response that is something more than ho-hum. Generally, it doesn’t, which tells me that people have become inured to UFO sightings.

Abduction accounts, not so much.

Those professing that they were taken by alien entities -- extraterrestrial or otherworldly beings – end up, afterwards, talking about their experience as if it were just an unusual occurrence during their daily routines.

Under hypnosis, recollection of their alleged sojourn often invites behavior, while “asleep,” that appears to suggest a terrible or horrifying experience.

Hypnosis, long denied as a viable mechanism for finding information from the unconscious (even among psychoanalytics), presents a number of problems which strike at the heart of the material(s) recalled by the person hypnotized; i.e., confluence and juxtaposition of things read, seen, heard, over the life-time of the hypnotic, such as Sci-FI films or stories or radio and television shows in which persons are kidnapped, by humans or alien beings.

In one of my high-school’s assemblies, during the 1950s, an hypnotist mentioned to some students he had onstage, as part of his act, while they were “under,” that they were seeing a flying saucer. Panic ensued, the students getting up from their chairs, and running, helter-skelter around and off the stage. It was a moment of seer pandemonium, which took a while to be quelled. That was a reaction to flying saucers at the outset of the modern era of sightings, and is what one should have expected then, and somewhat now.

That aside, persons who’ve seen a UFO and those who have supposedly been taken against their will by entities of a anomalistic kind, generally resume their day-to-day existence, while some go so far as to try an exploit their experience, without any hint of the vicissitudes that would normally occur after such a traumatic event as that of a kidnapping, especially one involving the particulars included in the retellings, under hypnosis or not, that are proffered.

A UFO sightings should provide a “wow factor” for the sighter. It doesn’t any more.

An abduction experience should cause the abductee to suffer a smattering of traumatic symptoms, lasting long after their alleged experience. That doesn’t happen.

This lack of psychological repercussions is what did in the so-called contactees; none showed indications of trauma – rather they displayed psychopathic delusions that were not related to their alleged contact by beings from other worlds.

Abductees today, resume their lives, as if nothing untoward or totally bizarre afflicted them.

Yes, something happened to some who recount abduction experiences, but if what they say they experienced is true, their after-behavior belies that experience. The human mind can’t repress, forever, an event as traumatizing as that of an alien abduction, as it is remembered by the abductee.

In the psychological or even the psychoanalytic literature, where sexual elements are stressed, one can find the raft of symptoms that a UFO sighter or a UFO abductee should display after their encounter.

That few show such symptoms puts a question mark over their accounts.

(And this lack of a psychological aftermath is what mars such UFO events as Roswell, where for thirty years, the alleged crash of a flying disk lay dormant, until resurrected by ufologists with a penchant for infusing apparent witnesses to the Roswell episode with details and remembrances that were not based in actual circumstances. But that for another time….)

RR

Rex Heflin's inspiration for his UFO photos?

2011-10-03T16:15:00.000-04:00

Paul Villa was an alleged flying saucer contactee, living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who provided a slew of crisp (faked) UFO photos in the 1960s:

These two photos were taken in 1963/64 by Mr. Villa, a mechanic.

Did Rex Heflin see these photos and tried to duplicate them in 1965?

RR

UFOs: Why Science Isn't Interested

2011-10-03T13:52:00.001-04:00

Scientific methodology is thwarted when it comes to the UFO phenomenon.

What can science study when it comes to UFOs?

There is nothing tangible for scientists to study. There is no evidence that can be tested or any behavior that can be replicated or pinned down in any way.

Photos of aircraft or even of evanescent phenomena (lightning for instance) can be examined, but UFO photos offer nothing specific for science to look at.

The photos of Adamski, Villa, and Billy Meier, to name a few, would offer elements for science or intelligence agencies to scrutinize, if they were authentic photos.

Photos, less detailed, and maybe real, of amorphous UFOs don’t offer worthy elements that can be studied either. Does no one take a telephoto picture of a UFO? Where are the professional snapshots?

As for trace elements in supposed UFO landings (Socorro) or debris elements (Roswell), those are so indefinite or imaginary that science really has nothing to examine. (Anthony Bragalia has discovered that Battelle has studied malleable metal, allegedly from the Roswell incident, but Bragalia’s findings are beclouded by Battelle’s “secrecy” in what they’re doing or have done.)

Scientists need specimens to study, or hypotheses based upon observation(s). Witness testimony, regardless of the support of such by some UFO buffs, is useless, for scientific purposes. Sure, a credible witness might provide a clue that helps a scientist see an avenue for study, but witness testimony, all by itself, is generally useless.

UFO sightings nowadays are even more transitory that flying saucer reports of the past, those that supposedly left indentations (Socorro again) or radiation traces (the Desvergers, Florida tale), so science is even less inclined to get involved with sightings.

Some UFO mavens keep indicating that the O’Hare sighting of a few years back is a prominent UFO sighting, but others (Lance Moody for one) ask for something tangible: where are the photos? After all, almost everyone has a camera-enabled cell phone, and so many persons relate that they saw something strange over the Chicago airport, one wonders (along with Mr. Moody) why none of them had the presence of mind to snap a photo of the alleged O’Hare UFO?

Scientists might have trouble with a photo, as noted, but at least they’d have something to scrutinize. (Of course, some UFO hobbyists insist upon the negatives or original photos for study but today’s photos are captured electronically, so there are no negatives to offer. That argument, from UFO tyros, even when applied to older photos, is just stupid, non-scientific.)

The point here, by me, is that science has nothing with which to grapple when it comes to UFOs. The phenomenon is primarily witness-induced today, or hoaxed, just as it was in the past. However, those past UFO or flying saucer incidents had a few ingredients (radar blips, movie-film captures, trace elements) that today’s sightings do not have.

Moreover, the topic is so tainted by the goofiness and circus-like atmosphere, even by those who once had some credibility and cachet when it came to UFOs, that science won’t touch the phenomenon at all, often acknowledging it as not a legitimate area for scientific scrutiny.

So, science is out. And ufology is a sham. That leaves us with what? A curiosity that is not going to be explained or understood as it stands right now.

To pursue the matter further takes a mind and/or personality that is in a state of denial about reality, and what is purposeful for life.

RR

Stanton Friedman needs pocket change?

2011-10-02T13:24:00.002-04:00

This letter to Beyond Reality magazine [March/April 1978, Page 6] from Stanton Friedman indicates, to me, that one of the purposes of Mr. Friedman’s immersion in the UFO mystery was and is to accrue some money, not riches perhaps, but monies with which to subsist.

Retired from his profession – a profession that seems to have ended early for him; we’re not sure why, retirement or ?? – Mr. Friedman has tried to gather or recoup costs for his UFO adventures.

For me, trying to obtain money from an obtuse hobby, any obtuse hobby, is unseemly and detracts from the credibility of one who honestly pursues an interest, above or beyond one’s main source of livelihood.

If UFOs, for instance, are a nagging source of curiosity, scientific, ufologically, or any other kind of curiosity, one can try to capitalize upon that curiosity, but to do so invites mercantile motivations that make questionable one’s interest in the matter.

A number of “ufologists” have tried to make a living from UFOs – Jerome Clark, Brad Steiger, Kevin Randle, Mr. Friedman, and many more. Some have been successful (Steiger), while others have struggled to even break even; that is, they haven’t even gotten back the monies spent on travel (to conventions and UFO event sightings) or the expenses of running web-sites and blogs, as niggardly as those expenses are.

One can’t condemn a person for trying to make a living, or from trying to get back monies they’ve spent on their obsession. But one can question one’s motivations when asking for money becomes the sine qua non of their initial curiosity.

Mr. Friedman may have needed the few dollars he solicited in his Beyond Reality offering, way back in 1978. And he may need the few dollars he gets from his writings today or from his sojourns at conventions or from TV appearances.

I don’t begrudge him the little bit of money he is able to gather. But I do wonder what lies at the heart of his UFO pursuit – an explanation of the phenomenon, or the need to keep his head above the waters of everyday living.

RR

UFOs: The Science Fiction Effect

2011-09-29T15:05:00.000-04:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

While perusing The Science Fiction Encyclopedia (Illustrated) edited by Peter Nicholls [Doubleday & Company, Garden City, NY, 1979] I was struck by how many SciFi images matched or were similar to what some notorious UFO sightings proclaimed.

More importantly, the images all antedate the sightings that have become folkloric in the UFO canon.

Witnesses of the airship phenomenon of the late 1890s and early 1900s might have been influenced by illustrations for various publications such as these:

Maybe George Adamski got the idea for his allegedly concocted flying saucer and photographs of same from something like this:

Betty Hill was remembering her contact from magazines and images like this:

Detail from clipping (above)

And Barney Hill’s recollection of what he saw came from this magazine, spotted on a newsstand perhaps:

Or maybe it was one (or both) of these clips:

(One might even posit that Reverend Gill’s sighting in New Guinea was predicated on a remembered picture he once saw, particularly like the first of the three above.)

And have those who’ve seen little men next to or inside craft gotten their "sighting" from a classic Superman segment airing on TV in 1951?

Those who’ve described flying saucers and UFOs must surely have been influenced by clips such as these or movies of the 1950s which emulated the “saucer” seen here:

And persons halted by entities shooting them with a ray gun could assuredly been interposing, by culling from their memory, such images as this:

And abductees got some of their ideas from portrayals such as this one:

Recently, UFO spotters have been indicating they’ve seen triangular craft in the skies above them, such as this:

Now either UFO witnesses are regurgitating images purloined from their memory, or UFOs and flying saucers have adopted the constructs imagined by SciFi writers and editors.

Which is it I ask?

RR

Howard Hughes: Socorro (and Roswell?)

2011-09-27T10:38:00.000-04:00

Howard Hughes’ Tool Company and Hughes Aircraft were employed by the U.S. military to devise various space craft and satellite equipment, including lunar landing modules in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s.

Both Hughes’ constructs were CIA connected and some Hughes’ operations were CIA fronts: Maheu & Associates were a CIA front in the Hughes empire. (See Age of Secrets: The Conspiracy that Toppled Richard Nixon and the Hidden Death of Howard Hughes by Gerald Bellett, 1995.)

Hughes and Raven Industries (a CIA front) worked on LEMs and tested them in the southwestern deserts of The United States in the 1960s (footnoted at the RRRGroup blog)

Howard Hughes also worked with Soviet agencies and engineering counterparts, with CIA approval, to acquire technical information about the Russian advances in space materials, especially lunar landers.

Here are three prototypical drawings of what Hughes Aircraft/Toolco derived from those internecine contacts with the Soviets.

(Note the similarity to the Socorro craft – image 1 and 2 -- spotted by Lonnie Zamora in Socorro, 1964, and the propulsive thrusters in image 3; Zamora’s rocket blast!)

Howard Hughes was for atomic disarmament, and struggled with the AEC to thwart atomic explosions in the Nevada desert in the 1950s. He was generally rebuffed. (Ibid, Age of Secrets)

Hughes also was enamored of pychics and connected with Peter Hurkos on various occasions, ostensibly about the insinuations of George Adamski, who imparted dire warnings that supposedly came from Venusian visitors about atomic testings. (Ibid, Age of Secrets et al.)

(We have also stumbled across indications of a secret Hughes Aircraft test for the Navy in 1947 that might account for the Roswell incident and debris. More on this upcoming.)

Hughes’ operations were also employed by the United States Navy. Late 1969: the CIA wanted to use the Hughes Tool Company as a front to build a high-tech "The Hughes Glomar Explorer" vessel to salvage sunken submarines. "The Jennifer Project" was to retrieve a sunken Soviet sub 750 miles northwest of Hawaii…but Hughes pulled out of the plan. (Ibid, Age of Secrets)

That UFO buffs and investigators have overlooked the Hughes connection to U.S. military testings of prototypical space vehicles, one of which we contend is what Lonnie Zamora saw in Socorro in April 1964, goes to the heart of the lacunae in “ufological” research, especially when such research tends to reference prosaic explanations for some esoteric UFO incidents, Roswell, Socorro, Shag Harbor among them.

RRR/JS/RR

Adamski's Flying Saucer and Heflin's UFO

2011-09-25T11:05:00.001-04:00

The November/December 1976 Beyond Reality (Special UFO Report) magazine had a Guest Editorial by Brad Steiger (on Page 4), in which another “identification” for George Adamski’s iconic flying saucer is provided:

To read the Editorial clearly, which says Adamski’s flying saucer photo was of a bottle cooler lid, click HERE.

The other “identifications” include a chicken brooder, a humidor, and a Christmas ornament.

How or why, then, did some UFO spotters see UFOs that look like Adamski’s flying saucer:

Drawing by Spanish witness, 1977 [Beyond Reality UFO Update, Fall 1978, Page 13]

Muhammed Ali’s drawing of what he saw in 1972 [Beyond Reality, March/April 1978, Page 34]

And the same thing happened with Rex Heflin’s alleged UFO:

Warren Martin drew a craft that he and four friends saw:

Beyond Reality UFO Update [Ibid, Page 34]

Both Adamski’s photos of flying saucers and Heflin’s photos of a UFO are said to be fakes, Heflin’s photos less so than Adamski’s arguably.

Nonetheless, if such photos are, indeed, fakes, why do some credible UFO sighters see or draw objects (or craft, if you will) “things” that smack of faked UFO photos?

RR

The U.S. Air Force: Adamski/Heflin photos are fake!

2011-09-22T14:05:00.001-04:00

Ray Palmer’s Flying Saucers magazine [February 1969, Issue 62] has some interesting copies of correspondence tied to Palmer’s “editorial” about William D. Clendenon’s attempt to interest the Air Force and Hughes Aircraft in his flying saucer prototype, which he, Clendenon, hoped to patent also.

Those thrusts by Clendenon led to missives from the Air Force to members of The United States Congress, in which Adamski’s (in)famous flying saucer photograph is mentioned along with the photographs of Rex Heflin.

Click HERE to see the Adamski reference.

And click HERE to see the Adamski and Heflin references. (Another click HERE provides the signatory of this letter.)

Also, as I implicate Hughes Aircraft in the Zamora/Socorro sighting of 1964, I’m including two missives from Palmer’s publication [Ibid] that indicate Hughes Aircraft was not immune from the flying saucer phenomenon, in practical, constructive ways:

HUGHES-1

HUGHES-2

(Note that, in the Heflin letter to Congressman Meeds, the Air Force writes that it never had possession of Adamski’s photograph nor Rex Heflin’s, which may be disputative to some Heflin supporters.)

RR

How the Trent/McMinnville photos were created?

2011-09-21T00:11:00.001-04:00

This photo from The NEW Report on Flying Saucers magazine [True/Fawcett, NY, 1967] appears on Page 27 in a Lloyd Mallan article entitled “There’s More (and less) to Saucers than Meets the Eye.”

The saucer depicted consists of two paper plates glued together by Gary Buboltz, hung on a clothesline with a thin thread and photographed from fifteen (15) feet.

The photo may be found in the Project Blue Book files.

Here is the uncropped photo:

Ibid: Back Cover

It shows, as Mr. Mallan points out, how easy it is or was to fake flying saucer photos.

J. Allen Hynek authenticated this photo from 1967:

The saucer shown was a balsa-wood model, created and filmed by the Jaroslaw brothers of Michigan who hung it, by a thread, from a tree at the edge of Lake St. Clair:

Ibid: Page 31

The idea that the Trents may have strung a truck mirror from overhead wires rankles even me. The iconic photos have their supporters and defenders, such as Bruce Maccabee, and also their critics, such as Robert Sheaffer and deceased skeptic Phil Klass.

What allows me to accept the possibility [sic] of a Trent hoax is the time factors involved in the episode: the sighting by Mrs. Trent, the calling of her husband, his trip inside the house to get their camera, and the time to take two shots before the object departed.

Moreover, the object doesn’t move far enough in the sky if Bruce Maccabee’s estimate of the time between photo one and photo two taken by Mr. Trent is correct: 31 seconds.

(See a previous post here for copies of the Trent photos.)

Photos can offer proof or disproof of UFOs, as the Mallan article delineates, among other critiques of UFO photography; the advent of computer programs that can create or manipulate images exacerbates the problem of hoaxed UFO photos.

The Buboltz photo, above, emulates the Trent photos. Does it remove the “authentic” rubric given to the Trent pictures? You decide.

RR

Some UFO Stuff (being discussed in the UFO arena)

2011-09-18T19:50:00.002-04:00

This February 1977 issue of Official UFO has a rebuttal letter from Bruce Maccabee about the analysis of the Trent photos by Robert Sheaffer [Contact, Page 36 ff.] in an earlier edition of the magazine (October 1976).

Mr. Maccabee gives it his all to refute Mr. Sheaffer’s evaluation with which we generally agree.

However, what caught my eye was the mention that 31 seconds expired between Photo One and Photo Two that Mr. Trent took of the flying saucer (in 1950, over his farm).

Here are the Trent Photos:

Photo 1

Photo2

Timewatch 31 seconds.

How slow was Trent’s flying saucer traveling to only traverse the sky the short distance that his photos indicate?

You can read Mr. Sheaffer’s erudite critique by clicking HERE
----------
The magazine also has an evaluation by Robert Barrow of the Tom Towers 1956 UFO movie, Unidentified Flying Objects, which is being discussed elsewhere in the UFO community [Page 26 ff.].
----------
There is also an interview with J. Allen Hynek by The Paracast’s Gene Steinberg [Page 14 ff.]
----------
And finally there is an interview of Phil Klass by NASA sycophant James Oberg; an interview that deals with the alleged Travis Walton abduction, which Mr. Klass, unsurprisingly, thought was a hoax [Page 18 ff.]

Phil Klass has been indulged by Kevin Randle at his blog for several days now, with a protracted debate by Lance Moody, David Rudiak, and others…all of which has nothing to do with UFOs per se, but provide alternate views of Mr. Klass, which the Official UFO article supplements and maybe clarifies: Klass wasn’t a stupid man surely, although he was, by all accounts, a skeptical S.O.B.

(I would scan the magazine but the return on investment (payback) wouldn’t offset the effort, so you might try to obtain a copy, if interested, from a collector willing to sell it.)

RR

Egregious actions and blunders?

2011-09-18T10:12:00.004-04:00

UFO Report magazine [August 1976] had an interview with J. Allen Hynek by Timothy Green Beckley [Page 18 ff]. This clip is from Page 20:

Hynek’s “marsh gas” or “swamp gas” explanation was for the Ann Arbor/Dexter/Hillsdale sightings in March of 1966, not April 1967.

This kind of inattention to detail is what has undermined Hynek by any serious UFO investigator or maven.

Adrian Vance provided an article for that same UFO Report magazine [August 1976, Page 36 ff]: Vanishing UFOs: A Dimensional Dilemma.

In Vance’s piece he related that Edward U Condon destroyed all the Colorado Projects UFO materials right before his death.

And in a following paragraph, Mr. Vance tells how Hynek mislaid some UFO photos and negatives that he (Hynek) took of a UFO himself.

Click HERE to see that portion of Mr. Vance’s article.

Can anyone substantiate the Condon and/or Hynek actions?

If either actually happened, it represents behavior that is egregiously unscientific and sickening, as Mr. Vance indicates.

Condon was a security risk, who should not have had access to any materials from the Air Force or any other government agency. We went after Condon’s security status right before he was handed the Colorado Project and you can read about our efforts here in a very early posting – the second one in the archive:

Condon's Security Woes

Hynek was just scatter-brained.

Is this any way to do science?

Is this why the UFO phenomenon is a joke?

Are UFO hobbyists investing their productive lives in a topic that is so befouled by past and present stupidities that they (the hobbyists) can be maligned for wasting their lives?

I ask you…

RR

Merlin, Arthur, UFOs, and Mac Tonnies

2011-09-15T12:18:00.001-04:00

A letter to the Editor of UFO Report magazine [Summer 1975, Messages, Page 6] from a David A. Krouse of Wallingford. Pennsylvania refers to the ancient British work, The Brut, an account of English history from antiquity to the Middle Ages.

Mr. Krouse wrote that the text contains a segment for the period 900 A.D. which tells that a small boat, piloted by two women, dressed in strange garments, rose out of the sea, to take Arthur, the King, to Avalon.

Here’s the actual Brut account:

Mr. Krouse didn’t remember the story exactly as it exists in The Brut.

But his note spurred me to look into the Arthurian legend, again.

That much of the legend is immersed in, near, or within water, Arthur’s story took me to Ivan Sanderson’s thesis that UFOs may derive from bases in and under the oceans of the world, which brings me to Mac Tonnies conjecture, in Cryptoterrestrials, that a concomitant civilization to our obvious civilization has thrived for millennia and may account for UFO sightings over the years.

Mac’s hypothesis leaves much to be desired, but along with Sanderson’s ideas and legends such as that of Arthur the King, and the fish-god Oannes who came from the sea to enhance early Babylonians, one has to consider the possibility that UFOs may come from underwater bases or a civilization evolved within the waters of the Earth.

What’s interesting to me, however, is that abduction tales never have anyone taken down into waters but, rather, up into the sky.

If UFOs do come from the seas – a big IF I grant you – one would think that the beings who are allegedly abducting people would take them downward, into the watery depths instead of upwards, into the heavens.

After all Jesus ascended into the sky; he didn’t sink into the Sea of Galilee when he departed this Earthly realm.

And Mohammed went up, not down.

Nonetheless, the fact that water makes up 70% of the surface of the Earth, as Anthony Bragalia reminded me recently, the idea of an underwater world of aliens is not out of the running to explain the source of UFOs.

Yet, Vallee’s and Aubeck’s Wonders of the Sky, which contains a raft of strange UFO or UFO-like sightings, isn’t entitled Wonders of the Sea.

So, either scrutiny of the Tonnies’ crypto-world or Sanderson’s little-talked-about underwater UFO hypothesis has been remiss or there is no real cause to pursue the underwater explanation for UFOs.

But can we readily dismiss the legends that Gods and Kings came from beneath the seas so easily also?

(One aside: I know that most visitors here, maybe all, have not bought or read the Vallee/Aubeck book, or Nick Redfern’s Contactees book, and many other books referred to here, and elsewhere. That dearth of reading or effort is distressful, for it indicates a slovenly approach to the topic of UFOs and attendant ideas. To continue to ramble on and on here without a connected base of well-read individuals is a futile effort, as Paul Kimball has seen it and we, here, are starting to see also. While Wonders in the Sky is disappointing – it lacks evaluation of the sightings listed – it is an invaluable source for those who truly wish to know what UFOs are or may have been, just as legends such as that of Arthur allow hints to supplement conjecture, about UFOs and related matters.)

RR

The Carlos Alberto Diaz abduction, not unlike the Antonio Villas Boas episode

2011-09-12T19:57:00.001-04:00

Joseph Brill wrote, in Official UFO magazine [February, 1976, Page 12 ff.] about an alleged “abduction” of an Argentine man, 28 year-old Carlos Alberto Diaz, in 1975.

The picture above is a sketch, from the magazine, depicting what Senor Diaz experienced.

He was “absorbed” by a descending light [UFO?] in which he was succumbed by three entities of human form but stumps rather than arms, and faces without mouths, noses, or ears and greenish-tinted skin.

He was unceremoniously deposited in a vacant field about 200 miles from the spot where he first encountered the light. The time of his “capture” was 3:50 a.m., according to his stopped watch. When he was found, during mid-day following, he had a newspaper with him that he bought in his Naposta neighborhood of Bahia Blanca, which lies southwest of Buenos Aires by the 200 miles noted. That newspaper provided credibility for his story, Brill writes.

During his stint in a hospital, it was noticed that hair on his head and chest had been cut or taken (not by shears). He suffered no ill after-effects.

The Villas Boas case is one said to be instigated by a CIA/military psy-operation, according to DoD/CIA operative Bosco Nedelcovic, who told me the story in the late 1970s.

Nick Redfern covers the account in his book Contactees [Chapter 20].

Nedelcovic presented a scenario that’s hard to accept by some but readily accepted by those who’ve studied the machinations of the CIA and military, the so-called psychological operations.

