Disclosure, disclosure, disclosure!

Copyright 2020, InterAmerica, Inc.

Dipping into Facebook Saturday night [8/1/20] – to check my media connection – I found several notifi- cations about new postings from the UFO UpDates group and administered nicely by Curt Collins.

For several days now, there, and in my Google UFO newsfeeds are dollops about the supposed acknowledgment by the Pentagon that its long-secretive, ongoing UFO study is about to announce that it thinks the UFOs [UAP] encountered by U.S. Navy pilots and other military are off-Earth vehicles.

A botched New York Times piece, revised after its initial publication, created the anticipation of “disclosure” by, from what I can tell, UFO fringers: persons not well-known or even known at all among the usual contingent of noted UFO enthusiasts.

These closeted or passive UFO newbies and UFO hermits are drooling at the possibility that the U.S. government may be about to tell the public (us) that UFOs exist and are from somewhere off the planet, the fringers hoping that the news is a disclosure of an extraterrestrial presence on Earth now (and for a very long time up to now).

What little contact I’ve had with the fringers indicates a hoary lot, disheveled and ignorant generally, rude and without class or taste of any kind. I could name them but a few have been around a long time, without making a ufological mark and are angry with me already for closing this blog to them where now they have to ask for “permission” to see my dopey renderings; e.g., skeptic Tim Printy for one and a mess of a guy, Roy Hale.

It’s good that Facebook is losing advertisers by the sh*tload and is about to be broken up by the government for deleterious behavior. This should clean the UFO palate there or mitigate the offensive effluvia.

We’ll see.

RR

Those damnable UFO pieces feigning scholarship

Copyright 2020, InterAmerica, Inc.

This wiggy-waggy attempt at enlightening UFO enthusiasts appeared on Facebook a few days ago [7/2020], placed online by Christophe Spitzer:

This piece might intrigue a few persons I know, but it represents one of those kinds of insertions that I often present at one of the RRRGroup blogs: a pretense of scholarship or high intelligence.

No one should be plopping philosophical barbs or linguistic medi- tations online at UFO forums, of any kind.

It's a slap in the face of UFOers who are, by lot, a pretty rancid group, dumber than potatoes and not prone to be swayed by such attempted muckety-muck embroidery.

Can you imagine Newton or Tesla or Einstein side-stepping their thought to process the difference in kinds of skepticism or a beclotted array of Kantian maxims?

The UFO phenomenon should be addressed via musings and expla- nations addressing the enigma itself, not by a foray into extraneous academic flippery.

Such misdirected excursions dilute the phenomenon and only confuses the mystery by way of intellectual flim-flam.

Facebook's UFO community is flush with such silliness, as is, admit- tedly, my UFO Conjecture(s) blog sometimes.

But is has got to stop. Discussions of Ockham's Razor or various kinds of skepticism and other wayside erudition bring UFOs up short, taking us aficionados into shallow waters where only the most insipid UFO mavens play.

RR

The “Black Hole” that is Ufology

Copyright 2020, InterAmerica, Inc.

A lot of time has been spent or wasted on UFO hoaxes and nonsense and continues to be so in 2020: Roswell still, Aztec, Ancient astronauts, and others that you can suggest surely.

But what about such intense remembrances as that of John Keel? Yes, he was a light in the darkness of ufology or seemed to be.

But within his nature, inside his being, was a demented germ, a psychopathology that eventually took him from a kind of sanity into full-blown madness, as his late UFO material indicates.

That UFO advocates still rave about him and his work – all of it besmudged by his inherent dementia – goes to the heart of why UFOs and “ufology” are not taken seriously or seen as worthy of real research.

The contactees did this to the flying saucer sightings of the 1950s and Keel, himself a kind of contactee, did the same, and still beclouds the UFO matter by acolytes of his nonsense about The Mothman and something intruding on his mind and being in his last days.

Then there are the Men in Black, those “mythological intruders” who have never really been evidenced, by photo or any other kind of substantive actuality.

 UFOs have been encrusted by subsidiary madness during all of their appearances and even today when UFOs are less intrusive than have been in the past.

With the demise of the few serious UFO researchers or the silence of UFO buffs who’ve become rancid with age and boredom about the topic, the phenomenon, UFOs have sunk into the miasma much as the ‘information” disappearance within Black Holes bemoaned by Stephen Hawking et al.

Forget about John Keel, MIBs, those contactee nuts, or those conference attendees who have social needs that are neurotic in nature, and all those UFO enthusiasts who clog Facebook with pages of effluvia or the dregs of their personal existence about which most of us have little or no care.

Get on with a search for a real answer to the UFO phenomenon. That may be important, or not. We’ll have to see.