Villas Boas was, Nedelcovic said, collected by a special unit whose purpose was to create simulated alien contact. The unit operated in South America, with the help of A.I.D. and also in Great Britain, where Nedelcovic said they were part of the infamous Scoriton contact with a man named Bryant.

My point is that the Diaz event mimics the Boas incident, but almost twenty years later.

Was Nedelcovic privy to such simulated events. It seems so. (The UFO UpDates archives has more on Nedelcovic, involving the CIA and child-nappings with a perverse sexual element.)

However, Vallee’s and Aubeck’s Wonders in the Sky is replete – and I mean replete – with similar abduction-like events: Listings 48, 108, 116, 163, 171, 233, 337, and many more.

The CIA wasn’t around then to perform such “tricks” nor were there other groups able to create, so imaginatively, such bizarre stagings.

So, was Boas really part of a CIA experiment, and Diaz too? Did both men suffer similar psychotic-induced hallucinations? Or were both men taken by entities unknown, ETs or otherwise?

Can we ever know?

RR

Man in the Moon?

2011-09-06T01:07:00.004-04:00

From Curious Myths of the Middle Ages by S. Baring-Gould [1867, Kessinger Publishing reprint, Montana] Page 198:

The belief in the Moon-man seems to exist among the natives of British Columbia; for I read in one of Mr. Duncan’s letters to the Church Missionary Society, “One very dark I was told that thre was a moon to be seen on the beach. On going to see, there was an illuminated disk, with the figure of a man upon it. The water was then very low, and one of the conjuring parties had lit up this disk at the waters edge…It was an imposing sight. Nothing could be seen around it; but the Indians suppose that the medicine party are then holding converse with the man in the moon…After a short time the moon waned away…”

This is just one of many such accounts of beings seen inside ships (or moons). Aubeck’s and Vallee’s Wonders in the Sky is replete with such tales.

But what do such tales tell us, about UFOs or anything else?

I suppose that had such an incident as this occurred today, a few avid researchers would descend on that beach and look for tell-tale signs of a moon-landing.

The Indians would be sought out, and one or two would provide testimony and maybe even a drawing of what they purported to have seen.

This is what happened in the Socorro/Zamora sighting of 1964, and in many other so-called UFO or flying saucer sightings.

Such occurrences are not rare. And their redundancy may be intrinsic to the phenomenon we discuss here.

Yet, anyone with a yen to discover the meaning of such accounts is stymied by a lack of concrete substantiation, having only witness testimony as evidence of such events.

So what is the point of pursuing such accounts/stories?

There is nothing that can be examined scientifically.

Those who find such tales to be intriguing or curious are left with ephemeral data, and I’m using the term “data” loosely.

Today, photos and videos are compromised by the onslaught of concocted imagery.

Witness testimony is besmirched by the vicissitudes of modern man: stress, psychological and medical aberrations, the insertion of mind-modules from movies, books, and television, plus the belittled but rampant UFO meme.

Governments and military agencies are holding what they know within the province of secrecy or corrupting what they impart to the point that anything they disclose is virtually worthless.

There is no way forward, as far as I can tell.

Along with our outcry about the unraveling of ufology, the matter of UFO research is beleaguered by the above constraints and the ineptitude or cavalier approach to UFO study hat has been and is endemic to the topic.

Ufological newbies haven’t the expertise to pursue the UFO phenomenon, and the UFO old-guard has missed so many opportunities to clarify significant sightings by diligent research and acumen that those with a penchant for the enigma are hamstrung; separating the wheat from the chaff, as it were, is daunting, to say the least.

Should we give up the pursuit of an explanation for the UFO phenomenon? Common sense says we should, letting the dust settle, and allowing the old-guard to pass away so a new beginning might be attempted, as we’ve written often before.

The muck and mire that afflicts ufology needs to wane, just as that moon waned in the above story.

RR

The Unraveling of Ufology

2011-09-05T14:08:00.005-04:00

It is obvious to the observer who’s paying attention that the topic of UFOs has reached a nadir.

The problem is much worse than when we noted the submersion several months ago or when Paul Kimball saw the writing on the wall causing him to ostensibly withdraw from the UFO scene, again, in July.

UFO debate is either totally bizarre, as practiced by newbies stumbling on the raft of UFO blogs and web-sites extant or the UFO debate has become impotent and irrelevant because of the site-tracking of substantive issues by protracted and silly confrontations about peripheral issues – really peripheral – as one can see at Kevin Randles’ blog or UFO Updates (about Phil Klass at Randle’s site and totally inane topics at UpDates).

The UFO subject matter has been weakened more than ever by the onslaught of stupid argumentation -- and I really mean stupid!

The oneupsmanship desired by some skeptics (and UFO advocates) has pulled UFO hypothesizing and investigation from the realm of intellectual or intelligent discourse to a realm of petty bickering about minutiae that is so much farther on the fringe of practical reality that it makes ufology as a “discipline” seem positively profound.

Visitors to our blog(s) and Randle’s, among others, more often than not, skew the original posting premise and take the material to the outskirts of banality.

I thought that we might corral some intellectual discussions here, but I was wrong.

For instance, Anthony Bragalia has done research on the 1966 Wanaque sighting that is intriguing but his work has been stiffed by most who’ve read it.

And we note that a discussion at Randle’s blog, about UFO curmudgeon Phil Klass’s malevolence had some sidebars about the alleged Socorro sighting, as a set-up job or hoax.

Yet, no one had the temerity or smarts to incorporate Anthony Bragalia’s hoax hypothesis (which, even if discounted, has enough circumstantial elements that allow a sensible person to see the possibility that a hoax was in place during or concomitant to the 1964 sighting) into the comment section where Randle, himself, has succumbed to the red-herrings and non-topical broadsides of the commentators.

One-time UFO devotees has become harpies, persons who want to show how much UFO minutiae they’ve accumulated and how that puts them atop the Ufological mountain which, itself, has been a dung-heap for a long-time now.

UFOs, as a topic, have become slimier and slimier of late and we, like Paul Kimball and a few others, have to weigh whether or not we wish to muck around in the effluvia any longer….

RR

UFOcus

2011-09-03T18:54:00.001-04:00

An article in UFO Report, September 1978, by Alex Evans, about two young fellows in Maine [1975] who saw a UFO, were allegedly abducted, then visited by some so-called “men-in-black” got me to thinking about how shattered the topic and study of UFOs is.

I found Mr. Evans’ piece to be very interesting, for several reasons, so I Googled the names and found a MUFON link to Bob Pratt’s web-site – Mr, Pratt died in 2005 – that has a rather thorough, bizarre, account of the Maine episode.

Click here to access the Pratt rendering

The young men, David Stephens and Glen Gray, should be contacted now to see what they can add to their totally intriguing experience.

They were inside a ship, saw alien beings, and had a total abduction experience, plus their initial UFO sighting, supplemented by a visit from strange people, that have received the sobriquet “men in black” by UFO investigators.

The problem is that there are several conjoined UFO events here, or several disparate UFO events, depending upon one’s perspective.

First there is the UFO, then there is an “abduction,” followed by a description of the inside of a UFO and the entities responsible for the UFO. Afterward, the young men and their families were ‘assaulted” by strange phenomena, as was a doctor who regressed the two fellows at the behest of UFO investigators, Shirley Fickett and Brent Raynes.

This UFO event encompasses almost everything that a UFO researcher might like to get his or her hands on: a seemingly credible account of a UFO sighting, an “abduction” (with a medical examination by alien beings using telepathic communications), and visits by men/people in black.

But what was done? Where’s the denouement?

The episode requires specialization. Someone versed in UFOs, someone versed in the abduction phenomenon, and someone versed in men-in-black accounts.

But there is more. Someone versed in psychiatric hallucinations and/or hysteria is a must, just in case the event is an hallucinosis.

Alex Evans records that Stephens, while inside the alien ship, describing a “mushroom man” (or alien), punched the “entity” (who had, large, slanted, unblinking eyes, no visible mouth, small, round nose, webbed fingers and was dressed in a flowing black robe), with no repercussion(s), accepted the futility of his situation, and laid down, letting the creatures remove his clothing (for a medical examination).

(This variegated incident is the possible psychiatric component.)

I know of no UFO researcher or investigator who has the credentials or cachet to delve into the various facets of such a UFO account as this one, which is not atypical of many UFO events.

MUFON is collecting data, the Examiner is reporting sightings (with no evaluations) and UFO buffs are arguing about minutiae that has nothing to do with UFOs, per se.

(See the current discussion about Phil Klass at Kevin Randle’s blog or the UFO UpDate brouhaha about Jeff Rense’s anti-semitism for examples of “ufology” gone astray.)

A sincere study of UFOs, as they appear today, needs focus, not abstracted, discursive dialogue about peripheral elements that besmudge or side-track the search for what UFOs are (or were) and what their relevance is for humanity, if there is any relevance.

Everything else is entertainment, and not good entertainment either….

RR

Freudian or Jungian UFOs?

2011-09-02T09:59:00.001-04:00

Matthew J. Graeber’s “article” from Magonia 52, May 1995 about UFO mother-ships or airships posits the idea that the cylindrical ships spotted since early times right up into the modern era may have a sexual psychical component.

You can access Mr. Graeber’s thesis by clicking HERE

As readers here know, or should, we do not think UFOs are psychical projections or quantum creations, although we have conjectured that quantum mechanics seem to have a bearing on the ‘tangible” objects we designate as “flying saucers” and quantum theory may help explain UFOs, as they appear today.

(Triangular UFO craft, for us, are military prototypes, and don’t factor into our conjectural observations here and elsewhere.)

As for Mr. Graeber’s sexual symbolism for airships, the idea is not anathema to us, but it is a psychological stretch, just as Carl Jung’s hypothesis was in his book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of things Seen in the Skies [Princeton University Press, 1978].

And even though the current thrust in many UFO circles is toward the concept that UFOs are projections of the human psyche or mental impressions coming into the minds of select individuals (from extraterrestrials supposedly), for purposes as yet unknown, we think that persons who imagine UFOs or see them mentally when they don’t exist in any tangible, real form are in need therapy of a serious psychological kind.

However Mr. Graeber would disagree:

Although we might expect to make little headway towards resolving today’s UFO enigma by comparing it to past mysteries, we may, nevertheless, examine both present and past UFO events as being comprised of optically perceived images or imagery that occasionally have an extraordinary effect upon the individual(s) who either observe or come into close proximity with them.

Mr. Graeber’s views are both Freudian and Jungian.

But if UFOs or mother-ships resonate as a sublimated sexual symbol with someone, as Mr. Graeber delinates in his piece, we think that that person should hie themselves off to a psychiatrist immediately. They have serious terrestrial problems.

Nonetheless, Mr. Graeber’s views should have a hearing or reading; they are pondered sensibly and unsensationally.

He closes with this:

Perhaps we have discovered enough about the mythical, sexual, and marked psychic background of the god-ships to determine that their origin is most likely the human unconscious, and not some alien planet situated at the edge of the cosmos. For it seems highly unlikely that a visiting alien intelligence would be so human-like as to possess similar intrapsychical processes regarding the development of their technology, their exploratory aspirations, and their myth-making tendencies.

Not a view we espouse necessarily, but a cogent suggestion by Mr. Graeber.

RR

Kevin Randle -- UFO researcher? Really?

2011-08-29T13:21:00.002-04:00

Here is an excerpt from a piece by Kevin D. Randle in UFO Report magazine, Spring 1975, entitled, Mysterious Clues Left Behind by Flying Saucers (Page 37):

Note the third paragraph, where Randle writes that "The military showed up in strength..."

Where's the substantiation, the citation that proves the military did, indeed, show up?

We have a number of other Randle articles, and many by Jerome Clark, which, in hindsight, indicate some sloppy reportage, and mind-sets that indicate a bias toward believability of accounts by anyone, anywhere when it comes to UFOs.

The questioning mind is absent by those fellows, at least, in their early incarnations as "ufologists."

Even Allen Hynek, who smothered the Mannor and Hillsdale flying saucer sightings in 1966 by attributing them to "swamp gas" fell for the faked 1967 Jaroslav photo seen here:

Hynek said that the "Analysis so far does not show any indication of an obvious hoax." [Flying Saucers Pictorial, 1967, Page 44].

The teenage Jaroslav brothers admitted, not long after, to making the "saucer" and faking the photograph.

Hynek was dismissed by reporters as unreliable after the 1966 "swamp gas" fiasco and he never regained credibility with news media after that episode.

He never regained credibility with us either.

We eschew the so-called noted ufologists because they've proven to be incompetent or just plain wrong, often back-tracking and making excuses for their earlier "nonsense."

One can forgive them, but one can't forget...their blunders and errant "research."

RR

Is Earth an alien zoo?

2011-08-24T12:57:00.001-04:00

A new study says that Earth is home to (approximately) 8.7 million species.

Click her for news-story

There has, almost from the beginning of the modern UFO era (1947), been a few hypothetical thrusts saying that Earth might be a zoo where species have been brought or created and dispersed for extraterrestrial purposes which remain totally hidden.

The idea may seem fanciful at first glance, but isn’t outside the realm of possibility,

The idea, along with the penal colony thesis, can be elaborated upon and made sensible when one examines the idea that an alien species from other worlds, should there be any, could very well use the Earth as a laboratory or park containing animals, plants, humans, insects, reptiles, and other elements of life.

This would explain the vast array of UFO visitations over the years, and supports the hypothesis that alien beings have taken a particular interest in the Earth as regards atomic or ecological devastation, both of which having the potential to destroy eons of lab work or eliminating an extraterrestrial “vacation venue.”

Earth could be the lab-source for species meant to be seeded throughout the galaxies or, at least, one of the lab-sources.

Wikipedia has a succinct review of the Alien zoo hypothesis ,which may be read by clicking HERE.

For me, the zoo idea is not as zany as many other hypotheses which have pummeled UFO devotees of the years.

What do you think?

RR

The statistical odds (and common sense) against UFO/ET visits

2011-08-20T11:38:00.005-04:00

Universe Today:

[There are] 200 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way [alone]

{There are] 100 to 200 Billions galaxies in the visible or known universe with hundreds of billions of stars

An average galaxy contains between 1011 and 1012 stars. In other words, galaxies, on average have between 100 billion and 1 trillion numbers of stars

[Galaxies can be] small dwarf galaxies, with just 10 million or so stars, or they can be monstrous irregular galaxies with 10 trillion stars or more.
------------------------
NASA:

In 1999 the Hubble Space Telescope estimated that there were 125 billion galaxies in the universe, and recently with the new camera HST has observed 3,000 visible galaxies, which is twice as much as they observed before with the old camera. We're emphasizing "visible" because observations with radio telescopes, infrared cameras, x-ray cameras, etc. would detect other galaxies that are not detected by Hubble
--------------------------
Wiki Answers:

Based on current estimates, there are between 200 - 400 billion stars in our galaxy (The Milky Way).

There are possibly 100 billion galaxies in the Universe. So taking the average of our galaxy, gives approximately 3 x 1024 stars. So about 3 septillion. This has been equated to the same number of grains of sand that are on Earth.

One source (BBC) stated that there are about 1,000 stars to every grain of sand on Earth!! There are an estimated 100 to 200 billion galaxies.

So taking a conservative number of 100 billion stars per galaxy gives an approximate total of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. (Which is 10 sextillion)
-------------------------
Wikipedia:

Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to our Solar System. It lies about 4.37 light-years in distance, or about 41.5 trillion kilometres, 25.8 trillion miles or 277,600 AU.
------------------------------
With the information above, how can anyone, with an ounce of rationality, think that UFOs represent visitors from galaxies, far, far away, or even from the nearest star system to Earth?

The Universe, with its vast diversity and intriguing panoply of astronomical or cosmological entities (by which we mean stars, planet, moons et al., not living beings), offers any curious alien intelligence much better sources for exploration than Earth which, in the great scheme of things, is a backwater and insignificant cosmological element, no matter how hard humans try to think otherwise.

Even if an alien exploratory team stumbled upon Earth millennia ago, what would stir them to keep visiting for centuries or eons afterward?

Of course, some ET believers say Earth was seeded by alien visitors and they keep coming back to see how their humanoid garden is doing.

Or Earth is a penal colony or some sort or a zoo, and extraterrestrial aliens keep checking in or visiting as if this lonely, remote planet is an integral part of a special alien agenda.

The idea that UFOs, with their abundant sightings, represent extraterrestrial visitations in light of the statistical probabilities above which open the whole Universe to such visitations, is ludicrous on the face of it.

No wonder that UFO devotees are seen as cranks and weirdos. Their thought processes invite the opprobrium.

Courtesy JayForde.com

Addictive Ufologists

2011-08-17T07:44:00.001-04:00

What one characteristic is typical of virtually all UFO enthusiasts?

Hoarding, collecting, accumulating UFO material or sightings.

Ufologists just have to get their hands on sightings released by government agencies; that welter of UFO sightings gathered from pilots, military people, and various other members of the population, the general citizenry.

And UFO devotees have to collect the plethora of books about UFOs that show up rather regularly, along with magazines, news-clippings, and web-pages or internet items.

What do UFO mavens or ufologists do with this collection of UFO detritus? Nothing – nothing at all.

They merely hoard it, sometimes giving it a cursory view.

Only a few use the collected material for research or as a supplement to hypothetical ratiocination.

The process of gathering such materials is a kind of addiction, a pathology that is endemic to the subject matter.

It’s not like coin collecting, or stamp collecting or baseball card collecting, which have a monetary value of some kind. It’s just a need to have a pile of stuff related to the UFO phenomenon, as if having it gives the collector a kind of authority just because of the ownership.

The UFO mystery has always attracted people with maladapted personalities.

That, in itself, is a matter for study, but no one with psychiatric or sociologic bona fides gives a good goddam.

And the hoarding is essentially harmless. But there it is…..

N.B. Click here for a news-clip on addiction

UFOs: a lot of data; a lot of nothing

2011-08-16T13:18:00.000-04:00

I’m fascinated by the accounts in the Vallee/Aubeck book, Wonders in the Sky, from the earliest of times, in which “beings” (often clothed in white garments) were reported seen in the presence of strange celestial objects [Pages 35, 37, 39, 40, 46, 47, 51, 52, 54, 57, 58, 62, 63, 67, 71, 72, 75, 77, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 93, 95, 103, 105, 106, ff.]

(Remember, Zamora’s Socorro craft was accompanied by beings clothed in white, as were beings allegedly spotted outside Woomera, Australia, which some, us included, tied to the Solway Firth “spaceman” photo. And there are other sightings in which entities were garbed in shiny or white clothing or uniforms.)

And a look at cave art also raises the specter of strange beings mingling among early mankind (used by Alien Astronaut devotees for their hypothesis).

Then, of course, we all have access to hundreds, thousands actually, of UFO stories that have accumulated since 1947, and appear in books, television, and the internet.

But none of this data or information has taken us to an explanation of what flying saucers or UFOs were or are.

That dastardly skeptic Phil Klass said none of us would ever get an explanation for UFOs in our lifetime. His “prophecy” seems to be accurate, at least so far.

My point is that we have the data, lots of it, but we are nowhere near an explanation of what UFOs are or what their raison d’être might be.

And the chase has become wearying for some: Paul Kimball and a few fellows here, plus others who have dropped off the UFO merry-go-round.

Why Roswell remains an active source for UFO mavens. That incident had aspects of concretebility: recovered debris, alien bodies (supposedly), credible or near-credible witness accounts, an official Army Air Corps release, newspaper stories of a captured disk, and the status of a hardened myth.

Roswell is just as evanescent and non-determinant as the data mentioned above, but it, at least for the UFO die-hards, has elements that seem to be provable if one can just break through an alleged government/military cover-up.

However, in a final analysis, no amount of data or information with a UFO tinge is going to solve the mystery.

The phenomenon remains elusive, and Phil Klass’s assessment also remains intact.

RR

UFOs and the Death of God [Redux]

2011-08-13T11:37:00.003-04:00

Reading through Wonders in the Sky by Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck [Penguin Group, NY, 2009] one is struck how most of those sightings from antiquity through the Middle Ages up to the beginning of the 20th Century have a direct or tangential connection to persons or enterprises that have a religious patina.

As aficionados of UFOs know, modern sightings, mainly from 1945 on, are secular in nature; that is, UFOs or flying saucers were not attendant or dependent upon a religious overlay.

Why is that?

I conjecture that UFOs had an umbilical connection to those events and people who believed in God and practiced the Faith, no matter if what the denomination or premise what was: Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Pagan, Mayan, Christianity, et alii.

But after the Death of God – and I believe that God died, not metaphorically as Nietzsche proposed, but actually – UFOs became attracted to humankind as a symbolic phenomenon, with meaning that has yet to be discerned.

UFOs and God is Dead -- 2009

Carl Jung’s magnificently clear rumination on the nature and reality of God in Answer to Job outlines how God, in a fit of divine despair, about how humans had been treated by Him and the vicissitudes of His creation, became incarnate, as Jesus Christ to atone for His (God’s) misbehavior, and ultimately die as a personal -- shall I say suicidal? – retribution to assuage the divine guilt.

However, that atonement, by partial Deicide, was short lived, and God’s aloof, distant, or hidden nature [See Richard Friedman’s The Hidden Face of God] brought about, in modern times, one of the most horrific episodes against humanity, and a chosen element of that humanity: The Holocaust.

In that human catastrophe and its aftermath, God died -- He either did Himself in (a total act of Decide) or died of a divine heartbreak; either way, God Himself – not his surrogate (Son) but God Himself died in h mid-1940s A.D.

Thus UFOs, whatever they were or are were transmogrified by the Divine denouement, but destined to intervene in human affairs by an eternal mandate of God, had to continue the “mission” and secular sightings became the norm, and the religious connection was set aside or lost from that point on.

This doesn’t explain, admittedly, what UFOs are, their essential makeup, nor their purpose. But it may explain by Vallee’s and Aubeck’s litany of ancient UFO sightings have been replaced by a litany of secular UFO sightings.

To augment my bizarre thesis, I suggest readers here check out an article in the current New Yorker: Is That All There Is? by James Woods, about Secularism [August 15/22 issue, Page 87 ff.]

RR

Wonders in the Sky (and nonsense in the book)

2011-08-07T11:17:00.000-04:00

David J. Hufford, Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Psychiatry, Penn State College of Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania provides the forward to Jacques Vallee’s and Chris Aubeck’s book (pictured above).

Professor Hufford is erudite and insightful.

Here are some examples from his Foreward:

I [Hufford] was pursuing the heretical idea that folk belief traditions might actually incorporate accurate observations…

[Vallee in his books, Anatomy of a Phenomenon and Passport to Magonia] recognized the difference between the core phenomenology of [UFO] reports and the local language and interpretations that clothed that core in traditional accounts.

Criticizing conventional UFO investigators for “confusing appearance and reality” [Vallee] said that “The phenomenon has stable, invariant features….But we have also had to note carefully the chameleonlike character of the secondary attributes of the sightings.

The willingness of [Vallee and Aubeck] to cast a very wide net, andn ot to allow the particular cultural interpretations of events to limit their view, offers us a remarkable opportunity to seek patterns that may lead to new understandings.

Those with a view of these matters narrowly focused on a particular interpretation, especially the extraterrestrial idea, may be annoyed by the mixing of the aerial and the religious, the political and the mystical and more.

The problem with “spaceship” is not that it is anomalous; it is that it is an interpetation rather than an observation.

But Vallee and Aubeck undercut these judicious remarks by Professor Hufford by making these comments in their Introduction:

We will show that unidentified flying objects have had a major [sic] impact not only on popular culture but on our history, on our religion…

…the fact would remain that an unexplained phenomenon has played and continues to play a fantastically important role in shaping our belief systems, the way we view our history and the role of science.

…their [UFOs] impact has shaped human civilization in important ways.

Vallee’s and Aubeck’s hubris astounds.

UFOs have never had a “major” impact on humanity or civilization or history or religion.

The phenomenon has always been a remote and peripheral aspect of societal life, of human existence.