RR

Reframing Ufology, with dolts?

Copyright 2017, InterAmerica, Inc.

We think we lost Robbie Graham as a Facebook “friend” because we knocked his new book, UFOs: Reframing the Debate.

Our take was that Robbie picked his pals and buddies rather than truly brilliant persons to load up his book with suggestions for a new look at UFOs; Here’s his contingent of UFO gurus:

Instead of taking the trouble of rounding up a cache of smart UFO people – yes, there are a few – Robbie piled into his book a group of people who are not well-known or well-regarded among ufology’s cognoscenti.

If one wants to reframe the UFO saga, one would select a raft of people who really have unique and substantive ideas. His gaggle is not that group.

We would have contacted the Anomalist’s Patrick Huyghe for suggestions or see the persons, on some UFO Facebook pages, who are offering interesting insights that are remarkably fascinating.

One can find them on the FB pages of Isaac Koi, Gilles Fernandez, Jose Caravaca, and Mrherr Zaar, and a few others.

We refer to people, here at this blog and elsewhere, who have intellectual intelligence about UFOs and cachet in the UFO community, and a few show up in Robbie’s book: Micah Hanks and Chris Rutkowski among them.

But, overall, Robbies’s cronies don’t cut the UFO mustard. Sorry, but it’s true.

So, we’ll skip buying Robbie’s book and take the lumps that may come my way for expressing the view presented here.

But if Ufology and UFOs are going to have a resurrection in interest and real insights, it will have to “reframe” with a few persons with higher IQs than those in Robbie’s mix.

RR

The desperation of Ufology and its practitioners

Copyright 2017, InterAmerica, Inc.

Astute (and not so astute) observers of the fringe see the UFO community gasping for oxygen, as their addictive interest, UFOs, becomes more irrelevant by the hour.

As King Belshazzar (Baltassaar) in Daniel, Chapter 5 of The Old Testament, was unable to interpret “the handwriting on the wall,” many ufologists and UFO buffs are not able to see that their topic of interest is submersed in an abyss of indifference by the general strands of society.

UFOs are not an issue to contend with, at least not an issue that matters, in any sense.

But there is rabid activity, by ufologists, to make it seem otherwise.

Robbie Graham, whose UFO credentials derives from his book about flying saucers in the movies, has written a new book, using “essays” from people on the UFO fringe, calling for the UFO topic to be reframed; that is, Graham hopes to rejuvenate ufology and UFOs, using suggestions from persons who write about or are addicted to the mysterious phenomenon.

The effort is futile, of course, considering the tenor of the people whom Graham selected to defend UFOs. They are mostly unknown, without cachet in any discipline that would allow a refreshing look at the UFO phenomenon.

If Graham wanted to really reframe UFOs, he would have chosen people outside the fetid batch he selected to provide a renascence in flying saucers or UFOs.

The UFO community has become generally delusional, hoping that UFOs will come to be defined or explained somehow, many thinking that government disclosure is the path to the UFO reality, others just delusional about UFOs, that they are pertinent to society and the history of human civilization.

Again let me refer you to the musical work of Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question, and the exegeses of the work: what it means.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXD4tIp59L0

The short musical work sums up the anxiety and ultimate futility of Graham’s desire to re-stoke the UFO topic.

RRR

Facebook: A New Nazi-like Regime?

When Adolf Hitler began his mesmerization of the German peoples, he sucked them into his perverse “theology” that proposed Germans were an exclusive element of human society by his charismatic “charm” and ideology that his “political party” was an all-inclusive membership party for his defined super race.

If one wasn’t a Nazi Party member, one was an outsider.

Even brilliant persons, scientists [Werner von Braun], composers, film-makers [Leni Riefenstahl], and writers [Ezra Pound], and philosophers [Martin Heidegger] became enamored of Nazism.

Facebook’s attraction of “brilliant persons” and thinkers may be seen by scouring the Facebook membership rolls. I won’t note the many one-time UFO aficionados, many of them notable in the UFO community, who are avid members of Facebook, attracted to Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of a world-wide society, under the influence of his internet creation. 

Is there the intrinsic evil in Facebook that underlay Nazism? 

Certainly not. But the mass [Facebook] membership, of ignorant human beings, is similar in essence to what made up the Nazi party and those who came under its sway: the German people as a virtual whole, going along with nazi policies and practices, unthinking and obeisant to the machinations of its founder and leader(s).

This is worrisome to some of us, certainly to me. 

Facebook is intellectually and politically innocuous at the moment, but in a few years?

RR

Death but not Transfiguration?

Yes, I saw the Anomalist listing about Paul Kimball’s Facebook note on the passing of Errol Bruce-Knapp, who has received honorariums from those who knew him.