UFOs, today, are as inconsequential to humanity and society as a whole as they have always been, despite Vallee’s insistence that UFOs have been and are integral to life on Earth.

Vallee’s view is egocentric, megalomanic almost.

His view typifies that of those, generally, who are absorbed by the pheonomenon.

Irritated by Stephen Hawking’s postion vis a vis UFOs – “I am discounting reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos?” – Vallee and Aubeck don’t get it:

The persons seeing UFOs are not cranks and weirdos. Hawking is wrong. The people who study UFOs are the cranks and weirdos – Vallee and Aubeck among them.

RR

The Roswell Addiction

2011-07-28T12:11:00.000-04:00

We see that Kevin Randle spices up his blog by posting regular Roswell tainted posts.

Roswell is a “drug” -- and he’s one of its dealers.

Some present and former visitors to this blog go to Randle’s blog for their Roswell fix.

One can find CDA there, Sourcerer (Don), and the heavily-dosed David Rudiak, among others, immersed in the drug-induced fog that has become Roswell.

Stupifyingly redundant comments are grist of the blog, and nothing of value ensues, ever.

When we provide a post about Roswell, usually from researcher Anthony Bragalia, it, at least, has something new appended to it…something unknown and pertinent.

Randle just likes to fill his blog with a raft of comments, and he doesn’t care if they have an intelligent value or not.

He just likes filler, and Roswell always provides it.

Roswell is intriguing, but well-mined by UFO hobbyists. Yet, some find the incident necessary for their online existence; they need it to feel alive, and intellectual by regurgitating old Roswell detritus, over and over, again.

It’s embarrassing….that is, the “addiction” makes the rest of us who are fascinated by the UFO mystery look as if we are part and parcel of the “addicted” Roswellians, even as we try to distance ourselves from Roswell, just to get on with trying to explain the extant UFO enigma, the phenomenon itself, not the myth and corrupted event that attracts some like moths to flames, when they should know better.

The Higgs Boson (The so-called “God’s particle”) and Ufology’s Atheists

2011-07-25T11:52:00.002-04:00

I’m rather surprised at how many of the visitors to this blog, some of whom are my UFO friends, profess to be atheists.

I shan’t name them, but you know who most of them are. They are not “in-the-closet” atheists by any means.

At the same time, many physicists and scientists, generally, say they are atheists also. But their actions belie such a declaration.

At a subliminal level, science, especially physicists, are believers in a supreme deity and all their mathematical machinations and theories are a search for that deity.

Watch a group of NASA scientists when a space probe or experiment is successful. They clap and get giddy, much like fundamentalist Christians at a church rally when someone is cured by an evangelist.

But that superficial observation is bolstered by what science, physicists mostly, spend their lives looking for – the meaning of life – the physical laws of nature – one clue to is the Higgs boson, that elusive particle that is as evanescent as the God of believers but still pursued as diligently as believers and theologians pursue proof of their God.

The money and time spent in the search or Higgs’ particle – at the Fermi lab in Chicago and the newer Hadron Collider in Europe – is nothing more than the pursuit of a footprint of God.

The whole structure of quantum physics and classical physics, since Aristotle through Newton up to today’s theoretical physicists’ obsession with the fundamental laws of nature – God’s principles – is based on a proof for God, no matter how that search is described.

Yet, why do my ufological friends insist that they, too, are atheists? I think it has to do with a desire to mimic science. That science is in a state of denial about its belief in God doesn’t register with the UFO group that professes not to believe. They haven’t thought it through nor have they understood the charade that science, and physicists have foisted on themselves and the public too.

That there is an intelligence at work in the Universe is palpable, even if that intelligence is marred by a psychotic-like behavior.

The UFO clique that insists there is no such intelligence – no God (a term I’m using as a rubric for discussion) – strikes me as incomprehensibly shallow.

I accept that science, physicists mostly, are profoundly shallow – else why do they insist that mathematics portray reality better than any other form of communication – a matter to deal with, again, upcoming – and science is so focused on its subliminal, disguised obsession that it has devolved into a cult of believing non-believers who can’t be trusted to come up with an outlay of truth.

That the denial of a God by physicists is pathological is a given in these quarters. That ufologists say they are atheists is a ploy to appear scientific and foolish, intellectually.

But that’s, as Gilles Fernandez, the French psychologist says, ufology.

RR

Quantum UFOs

2011-07-19T11:02:00.001-04:00

We’ve touched on this previously with several blog postings, but a reading of The Black Hole War by Leonard Susskind [Little, Brown and Company, NY, 2008] allows for an extrapolation of our views.

The whole tenor of Susskind’s discussion of black holes and his consternation with Stephen Hawking’s once held view about black holes and information (the loss of it) revolves around the idea that quantum theory applies to black holes….something macroscopic rather than microscopic, which is generally the province of quantum reality.

Large elements of reality have always been eschewed by quantum physicists, but Susskind, and others, apply quantum mechanics to black holes, which are an egregious element of large reality:

“Jacob Bekenstein [a noted Israeli physicist]…had a sense that black holes had something profound to say about the laws of nature. He was particularly interested in how black holes might fit together with the principles of Quantum Mechanics and thermodynamics that had so preoccupied Einstein.” [Page 147]

So we contend, hypothetically, that UFOs may be quantum artifacts – large quantum particles as it were.

UFOs mimic several aspects of quantum theory: the indeterminacy of location, observation (measurement) of UFOs affect them, and their reality is hypothetical, not actual in practical, classical terms.

Quantum artifacts behave in strange, quirky ways, as you know. UFOs behave similarly.

UFOs, more often than not, disappear when observed, suddenly rather than gradually, according to most UFO sighting-reports.

The Hungarian physicist Eugene Wigner [1902-1995] said this:

“When we become conscious of something, we bring about the crucial collapse of the wave function, so that the perplexing mixed states of [reality] disappear.” [Page 148, Introducing Quantum Theory, Totem Books, NY, 1997].

UFOs behave, usually, as waves rather than particles, but they have had substance, seemingly, as trace elements of them have been adequately reported; however, they behave more readily as waves (of light), especially in current times.

As for quantum, Niels Bohr said this:

“Whether an object behaves as particle or wave depends on your choice of apparatus for looking at it.” [Page 160, Ibid]

Bohrs insight applies to Paul Kimball’s favorite UFO event, the so-called RB-47 sighting of 1957.

Erwin Schrodinger (of dead/live cat fame) conjectured that particles – let us insert UFOs here – do not exist at all, but are just a “superimposition of waves” [Page 140, Ibid]

While quantum mechanics/theory is abstruse for many, we think it may be a vehicle -- a methodology – for study of the UFO phenomenon.

We’ll continue this hypothetical thrust here (and elsewhere)…..

UFO Conspiracies

2011-07-07T08:31:00.001-04:00

A paper on the [UFO] conspiracy mind-set -- a PDF

Paul Kimball's state of mind...

2011-07-05T11:42:00.003-04:00

We consider Paul Kimball a friend, and we follow his blog and Facebook musings regularly.

Lately he has been absorbed by what he sees as synchronicity-like happenings that afflict him.

We think he and his followers might like to see an alternative view.

Click here for a precis on Apophenia

Life, death, life and UFOs: The witness failure(s)

2011-06-02T18:23:00.001-04:00

The book, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience by Pim van Lommel, M.D. provides extensive data and information about the so-called near death phenomenon or the NDE (near-death experience).

The author covers virtually everything about NDEs, including an extensive account of Quantum Mechanics in relation to the experience.

Most of you have read or heard the accounts of persons who died and “came back.”

What I want to zero in on are a few of the descriptions that the dying or dead witnesses provide; namely, the beautiful music and beautiful flowers they experience, and how this relates to UFO reports, as they has been presented by persons who’ve experienced that phenomenon, also.

Every NDE account that Dr. Lommel provides from the literature and his own accumulated reports, from his practice or that of colleagues, tells of the dead/dying person’s hearing “beautiful music” [sic] and seeing “beautiful flowers” [sic] on their way to a blissful landscape after transitioning that tunnel with a light at the end of it.

But no one, and I mean no one, has reported exactly what kind of music or what kind of flowers they experienced.

Were the flowers gladiolas, petunias, roses, dandelions?

Was the music classical, operatic, chorale, jazz, rock, even hip-hop?

No one has ever provided a definitive account or identification of the music or flowers.

Did no musicologist, opera buff, composer, or musician have a NDE?

Did no horticulturist, avid gardener, or flower enthusiast ever have a NDE?

That is, why does no one provide an exact, precise descriptive of the music or flowers, if the experience is a real one and not a metaphor of the mind?

Now, this also applies to those who witness UFOs, in the sky or up close and personal.

Has ever an aeronautical engineer seen a UFO and can provide a description of the design that corresponds to his or her expertise as an engineer of aircraft?

Has ever a chemical engineer or metallurgist provided a description of the smell or patina of a UFO that has appeared near them?

Has a pilot ever – really – provided an actual account of what a UFO did in the context of its flight; that is, has anyone with flying acumen given an account that explains or shows the proclivities of flight by a UFO, in ways that indicate they actually took in the experience in a way that was or is real – Kenneth Arnold, Gorman, or Lt. Coyne, notwithstanding?

No UFO report by a witness of a UFO has ever provided a forensic description of what was seen or experienced; the details come after the fact by UFO investigators and/or “researchers.”

No UFO report has ever been definitive, in portraying what a UFO or flying saucer was constructed of in essence.

Yes, Scully gives details that resonate in his account of the Aztec crashed flying disks, but that’s second or third-hand information, and concocted as most UFO mavens think.

But no UFO witness, with credentials that count – engineering, chemical, aeronautical – has given a report that provides actuality – no one.

This means, on the face of it, that either NDE’s and UFOs are chimeras, or that witnesses to either are incompetent or without credentials that allow them to be professional in their reportage.

The Flying Saucer from Mars and CDA

2011-05-30T21:47:00.001-04:00

Back in the day I thought that this book by “Cedric Allingham” corroborated the Adamski alien contacts and story:

Here are the Adamski-like photos that Allingham purportedly took of a flying saucer that allegedly came fro Mars:

But the story was a hoax, concocted, for some bizarre reason, by respected and credentialed British astronomer, Patrick Moore:

And who was the journalist who unmasked the hoaxer and the exposed the hoax? Our favorite skeptical thinker, Christopher Allen, known here and in the UFO community as CDA.

Click here for the story

CDA has cachet with us and with those who like clear thought, gentlemanly argumentation, and skepticism in its revered and best sense.

So when you read his comments here and elsewhere, take a moment to appreciate his bent of mind and research acumen.

Confining our blogs....

2011-05-25T10:53:00.001-04:00

Today, Wednesday, May 25th, 2011, comments to this blog were not automatically sent to us for moderation. I had to go into our e-mail service and retrieve them, which allowed me to scrutinize responses more judiciously than usual, and without them being sampled by other here.

I continue to be distressed by the slovenly thought-processes that are exampled by what purports to be critical thinking about our postings.

In dialogue with other bloggers and friends, I’ve decided that we shall confine comments here to those that reflect intellectual, open-minded rumination, and not knee-jerk response to things written by us and others, which torment an ingrained belief-system or narrow-minded, non-objective cogitation.

There are several (many, actually) commenters we look forward to hearing from but a few that irk us with their bigoted, snotty, unthinking commentary.

From this point on, more so than our usual fascistic deletion of comments that we don’t like, we’ll not be approving comments from some who visit here.

We have a respect for some of you -- your intellectual proclivities, your open-minded objectivity, even-handed skepticism, and your genteel approach to our oblique and beleaguered postings, some of which I agree are over the top.

Your comments will continue to be registered here.

But if you send us a comment that doesn’t appear, and it’s not the fault of our blogging service, you know where you stand with us.

So don’t go away angry…just go away…..

RR

The Need for Metaphysics and Common Sense (in ufology)

2011-05-15T18:17:00.002-04:00

In the preliminary stages of change in the study of UFOs, sparked by Paul Kimball, Nick Redfern, and us (among a few others: Moody, CDA, Gilles Fernandez, et al.) there has to be some quiding principles of and for thought.

Mr. Kimball, at his blog -- The Other Side of Truth -- is addressing some of the issues for the new ufology.

And, for our part, we keep the ball rolling with a paper by James Williams that provides an exegesis of Alfred North Whitehead's thoughts on common sense in Process and Realty.

The paper, for those with intellectual stamina, outlines how metaphysics and life can be enhanced by proper thinking and observation.

Click here for Willams' paper (a PDF)

Ufology, a term we hate and hope to see discarded in future, and the study of UFOs need a cataclysmic paradigm shift.

Kimball, Redfern, and the skeptics, Moody, Christopher Allen, Fernandez, along with our small part are at the forefront, we hope, of a major change in how UFOs are discussed, studied, commented on, and viewed by media, academe, science, and the public.

This posting is a small step in that direction.

A Socorro Confusion (that flummoxes researchers)

2011-05-01T10:41:00.001-04:00

This symbol is ostensibly the “insignia” that Lonnie Zamora saw and drew (for the public) which was on the UFO craft he reportedly observed in Socorro, New Mexico in 1964:

This is the “actual” symbol seen by Zamora, according to Allen Hynek, Ray Sanford, and Air Force files – it has been duplicated by an observer of a later UFO sighting, as outlined below the image (here):

We’ve added the horizontal lines, to approximate what officer Zamora saw and drew, but which was kept secret, supposedly to prevent hoaxers from using it for mischief.

The symbol/insignia that Zamora provided, and seen in 1973 by Gary Chopic on a triangular UFO, was an insignia used to identify a U.S. military prototype we believe, and confirms, for us, that Zamora’s UFO was a test vehicle of Earth manufacture in 1964.

Keeping Zamora’s original, true drawing sub rosa has prevented UFO researchers from reaching the same conclusion, and has allowed the false assumption by UFO mavens (Jerry Clark, for example) that Socorro is one of the best UFO sightings on record.

This subterfuge is part and parcel of the UFO story: persons and agencies holding back information and details that could clarify and even explain, perhaps, what UFO are.

Why does the government becloud UFO sightings and information? One can guess.

Why do UFO researchers becloud UFO material? To adopt a façade of illuminated secrecy and alchemical-like mystery. But that practice has only made the study of UFOs more daunting and difficult for those who would like to use scientific-like methodology and/or forensics to get at the UFO enigma.

For us this means that older, classic UFO sightings have to be re-examined or scrapped, and new sightings pursued without all the convoluted clutter and devious detritus that has accreted to UFO sightings of the past (by flawed “ufologists”).

We hope you agree….

Not exactly rats but….

2011-04-27T08:22:00.008-04:00

UFO mavens are abandoning, in droves, UFO UpDates, that slovenly hovel where UFO geezers and close-minded. fascistic-like UFO aficionados have congregated for years, to hawk their mind-numbing hypotheses about flying saucers while stifling open discussion and intelligence.

A foul-stenching clique has arisen at UpDates, containing such one time UFO luminaries at Jerome Clark, Don Ledger, Bruce Maccabee, Kentaro Mori, among others.

But those luminary-lights have dimmed considerably in recent years, and what we’ve noted for some time now, about the UpDate list-master, Errol Bruce-Knapp and his minions, has finally come to awareness by slow-to-get-the-message UFO hobbyists.

Our friend Paul Kimball, at his blog – The Other Side of Truth – has relieved himself, once again, of UpDate visitations, because of how Bruce-Knapp closed the door on Carol Rainey, whose excoriation of Budd Hopkins’ abduction methodology brought opprobrium in spades, to Hopkins, Ms. Rainey herself, and advocates on both sides.

You can see Mr. Kimball’s rejoinder and reasons for abandoning UpDates about this matter by clicking here.

Brit UFO researcher and folklore expert David Clarke left UpDates several months ago, after suffering megalomaniacal attacks by Jerry Clark, who uses UpDates to showcase his past UFO acumen and lost-stature as a bona fide UFO writer/researcher.

Others have left because they were held at bay or bludgeoned by the likes of Bruce-Knapp’s lapdogs whom we know, first hand, to be a truth-bending, sociopathic personalities, jealous of thinkers who capture the UFO audience, while they lie fallow in the muck of their disgusting mind-sets and hatred of the truths that they pervert.

At any rate, UpDates is in its final decline, and will be out of business by the end of 2011.

We’ve told you so, and now persons with more street cred than us are doing so also.

Frankenstein's Monster and Roswell

2011-04-20T10:19:00.001-04:00

Christopher Allen [CDA], a Roswell skeptic and the story’s most intellectual debunker, often points out that Roswell was dead almost immediately after it came to light in 1947.

And he’s right, of course.

The headline(s), touting a captured flying disk, moved from the front pages of newspapers to those newspapers’ morgues, within hours of the original outing.

Roswell’s flying saucer incident remained moribund for thirty years, until it was resurrected by a few opportunistic writers and UFO “researchers” – including Stanton Friedman, Charles Berlitz, William Moore, Kevin Randle, and a few others.

The story was dead until those mad men raised it from the grave in the late 1970s.

And ever since, the original story has been accreted or enhanced by a slew of UFO mavens, among them David Rudiak, a full-blown Roswell extraterrestrial supporter/believer.

Christopher Allen’s scenario of a dead story brought to life by men with an agenda to “prove” extraterrestrial visitors crashed near Roswell reminds this writer of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s gothic tale Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus.

In the Shelley story, as you know, a body is created by Dr. Frankenstein putting together a creature from dead body parts, some human, some not.

Frankenstein comes to loathe his creation, just as some UFO investigators [Kevin Randle?] have come to loathe their initial Roswell ET support.

But the creature – Roswell – lives on imbued with a life that isn’t easily snuffed out, no matter how hard intelligent people like CDA try to kill it.

The Roswell creature is composed of all kinds of mouldering additions, each with a history and one-time life, but none salient as a living, true experience, only alive now because of their creative addition to a form that was dead but is now alive by alchemical-like machinations.

Killing Roswell is as daunting as it is in the original story and every film or story that has followed Ms. Shelley’s 1818 tale.

UFOs, String Theory, Quantum Gravity

2011-03-30T11:58:00.001-04:00

Physics has become as discombobulated and goofy as “ufology.”

String Theory for Dummies by Andrew Zimmerman Jones and Daniel Robbins [Wiley Publishing, Indianapolis, 2010] presents a pithy overview of string theory and quantum physics; an overview that shows just how crazy the study of physics has become, and how physicists have resorted to mathematics as a kind of abracadabra to help them find an answer to the mysteries of the Universe that discombobulate them.

Ufology, that faux research sobriquet use by UFO hobbyists to provide cachet for their irrational attempts to uncover the nature of UFOs, is loopier than string theory, but is also encumbered by overt pathological participants whereas physicists keep their pathology suppressed, masking it with calculus and other mathematical formulae.

Physicists are trying to discover the reality of the Universe.

Ufologists once tried to uncover the mystery of flying saucers and then generic UFOs, but have since devolved into a babbling clique of pseudo-researchers who are so flummoxed by the enigma they once hoped to explain that they are now babblers of nonsense that borders on total insanity.

The UFO phenomenon is not amenable to mathematics, it seems – but who has tried to use math to provide a theoretical paradigm?

Moreover, UFOs have attracted crazies of all types, while physics (quantum, string, and classical) attracts brilliant loonies who see beyond the prosaic and mundane to theoretical models of the Universe that may provide profound truths of our existence.

The study of UFOs takes us nowhere and thus far has only provided babbling of a pathological kind. (See Alfred Lehmberg’s ditherings for example.)

One holds out hope for a rational denouement in the realm of physics (string theory notwithstanding).

But in the realm of UFOs? One should keep their distance, remaining aloof and disconnected, if only to remain compos mentis.

UFO Regurgitation: A Warning!

2011-03-29T10:05:00.000-04:00

One of the problems when UFOs are the subject matter is the propensity for bloggers and UFO aficionados to pad the discussion with a redundant recap of hoary UFO stories: Roswell for instance, and others like the L.A. battle of 1942, Socorro, the Betty/Barney Hill “abduction” among many others.

The RB47 incident, noted here, and regularly by Paul Kimball at his blog, The Other Side of Truth, is also an example of a UFO sighting that gets an extended work over.

We try to avoid presenting hackneyed flying saucer tales at our blogs, only posting such referential stories when and if there is new light to be shed upon them, as is the case when Anthony Bragalia delves into the Roswell event with his memory metal angle.

But, some who visit our blogs can’t help themselves and often regurgitate known and banal details from the classic UFO sightings. It’s a matter of showing off their accumulated knowledge about UFOs we think, or a disregard for the sensibilities of those who are trying to find new, unique insights to the UFO enigma.

Let us assure you that we won’t go down that trail of insipid rehashing, as is the pattern at such blogs as Kevin Randle’s A Different Perspective.

That is, we shall try to limit our postings and comments here to views that are truly unique or new.

Fleshed out theories of what UFOs may be shall be the grist for content here, not purloined hypothesizing or regurgitated material, taken wholesale from other blogs/sites or books and archives that true UFO hobbyists are well acquainted with.

We’ll try to be inventive in our thinking and conjectures. And we’ll try to curtail grandstanding by those who need to display their assumed acumen when it comes to an almost profound mystery: UFOs.

Therefore, if you are a regular here, know that an onslaught of UFO drivel, acquired from sources not your own, will be ignored and not posted.

That’s our caveat for the time being…..

UFO skeptics and believers

2011-03-27T10:05:00.002-04:00

This quote appears on page 105 of Consciousness Beyond Life by Pim van Lommel. M.D. [HarperOne, 2010] (which we’ll be posting on soon for the connection of Near Death Experiences to the abduction phenomenon):

Skeptic and believers are all alike. At this moment scientists and skeptics are the leading dogmatists. Advance in detail is admitted: fundamental novelty is barred. This dogmatic common sense is the death of philosophical adventure. The universe is vast. –Alfred North Whitehead

What concerns us, besides the skeptic/believer propinquity, is the absolute anti-intellectualism of UFO mavens – their inherent stupidity, ignorance (how ill-read and uneducated they are).

But that for another time, and place…..

The Best UFO Case, Ever???

2011-03-24T10:38:00.001-04:00

Our friend, film-maker Paul Kimball, along with once prominent UFO researcher Brad Sparks consider a UFO incident from 1957 to be the very best incident to offer proof of UFOs.

It is the so-called RB47 bomber confrontation, as it were, with a UFO in July 1957.

Here’s Mr. Kimball’s essay on the incident, from his film, Best Evidence:

While Mr. Kimball is seemingly obsessed with this UFO sighting, we find it evidentiarily boring.

A plane was followed by a UFO, which was seen by some members of the crew, spotted on radar, and apparently interacted with the plane’s radar.

The Air Force, as is its wont, said the crew was tailed by and taken in by another aircraft in the area, as noted in Mr. Kimball’s film.

The Air Force was obviously maliciously stupid as usual, but the sighting is hardly the theochristic UFO event that Messieurs Kimball and Sparks think it is.

It doesn’t come near to explaining what a UFO is, nor does it provide overt clues that lead to a possible explanation. It is merely a well-witnessed sighting of a strange thing in the sky.

We would hope that Mr. Kimball gets over his obsession with this beleaguered sighting, and apply his noteworthy UFO acumen to sightings and incidents that resonate in more meaningful ways.

RB47 is just another sighting of an anomaly that requires more scrutiny than that provided by the details inherent in this admittedly intriguing, but ultimately soporific case.

Ufology’s Insane Asylum: UFO UpDates

2011-02-26T13:35:00.000-05:00

The pathology inherent to or study of UFOs is rampant and overt at an internet place that designates itself as The List: Errol Bruce-Knapp’s UFO UpDates.

A cursory glance at the postings on UpDates provides evidence of a psychopathology that is substantiated by a perusal of such dolts as Jerry Clark, Don Ledger, Stanton Friedman, and especially the sour and intellectually misguided Alfred Lehmberg.

Recently, sensible and coherent thinkers such as Britain’s David Clarke and the eminent Jeff Ritzmann have departed UpDates, realizing that the venue now contains a gaggle of very mentally-sick persons, who are spouting jeremiads about the Alien Abduction brouhaha that Paratopia started by its anti-Hopkins revelations of Carol Rainey, Hopkins’ ex-wife and colleague, and the Jacobs/Emma Woods imbroglio that has captured the noses of ufological morons and idiots who haven’t a clue as to what malfeasance is or perverse bias is on their part or others,

UpDates is the last refuge of the ufological residue that has been marginalized by UFO newbies and true intellectuals, who refuse to habituate the site.

The scandalous asides of The Listers is grist for psychoanalytic study, if one wants to examine minds that have gone off the deep end of sanity.

The once scholarly UFO historian Jerry Clark has descended into a state of Libyan-like autocracy, where he thinks he’s the sole-arbiter of what is germane about UFOs and what isn’t.

Don Ledger is just dumb, and grammatically lax.

Freidman is defensive and self-aggrandizing.

Lehmberg is egregiously loopy, ruining the English language with his grammatical faux pas and incoherent ramblings.

Bruce-Knapp likes the idea of having a lot of material in his UpDate archives, and encourages postings of every kind. He’s the asylum’s wayward director who should have retired a few years ago, before senility hit him square in the head.

There are others, too many to name here, who complete the inventory of psychopaths who once were atop the ufological list of responsible UFO mavens but who now make up the raft of silly persons that time has made irrelevant and rationality has subverted.

UpDates is the list alright – but the list of UFO nuts and crazies.

Edward U Condon and pink UFOs

2011-02-22T11:51:00.001-05:00

Way back when, before many readers here were even extant, we pursued the allegation that Edward U Condon, the person responsible for the flawed Air Force/Condon Report on UFOs, was a communist sympathizer, a "pinko" as The John Birch Society called him and his ilk.

We posted our inquiry online, earlier at his blog and others, but provide it again for your edification.

We believe that if Condon was, indeed, a commie sympathizer (or worse), his perversion of the Colorado Study of UFOs was compromised for reasons more substantial than stupidity.

Click here to see our paperwork for what we call The Condon Affair.

Scientology, Ufology, and Psychology

2011-02-20T10:58:00.000-05:00

The New Yorker issue for February 14/21, 2011 has a lengthy piece by Lawrence Wright [The Apostate, Page 84 ff.] about a Scientology defector.

The article presents an overview of Scientology and especially L. Ron Hubbard (its founder).

Those interested in the Navy’s connection to UFOs will find clues to that connection in the article, but they will find much more about the founder of Scientology, and it’s not a pretty picture.

Just as Christianity is marred by the machinations of its early followers and Constantine, and psychology is saddled by the permutations of Freud to make psychoanalysis viable to his colleagues [See Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s “The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory” – Ballantine Books, NY, 1984/2003], Scientology is riddled by the flaws of its founder L. Ron Hubbard.

And ufology? Where has that artful and contrived discipline gone wrong?

Ufology has no definitive founder, but the progenitors of the faux “science” were (and are) men flawed by a lack of scientific acumen and a lack of intellectual credentials.

Whereas Freud has great insights about the human mind and behavior, he muddled those profound insights by fudging truths and facts to make his (psychoanalytic) movement palatable to psychologists and the Victorian populace of his time.

L. Ron Hubbard had no profound insights, but his movement (Dianetics and then Scientology) has been promulgated by a patina of distortions and concocted legends of his acolytes, just as happened with Christianity. [See Bart D. Ehrman’s “Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible…” – Harper One, NY 2009]

In Ufology, one can’t point to a single person who led the study of UFOs astray but one can point fingers at persons such as Phil Klass (a perverse skeptic), Stanton Friedman (a biased researcher), and a host of other “ufologists” who had or have an agenda that has little or nothing to do with truth or science but is, rather, a ploy for self-aggrandizement.

The raft of persons who’ve led the study of UFOs/flying saucers astray is too vast to list here, and most readers know to whom we refer.

The point is that movements are always corrupted by followers or instigators who have self-promotion as their premise or ignorance at their foundation.

Psychiatry, Scientology says, is a crock. And Scientology may be right. Psychiatry moved away from a therapy based on the study of the mental afflictions of people to an overly of symptomatic suppression with drugs or various kinds, a move away from the methodology of Freud and his followers.

Freud may have compromised his movement by altering the truth of child seduction but his methodology for getting at unconscious truths was remarkable and unique, even helpful to those afflicted by neuroses of a sexual kind.

But the little insight by Scientology about psychiatry and drug-therapy doesn’t offset the flawed premises of L. Ron Hubbard, as you will see by the New Yorker article.

And since Jeffrey Masson exposed the flawed, dishonest Freudian account of child seduction – the root of neuroses according to psychoanalysis, and Bart Ehrman (among others) exposes the flawed, distorted beginnings of Christianity, why has no one exposed the flawed roots of ufology?

Yes, skeptics of UFOs abound, and some in the UFO community have assailed the fraudulent in the UFO/flying saucer era, but no one has made as thorough assessment of the UFO crockery as have Dr. Masson of Freud or Bart Ehrman of Christ’s early devotees.

L. Ron Hubbard has been skewered, and Freud too, along with Jesus’s early disciples. But nowhere has anyone taken on the personalities that have tried to make ufology a valid enterprise, using lies and distortions in the process.

Is that because ufology is seen, intrinsically, as the canard it basically is? Or is it because no one has the intellectual stamina to assail a thing as ridiculous as ufology?

We think it is both…

Douglas R Hofstadter: Metamagical Themas...

2011-01-30T11:24:00.001-05:00

A favorite author of ours is Douglas Hofstadter, whose Godel, Escher, Bach and Metamagical Themas (a compilation of his Scientific American columns from the 1980s).

While Mr. Hofstadter is moderate and limited about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle – he thinks it is misinterpreted by almost everyone – and that the principle doesn’t state that an observer interferes with the observed but “rather hat a very fine grain size, the wave duality of the measuring tool becomes relevant.” [Page 464, MT].

Heisenberg’s principle may be extrapolated to include such things as how the measurement (the observation) of individuals or UFOs is affected by the observation of either.

For instance, if a group of people, at a party are intruded upon by a person with a camera, the group will alter their behavior, to accommodate the picture or video being taken, since it will record a moment by which the group and individuals will be remembered for posterity.

And there is anecdotal information that UFOs often seem to be affected by an observer, with a camera, radar, or just a visual encounter.

The measurement (observation) of things alter those things in various ways, some subtle, some not so subtle.

Mr. Hofstadter, in writing about electromagnetic waves, points out that “as a black body heats up, it begins to glow: first dull red, then bright red, then orange, eventually white, and then, surprisingly enough, bluish!” [Page 458 MT].

Isn’t that what UFO observers often report?

Mr. Hofstadter makes it a major point to support the cautions of physicists who tell laypersons that quantum microcosm can’t be extended to explain the macrocosmic events.

We think that is an error in judgment and theoretical hypothesizing, and have addressed the issue here at this blog and the RRRGroup blog, early on.

Applying quantum thinking to the UFO phenomenon provides an interesting patina to the UFO mystery, almost explaining some behavior and sightings.

Bruce Duensing deals with such things, rather more brilliantly than we, at his blog, Intangible Materiality, which can be accessed by clicking here:

Intangible Materiality

Also, Mr. Hofstadter is not inimical to mathematics as the lingua franca of science, which we think is detrimental to human thought, and a contrivance that is unreal, a concoction that gives scientists a mantle of authority that it doesn’t really deserve.

Math is bogus, and used by science to make hypothetical thinking obscure to laypersons and to create a priest-like order for science that co-opts religion, philosophy, and thought in general.

So, while it seems that we think that Mr. Hofstadter is off the mark on the items listed above, why do we find him so fascinating, and intelligent?

That goes to his views about how we think or should and is addressed in his Metamagical Themas chapters, World Views in Collision (which deals with the Skeptical Inquirer – he likes it) and On Number Numbness (about how people don’t comprehend the reality of numbers that affect their lives).

And in Section VII, Sanity and Survival, Hofstadter tackles irrationality itself, which is rampant in the UFO community and “ufology” particularly.

We don’t expect visitors to this blog to read or understand the bulk of Metamagical Themas, but we’d hope they might give it a try.

Moreover, since most of the UFO crowd are hobbyists, who work on the UFO mystery when it is convenient and not during their weekend down-time, we are not holding our collective breaths for any to try and enlighten themselves beyond their myopic attention to the UFO phenomenon, Bruce Duensing as the stand-out exception.

Roswell’s Bad “Joke”

2011-01-25T15:40:00.000-05:00

Debating Roswell often brings out the worst in UFO mavens, but why?

We think the Roswell saga starts to unravel when news media provided this photo of the allegedly misidentified “flying saucer” debris that was originally reported as captured [sic] by the military:

The photo of General Ramey scrutinizing the alleged captured flying disk debris insults the intelligence of everyone.

The photo is saying, This is the stuff that was found near Roswell and thought to be a flying saucer.

Who, in their right mind (Brazel, Marcel, and various Roswell citizens) would have thought that the mishmash of sticks and foil was from an exotic flying craft that destructed in their locale?

The “joke” – seen as a cover-up by UFO aficionados who believe an extraterrestrial craft was discovered near Roswell – was so blatant and silly that news media and other interested persons who saw the display shrugged off the initially fascinating account as a complete observational blunder by some rural hicks, compounded by a military contingent that was totally inept.

The event faded almost immediately, only to be resurrected in the late 1970s and early 1980s by the books inspired by Stanton Friedman’s contact with Jesse Marcel, who convinced Friedman or was convinced by Friedman that the Ramey photos did not picture what he had gathered up, from the so-called debris field left by the crashed flying disk.

From that point on the Roswell incident took off.

But the intellectually insulting photos, of General Ramey with a batch of crummy materials, was the downfall of the Roswell story, in 1947, and still resonate with skeptics to this day: the photos are so bizarre and foolish that they invite the charge of a government cover-up by some or, by others, as a real account of what was found at Roswell and woven into a story of extraterrestrial aliens, expanded by fictions from those seeking notice or a late-in-life legacy that “ufologists” encouraged or helped create.

But it’s the “joke” -- the Ramey photos – that really have offput science and news media, then and now.

Who thought up the “joke” has been grist for Roswell scrutiny for years, but it’s merely a “joke” and should be treated as one, with a great guffaw by thoughtful persons who should really get on with their lives, leaving Roswell for the accumulators of hoaxes that make humans laugh.

Roswell: The Great Pan is dead!

2011-01-14T09:35:00.001-05:00

In Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend [Gambit Inc., Boston, 1969], the authors, in Chapter XXI (Page 275 ff.), recount the famous tale from Plutarch about how, on board a ship with many passengers, sailing near the Echinades Islands, Epitherses (son of Aemilianus) tells that Thamus, the Egyptian pilot, heard a voice, while near the island of Paxi, calling his name.

Thamus, at first did not reply, but after a third time he responded to the voice, which said, “When you come opposite to Palodes, announce that Great Pan is dead.”

Thamus, Epittherses, and the passengers were astounded and reasoned among themselves whether to carry out the order or not.

Thamus, however, while approaching Palodes said the words, “Great Pan is dead.”

A great cry of woe, by many on the land, went up, and eventually spread to Rome, where Tiberius Caesar called for an investigation as to the truth of the profound rumor.

Plutarch, himself, did not accept the acclimation and suggested that the shouts from Paxi were misunderstood by Thamus and the story became embroidered by the masses, encouraged by the fact that Tiberius had called for an official investigation, apparently giving some credence to the tale.

The authors write this, “One is still allowed to wonder why such a fuss was made at the time about [the] exclamations…and why…that most learned of mythologists, the Emperor Tiberius himself, thought the matter worth following up.” [Page 276]

The significance of the tale is many. Firstly Pan was considered a major God, and equatable, in some quarters, with Jesus who was crucified during the reign of Tiberius.

Secondly, the tale strikes at the heart of the prevailing belief system of the time, Paganism.

Thirdly, the tale continues to be remunerated upon to this day (by scholars and mythologists, mostly).

And finally, Great Pan is dead was retold in many configurations over the years, such as it was Tammuz-Adonis, the grain god who died, the yoke-bearer, Giki-Gaki is dead on the Hurgergorn, and the Fanggen, a kind of “Little People” (or giants!?) disappeared in the Tyrol.

How does this tale relate to Roswell?

The Chapter (and book, in toto) elaborates on how history and events are muddled by belief systems, what people wish to hear, and Chapter IV (History, Myth and Reality) examples instances where events are confabulated or twisted, often inadvertently, by a jumping to conclusions inspired by entrenched beliefs and/or stories heard, many times, over the years.

Hamlet’s Mill treats great myths and tales that affect or have affected humanity in significant ways, over the millennia.

Roswell is not significant, nor worthy of a Myth status, Gilles Fernandez notwithstanding, but it has developed the status of mythos, in the sociological sense.

(Mythos -- the complex of beliefs, values, attitudes, etc, characteristic of a specific group or society)

What was decried by Thamus may be seen as similar to what was decried at Roswell: The Army Air Force has captured a Flying Saucer.

The “heard refrain” at Roswell has been elaborated upon and added to, much like that which happened when “The Great Pan is dead” was taken as a profound truth by those hearing about the announcement and taking it to varying interpretations, far and wide, subjecting it to the vicissitudes of many locales and peoples.

The original story – the original announcement – has been taken apart by “researchers” and recast by those same “researchers” into many guises, all adumbrated to enhance whatever belief system held in the mind of a particular “researcher” – some preferring the extraterrestrial cast, some preferring a secret military cast, and others eschewing any cast at all, debunking the tale, altogether, as Euhemeros, the first debunker, did with myth.

Roswell is a story, with a core truth at its center. What that core truth may be has been lost to time, and the ineptitude of those who gathered the remnants of the original tale twwnty years after the “event” allegedly took place.

Can the story be cleansed of the accretions? Not easily, if at all.

The Roswell tale has been concretized into a myth (or, better, mythos) as CDA and Gilles Fernandez continue to decry.

It can’t be scrubbed clean, that’s a certainty, which Nick Redfern and this writer (among others) think is the case.

But others, David Rudiak, Stanton Friedman, Kevin Randle, et al., will continue to promote the mythology, because, for them, mythos is more important than truth.

Scholarship. Truth, and UFOs

2011-01-03T07:55:00.000-05:00

The January 3rd 2011 New Yorker has an article by Daniel Mendelsohn about the Vatican Library [Page 24 ff.].

There are a few quotes in the piece by current Library Prefect, Monsignor Cesare Pasini which applies to our approach here for 2011, regarding postings and content.

Monsignor Pasini, talking about culture and scholarly community says this:

“There is the possibility of entering mystery of culture…The mystery of scholarship, the mystery of the spirit of humanism. The patient study that allows someone to know something that hasn’t been know before – or perhaps something that someone has studied before. But one can go another step further, testing, verifying, correcting…the world of scholarship, entering the mystery of scholarship – the mystery of truth.” [Page 30]

This is where “ufology” (we hate the term!) goes wrong. There is no culture, no scholarship, and no mystery. Ufology and the UFO phenomenon have been held hostage by a few fanatic self-aggrandizers and intellectually deficient persons, many of whom can be found lighting up the pages of UFO Updates with smug, meaningless asides and self-promoting rants.

We shall make sure that posts here, from now on, will make every effort to be scholarly and truthful – even when we provide our usual lambastings of UFO geezers and those who kneel at their feet, sycophantically.

Those of you, with open minds and the desire to attack the UFO mystery – its old and new manifestations -- with hard scholarship and a sincere pursuit of truth will bear with us we hope.

UFO Peer Review? You gotta be kidding….

2010-11-22T09:09:00.002-05:00

The UFO phenomenon continues as a mystery, unabated.

Although some so-called researchers have spent their life-times studying the phenomenon, these “researchers” have come nowhere close to resolving any aspect of the UFO phenomenon.

Not an iota of understanding or tangible hypothesis has evolved over the sixty years plus of UFO study by a small group of UFO die-hards, who like to pretend research credibility by labeling their hobby “ufology.”

The resident hang-out for this moldering group of UFO devotees is UFO UpDates, called “The List” by habitués of the shop-worn web-site.

A visit to The List will show you that the left-over and left-out members of “ufology” try to one-up other members with attempts at faux-expertise; that is, members strive mightily to show that they have some expertise about something: aircraft, chemistry, photography, et cetera – all things that have little or nothing to do with the intrinsic UFO riddle.

Elder statesmen of the concocted “science of ufology” hope to create a legacy of some kind for the futile and fruitless endeavors over the years.

Jerome Clark, for instance, hangs his hat on the rubric “UFO Historian” – a sad commentary for one’s career or life.

Stanton Friedman, a well-known UFO spokesperson has been relegated to defending his obtuse views about UFOs and various elements of the foolish study called ufology.

Bruce Maccabee, a Naval insider, uses The List to showcase his knowledge – limited knowledge we note – of UFO photography that has shown up over the years.

Don Ledger is a pilot, who likes to correct Listers when they wax eloquently but incorrectly about airfoils and things that fly in the sky.

When a topic arrives at UFO UpDates, it’s never ignored, but always flailed by someone who uses the topic to back-bite others or to showcase a pretense at scholarship about something.

No topic is ever debated on its merits, or efficacy. The List is all about ego and self-promotion.

What’s even sadder is that the small contingent of UFO mavens who still use UpDates for a presence in the UFO community have no idea how ridiculous their ramblings are to outsiders who look at UFOs in the context of wider realities or surrealities.

Over the years, The List has accumulated more UFO rot than any other UFO site in existence.

The surfeit of blather is astounding, for its faux seriousness and ludicrous patina, as academics and true scientists see the thing.

We continue to refer to the group that maintains a presence at UFO UpDates, The List, as UFO Geezers: a group of has-beens or never-weres who represent nothing worthwhile within the legitimate study of UFOs.

This group of pathetic UFO hobbyists are in the final stages of life, thankfully, whose passings will leave open the door of UFO study for real peer review by persons who are less inclined to defend their smarmy, egotistical wasted lives and pursue a mystery that evokes true awe in the human mind.

UFOs and The Smiley Blanton Syndrome

2010-09-13T13:30:00.001-04:00

In a monograph (1966) for Abnormal Psychology, University of Michigan, this writer provided an epithet – The Smiley Blanton Syndrome – for the confluence of materials that form a new memory or recollection, composed of diverse artifacts that a human mind accumulates, around a topic.

That is, when one reads or sees an item, then reads or sees another item (in the same or near-same context), a new memory or recollection is formed, from combining and mixing the disparate data/information.

The new memory or recollection is considered to be valid (or true, real) by the person who has “created” the new memory/recollection, even though it is a unique creation made up of tidbits that are only tangentially connected if connected at all.

This corresponds to the theses advocated by Bartlett in his 1932 work, Remembering, which remains a primary, still relevant work by cognitive psychologists and neurologists. (See current thinking about Bartlett’s work by accessing the list of materials below.)

When a witness to a UFO event, such as Roswell or Betty/Barney Hill’s testimony, after-the-fact (of their alleged abduction), comes into contact with related materials, they tend to incorporate, unconsciously or semi-consciously, elements from those related materials, forming a new “reality.”

This isn’t a direct malfeasance by the persons concocting the new “story” or enhancing another story in the news. It is a quirk of the mind, as Bartlett noted, correctly, many years ago.

The Smiley Blanton Syndrome, which was reproduced in experiments at U of M, provides a template for UFO researchers who want to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were.

Roswellian testimony is a selective source for determining if a witness has, inadvertently, combined multiple data and input to form what appears to be accurate and supportive testimony from other Roswell witnesses.

This is Anthony Bragalia’s thesis: the testimony he has acquired resonates with other witness testimonies.

The collective memory flaws are also addressed by Bartlett and the writers below. (Jung, too, dealt with collective memory, and its caveats.)

It is time to move away from Roswell testimony and witnesses, in the public arena, anyway, and time to move on to other UFO events without the residual energy of ET believers and resident debunkers or skeptics that Roswell generates.

That is, until Mr. Bragalia, and a few other UFO researchers produce information from new leads, which may (or may not) confirm the ET crash in Roswell.

(The RRRGroup is not holding its united breath, however.)

--------------

N.B. Bartlett's book Remembering (1932) is frequently cited as a major forerunner of the information processing approach to memory and cognition....remembering in natural contexts. A re-examination of Bartlett's work demonstrates that it offers little basis for an information processing approach, but rather that it offers the foundation of a much broader, culturally contextualized and functional approach to the study of everyday remembering. Three particular themes are discussed: the integration of social judgements and affective reactions with cognition, the role of conventional symbols in the coding and communication of experience, and the importance of conversational discourse. Bartlett's best-known studies, involving the method of serial reproduction, are shown to be microcosmic demonstrations of the process that he was most concerned with—that of conventionalization of symbols rather than of the workings of an individual's memory. It is argued, again beginning with Bartlett, that everyday remembering may be most fruitfully studied in terms of its personal and social functions, and particularly through its realization in discourse. [Conversation and remembering: Bartlett revisited, Derek Edwards, David Middleton, Copyright © 1987 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd]
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The thinking person's emotional theorist: A comment on Bartlett's "Feeling, imaging, and thinking" [Tim Dalgleish, British Journal of Psychology, 2009]
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Bartlett, Culture and Cognition [Edited by Akiko Saito, University of Cambridge, UK, 2000]
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Disparate Effects of Repeated Testing: Reconciling Ballard's (1913) and Bartlett's (1932) Results [Mark A. Wheeler and Henry L. Roediger, III, Rice University, American Psychological Society, 1992]
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The Roswell Memory Mess

2010-09-11T02:34:00.002-04:00

Copyright 2010, InterAmerica, Inc.

Debate continues here and elsewhere about witness testimony regarding the Roswell incident [sic] and other UFO episodes.

Related accounts at the time and, more importantly, later – much later in some instances – have to be tempered by all the psychological caveats for memory.

The literature is extensive, but not accessed by ufologists (which isn’t surprising, as ufologists generally are inept at researching what they perceive as tangential to their preconceived notions) and, along with their inadequate training in appropriate academic disciplines, the matter of memory failure is shunted aside or disregarded altogether.

But it is clear to psychologists, neurologists, and those in the legal profession (lawyers, prosecutors, judges, et al.) that witness testimony has to be corroborated by something more than circumstantial elements. That is, memory alone cannot and should not be the sole arbitrator in matters of serious consequence.

The mental acuity of every person is subject to a diversity of things including physiological debilities, associative history (from childhood onward), memory disorder,¹ and something we call the Smiley Blanton Syndrome, predefined by F. C. Bartlett in his book Remembering [Cambridge University Press, 1932]:

"[Bartlett] has demonstrated that the content of what has been previously acquired in ordinary experience may be radically altered when remembered…It is his argument that the individual tends to incorporate new items a mental ‘schema’ so that remembering is ‘an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience…"²

Ernst Jones also discussed “memory replacement” in his Papers on Psycho-Analysis, (4th Edition, Wood, Baltimore 1938)³

The processes of memory may be afflicted by neural maladies including simple forgetfulness all the way to dementia. The “memory trace” or neurogram (engram) can be disoriented by brain modifications or diseases of the nervous system, as outlined in Psychology [4th Edition, Norman L. Munn, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston 1961, Page 451 ff.]

Repression also needs to be determined, as many Roswellians, according to Anthony Bragalia (See material in archives here), were affected psychologically (and physiologically) by their association with the Roswell story and may have resorted to the neurotic escape of suppressing what they experienced, in reality or in fantasy. (See The Psychology of Adjustment, 2nd Edition, Laurance Frederic Shaffer and Edward Joseph Shoben, Jr., Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1956, Page 236 ff.)

Then there is “memory error” or confabulation where, unable to recall exact events or details, persons manufacture something that seems appropriate.⁴

None of the things mentioned here have been taken into account, for the Roswell witnesses or witnesses to other UFO sightings and events.

Until the memory matter is clarified, which is possible for some still-living Roswell witnesses, their accounts and remembrances remain suspect.

-----------------
N.B. See also sciconrev.org/category/cognition/

¹ Symptoms of Psychopathology: A Handbook, Edited by Charles G. Costello, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. NY, 1970, Page 95 ff.

² A Dictionary of the Social Sciences, Edited by Julius Gould and William L. Kolb, The Free Press, NY, 1964, Page 422

³ Psychiatric Dictionary, 4th Edition, Edited by Leland E. Hinsie, M.D. and Robert J. Campbell, M.D., Oxford University Press, London, 1970, Page 189

⁴ Psychology Today, CRM Books, Del Mar, California, 1970, Page 360

Ufology and The Perversity or Criminality of Beards

2010-09-02T10:26:00.001-04:00

Copyright 2010, InterAmerica, Inc.

If you wish to avoid lies, subterfuge, and intellectual deviance in life and the UFO community, make it a point to avoid or eschew persons with beards and writings by persons with beards.

The current thinking in psychology is that persons with beards are using facial hair to cover or disguise mouths that spew lies (or have engaged in perverse activities of an oral nature).

We have always been wary, instinctively, of those ufologists who are heavily bearded, and find that those instincts compare favorably with the prevailing thinking of psychiatry nowadays.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say, in part, about beards and those who sport them:

In the course of history, men with facial hair have been ascribed various attributes such as … filthiness, crudeness, or an eccentric disposition.

In a general way, in Rome at this time, a long beard was considered a mark of slovenliness and squalor. The censors L. Veturius and P. Licinius compelled M. Livius, who had been banished, on his restoration to the city, to be shaved, and to lay aside his dirty appearance, and then, but not until then, to come into the Senate.

From the 1920s to the early 1960s, beards were virtually nonexistent in mainstream America. The few men who wore the beard or portions of the beard during this period were frequently either old, Central Europeans; members of a religious sect that required it; in academia; or part of the counterculture, such as the "beatniks".

Many Hindu priests are unshaven as a sign of purity.

Vaishnava men, typically of the ISKCON sect, are encouraged to be clean-shaven as a sign of cleanliness.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Modern Mormon men are strongly encouraged to be clean shaven. Formal prohibitions against facial hair are given to young men entering their two-year mission service. Those entering the church-sponsored universities are asked to adhere to the Church Educational System Honor Code, which states in part: "Men are expected to be clean-shaven; beards are not acceptable."

The U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, and U.S. Marine Corps justify banning beards on the basis of both hygiene and of the necessity for a good seal with gas masks. The U.S. Navy did allow beards for a time in the 1970s and 1980s, following a directive from Chief of Naval Operations Elmo Russell Zumwalt, Jr., but subsequently banned them again. The U.S. Coast Guard allowed beards until 1986, when they were banned by the Commandant, Admiral Paul Yost. The vast majority of police forces across the United States still ban beards.
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Our experience has been that those in the UFO camp who sport beards are crude, as indicated above, or sexually perverse.

Moreover, what they have to say about UFOs is tempered by us as we have found that such hirsuted persons will lie, through their teeth (as the old caution puts it), to achieve any nefarious end that benefits their personal psychopathology.

If you come across anything written or said by a person with a beard – the bigger the beard the worse will be the affect – either eschew the material or receive it with a large dose of skepticism.
----------------
N.B. Reginald Reynolds: Beards: Their Social Standing, Religious Involvements, Decorative Possibilities, and Value in Offence and Defence Through the Ages (Doubleday, 1949) (ISBN 0-15-610845-3)

James A. Brussel, M.D.: Casebook of A Crime Psychiatrist (Bernard Geis Associates, [Grove Press], 1968)

Charles G. Costello (Editor): Symptoms of Psychopathology: A Handbook (John Wiley and sons, Inc. NY, 1970)

Leland E. Hinsie, M.D. and Robert J. Campbell, M.D., Psychiatric Dictionary [Fourth Edition], (Oxford University Press, London, 1970)

Stanton Friedman: Derivative UFO Researcher?

2010-08-31T10:54:00.000-04:00

Stanton Friedman is notorious for his incessant use of the term “Cosmic Watergate” which he applies to his conjecture that the U.S. government and its Air Force have been covering up the real story of what happened at Roswell in 1947.

But the Watergate reference derives from noted UFO researcher Raymond Fowler as found in an article by Mr. Fowler in the May 1976 issue of Official UFO magazine.

Mr. Fowler applied his phrase for all UFO accounts, whereas Mr. Friedman applies his sobriquet to the Roswell incident only.

Click here for a look at the Fowler piece in Official UFO:

Mr. Freidman’s use of his term stems mostly from the period of 2000 forward and was used “officially” in his book:

Top Secret/Majic: Operation Majestic-12 and the United States Government’s UFO Cover-up (Marlowe and Co. 2005)

While Mr. Friedman was the first person to re-invigorate the Roswell episode by his 1978 interview with Jesse Marcel, his contribution was snubbed by Charles Berlitz and (discredited?) William Moore in their book, The Roswell Incident of 1980, the book that got the Roswell story back in the public arena.

But everything by Mr. Friedman about Roswell after his initial interview with Marcel is reactionary, not revolutionary or original, by a long shot.

While some UFO researchers, such as Jacques Vallee, offer imaginative conjecture and hypotheses, Mr. Friedman maintains a defensive, non-original stance on Roswell and UFOs generally.

He has done the same with the MJ-12 documents, which were dealt with or publicized by others (Moore, again and his cohort, Richard Doty, and Canadian Arthur Bray et al.).

Mr. Friedman has co-opted, as he did with the “UFO Watergate” mantra, the MJ-12 controversy, providing some interesting interpretations and insights while offering nothing that would clinch the truth or falsity of the documents.

Mr. Friedman is the face of “ufology” and has provided UFOs with a patina of respect and sanity.

But as a revolutionary UFO thinker, Mr. Friedman, like most of his fellow ufologists, falls short.

After all, Friedman’s many years at the forefront of the UFO mystery has produced nothing like a “smoking gun” although he has to be given props for a good try.

Mirage Men internet site

2010-08-25T11:21:00.001-04:00

Since we have a post here (below) by Anthony Bragalia that references, somewhat, Mark Pilkington's recent book, Mirage Men, and has caused some interesting back-and-forth, we think readers might like to access Mr. Pilkington's interesting blog about the book and other things Fortean in nature.

Click here for the Mirage Men site

UFO UpDates still stinks!

2010-08-20T11:23:00.002-04:00

A few years ago, I was a UFO UpDate habitué, but came to rue the time spent visiting the archaically formatted web-site.

The host of UFO UpDates is a codger: Errol Bruce-Knapp. His site is a codger-site, where UFO geezers congregate and ruminate endlessly and nastily about UFOs, (mostly) past and present.

Also a few years ago, Bruce-Knapp established UpDates as a fee-oriented site. Apparently that effort has proved fruitless as the site is once again free for visitors.

Visitor input is set in a circa 1984 computer format that Facebook and Twitter users would find, as I do, infuriating and off-putting in the extreme.

But the main problem with UpDates is that, by catering to geezers, the content is overwhelmingly curmudgeonly; visitors back-stab and try to one-up each other, and eschew anything approaching diplomatic dialogue.

This includes UFO “celebs” such as Stanton Friedman and Jerry Clark.

Friedman is always defending himself against barbs from critics of his UFO work.

Clark damns and corrects content, while never or rarely addressing UFO sightings per se, even those he has championed in years past when he was a UFO researcher of note.

Clark has become the old-lady celebrity in a rocker at a nursing home for has-beens.

The other UpDate regulars are either sycophants (kissing the asses of the UFO celebs) or UFO skanks – persons with no real UFO acumen who want to be in the presence of the UFO old-timers who still have cachet among deluded UFO aficionados.

Yet, UpDates does provide an occasional nugget of UFO gold, and does spur lively, albeit often retrograde, information that UFO newbies might find interesting.

If Bruce-Knapp would bring UpDates into the 21st century, his site might be worth a visit from new, fresh UFO mavens.

But as it is, UpDates is an island populated by the dead or dying of ufology, and it has the smell of decay all over it.

UFO hoax exposures: too little, too late?

2010-08-19T10:58:00.004-04:00

The rush to expose long-time, classic UFO events as hoaxes is in full swing.

Kevin Randle’s blog is thrashing about with the (in)famous 1958 Trindade Island photos that once were considered by almost all UFO researchers as authentic.

The Heflin photos have been declared fraudulent.

Roswell is on the cusp of hoax, seen as a misidentified balloon crash by many, and exacerbated by the UFO old-timers who’ve committed themselves to the Roswell extraterrestrial myth and can’t accept their long-time duncery.

The next UFO episode that will be labeled a hoax is Brentwaters, the 1980 Rendlesham UFO incident.

A new book about George Adamski -- George Adamski: A Herald for the Space Brothers – is trying to resurrect and revise the stature of the ultimate UFO hoaxer.

The Socorro/Zamora sighting of 1964 is rife with the patina of hoax. [See Anthony Bragalia’s pieces about the sighting at this blog and others.]

But UFOs, themselves, are a phenomenal fact. The evidence is overwhelming, and some of us have experienced the phenomenon, first-hand, so we know that it is a real phenomenon, even though we have no idea as to what they are or what they represent.

But the orgy to disclose the plethora of UFO sightings and episodes that are now known to be frauds undermines any attempts by legitimate societal agencies (media, science, academia) to look into the phenomenon.

What serious construct would take on a topic that is rife with fraud or hoaxes? The effort to separate the wheat from the chaff is daunting.

Jerome Clark, who usually gets the rubric as the noted UFO historian, has all but recused himself from the subject, unresting his laurels once in a while only at the UFO gathering place for ufology’s has-beens and quidnuncs: UFO UpDates.

Kevin Randle is trying mightily to re-connect with sanity by his recent blogified mea cupals for all those UFO and flying saucer accounts he once extolled as authentic but now prove to be fake.

The “art” of ufology is under attack, by members within it own ranks, joined by the ongoing and overwhelming feeling of serious phenomenal investigators who have always felt that UFOs are a matter for psychiatrists and those who fill their boring, unpro- ductive lives with fantasy and a need to garner attention to themselves.

Some UFO events need further investigation. But the surging efforts of some well-known ufologists to separate themselves from sightings they once touted as real and a proof for extraterrestrial visitation will only muddy the UFO waters again.

And what true UFO aficionado wants that?

UFO POSERS AND THE "MIRAGE MEN" MYTH by Anthony Bragalia

2010-08-16T07:35:00.000-04:00

Copyright 2010, InterAmerica, Inc. [Permission required to reproduce this article verbatim. Fair Use of course is acceptable, but internet links are preferred.]

A recent book entitled "Mirage Men" by Mark Pilkington has been received with great fanfare and positive review by the UFO community. According to Amazon's summary, "Mirage Men" are those men who are part of "the strange and symbiotic relationship between the U.S. military and intelligence agencies and the community that believes strongly that UFOs have visited earth."

But much of the premise of the evocatively titled "Mirage Men" - like a mirage itself - is illusory and insubstantial. The truth is that there is no truth to a "strange and symbiotic relationship" with agencies of the US Government and those into UFOs. There is nothing whatsoever to be gained from giving even passing consideration to the UFO tales told by those such as former AFOSI Special Agent Richard Doty. Such people are not government-sanctioned "disinformers" as some speculate. And their efforts are not being used to officially "cover up" advanced experimental military craft or operations. Nor do such men have any "special knowledge" to impart us about the true "core story" of UFOs and ET.

Calling even more attention to such attention-craving individuals only serves to feed their egos and perpetuate their pranks. Putting the spotlight on these types - even in the context of "UFO folklore" or as a social commentary - does the field of serious UFO research a serious disservice. The best course of action is not to highlight the actions of these Mirage Men at all - but to ignore them forevermore. We should not listen to the Mirage Men.

MIRAGE MEN

UFO enthusiasts know of the endless stories and documents associated with people such as Richard Doty. I will not detail here the many things that he has been involved with in the world of UFOs, as the list is so long: MJ-12 stories, the Paul Bennewitz Affair, fabrication of a UFO base intrusion document, the book "Exempt from Disclosure" with author Robert Collins, etc. Recent evidence ties Doty rather conclusively to the ridiculous "Project Serpo" hoax from a couple of years ago.

Mirage Men are much more than a mere "distraction" to the disciplined and intelligent pursuit of the UFO mystery. To have to "deal with a Doty" - and those of his ilk - is tiresome and counter-productive in every way. Such nonsense takes away valuable resources that are better spent on real investigation. It involves the time of researchers who must work to "disprove" fraud. And most importantly, it clouds the public's perception of what is true when it come to things UFO.

"Mirage Men" are not here to help- but their role is not a "sinister" or "covert" one either. Rather, their "role" is a self-serving one. They are not "mysterious" or "shadowy" - though they would like you to think so. They are really here to feed their egos. They receive enjoyment from deceit because they have nothing "real" to give. They insinuate their "power" over others in a way that is meaningful only to themselves.

People hoax many things - from literary works to clinical results. Precisely why they do this is difficult to ascertain. But personal "elevation" is always at the heart of such hoaxes. We have all faked something in our lives. We do so when we cannot offer truth. And there are many who have faked their knowledge of the truth about UFOs. This includes people from all walks of life. Station and position in the world have little to do with the desire or ability to fake. Some very intelligent and very prominent people have done so. Those who lie about the "core story" of ET have included military officials, intelligence agents and even men of science. They all can be Mirage Men.

Stories from people such as these - which surface with alarming regularity in the world of UFOlogy - suggests that the "Walter Mitty" syndrome is widespread in the field. Making up stories to get attention, or wanting to be someone important without expending a lot of effort, are hallmarks of these compulsive fantasists. They remind me of The Talented Mr. Ripley. The title character says what Doty, et al. must believe: "It’s surely better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody."

But unlike Walter Mitty and The Talented Mr. Ripley (which are clearly and delightfully fictional) Mirage Men is rather like putting the spotlight on those afflicted with deep-seated emotional, social or mental challenges. There is nothing "funny" or "entertaining" about it - and it only serves to document the sad, inner workings of the deluded and psychologically needy. It also "eggs them on" to create new "mirages" and it inspires future Mirage Men.

Dr. Colin Gill, a brilliant UK psychologist who has studied such types, states: "There is a suggestion that these kind of fantasies reflect some kind of deficit in childhood - they were not noticed, rewarded or perhaps loved - so later in life they go on to try and seek the attention or praise that was denied them." Such psychologists caution that the best "treatment" is not to engage them in their delusions and to give them no attention. Do not play into their mind-games, or they could infect yours too.

John Lear Jr. (UFO tall-tale-teller and Doty friend) is a perfect example of the psychological dynamic of which Gill speaks. The rebellious son of an overachieving father, the Junior's achievements were far surpassed by those of the Senior, the inventor of the Lear Jet. John Jr. did not need the money or notoriety to tell his tall ET tales, he just wanted to have some fun and spin some yarns in his advancing years. An adventurous type, Mr. Lear spun tales of adventure about pretend underground alien bases at Dulce. Lear even flirted briefly with supposed ex-Navy Intel's William Cooper's UFO fantasies. When Cooper began carrying guns and behaving very strangely, Lear backed away.

"REAL" DISINFORMING

"Real" disinformation does of course exist. Governments generate false information all the time. This is particularly true in two cases: during wartime for military purposes and for political purposes during peacetime. Such disinformation and propaganda can include covert media placements; dissemination of false stories and documents; and editing broadcasts or images. The technique of disinformation by military and intelligence goes back to at least 1918 with the end of WWI.

And I do believe that the art and science of disinformation does extend to UFOs. As readers know, I also believe that the Government used all manner of disinformation to suppress the truth of fallen ET at Roswell in 1947.

But such obviously phony stories emanating from people like Doty are not examples of an "official" disinformation campaign - or of "authorized" actions. They are amateur attempts by men who are trying to insert themselves into history. They are like Walter Mittys and talented Mr. Ripleys:

* They are not helping to "hide secret military aircraft experimentation" with tall tales

* They are not themselves knowledgeable about the "core story" of the truth about UFOs and ET

* They are not agents who are authorized by their superiors to spread "wild tales" to make UFOs and ET "appear ridiculous"

Rather, Mirage Men are men who wish that they knew the truth about UFOs and ET. Due to their positions in US military and intelligence, they may have even been near - or suspected that they were near - the truth. But instead, they are men who never quite made it, ones who would never be in a position to "really know." They were always near the action and around men of achievement, but were themselves mere wannabes. They wanted to "make a mark" for themselves by making great "revelations." They would use "smoke and mirrors" to delude themselves and others in the process.

The Mirage Men are "seeking" ET answers - just like all of us. The difference is that they will go to any length. They will even lie, play "games" and use others to find the truth. The MJ-12 "papers" were fabricated - not so much as to "deceive" - but to "smoke out" the "real" papers. Mirage Men have their own sense of strange humor. And they will even make up stories to get to the real story.

MY BRUSH WITH MIRAGE MEN

"RESEARCHER" WILLIAM MOORE

FORMER AFOSI AGENT RICHARD DOTY

I have little interest or time for the Mirage Men. I hesitated even writing this article because I do not wish to give them any more attention than they already "enjoy." They need no more attention from anyone, ever. But during the course of doing some research on Roswell, I had a brush with them.

Some months ago I had happened across a 1982 MUFON paper that researcher Bill Moore had presented. Moore had cited an interview with Special Agent Percy Wyly (who authored the FBI Telex on Roswell.) Moore claimed the interview of Wyly was conducted by Richard Doty, about a year prior. Due to the startling, confirmatory information that Wyly supposedly imparted to Doty about Roswell, I felt compelled to "break my rule" and I contacted Mirage Men.

I e-mailed Richard Doty directly about this. He chose not to answer my question about his supposed interview of Percy Wyly. Instead, I received a brief e-mail reply from him dated March 31, 2010, 12:09 AM that read:

"Mr. Bragalia: I am no longer involved in any aspect of UFO investigation, research, nor do I involve myself with the topic. It is impossible to provide any information without being criticized, defamed or trashed. I suggest you contact Bill Moore. Richard Doty."

So, I then contacted Bill Moore by e-mail and received an email back from him:

"Dear Mr. Bragalia: You must understand that all of my concerns were satisfied a long time ago and therefore I no longer have any need, or desire, to pursue these matters any further."

But then Moore later in the e-mail contradicts himself and indicates that he would indeed pursue the matter with me further - but only under these stipulated, bizarre conditions:

"If you can answer these three recognition questions correctly, you will have identified yourself as someone I can safely talk to. Otherwise I have nothing more to say. I understand that you have an Aunt who is a famous dancer. (1) What is her name? (2) Where does she dance? (3) And what is her favourite bird? Best, WLM"

I do not need to point out to readers that the reply from Doty is disingenuous. He still loves being a Mirage Man. Though we should not listen, we will hear more nonsense from Richard Doty in the future. Of that you can be sure.

The e-mail reply that I received back from William Moore seemed like it could have come from a kid obsessed with "cloak and dagger" games. He continues with his imagined "aviary" of "UFO insiders." Moore had put together what he termed an "aviary" of individuals in military and intelligence who were seeking truth about the "core story" of ET after Moore had written his book "The Roswell Incident" in 1980. He assigned these individuals code-names using the names of birds. The "birds" (many of whom I have talked with) often did not even know that they had ever been "assigned" such names or that they were even part of a formal "Aviary." On the face of it, we should have known that Bill Moore was not acting as an especially mature man. He was acting out James Bond-like scenarios. William Moore's e-mail to me confirms that he has still not grown up. At one time early on, a ground-breaking UFO researcher, Moore has perhaps regressed into fantasy and puerile behavior.

Doty and Moore fed each other tall tales. And they fed each other’s egos. A "minor member" of the Aviary was Dr. Henry Monteith. Erroneously reported as deceased in Greg Bishop's credulous book "Project Beta" on the "Paul Bennewitz Affair," Bishop did not dig deep enough and he allowed the "cast of characters" to influence his research.

Now retired after decades with Sandia Labs, Monteith is a believer in ET. However, when Doty came by to discuss the UFO matter with him in the 1980s, Monteith told me, he did not trust him. Not because Monteith felt that Doty had a "covert" agenda or any "official" status, but because he didn't think much of Doty. Doty was apparently trying to elicit any UFO "tidbits" from anyone he could because he had no "special knowledge" about ET himself. He then fed the information to others, inspired others, and mixed a cocktail of stories only the gullible would swallow.

Do you really think that the US Government military or intelligence agencies would employ such rank-amateur, laughable characters as Messrs. Moore, Doty or their ilk? Would they entrust the cover-up of state secrets (whether relating to ET or to experimental military technology) to people who write e-mails like the ones written to me?

Mirage Men can be found out. We know many of these military, intel, and science posers already: Sgt. Rick Doty, Capt. Robert Collins, Dr. Kit Green (whose MD is apparently from a non-existent school) Sgt. Clifford Stone, Dan Smith, John Lear Jr., Val Valerian (Capt. John Grace, Lear's friend) Bob Lazar, Sgt. Dan Sherman, Command Sgt. Major Robert O. Dean and many, many others.

They form their own cliques; they "support" and reinforce one another's claims and they feed their "mirages" into the future. Despite their station and position, these Mirage Men are not dissimilar to "contactees" and other fringe denizens of UFO conventions. None are worth our energy, and to get too near them will sap our's. We are instructed in Galations to "discern" the spirits and test for their veracity. So too must we apply this instruction to anyone in military, intel, or science who claims to know the "core story" of UFOs and ET.

AVOIDING THE MIRAGE MEN

Mirage Men are legion, but they are easy to detect. Many are mentioned in the book- and there were many before this current crop. In fact, they have always been with us under many guises, and they always will be.

But they are not "official government agent dis-informers." Nor are they "trickster figures" with some sort of "deeper meaning." Nor do they know more than we about ET. They are merely a group of minor men who themselves have more questions than answers. In their own confusion, they confuse us and waste our valuable time. And in some way, putting a spotlight on them is cruel, like putting a spotlight on the afflicted, for our own entertainment and amusement. They deserve our pity but not our attention, lest we get woven into their web ourselves.

The lesson learned from the Mirage Men is that they are best left alone.

Mass culture and the death of ufology

2010-07-14T12:08:00.001-04:00

Mass culture is composed of a set of patterns of thought and action which are common to the subcultures of a heterogeneous society.¹

The UFO community is the “mass culture” and ufology is the subculture, both adhered to, generally, by a pack of indigenously stupid human beings.

The patterns referred to above “have common meanings and values for all or most of the members of the [UFO] society and serve points of mutual identification and recognition for [its] members."²

UFO study unites a mass of diverse individuals, whose only common link is their inherent dementia, a dementia that is sociopathic rather than psychopathic, but abnormal nonetheless.

Ufology provides a commonality that is as warped as any ersatz culture (motorcycle gangs, for instance), but remains a culture “destined for those who, insensible to the values of a genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide.”³

This ersatz culture, knows as ufology, has a subliminal fascistic nature, not atypical for group gatherings, as Tocqueville noted in his masterwork, Democracy in America, wherein he describes how those outside certain mental and social aggregations are shunned or punished for having views contrary to the group-think that prevails.

In the United States’ ufological circles there resides a hard-core element, so disturbed, obnoxious, and intellectually vulgar that science, media, and normal folks rightfully eschew the UFO topic out-of-hand.

U. S. ufology’s prominent members have a high visibility, and form a mass that “does not merely describe [a] people: it also describes a certain attitude adopted towards people.”⁴

This close-knit inconsequential, even insignificant, “culture” has, unfortunately stifled UFO research and new-think, to the point that many now recognize that ufology is dead or surely dying.⁵

But offering life-support, of an innocuous kind certainly, are a few motherly types who, while not offering anything tangible or sub- stantive to UFO research, do offer aid and comfort to their “mass culture” colleagues.

Such comfort won’t save ufology, just as it wouldn’t save a dying dog, but the effort examples what is wrong with ufology: efforts to keep it alive are enervated and useless. Research is nil or phony.

Thinking is saddled by the UFO history. Many can’t imagine a new paradigm that replaces the UFO sobriquet with something that doesn’t scare away persons afraid to be identified with such a loopy phenomenon.

The ufological flag is needed by the “culture” to keep it intact. Renaming the phenomenon and taking a new or different research tack would obliterate the culture and its members would be persons without a “country," as it were.

E, Lederer in State of the Masses, [ New York, Norton, 1940, p.45] indicates that “The totalitarian state is the state of the masses.” This describes what has happened with the ufological movement and community.

Self-preservation is the sine qua non of the overt, highly publicized, highly vocal members of the UFO community. They care not for truth or the meaning of UFOs. They merely seek to be recognized, giving themselves a kind of false immortality and importance.

The dynamic is self-destructive, however. And the “culture” is coming to an end, its members scrambling to keep it extant. But their efforts will be and are futile.

The culture is, in the context of human society, a bizarre footnote – an intellectual fluke that ultimately went nowhere.

Some will still gasp for air, but normal persons would do well to acknowledge the death of ufology and its faux culture and move on, to more enterprising ventures.
--------------------

1. J. W. Bennett/M.M. Tumin, Social Life, New York, Knopf, 1948, p. 609

2. Ibid

3. C. Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch in Mass Culture, pp. 98-107

4. R. Wollheim, Socialism and Culture, London, Fabian Society, 1961, p. 7

5. See Carrion and Rutkowski (here and via Google)

Vitriol is good?

2010-06-28T08:33:00.000-04:00

Bloggers and their readers. including us, often gripe about the incendiary and sometimes overly partisan commentary that infuses political, religious, and even UFO discussions.

But Ron Chernow, in The Wall Street Journal, reports on the venomous and divisive discourse engaged in by America’s Founding Fathers.

Here’s Mr. Chernow’s piece.

So, vitriol has a lofty genealogy it seems…

Chris Rutkowski gets it exactly right!

2010-06-04T15:09:00.001-04:00

The demise of ufology

Are you a UFO tyro?

2010-04-22T14:00:00.002-04:00

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

2010-04-15T15:55:00.005-04:00

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.

Wild-eyed and crazy? No! However....

2010-03-19T13:47:00.001-04:00

Stan Friedman is the face of “ufology” and that face should reflect a kind of academic or scientific seriousness.

But as you see, Mr. Friedman’s face has more than bemused demeanor; it’s strikes some observers as the face of madness.

That’s one of the problems with ufology’s spokespeople: they all look a little crazy.

Now Mr. Friedman is nothing if not reserved when he speaks about UFOs. Even though he believes UFOs are extraterrestrial aircraft, piloted by alien beings from an alien civilization, his pronouncements are reasonable and sensible. After all, the interplanetary explanation for UFOs/flying saucers is the most commonsensical, if one doesn’t delve too deeply into the phenomenon, as Jacques Vallee and a few others have.

But it’s the marketing of UFO ideas that has besmirched the topic.

UFO believers are a little too animated and goofy-acting when the subject comes up. And UFO web-sites/blogs et cetera reek of psychosis – some superficially, others insanely, with black backgrounds, bizarre ads, and commentary that could come right out of an insane asylum.

It’s not that the UFO old-guard is senile; they just appear to be so.

If one actually listens to Mr. Friedman, one will see that he has mastered the UFO situation as well as anyone, and better than most.

But when he lets photos, like this one, go forth, he undermines his message and the UFO discussion accordingly:

Albert Einstein allowed a number of goofy photos of himself to circulate:

But his subject matter, astrophysics, was serious and taken seriously by colleagues, the media, and the public generally. Einstein wasn’t starting from a negative stereotype, like that which infuses UFOs.

So, to create an ambiance of seriousness and intelligence, Mr. Friedman and his UFO buddies have to present themselves and their ideas in a way that doesn’t come across as edging on the brink of insanity.

A Geezer Rant

2010-03-16T13:05:00.002-04:00

Old guy Dennis Balthaser has the temerity (and errant gall) to list Anthony Bragalia alongside known UFO do-badders in an aside in a March 2010 web-offering:
---------
"Fortunately for those of us seriously interested in the subject of Ufology, there is support for the existence of UFOs from many impressive sources, which I will share with you. As with all of my research however, there are some individuals that claim extraterrestrial UFOs do exist, but I have to question their claims based on their record, lack of scientific data, omission of references, etc. That list of individuals would include Bob Lazar of Area 51 fame, Phil Schneider about the Underground Dulce New Mexico base, Lt. Col. Phil Corso, with no references for his best selling book 'The Day After Roswell', Tony Bragalia about Roswell, and several others. I am hopeful that in time new information will surface, which will allow me to retract my current views on those mentioned above."
---------
To imply that Mr. Bragalia’s work lacks references is not to know what Mr. Bragalia provides when he posts UFO materials at our blogs (The UFO Iconoclasts, et cetera) and elsewhere.

Balthaser is an uneducated bloke, as one can tell from his appearances on various UFO shows (from the History Channel, et al.)

We once saw and heard him say this:

Those sightings collaborated [sic] these witness reports of sightings.

He meant corroborated, but that would require an education in grammar and language use, which he and most ufologists lack.

Balthaser is among that clot of ufologists whom we’ve listed (earlier here) as on the terminus express – they are on the slippery slope of life, near to death because of age.

Fortunately for ufology, the geezers, like Balthaser, will pass on -- sooner than later – and the UFO palate will be cleansed of the fetid nonsense these old guys have spewed and keep spewing in such a manifold way that ufology and the UFO topic itself have been virtually destroyed by their incandescent ignorance and lack of fundamental academic decency.

The Zarkon Principle(s)

2010-02-03T09:04:00.002-05:00

We recommend, highly, this hard-to-find book:

And we recommend a blog by a "disciple" of the original Zarkon:

The Truth Uncensored

N.B. The Blog (above) currently deals with Ray Stanford, who is a darling of the UFO crowd, because of his (flawed?) 1976 book about the 1964 Socorro UFO "landing."

The Socorro Mess

2009-12-06T10:33:00.002-05:00

When Socorro police officer Lonnie Zamora spotted that strange craft in the desert on April 24th, 1964, how did the Air Force find out and the FBI? Who called those agencies?

Ray Stanford, considered by UFO geezers as the archetypal researcher of the Socorro event, arrived at the alleged landing site four days after the incident.

Since word spread quickly -- by whom? – in the relatively small community of Socorro, the landing site was compromised almost immediately – destroying evidence, inadvertently perhaps, but destroyed nonetheless.

The Air Force, Stanford, and the incompetent J. Allen Hynek all scrutinized a forensically besmirched UFO landing.

Stanford, tramping around, gathering data and information, was collecting material that was inalterably debased by the time factor and the insertion of locals into the event site.

And with admission by Mr. Stanford that the supposed insignia seen and drawn by Officer Zamora was fudged at the advice of a young Air Force Captain [Richard Holder], a major clue to what Zamora saw has been diluted and ruined.

Moreover, Mr. Stanford went to Socorro as a firm-believer in the extraterrestrial source for UFOs, biasing, unconsciously or overtly, his research.

Hector Quintanilla, the Air Force Blue Book officer, who also showed up in Socorro, was a UFO debunker. His views and investigation can be discounted, also, for bias – in the opposite direction of Ray Stanford’s.

Hynek, who two years later screwed up the Ann Arbor/Dexter UFO sightings with his “swamp gas” pronouncement, was just as nonplussed during his Socorro foray.

Why the FBI was sent in goes to the heart of what the craft was that Zamora saw.

The insignia/symbol and particulars gathered point a finger at a Hughes Aircraft/CIA prototype that the FBI and Air Force knew about but were not privy to details (because of the highly classified nature of the Hughes/Raven Industries’ creations) and covered that outsider status with bravado and dismissive reportage to the press and their superiors.

But that aside, serious researchers have to take into account the predilection of Ray Stanford for the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs, the need-to-debunk UFOs stances of the Air Force, the intrusion of Phillips Klass (another late-to-the-landing participant and rabid UFO debunker), the lax investigational procedures of Allen Hynek, and the faulty observations of Lonnie Zamora himself.

Forty-five years later, with a hoax scenario in the offing to explain the Socorro event, and with the accumulation of the biased data enumerated above, UFO researchers should either seriously re-evaluate the Socorro incident – especially the insignia (if and when they can determine which drawing and Zamora account is the correct one) which is the primary clue as to whom or what created the Socorro craft – or move on, as some UFO mavens (Joseph Capp for one) desire.

Ray Stanford’s tome can be culled for non-biased material, and all the other material provided by the Air Force, newspapers at the time, and Zamora’s testimony should be re-examined, in a fresh light, without the over-worked clutter of UFO researchers like David Rudiak and/or the flaccid observations of such UFO die-hards as Kevin Randle.

Otherwise, the Socorro event should be laid to rest, along with Roswell, and the slew of other old UFO cases that are or seem to be immune to rational and clear-cut evaluations.

Contactees – A (short) Review by Adrian Wells

2009-11-27T12:51:00.002-05:00

$15.99 at bookstores everywhere. [See press kit in earlier posting here, below]

A book that I couldn’t set aside. Nick Redfern provides relevant information and pertinent minutiae about those now considered to be part of the UFO fringe. I found details that many of us (UFO aficionados) have never read, or heard, before, and all in a serious, sometimes breezy style that makes Mr. Redfern a delicious writer to read.

The flying saucer pantheon of contactees is presented by Mr. Redfern respectfully, even when it is obvious that he doesn’t believe a word of their obtuse tales.

One could have hoped for more photos of the contactee culprits, but since many died long ago, and copyright issues often prevent using photos found in the public arena, Mr. Redfern’s descriptions provide a visual idea of how they appeared, to followers and those suspicious of their elaborate saucer sagas.

Mr. Redfern does offer photographs of locations and artifacts that he’s taken himself, and that fleshes out many of the 22 Chapters (plus) in this entertaining and thoroughly research book.

More importantly, it seems to me, are the common threads that run through the stories related by the Contactee hierarchs: George Adamksi, Truman Bethurum, Orfeo Angelucci, George Van Tassel, Daniel Fry. And one common thread is use of the Planet Venus as the home-base for most of the entities that afflicted these contactees. Another thread is the FBI’s mingling in many of the affairs contrived or related by these men.

The (in)famous Villas Boas case gets several viewpoints – the well-known Fontes account, Mac Tonnies’ observation, and the (possible) CIA contrivance.

Those ufologists who’ve looked into the contactee stories are enumerated and given ample note by Mr. Redfern – Greg Bishop, Colin Bennett, Regan Lee, Adam Gorightly, Jim Moseley, Bob Short, Leon Davidson, and Timothy Green Beckley among them.

Crop circles get a nod, and much peripheral but significant material supplements the contactee gist that Mr. Redfern delineates.

Readers will find much to chew on in this 256 page book, and they will find tasty tidbits along with a UFO entrée that totally satisfies

Mr. Redfern also includes an Index, one thing that many UFO books ignore.

The book is a must for UFO devotees and would make a wonderful Christmas gift for those who like to read about strange behavior by persons with a patina of normalcy even as they create scenarios too bizarre to believe.

Fiction can’t compare to what Mr. Redfern presents in this marvelous book. But are all the Contactee stories really fiction? That’s something you can decide.

Nick Redfern (on his "Contactees" book)

2009-11-20T15:52:00.001-05:00

Contactees, Cryptoterrestrials, and Mac [Tonnies]

Nick Redfern's latest book: CONTACTEES

2009-11-19T13:25:00.001-05:00

Press Kit

UFOs and The Divine Milieu

2009-10-30T12:44:00.001-04:00

The great Teilhard de Chardin proposed in his treatise, The Divine Milieu, that human beings – actually the souls of human beings – make up the “mystical” body of Christ; that is, we humans comprise the actual corporeal structure of Christ, who is manifested by the living Universe.

Christ (God) is the Universe, and a corporeal body – a real physical presence, biologic in nature or essence.

And human beings make up the cellular structure of that Universe or, rather, the Mystical Body of Christ, which is the Universe -- the total reality.

If this is so, and we accept it as a firm (beyond theology) possibility, then we might conjecture that UFOs are viral or bacterial intrusions – infections as it were – within the Body of Christ.

This would account for the various configurations of UFOs; they are various kinds of viruses or bacteria, and appear in many forms (even mimicking solid structures).

We don’t mean to imply that UFOs, in our hypothesis, are metaphorical. We, like Teilhard, assume UFOs to be tangible artifacts – biologic entities, some benign and some not.

The intrusions of UFOs in the Earth’s biosphere are infections of a kind then. Will they ultimately bring about illnesses for Earth and the Body of Christ, or will they be counteracted by a kind of immunity as yet to be discovered or experienced?

At present, the pursuit of UFOs cannot be fruitful. They may likened to such viral infections as HIV or the AIDs virus, not amenable to cure or understanding.

UFOs cannot be inoculated against apparently, and the lack of explanation of UFOs over the years, confirms this.

But a profound medical-like approach to ridding the world of UFOs or, at least, understanding the phenomenon, might be undertaken by those who truly wish to resolve the riddle they have provided.

Mac Tonnies gone?

2009-10-23T10:18:00.002-04:00

Greg Bishop notifies readers of UFO Mystic that the brilliant and young Mac Tonnies has died (of natural causes).

This is a loss to science, science fiction, and ufology that is immeasurable.

We only knew Mac indirectly, but considered him one of the bright stars of ufology and all things avant garde.

This is a great loss.

Rest in peace, buddy…..

Nick Redfern's tribute

In defense of the Socorro hoax hypothesis by Zarkon II

2009-10-10T10:38:00.005-04:00

Anthony Bragalia’s recent postings about the Socorro/Zamora sighting of 1964 have raised hackles among the UFO mainstream.

Mr. Bragalia presented a scenario that strikes at the heart of ufology’s belief-system: that UFOs and flying saucers are extraterrestrial craft, piloted by alien life-forms or robotic creations.

When that belief system is questioned, no matter how obliquely, UFO’s “believers” move aggressively to squelch the heterodoxy.

This is what happened when Mr. Bragalia had the temerity to suggest that the 1964 Socorro sighting was a prank promulgated by students at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

Ufologist Ray Stanford became particularly exercised by Mr. Bragalia’s assertion(s). Why?

Mr. Stanford’s “fame” in the UFO community – he has none in the real world – rests on his intrepid “investigation” of the Socorro episode, almost immediately after it occurred.

His book about the sighting has become a UFO Bible of sorts for the Socorro event and its aftermath.

If someone were to rebuke Mr. Stanford’s “research,” he would be left without the legacy he has accumulated for the past forty-five years. So one can understand his pique and desperate attempts to protect his turf.

David Rudiak, another ET die-hard, also came out of the woodwork to take on Mr. Bragalia’s thesis. Mr. Rudiak is nothing if not thorough in his attention to minutiae of various UFO accounts – Roswell and Socorro among them.

Where Mr. Rudiak goes wrong, and he is off base in his ET bias when it comes to Socorro, is that he overlooks the mundane aspects of the Socorro details as related by Lonnie Zamora: the blue-flame of the propulsion that landed and lifted Zamora’s craft; the “beings” seen outside the egg-shaped craft, wearing white overalls; the flight pattern of the craft as it lifted and flew off; the indentations left behind, in the sand; the “roar” that accompanied the thing, et cetera.

The Zamora craft wasn’t exotic enough to be an alien craft.

Ufologist Frank Warren posted a kind of rebuttal to Mr. Bragalia’s exposé. One of the points made by Mr. Warren was that other egg-shaped UFOs were spotted before and after Zamora’s sighting.

What Mr. Warren didn’t note was that egg-shaped craft have been listed among UFO reports often, but none with an insignia, unique to Zamora’s UFO, nor any that had beings outside them, wearing human-like clothing. And none had produced the “roar” that Officer Zamora heard.

Mr. Warren is offended by Mr. Bragalia’s direct assertion that the Socorro event was hoax, ostensibly and admittedly a premature assertion since Mr. Bragalia hasn’t produced (yet) the person behind the prank or the methodology of their prank.

But Mr. Bragalia has only posed the possibility – one that has been raised before – that the Socorro episode was hoax-oriented, and Mr. Bragalia has mustered some interesting circumstantial evidence to support his hypothesis.

However, the Socorro sighting is so entrenched in the ufological psyche as an extraterrestrial landing (for repairs it seems) that any hypothesis outside the ET one will be attacked viciously and illogically, as is the case when any belief system is challenged.

I suggest Eric Hoffer’s insightful book “The True Believer” [Mentor Books, NY, 1951] to make my point.

And to see how hoaxes work, the Curtis D. MacDougall book “Hoaxes” [Dover Publications, NY, 1940/1958] for details about the mind-set of those perpetrating hoaxes and those who fall for them.

Ronald Millar’s “The Piltdown Men” [Ballantine Books, NY, 1972] also tells how grat men can be duped by hoaxes and hoaxers who are less skilled then they should be when it comes to discovering how a hoax operates.

In the world of ufology and UFOs the gullible are legion. And when it comes to the sacred cows of the UFO literature – the Arnold sighting, the Trent photos, Roswell, Socorro, and even Rendlesham, the UFO believers will do anything to make sure that anyone or anything that undercuts the “extraterrestrial” premise of those sightings should be stomped out and eliminated from any dialogue about UFOs.

The Bragalia hoax hypothesis has legs, of a kind, it is shaky perhaps, but not moribund and not unsound, if what he has uncovered has any merit whatsoever.

And when it comes to UFOs, nothing should be so sacrosanct that it can’t be thrown on the table for review and civil discussion. Otherwise, we shall find ourselves with a fascistic approach to truth-seeking; that is, only the orthodox shall prevail and anything that goes against that orthodoxy should be quelled at all costs – even if it means a diminishment of the truth.

Why Kevin Randle is a lousy researcher/writer

2009-09-22T00:33:00.001-04:00

Here is some of what Kevin Randle has placed on his blog, 9/21/09:

“Not too long ago, I posted an article about the "Old Geezers" in Ufology. A critic had suggested it was time for the old guys to get out of the way because we had failed to solve the riddle of the UFO. Once before he had suggested it was time for us all to die because we were inhibiting the younger, smarter, more rational researchers.”

What Randle writes is not quite right. The RRRGroup did have a piece a few months back that indicated that the old-guard would, indeed, die, because they are old. No one wrote or wished that any one of those men die.

Everyone is going to die, eventually, and our writer merely set down that inevitable maxim.

But Mr. Randle, as he probably does with his Roswell and UFO research, conflates our writing and intent for some personal reason that adjusts his agenda, whatever it may be.

Then he writes that he missed the boat with a key Roswell witness, a man named Easley, whom he talked with by phone, and who indicated that Randle’s extraterrestrial scenario about Roswell was on the right path.

Unfortunately, Mr. Randle didn’t have a tape recorder handy, and only took notes, missing a chance to get that witness’s ET suggestion down in a format that others could hear:

“There are some who said that the very instant that Easley made that admission, they would have gone out, bought a tape recorder and called him back. While I thought about it, I believed, at the time, I would have an opportunity, several opportunities to discuss all this with him again. I did not anticipate his illness. If I had it to do over again, I would have called him the first chance I got and hade him repeat the information.”

This is one of those botches that the RRRGroup chastised in its Old Geezers posting that spurred Mr. Randle’s current and earlier broadside.

Then Mr. Randle gives away his modus for his UFO obsession – to make money. Here’s what he writes at the end of his latest blog posting:

“As a final thought... if those who wish that the old geezers would get out of the way, I say this. Buy my files, records, tapes, microfilms and photographs for one million dollars, meaning that after taxes are paid, I have one million dollars, and I’m gone. I won’t write anymore UFO books, I won’t appear at anymore [sic] conferences or symposiums as a speaker, and I will take down this blog. Then you youngsters can have the open field. Just let me know when you have the money.”

If this isn’t an admission of a mercenary modus, we don’t know what is. That Mr. Randle is now seeking a million bucks for his efforts tells us why he’s been at the UFO game all along, and we’re embarrassed for him and by him.

We understand his attempt to make us look like nasty buggers, who wish death upon him and others in the UFO community, but that he would admit that his work is up for sale at a price goes to the heart of an effort that deserves research, not for money but for truth.

Shame on you Mr. Randle…shame, shame, shame….

Stalked by a UFO Skeptic by Anthony Bragalia

2009-09-18T12:42:00.003-04:00

The "will to disbelieve" in the extraterrestrial can be disturbingly strong. I know this because I am being stalked by a UFO skeptic. The secrets learned from this "extreme skeptic" provide telling insight into just how far some will go when they feel compelled to defend their doubt. A UFO skeptic who fashions himself as the new incarnation of the late arch-skeptic Phillip Klass has revealed why such doubters are so rabid. He provides keen insight into the mind of the "morbidly skeptical." He helps us to define the essential difference between a "critical thinker" and a "cynical skeptic."

In the most recent edition of Mr. Tim Printy's skeptical e-newsletter entitled SUNlite, he attempts to "deflate" or "demolish" recent UFO and Roswell-related research by this author. He has devoted pages upon pages to skeptical rants about my work. This commentary appears in current and past issues of his newsletter; within his blog; on various internet forums; and in endless, scathing emails to this author and to others within the UFO research community. But the backstory on Mr. Printy reveals a skeptic who does not wish to arrive at truth. Instead he fears it. And like his predecessor Phil Klass- he will obfuscate the truth by any means necessary. Like a child unable to accept something that he does not like, Printy protests too much. In his vehemence, he reveals his real concern: the evidence that I have brought forth on Roswell may be true. Printy has been compelled to resort to misrepresentation, omission and assumption. Exasperated, he has finally degenerated to name-calling and outright lying.

In Printy's latest issue of SUNlite, he offers his skeptical "solutions" to three of my recent stories about UFOs and Roswell. These stories have appeared on the UFO Iconoclast blog and have been reproduced on websites worldwide:

FAMOUS LIFE PHOTOGRAPHERS ROSWELL CRASH REVELATION

Famed LIFE photographer Allan Grant related to this author that he had been flown by military from LA to New Mexico on July 7, 1947 to photograph what he was told by military was a "big meteor crash." When he got there, he was issued a gun by his Air Force pilot escort. They searched and found nothing. When he returned, he realized that he that had either "landed in the wrong place at the wrong time" - or that the military had used him as a potential cover and diversion for the crash that he had learned was a disc near Roswell.

Full Story Here

THE SKEPTIC'S "SOLUTION"

Printy "solves" the case by telling his readers that Allan Grant and his widow were old people who were confusing dates. Printy makes the "discovery" that the Grants are really referring to a documented trip to Shiprock, NM during a November, 1947 "meteor hunt" that Grant had made, meeting with Dr. Lincoln LaPaz and Boyd Wettlauffer. The Grants somehow confused this as being associated with Roswell.

THE TRUTH

Printy makes much about this "solution" by reproducing a page from an archived Albuquerque newspaper that mentions Grant and this November 1947 meteor hunt. He pretends that it is an original "finding." He implies that this is "the answer to the mystery." The Grants were simply confused about dates.

What Printy did not know is that this author had already discussed this very Shiprock, NM visit with the Grants in email correspondence over two and a half years ago! Once he was provided this correspondence, Mr. Printy was stunned silent. He had tried to play a game of "Gotcha!" and it had backfired. This is because in a March 17, 2007 email to this author, the Grants had already explained what Printy had thought had never been discussed. The Grants clearly state in that email: "Just four months after Roswell, Allan was sent to Shiprock, N.M." Printy now admits his error and has assured me he will add this clarifying information in his next newsletter.

In follow-up correspondence I asked the Grants if there was any way possible that they were confusing the Shiprock, NM meteor hunt in November with Allan's flight to the Roswell area in July of 1947. I asked this because I had known that Allan was involved in many photography assignments to New Mexico over the years. It was important to know if he could make the distinction between the two trips and events. Grant remained clear and steadfast- that these were in fact separate events that had occured at two distinctly different times and places- one in July and one in November of 1947. During the July flight, Grant indicated that he went alone with a pilot- and that he was not met by others. He also was issued a gun. In the Shiprock visit in November, Grant explained that he was not alone- he was met by Dr. Lincoln LaPaz and Boyd Wettlauffer. And he was not issued a gun, as he was in July. Grant was very aware of the Green Fireball phenomena and of the Meteor Hunt and Balloon projects of the time period. He had confused nothing.

Printy fails to tell the Grant's complete account. Mrs. Grant confirmed that throughout the decades of their marriage they had identified Allan's flight in July of 1947 as the "Roswell flight." Allan remembered the fuss about the press release of the RAAF finding a crashed "disc" and then later stating that it was a balloon. This was precisely when Grant remembers being flown by military out to a site he was told was near Roswell.

Nor does Printy tell his readers the Grant's true feelings about what had happened in July of 1947. In emails in 2007 they write: "The Feds knew all along that it was something more than a meteor, and what better way to deal with it than to invite the prestigious LIFE magazine to come in and take a look. You take them to the spot and show the world there's nothing there. Everybody is happy and relieved, and you can go about your business. Additionally, you can keep all other media out by saying that LIFE had already been there and found nothing." Printy omits what the Grants belief that meteor hunts -like balloons- could be used as a very effective diversionary tactic. As a photographer for America's leading pictorial, Allan Grant lived by the clock for a living. He was very detail-oriented and even maintained a website late in life chronicling his long career. He knew what he did, when and where he did it- and for whom. Mrs. Grant allows that the photograph of her husband on their website that pictures him in a volcanic-looking terrain may not be of the Roswell visit. Printy -even after being forwarded Mr.and Mrs. Grant's 2007 emails to me- stubbornly maintains that they are gravely mistaken.

Mr. Printy never makes his readers aware that Allan Grant wrote about his July 7, 1947 trip to the Roswell area over two decades ago! In 1997 Mr. Grant's story was published in the Los Angeles Times. Grant is very clear about the specific date and the circumstances surrounding the event. Twenty years later he and his wife repeated the same details to me. Mr. Printy purposely omits such details so that his analysis "fits" - even if he has to force it.

Printy believes that the Grants were mistaken about Roswell in 2007. He believes that they were mistaken two decades prior and throughout their decades of marriage. Printy has a penchant for belittling the elderly. In numerous emails to me he has implied that the elderly are weak-minded and that they are "easily led." This is especially interesting in that Printy has privately admitted to me that he has never himself conducted even a single interview of a witness - elderly or otherwise - during his entire "career" as a skeptic!

ROSWELL FIREMAN CONFESSES- IT WAS A FLYING SAUCER!

In 2008 this author spoke with the last-living 1947 Roswell Fire Department fireman. This was done because numerous Roswell crash accounts relate the involvement of the Roswell firemen, including of fireman Dan Dwyer. Witness Frankie Rowe is the daughter of Dan Dwyer. She and her sisters confirm Dan's story of going to the crash site and viewing a crashed disc and non-human corpses. Because Dwyer is now deceased, I wanted to see what the remaining Roswell fireman would say about the crash event. The fireman (now 90) confirmed to me -and in a later conversation- with author Kevin Randle, several stunning things about the Roswell crash in 1947. He said that: 1) An intimidating Colonel from the Roswell Army Air Field visited the Roswell Fire Department after the crash. They were told that an unknown aerial object had crashed outside of town (the Fireman said that it was "unidentified- a flying saucer.") They were told not to respond to any calls about it or to go out there- that it was to be handled by military 2) The Roswell City Manager also came to the Department to warn them it was serious military business and not to get involved. 3) Dan Dwyer did go out to the crash on his own and saw strange activity near the site, including armed guards.

Full Story Here

THE SKEPTIC'S "SOLUTION"

Printy "solves" this case by simply comparing the Fireman's testimony to acknowledged fraudulent Roswell "witnesses" such as Frank Kaufmann and Gerald Anderson. Printy just decides to "lump" together any witness testimony that is troubling to his skeptical analysis with unrelated witness testimony that has been proven not credible. In other words, if one witness lied or embellished about Roswell- then every single witness before or since has done the same.

THE TRUTH

For Printy, it does not matter if you were a world-class photographer or if you are were a life-saving fireman. If you are old and you are telling a Roswell story- then you are either misguided or a liar. As mentioned before, Printy has admitted to me that in his many years of "skeptical analysis" he has never himself interviewed a single witness. In an email to this author, Printy said that only if you were with an organization such as the CIA would you have the ability to conduct such interviews to determine if a witness was telling the truth! Mr. Printy analyzes those of us who interview witnesses, but he admits that he has himself never conducted such an interview!

Unlike such frauds as Kaufmann and Anderson as pointed out by Printy, the Firemen is unquestionably who he says he was. And the Fireman was sought out - he did not come forward- to tell his story. These are essential differences.

And what Printy also does not tell his readers is that the Fireman was referred to me by the son of Rue Chrisman, the Fire Chief at the time of the Roswell crash. Chrisman's own son not only confirmed that the crash was that of a UFO (his words) but that the last-living Fireman knew much more. Author Kevin Randle also spoke with the Fireman. I wanted another person to confirm what the Fireman had told me. The story was confirmed by Randle, but this time the Fireman said that he would prefer not to be identified or to be bothered about the matter again. Living out the remainder of his life at age 90, this is understandable. But strangely, Printy seems to find this to be an indication of fraud.

Printy makes much of the fact that Karl Pflock had briefly contacted this Fireman many years ago. What Printy does not tell his readers is that I was the one who made Printy aware of that very fact! I made Printy aware of this because I wanted him to know that the Fireman was not fictitious (as Printy also implied.) In fact, Printy's own friend had interviewed him! And what Printy fails to explain is that the Fireman remembered this interview. It was Karl Pflock who kept hammering the Fireman with different variations of the same question. Pflock was obsessed that fireman Dan Dwyer would not have gone out to the crash site because the Roswell Fire Department did not make runs outside of city limits. The Fireman (a man of few words by nature) did not offer anything that Pflock did not ask.

Two decades later, I located this same Fireman and mentioned to him that I was referred to him by Rue Chrisman's son. I knew that Chrisman and the Fireman's family went to the same church. A brief but friendly dialog ensued. I asked him very specific questions as well as more open-ended ones. The Fireman told his story sparsely, somewhat reluctantly and without elaboration. He knew that I had already talked with the son of his former Fire Chief- and what the son himself knew about the reality of Roswell. There was not a hint of misdirection or embellishment. The Fireman was of clear mind and told the story as he remembered it. And he remembered it well.

ROSWELL MEMORY METAL RESEARCH

In a multi-part series of articles the case was made that in the months immediately following the Roswell crash, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base contracted Battelle Memorial Institute to begin studies on Roswell-like "memory metal."

These articles can be read through the links below:

Roswell Debris Confirmed As Extraterrestrial
Roswell Metal Scientist: The Curious Dr. Cross
The Final Secrets of Roswell's Memory Metal Revealed
Scientist Admits to Study of Roswell Crash Debris

THE SKEPTIC'S "SOLUTION"

Printy believes that all of the timing, events, documents and individuals identified in the Battelle-Roswell article series are "coincidental." He maintains that I have "connected dots" where they should not be connected and that I "read into things." He believes that I confuse standard aeronautical metals research with non-existent ET metals research.

THE TRUTH

Printy lacks even a sophomore-level understanding on researching the history of science. He admits that his critique of my work is limited to simple "Googling" -something that he had accused me of doing. Unlike him, I have engaged the expert opinion of metallurgists, utilized FOIA and subscription-based technical databases and I have contacted archivists of DoD and their contractors.

His skeptical "analysis" dances around several fundamental facts:

1) Backtracking the history of scientific literature on shape-memory alloys leads to work done by Battelle in the late 1940s under contract to Wright-Patterson AFB (where the Roswell debris was reportedly flown.) Memory metal reports conducted by military years later reference a once-restricted Battelle 1949 report on novel Titanium alloys (including on Nickel-Titanium, the basis for today's Nitinol memory metal)
2) A former General at Wright-Patterson implicates "specially-processed Titanium alloy" as part of what comprises the Roswell debris.
3) Another General (after the Roswell crash) states in a Secret Memo that a lightweight intermetallic material of unusual fabrication is a "material of construction" of UFOs.
4) A Battelle scientist named Elroy Center (whose story was publicly told in 1992) claimed in 1960 to have analyzed ET metal when at the Institute.
5) The Battelle 1949 report (obtained under FOIA this year) suspected to be related to Roswell was found to have been co-authored by Elroy Center. Center is the very same scientist who confessed decades earlier to having studied crash disc material. Another of the report's co-authors reported to Battelle Titanium scientist Howard Cross. Cross was found to have conducted secret UFO studies on behalf of the US government.
6) The official "co-inventor" of Nitinol (Nickel-Titanium) memory metal conducted "mind over matter" tests on the material to see if a psychic could "morph" it.
7) The official history of Nitinol memory metal is riddled with holes and contradictions.
8) There exists clear evidence that Battelle (and NASA) continue to "seed" shape-memory technology.

Printy has specific "gripes" about certain aspects of this research. They include:

Battelle Scientist Confessor Elroy Center:

Printy says that the story of Elroy Center is second-hand. He states that the person who related Center's story was the boyfriend of Center's daughter. He also says that Elroy's involvement in the Battelle metals report does not prove anything. What Printy does not tell readers is that the Center family friend was a middle-aged adult professional when he told Dr. Irena Scott about Center's confession. Printy also does not make clear that Dr. Scott was herself a PhD scientist employed at Battelle! Though he acknowledges that Center's family confirmed Elroy's intense interest in UFOs and ET, he does not explain what I had told him- that this is an ongoing investigation and that others may be coming forward to affirm Elroy's confession.

Printy fails to comprehend that a Battelle scientist related a story of ET metal analysis. And that it was this same scientist who authored the very report that was long suspected to relate to Roswell metal analysis. It was not known that Center was the co-author of this report until August, 2009 when his report was released under FOIA. Center made his confession in 1960. Center's report is later referenced in four military-sponsored studies on memory metal. These are "coincidences" that Printy simply cannot handle.

Earlier Titanium Research "Disproves" the Roswell Metal Thesis:

Printy offers up Titanium technical reports completed before the Roswell crash. He wants his readers to believe that I think that it was only after the crash that Titanium became of interest to military. What I actually maintain is that a novel Titanium alloy comprised some of the debris found at Roswell.

Wright Patterson Air Force Base Commander General Arthur Exon implicated "specially processed" Titanium as part of the debris composition. Battelle's chief Titanium expert (Dr. Howard Cross) was proven to be a secret UFO researcher for the US government. Elroy Center, who confessed to ET metal analysis, is shown to have been expert in Titanium purity. General George Schulgen wrote that the "materials of construction" of UFOs were of lightweight intermetallics of "unusual fabrication." Memory metal (such as Nitinol) is a lighweight, specially-processed Titanium intermetallic.

I am keenly aware that Titanium was being explored for its application in jets and aeronautics, with strictly terrestrial inspiration. But I am also aware that such Titanium alloys (like Nitinol) can comprise material that closely resembles the kind reported at Roswell. That a unique Titanium alloy should be part of an ET craft should not be that surprising. Titanium is one of the most abundant elements in the universe.

Skeptics have said that Titanium and Nickel were used as early as 1939. But I acknowledge in the very first article in this series that "the earliest known combination of Titanium and Nickel reported in the scientific literature was in 1939 by two Europeans." But this crude sample was a by-product of entirely unrelated research. Any unique alloy work was not performed or noted. No tensile tests for "maximum bend radius" or "elongation" were conducted (as they were for the Battelle report.) And the 1939 scientists would not have been able to melt and purify the Titanium to sufficient levels at that time (as they did at Battelle when the report was written) and they would not have known about the energy requirement needed to create the effect.

In the months after the crash the Battelle report shows- they began to conduct first-ever, sudden and intense development of these new Titanium alloys. This included chemical tests and phase diagramming. Swiftly -and all at once- they started a veritable obsession with "intermetallics." They were examining ways to melt these novel alloys effectively; increase their purity and "mixability" levels; and analyze their crystalline structures.

The "Nickel Ratio" of the Battelle Report Does Not Equate to the "Nickel Ratio" for Nitinol:

Printy says that because the Nickel content of Titanium-Nickel alloy found diagrammed in the Battelle report is not at 50% (as it is with Nitinol) that this proves my thesis is incorrect. What Printy does not inform his readers is that in my very first article on this subject I specifically note: "Although Nitinol is not identical to the Roswell debris material, it represents our best attempts at recreation of the found memory metal." I explain that shape-memory alloys are Roswell-inspired. But they are not themselves the morphing metal found at Roswell.

I even had emailed Printy new NASA research showing that by varying the Nickel content of shape memory alloys (and by including small amounts of other elements) certain desired characteristics can be brought out in shape memory material. The Roswell material was likely a specially processed material. Perhaps it was fabricated in the gravity-free vacuum of space where ultra-high levels of purity and "mixability" can be achieved. It was a highly-novel intermetallic that incorporated Titanium as one of its elements.

Psychic Uri Geller Was The Psychic Tested by Nitinol Scientists:

The "official" co-inventor of Nitinol (Dr. Fred Wang) was proven to have conducted bizarre "mind over matter" Nitinol experiments in the early 1970s. His associate at the US Naval Lab (Eldon Byrd) confirms there was a report generated on psychic influence to morph Nitinol. When I included the report's title, author and year of publication, I did not name the specific psychic who was tested. Printy feels that because the psychic (Uri Geller) was not named, that I in some way do not really believe the report. But Printy misses the point: I do not need to "believe" or "disbelieve" Uri Geller. The point is that -at that time- government scientists did conduct these strange tests and they wanted to see if Geller could influence a morph in Nitinol metal using mental energy. During this same time frame Geller was also documented to have been psychically tested at the government think-tank Stanford Research Institute. I knew that the inclusion of Geller's name in my article would a distraction that would be "hopped on" by skeptics as a reason to disbelieve the Nitinol tests, and I was right.

The Battelle Report Doesn't Mention ET:

Printy points out that the FOIA obtained document does not mention ET material. There is nothing to indicate that anything other than terrestrial materials were being studied.

But such comments show a complete lack understanding of the two fundamental concepts of military intelligence- and of how such science would be reported. These are the concepts of "Compartmentalization" and "Need to Know." "Compartmentalization" of sensitive information assures that fewer people know the details or scope of a particular mission or task. "Need to Know" is a security criterion that requires an individual to establish the need for such information in order to complete an assigned activity. You only reveal parts of the story- and never give the backstory. Or tell them a plausibly deniable story. For instance, tell them that the ET material was "Russian or German." Blend the information so that it does not appear to be anything other than part of existing areas of research. And it is clear that the release 1949 Battelle report is part of a larger study. Prior work on the material may have been finely "segmented" out to various groups so that no one group knew the full story. This is precisely how captured enemy MIG aircraft, for instance, were reverse-engineered. These science reports never mention the "backstory" of the craft's "who, what, when or why."

CRITICAL THINKER vs CYNICAL SKEPTIC

Never have your head in the sand- you'll only get your ass kicked. Printy's morbidly skeptical approach has come back to bite him. In a prior SUNlite newsletter, Printy implies that I conduct this research for "fame and fortune." What Printy does not know is that I have never taken (nor sought) any compensation for any of my research. He speaks without knowing. He says that I am motivated by a want for notoriety. He does not tell his readers that for many years I have quietly provided UFO researchers with leads and stories without receiving or seeking attribution or credit.

Critical thinkers are welcome. They encourage us to view all aspects of a problem to arrive at solutions and truth. Cynical skeptics are another matter. As Maya Angelou wisely observes, "There is nothing so pitiful as a cynic- because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing."

New Zecharia Sitchin book

2009-08-26T16:33:00.001-04:00

Zecharia Sitchin’s latest book, “The Earth Chronicles Handbook” (Inner Traditions / Bear & Company 2009) is available

As you know, Sitchin has published numerous books that collectively make up the Earth Chronicles series - a historical and archaeological adventure into the origins of mankind and planet Earth. This latest release serves as an encyclopedic companion to provide a navigational tool for the entire series. Entries are coded to indicate, at a glance, their cultural origin and contain summations and commentaries that reflect Sitchin’s unique insights into the past.

I thought this new release would be of interest to some of our readers.

If you’d like more information, you can contact: http://www.sitchin.com/

UFO Geezers

2009-08-14T13:23:00.000-04:00

The picture, above, comes from Kevin Randle’s blog.

It shows a primary ufological group that attended a recent MUFON symposium.

This examples the state of “ufology” today: a gaggle of tired old, white men, who haven’t a clue as to what UFOs are, even though they’ve spent the better part of their lives seeking an answer to the UFO riddle.

The UFO enigma and ufology itself should be passed to a new generation.

The lack of significant answers to the UFO riddle suggests that UFO newbies get into the fray, and take a look at new sightings (and maybe a few older sightings) to see what they can come up with.

Fresh hypotheses and a fresh outlook can’t hurt, and is sorely needed, if the UFO mystery/phenomenon is to come to a denouement.

It’s time to pass the torch.

The Roswell Flaw

2009-08-06T10:17:00.003-04:00

If a flying saucer actually crashed near Roswell in 1947, leaving alien bodies among the debris, wouldn’t attendant visitors (‘colleagues” as it were) of the aliens who piloted the crashed saucer try to recover their compatriots or some of the debris that allegedly lay in the New Mexico desert for days before Mac Brazel (and the Army) took possession of it?

We know, from Kenneth Arnold’s “authentic” sighting, that UFOs or flying saucers often traveled in formation/groups, and since his sighting took place in the same time-frame as the Roswell incident, the extraterrestrial visitors were, possibly, aware (or should have been) of the Roswell crash.

Are the supposed advanced alien travelers so unemotional or callous (other possibilities we admit) that they’d leave their disabled and dying fellow-travelers to the desert or human society, without trying to retrieve them?

One can’t presume to know the operational parameters of an extraterrestrial race, but since many of the so-called Roswell witnesses, especially those who said they saw bodies among the debris and crashed saucer, ascribed sentience of a human kind to the beings captured or taken by the military, one can suggest that the Roswell beings were not so alien as to eliminate survival tactics from their other-world arsenal.

If the Roswell “saucer” was not that far removed, in design and operational format, from human aircraft, and the described beings not so alien in physiognomy from human beings, one can assume that the visitors would very likely act in a similar way to human beings when a disaster occurred; that is, members of the “race’ visiting the Earth, didn’t come alone, in one flying saucer, but were accompanied by others, in a bevy of saucers, as Arnold saw, and others reported at the same time as the Roswell crash, and would have acted much as we humans would have acted: the crashed craft and its occupants would have been sought out and helped (or retrieved), or an attempt to do so would have taken place.

(No other UFOs were seen in or near Roswell during the July period that encompasses the infamous episode.)

And if that alien race did come to Earth, from outer space, another dimension, or even as time-travelers, they wouldn’t, if even moderately sensible, ignore members of their race who were in distress.

If the loss of a concomitant craft and its beings were dispensable, for whatever reasons one can conjure, then an alien retrieval of the Roswell saucer may be acceptable to rationality, but that opens a whole new aspect to the extraterrestrial modus.

Or the Roswell incident is bogus, as an extraterrestrial visitation and accident, which is what many in the UFO community are coming to believe.

Journal of Frontier Science

2009-08-04T16:52:00.000-04:00

Steven Bass's web-site, The Journal of Frontier Science, is highly recommended, for its objective scrutiny of things relevant to UFOs and science.

Click here to visit Mr. Bass's exemplary effort:

Journal of Frontier Science

The Ugly Truth about Ufology

2009-07-28T11:02:00.002-04:00

Eric Ouellet of the Parasociology site has provided an insightful look at ufology, as parsed by the late John Keel.

The piece can be read by clicking here -- It's a WORD document:

The Ugly Truth about Ufology

Where’s the Roswell evidence? There isn’t any…

2009-07-17T14:53:00.001-04:00

….just conjecture and hearsay, nothing concrete or substantial – mere circumstantial profferings that may work in a court of law but not in the halls of academe or laboratories of science.

Despite all the ravings of Roswell believers, there is not one scintilla of bona fide evidence to support the idea that an extraterrestrial flying saucer crashed near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 (or at any other time).

There is a newspaper story and multiple second and third-hand “witness” exclamations, but that’s it.

There is no alien debris or photographs of alien debris (just balloon debris), or anything else that can substantiate the initial newspaper account and lingering witness accounts.

If there were alien bodies, as some contend(ed), no one has provided proof of them.

And if the alleged craft was comprised of “memory metal” as Tony Bragalia’s research seems to indicate, where is that memory metal? Why did no one spirit a piece away from the officials of the day, if the Roswell crowd was as smart and intrigued by the event as some UFO buffs have it?

Those in the UFO community who hate Roswell debunking, let them provide the evidence that they think “proves” the Roswell scenario that has emerged as a reality for them.

They can’t do so, for there is no evidence, none whatsoever.

The supposed FBI teletype may have occurred but that doesn’t prove an alien accident. It merely shows an FBI interest, if true, in a bizarre occurrence near Roswell that July in 1947.

The overreaching military presence doesn’t prove anything either, other than a reaction to what may have been considered a “cold war” intrusion or attempt.

Every other Roswell detail may be attributed to an hysterical aftermath of a minor incident that has been magnified after the fact by Stanton Friedman and other UFO/ET stalwarts,
continuing even now in the enlightened age of 2009.

There is no Roswell proof. There never will be. So let’s all move on….to other UFO mysteries where the payoff may be more rewarding.

UFOs: A change of scenery

2009-07-01T15:09:00.001-04:00

Elsewhere (http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/) we hinted that some UFO notables (Kevin Randle, Dick hall, Jerry Clark) seem to have abandoned UFOs for other interests.

Mr. Randle said, No, he just had other interests, and Jerry Clark said he wasn’t obsessed with early Christianity as we stated but had other “intellectual” interests, which included The Old West, that Mr. Randle also took an interest in, which spurred our asking him if UFOs had lost their cachet for him and other UFO researchers.

We note that Hall’s Civil War studies and the Clark/Randle slippage into stories of cowboys and the Old West have got to detract from their UFO research; it just has to since, one can’t study all things or many things and do well by that which they have hung their reputations upon….in this case UFOs.

We find that the UFO old-guard, except for Stanton Friedman (and a few others), have pretty much thrown in the towel as far as the UFO phenomenon is concerned.

We can’t blame them. UFOs are a non-issue for almost every normal person on the planet. UFOs just don’t factor in anyone’s life, if they have one.

UFOs are unsatisfactory as a scientific pursuit or even a hobby. They (UFOs) have become boring and saturated by their past – what they may have been, not what they are.

Flying saucers once awakened a curiosity that was commensurate with other mysteries that intrigue mankind, but since the elusive flying thingies didn’t provide a denouement, much as the Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot haven’t, UFOs (flying saucers) have become and are an idle interest for only the most inane truth-pursuers.

The newer UFO guard, Paul Kimball, Nick Redfern, Greg Bishop, Mac Tonnies, et al. have also moved on, to other interests or life-styles.

So, the seeming abandonment of UFOs as an intellectual pursuit by Kevin Randle, Jerry Clark, and Richard Hall -- despite their enervated objections – makes sense to us, and others who know that life is short and UFOs are long….going nowhere, just circling our skies and lives, in a meaningless pattern that hasn’t made sense and isn’t about to, as far as we or anyone can tell….

UFO couldn’t save Betty and Barney Hill

2009-06-17T19:30:00.001-04:00

Even though Betty and Barney Hill’s alleged abductors seemed to have cutting edge medical information and instruments, they (the abductors) couldn’t save or chose not to save Barney Hill from a pending cerebral hemorrhage which he died from eight years after his abduction and medical exam by the gray UFO beings who had what seemed to be advanced medical knowledge and procedures.

Betty Hill, who died much later (2004), of lung cancer wasn’t cured either, or apprised of her potential disease.

What does this tell us?

That the episode was bogus, a fiction, or that the UFO occupants were a callous lot, who cared little or nothing about the human beings they had kidnapped.

And the UFO beings in other contact cases --Travis Walton, Parker and Hickson in Pascagoula, Shirmer, (to name a few) -- have been described as cold, indifferent, lacking compassion or sensitivity to the plight of those abducted.

But the indifference of the Hill captors was portentiousless, and cruel; the callous “objectivity” of the Hill UFO beings was almost satanic.

Or, perhaps, the medical expertise of the gray UFO beings is not as advanced or evolved as UFO stories would have it.

Something happened to the Hills – something imaginatively or something real but bizarre.

We can never know what the Hill story means. It’s remains a mystery or a contrived influential canard. But we do know that whatever the Hill episode was, it reflected a fiction or a strange reality wherein the main “characters” were probed, like guinea pigs, and left to die, without any help or instructions from their medically-oriented captors.

Either way, the Hills ended up getting no health benefits from their concoction or abduction. The incident that defined them was no help in the end. That is the nature of UFO episodes: nothing good comes from them, whether they are contrived or real.

UFO Digest

2009-05-27T10:26:00.003-04:00

Dirk Vander Ploeg provides a consistently interesting web-site about UFOs and various paranormal and/or related items.

Click here to visit UFO Digest

The Unexplained Mysteries Web-site

2009-05-14T13:21:00.001-04:00

One of our favorite sites is Vinit’s Unexplained Mysteries, and many of you also visit the extremely interesting and unique internet venue.

Here’s a link to get you there, just in case you haven’t visited it lately;

Unexplained Mysteries

THE NAZI UFO LIE by Anthony Bragalia

2009-05-11T08:19:00.000-04:00

A very disturbing theme recurs from time to time in the UFO literature. Some maintain that Nazi scientists had perfected advanced aerial craft including "flying saucers" - both in Germany during WWII and as captured "Paperclip" scientists in the US. This supposed Nazi technology is seen by these "researchers" as the genesis of early man-made UFOs. Even now it is seen by some as the reason for today's state-of-the-art "Dreamland" flying machines- or even as the true cause of the Roswell crash!

This lie has been repeated in many books and magazines from the very beginning of the UFO phenomena. It continues even now with the publication of material from authors such as Martin Cannon, Nick Redfern, Nick Cook, William Lyne, Michael Heiser, Mark Ian Birdsall, Joseph Farrell and David Hatcher Childress.

The belief that secret Nazi UFO technologies existed during WWII -and that the US took these technologies to develop further- is as unsettling as it is untrue. "Nazi UFOs" have been proposed by some on numerous websites and in such books as "The Facade," "Pentagon Space Aliens," "The Hunt for Zero Point," "Man-Made UFOs" and "Hitler's Flying Saucers." They elevate Nazi scientific know-how to a level that it does not deserve.

DISCOVERED- THE FIRST MENTION OF "NAZI UFOS"

I believe that I have found the "original impetus" for such nonsense...

Incredibly, in 1947 (the very year of the beginning of the modern UFO era) a fictional book entitled Rocket Ship Galileo authored by German-American Robert A. Heinlein, unquestionably "set the stage" for all future books and theories about Nazi saucers.

In this sci-fi novel, three teenagers work with their uncle, a "Dr. Cargraves," to construct a spaceship to go to the moon. The boys land on the Moon only to discover that the Nazis have already arrived! When the teens locate a secret Nazi lunar base, they discover wonderous technology. The boys and their uncle somehow overcome the Nazis and pilot the Nazi spaceship (which was of course was more advanced than the one developed by the American teens and their uncle) back to Earth. Every element of Nazi and Operation Paperclip saucer myth is set forth in this book. The idea that the Nazis had perfected advanced craft -and that we retrieved this technology- is a featured theme in the novel. It is one that is repeated to this very day.

The first known mention of the Nazi-UFO connection presented as non-fiction appeared in a March 30, 1950 article in the German tabloid, Der Spiegel. It continued with a series of 1950s "Police Gazette" neo-Nazi stories. In the 1960s strange books by authors such as Renato Vesco and "Michael X. Barton" -with titles like "The German Saucer Story" - made their way on book shelves.The idea that somewhere, someone is continuing the line of secret black projects the Nazis had initiated- is at the crux of these books and theories. Some of these theories are frightening in that they point to the supposed "reality" of a surviving "Third Power" of former Nazis.

Frauds such as "contactee" George Adamski put forth the concept of aliens of distinctly "Aryan" stock. Idealized as tall, blonde and blue-eyed, these aliens were human and possessed advanced technological wonders. The obvious connection between the idea of German-like superiority and Flying Saucers was again emblazoned upon the public psyche. In his book Messengers of Deception, author Jacques Vallee noted the connections between early contactees (such as George Hunt Williamson) and American Nazism. Such "German influence" is seen even today with reports of interactions with "Nordic" aliens.

Less troubling (but finding its origin from the same cesspool) is the notion that captured German scientists collaborated with US scientists to test-fly advanced or novel "gliders" and "balloon craft" at our bases in New Mexico. It is said that such aerial black experiments -designed by Germans and using captured Japanese or even deformed children- accounts for the crash at Roswell. Books such as Nick Redfern's "Body Snatchers in the Desert" promote this idea.

World War II is an historical period that has received more attention than any other. The focus of what happened has always been on the German's- their reprehensible experiments and their inhumane ways. But the history of Nazi Saucers just does not exist in mainstream history. Rather, such ideas rely on claims without proof, extreme right-wingers and on the profit motives of unscrupulous writers and publishers of the sensational.

From the beginning people speculated about the origin of the unidentified objects flying in our skies. In 1950, it perhaps made sense to consider that the technological achievements of the Nazis may have included the development of such saucers- but it makes no sense in 2009.

When carefully examined, we find that "Nazi UFOs" simply never existed. Every photograph presented on websites and books of such craft are faked with models, photoshops or artistic renderings. Others are misidentified, prosaic objects. And in every case where a German "saucer scientist" is identified- we find that the "scientist" did not exist- or was a false claimant.

REASONS FOR NAZI UFO BELIEFS

When we look at the people who promote such theories- we find that their beliefs are rooted in one of two reasons:

1) Anti-semitism or pro-Nazi sympathies; or just the opposite-
2) A continued hatred and fear of the evil experiments conducted by Nazis in remote locations

Those who are motivated by the first reason promote fantasies such as an "escaped Hitler" residing in Antartica and building Flying Saucers- or even that ET itself teamed with the Reich on how to construct such craft. Other, more occult fantasies (relating often to the "Thule Society" or the "Black Sun" group) associate Nazis with rituals and rites that led them to contact with mysterious "dark powers" that directed them on how to construct advanced aerials.

Those motivated by the second reason promote the fantasies of continued flight experiments on US soil by captured Nazi scientists of unusual or advanced aircraft using unwitting or unwilling passengers. In both cases though, there is a certain "elevation" of Nazi achievement over our own capabilities. But it is an advantage that simply never existed. Fake photos, fraudulent science, and lying or misguided witnesses and authors are at the heart of such beliefs:

FAKE PHOTOS

Famous rendition of a Nazi UFO is the "Schauberger" UFO. It is in reality a Water Turbine.

"The Bell" or "Die Glocke" is promoted by British aviation writer Nick Cook as a test rig for Nazi anti-gravity saucers. It is actually the frame for a Cooling Tower! Wider shot photos reveal a conventional power plant nearby.

One example of several (usually blurry) "artistic renderings" or photoshops depicting supposed Nazi saucers

FRAUDULENT SCIENCE

German scientists who engineered such Nazi saucer craft (with names like Meithe, Schauberger, Schriever and Habermohl) fail utterly to check out. They either never existed or they were not the engineering technologists that they claimed to be, but simply theorist "wannabes."

Others who were real engineers, such as the German "Horten Brothers," are implicated by some as having developed strange "flying wings." In actuality, the US had possessed at the time far superior designs than the Hortens for all-wing, wingless, delta-wing and wedge-craft aerial vehicles.

One of the brothers wrote to the president of Northrop Aircraft in the late 1940s asking if he could come to work for them. He was rebuffed because Horten had nothing to offer that we didn't already have. Historical documents show that both Northrop and the US military thought the Hortons "odd" and off-base when it came to things that fly. Even Russia ignored them.

ROSWELL AND THE NAZI-TERRESTRIAL CONNECTION MYTH

Author Nick Redfern carries this myth-torch today. Initially Mr. Redfern's thesis seems compelling- it even did to me. Closer examination though reveals huge flaws. In his book Body Snatchers in the Desert (and on his blogs) Mr. Redfern perpetuates the idea that German scientists (captured by us after WWII during Operation Paperclip) continued their heinous human experiments. This time though, it is in the form of sickening, secret test flights under the direction of US government personnel at New Mexico bases and national labs. Mr. Redfern maintains that this is the likely cause of the Roswell crash.

In Mr. Redfern's world, even after the war -and on US soil- the evil Nazis continued to toil on strange craft and to conduct heinous human experimentation in remote locations. The "fear of Nazis" meme is continued- even after the Reich was conquered and the war criminals were captured. And this meme sounds suspiciously like others that tell of "continued Nazi activity," but instead in other remote locations like Antartica.

Mr. Redfern's book's subtitle is very telling- "The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story." It reflects the continuing fear that our government experiments with its citizens. Of course, our government had indeed conducted -and now admitted to- horrible radiation tests, tests using LSD, tests on the retarded and worse. But Mr. Redfern goes one further by adding a "captured Nazi engineers" twist. He cobbles together a speculative scenario that attempts to show an unholy collusion between Paperclip scientists and US scientists.

Like similar authors before him, Redfern has yet to produce even a single official document or genuine photo to make such a direct connection. Instead -like similar authors before him- he props his thesis with information from discredited researchers like Timothy Cooper, faked film like the Alien Autopsy and anonymous testimony from people that he did not discover, but who approached him- people like "Mr. Levine, "The Colonel" and "The Black Widow."

He identifies by name only a couple of (third-hand) sources, William "Bill" Slater of the US Psychology Strategy Board in the early 1950s, and Alan "Al" Barker, formerly with the US Army Psychological Warfare Center, also during the early 1950s. We have yet to be offered proof of their existence and military station. Even years since the book's publication- they have curiously failed to come forward (or, to my knowledge- to be talked to by anyone at all other than Mr. Redfern.) This itself is damning to his theory. Whenever I discover a potentially valuable "witness" to Roswell or the UFO phenomena, I most always contact another researcher so that he or she can confirm my reporting.

Mr. Redfern believes that small, diseased or deformed Japanese from the notorius Unit 731 were brought to America by the US military to continue biological and flight experimentation on them. As an insightful Amazon reviewer wrote of Redfern's tome, Nick "reveals his confusion regarding the differences between Japanese people and alien bodies. Surely after five years of fighting the Japanese, any witness would know the difference between a physically handicapped Japanese person and an extraterrestrial."

Mr. Redfern does not seem to understand the history of flight. Well-conditioned, normal-sized adult men were used to test flight extremes. Using diseased or deformed midgets or those with otherwise compromised constitutions makes no sense- and would provide meaningless data. These are simply not the types of people that would be used because the results of their flights would not provide the kind of information relevant to healthy, real-world pilots or passengers.

Recently on his blog Mr. Redfern has been reduced to citing the writings of one "Kathy Kasten" to support his thesis. Ms. Kasten maintains that she was literally "guided by voices in her head" to find proof that Roswell was a secret terrestrial experiment. Kathy also believes that she was "irradiated" by the CIA and her by own father. Though her writings today on the subject are less delusional, she continues to relate false histories on the subject in publications such as the appropriately named Paranoia magazine, which Mr. Redfern recommends reading.

Mr. Redfern's deformed version of the Paperclip program ignores that the operation's noble aim was to grab the best German researchers -like Werner Von Braun- to use for what the Germans were really good at- Rocketry. This led to the Apollo programs and moon landings. These misleading "revisionist" assertations on aeronautics find their roots in good ole' rockets!

THE TRUTH

The Roswell crash -and the UFO phenomena- have nothing whatsoever to do with German innovation or experimentation. Instead, they represent a technology designed not by Nazis -or even by Mankind. The truth is that they speak to a science so advanced that it is altogether Unearthly.

The Roswell Lacuna

2009-05-07T09:43:00.000-04:00

The missing years of Jesus – from age 12 to about 30 – are not “documented” but there has been some speculation that he visited places far-flung from Judea; India and even England have been suggested, with circumstantial hints supporting those scenarios.

But things are quite different when it comes to the Roswell episode in July 1947. No one has a clue why the Roswell story absolutely disappeared for thirty years.

There was no mention – nothing at all, anywhere – about the incident from 1947 until 1978, when Stan Friedman opened the Roswell can of worms after being confronted with a tale about the so-called flying disk crash from a “witness” (Jesse Marcel, Sr.).

Our concern here is not what has transpired since 1978 but why there is no reference, none, to the Roswell “crash” during those intervening years, between 1947 and 1978.

We’ve scoured our vast batch of UFO magazines, newspaper clippings, and other UFO materials for some inkling of Roswell, and have, like others, found nothing.

This strikes us as particularly strange, if a flying saucer had actually crashed near Roswell, and its significant army base.

The canard that the people of 1947 were subservient to some amorphous military order(s) to keep silent about what supposedly transpired – a flying disk from another world crash near their community – is patently silly.

The people of Roswell, like others in the Southwest, were a hardy, non-wimpy breed – persons who came from hardscrabble stock, tough to the core, unlikely to be cowed by orders to keep their mouths shut – for 30 years.

And, as we’ve posted elsewhere, why did no one sneak a fragment of the alleged debris that was so wondrous in nature?

And why did no one take a photo of that wondrous debris, or the purported crash site, when cheap Kodak cameras were extant, and ubiquitous?

The thirty-year hiatus in information or recollection and reminiscences makes no behavioral sense.

Joseph Capp’s gung-ho support of Roswell witnesses belies the obeisant stance that these Capp-lauded witnesses undertook and maintained for over 30 years. Is such reserve concomitant with the lofty natures that Mr. Capp and others attribute to the panoply of witnesses who’ve surfaced after Mr. Friedman and a few others “broke” the Roswell story and the assumed cover-up?

The story, the witnesses, the resultant Roswell mythos don’t quite compute.

It’s that thirty-year absence of anything Roswell-related that undermines the hypothesis that extraterrestrial beings had a mishap in the desert near Roswell in 1947.

No one, with any American bravado or ethical behavior, would have kept quiet for 30 years, despite some vague warnings from military types. Many of whom would have moved on or died long before 1978 arrived.

This is what makes Roswell, for some of us, hard to swallow.

UFO Witnesses

2009-03-27T09:17:00.001-04:00

Joseph Capp of UFO Media Matters is a rabid advocate for those who claim to have seen a UFO.

Mr. Capp believes that witness accounts provide the primary reality evidence for the UFOs phenomenon.

But cognoscenti know that witness testimony is the weakest link when it comes to evidentiary hearings of any kind.

Witnesses are notorious for getting it wrong because witness testimony is fallible in a plethora of ways.

But don’t take our word for it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witness

http://fds.oup.com/www.oup.co.uk/pdf/0-19-927809-1.pdf

Mr. Cap does a disservice to “ufology” by giving an imprimatur to witness accounts while eschewing other evidence, or pursuing a discipline that might unmask UFOs for what they really are.

The physiology, the psychology of witnesses are never scrutinized in a forensic way by UFO researchers.

UFO accounts are gathered, and the bizarre aspects of a sighting, abduction, or episode get all the attention, while the witnesses’ psychical and physical make-ups are overlooked.

Yet, Mr. Capp, good guy that he may be, is way off base by hyping witness testimony, overlooking the fact that witnesses are human beings with all the sensory and mental frailties that humans are saddled with.

UFO will not be explained by witness accounts. Witness stories have been the bane of real UFO research, beginning with the incredible Kenneth Arnold sighting of 1947, which is still be debated because of the various possibilities for what Mr. Arnold saw.

Mr. Arnold, a credible, decent man and pilot, examples exactly the problem with witness testimony without accompanying evidence, such as photos or trace elements.

And UFO accounts go down from there, with many witnesses providing even less credentials than Mr. Arnold.

So, Mr. Capp has got to forego his christianized proselytizing on behalf of UFO sighters and try to come up with a better, scientific-oriented approach to UFO study.

That way, his credibility will be enhanced and UFO followers can get to the core of the UFO mystery, where witness testimony is unnecessary and irrelevant.

The UFO Dialectic

2009-03-05T13:04:00.001-05:00

There isn’t one.

UFO discussion nowadays is fraught with passionate bias, but no real access to new thinking about the phenomenon.

UFOs, via ufology (the study of UFOs that pretends to be a scientific discipline), have been given short shrift by those who grab hold of discussions and demean the phenomenon by assy beliefs and self-aggrandizing colloquies.

The UFO waters have become so muddied by all the discursive blogs and web-sites about UFOs that no one can make sense of anything UFO-related.

No one is studying the phenomenon as it exists, but many are evoking UFOs (and flying saucers) as they existed, especially the Roswell anecdotal material.

Web-sites such as Frank Warren’s The UFO Chronicles merely pile on UFO account and sightings, without any scrutiny of those accounts and sightings.

There is no discussion about the UFO sightings at Chronicles, just account after account, and story after story.

This isn’t bad, in that discussion about UFOs at blogs, such as Kevin Randle’s A Different Perspective, contain commentary by Mr. Randle related to old UFO events, in his case, Roswell, and comments from readers that are tiresome in their repetitiveness and biases.

Randle’s blog is totally useless, whereas Warren’s blog (or web-site) at least has material about new and old sightings, although Mr. Warren’s efforts are just like many other UFO aficionados – lots of photos, witness accounts, and newspaper clippings, all avoiding scientific perusal or dialectic.

The mess that is “ufology” has corrupted the UFO phenomenon so badly that scientists, academics, and media won’t take the phenomenon seriously.

One would think that UFO fanatics would have learnt a lesson from the flying saucer follies of the fifties, that nonsense having almost eviscerated UFO discussion by any sane person(s).

The great Donald Keyhoe kept UFOs and flying discs from becoming a total laughing stock, but there is no one around today with his charisma and stoic demeanor.

We don’t expect a UFO dialectic or any scientific effort to determine what the phenomenon was or is.

The internet and the nuts who have glommed on to UFOs to showcase their inane thinking about them have made any serious discussion or study of UFOs virtually impossible.

As we’ve said many times, the UFO phenomenon needs a whole new makeover, and discipline that shakes off the ufology epithet and the persons who continue to flog UFOs with insipid and asinine discussion about them.

A closed, underground group might pull this off, and we hear there’s a movement afoot to do just that…

UFOs and the Death of God

2009-02-20T10:49:00.006-05:00

While Nietzsche intuited the death of God and Richard Elliott Friedman deals euphemistically with that death (The Hidden Face of God, HarperCollins, 1995), sensible persons know that God died shortly after His Ezekiel visitation [590 BC].

(The alleged appearances in the New Testament are allegorical and Jesus is a tangible metaphor.)

Thus, UFOs have come to replace God in the psyche of many ufologists.

Some in the UFO community replace God with UFOs for psychological reasons, others for academic reasons, and still others because they have a lacuna in their souls.

Stanton Friedman, for instance, needs UFOs as God because he knows that God abandoned his people many times over the millennia, and more horrendously during the Holocaust. So UFOs have become a surrogate for Mr. Friedman.

Richard Hall needs UFOs to be God because he knows that God was absent during the American Civil War and most certainly is dead. So Mr. Hall, who is closer to death than life, needs to fill a void that the absence of God creates for those near to the afterlife.

Jerome Clark, in his study of early Christianity, knows that God is a thought, not a reality, so he keeps UFOs on his cognitive burners as a kind of replacement for a theological concept that intrigues him but is lacking in many ways.

Bruce Maccabee is agnostic about UFOs one day and a believer on another day, just as variable as his belief in God is. UFOs come and go in his mind, just as God does. Mr. Maccabee knows, however, that God is dead, and UFOs are nearly so.

There are many deranged people in the UFO community, named at our UFO web-site, who need God, but in that absence, have created a belief system based upon the UFO phenomenon.

These people can’t come to grips with the death of God, so they’ve made UFOs into God, to assuage their “spiritual” debilitation.

Peripheral UFO aficionado Joseph Capp recognizes, almost unconsciously, that young people have no yen for a God, knowing that God is irrelevant, which is as good as dead in their minds, and some see UFOs as an interesting, real replacement.

Sci-Fi writer and über-geek Mac Tonnies runs intellectual circles around the concept of God, whom he knows is dead, and does the same with UFOs.

UFOs and God are amorphous concepts that Mr. Tonnies plays with, because life is plaything, and God and UFOs are toys for his fecund mind.

Abductees (so-called experiencers) are so distraught by the unconscious or pre-conscious recognition that God is, indeed, dead, they’ve taken to hallucinating about being taken to Him by His “messengers” who visit them at night or during daytime catnaps.

The motivation for their alternate reality is a need to replace the dead God with a still extant God, who resides in other-worldly spheres (UFOs and other realities) just as Elias and Ezekiel did, maybe even as Jesus/Christ did.

UFOs for the Greg Bishops, Nick Redferns, Paul Kimballs. Bruce Duensings, Linda Moulton Howes, and other intellectual types are a coolish replacement for he idea of God, whom they know is long dead, and ineffective as a player in the game of life.

UFOs have the attributes of God – the long ago chronicled attributes before He died: mysterious, uncommunicative, able to perform feats that mere mortals can’t, and ubiquitous.

So while God is dead for cognoscenti, UFOs have come to replace Him (or It), but as we contend, one shouldn’t get too attached to the UFOs as God concept, since UFOs are themselves dying even as this is being typed.

And some in the UFO community (Cullan Hudson for one) knows this, and take comfort in an existentiality that is really real.

The Roswell Fixation

2009-02-04T08:24:00.002-05:00

The July 1947 “flying disc captured” episode in Roswell, New Mexico continues to absorb UFO mavens.

Kevin Randle, a Roswell investigator of note, has been fixated, for many years, on the so-called Roswell witnesses, especially Jesse Marcel who was the Intelligence Officer for the 509th Bomber Group at the Army/Air Force in Roswell.

Stanton Friedman is a Roswell groupie, and has been since the late 1970s. He believes that extraterrestrials crashed a flying saucer (maybe two flying saucers) in and around Roswell and Corunna, New Mexico.

He continues to flog the Roswell incident.

One interesting Roswell web-site can be found here:

The Roswell Files

And there are dozen, maybe hundreds more Roswell sites and blogs extant in the internet universe.

For UFO aficionados – the quasi-fanatic kind – Roswell is the Holy Grail of the belief in the alien (extraterrestrial) visitation hypothesis of “ufology” – ufos (flying saucers) contain explorers from outer space.

There is a mystery or two stemming from the 1947 incident in Roswell, but it can’t be deciphered by the fixation on contradictory witness testimony, Joseph Capp and other witness-defenders notwithstanding.

Kevin Randle is remiss by persisting in the illusion that the minutiae of Marcel’s testimonies over the years will provide a Roswell denouement.

But he has a batch of blog-followers who have assumed his obsession and debate the trivia of Marcel and a few others, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

Roswell is interesting, we grant these people that. But it hasn’t been approached forensically by any ufologist, ever.

The overt details – the obvious “evidentiary” aspects – of Roswell have been mined and talked about for years now.

But those details haven’t been investigated with scientific or even journalistic rigor by anyone in the superficial discipline of ufology.

Dr. Randle – he likes to flaunt his Ph.D – should be an expert on Roswell but he has diminished that expertise by his obtuse fixation on the lies and/or truths of Jesse Marcel and others who’ve obtained Roswellian fame from the writings of Friedman and a few other Roswell quidnuncs.

Yes, something happened at Roswell in July 1947, and that something might be, could be clarified if persons like Nick Redfern, Paul Kimball, and our colleague Anthony Bragalia have their way.

But they have to sweep away the errant detritus that Randle and his ilk continue to strew in their path to the truth.

World UFO Space

2009-01-20T09:49:00.002-05:00

A blog for UFO believers (with some interesting links):

World UFO Space