I had several inter-connections with Errol during my days frequenting his UFO UpDates.

He contacted me and apologized for inserting a posting from long-time UFO maiden Wendy Connors that stated I was king of the gay community in Fort Wayne Indiana.

Errol said the comment slipped by him, which I found strange as he ran UpDates like Mussolini ran Italy during WWII.

(By the way, I’m not king or prince of anything, let alone the supposed gay community in my media community. I only know one gay fellow in that town and it’s a TV meteorologist who outed himself when he married his partner.)

I had another few calls with Errol; one about Bruce Maccabee, whom Errol thought was an operative for the U.S. Navy, bent on discounting some aspects of UFOs., and a few calls about one of Errol’s promoted friends who showed up in a strange online place and which we asked him [Errol] about.

He [Errol] was always solicitous and gentlemanly with me, but he did run UpDates with an iron hand, letting the UFO old-guard have free rein but tempering newbies who challenged the UFO status quo.

While UFO UpDates has passed into oblivion, thankfully and some of his Strange Days Indeed radiocasts and poscasts too, Errol’s graciousness and toughness lives on. May he rest in peace.

RR

Slovenly “research” by the easily distracted (in ufology)

Kevin Randle called for suggestions recently in the ongoing attempt to decipher the so-called Ramey memo, seen in the Roswell newspaper photos.

I had hoped that some would pursue the matter seriously, including David Rudiak who has been beating that “dead horse” for years.

(I even provided a New Yorker piece replete with ideas for deciphering such things.)

But it seems that Mr. Rudiak and other Roswellians (those in the UFO community fascinated by Roswell to the virtual exclusion of anything else UFO-related) are again distracted by elements that do not pertain directly to the content of the memo: Who took the Ramey photos is the current backwash at Kevin blog.

This is true and has been for most of the period of flying saucer/UFO discourse and interest over the years: ufologists go from one UFO story to another like bees looking for nectar that will satiate their curiosity.

No one, except for Jacques Vallee and a few other notables, sticks with a matter for any period of time that might help resolve the enigma that haunts them (and the rest of us).

Mr. Rudiak spends inordinate amounts of time “elucidating” his Roswell hypotheses and collected data, followed by a few Roswell fanatics who love to bring forward, ad infinitum, ad eternum, ad nauseum, the Roswell information they’ve accumulated over the years.

They are desperate to show expertise in something, and Roswell if the pig they’re exploiting.

The Ramey memo has been set aside, or so it seems, as the minions, who started to make it a matter of concentration, have been dissuaded by a need to show-off their Roswell acumen rather than pursuing the decipherment seriously as a real researcher does when one has a problem to resolve.

I just received (from Daedalus Books) Einstein’s Genius Club: The True Story of a Group of Scientists Who Changed the World [by Burton Feldman, Arcade Publishing, NY, 2007/2011].

The book tells readers how real scientists and researchers attack problems that arouse their inquisitiveness.

The Ramey memo people don’t even come close.

And Mr. Rudiak should be ashamed of his laggardly approach to the matter and Kevin Randle with him, for offering Roswell asides that take Kevin’s followers away from the topic to worthless matters that are regurgitated over and over again at Kevin's blog.

Shame on the both of them and the commenters who are too stupid to see how easily they are led astray by a need to vent ego and UFO swill.

RR

Delusions: Self and Otherwise

This 1979 book from my shelves addresses many of the points or, rather, non-points, made here in comments recently.

Contents include:

Reality exists outside of us

Science is objective

Nothing but…

The myth of mind control

The lying truths of psychiatry

The chapter “Reality exists outside of us?” [Page 144 ff. by Sir Alan Cottrell] says this:

“ … it would appear that the concept of an independent reality ‘out there’ has been discredited … The central conclusion  is that if reality has any meaning at all, it is in the context of the observer and the observation itself.” [Page 158]

My point, with this book, is that what we’re debating in this place (and elsewhere) have many possibilities. No topic is definitive, to the point of conclusiveness.

If someone thinks they have the answer(s) to things, they don’t.

UFO skeptics don’t have the answers, and UFO believers don’t either.

UFOs, among lots of other things, are wide open to explanation and rumination.

What troubles me is the facile, superficial argumentation that rears its head in comments here.

Gilles Fernandez, Lance Moody, Zoam Chomsky don’t have the answers, but neither do David Rudiak, Tony Bragalia, Dominick, et al.

Further, most named here are ill-read, maybe not about UFOs but about almost everything else.

Their “discussions” here are limited by their liberal arts and general academic illiteracy.

Ufology – sorry Gilles, and Zoam and David – needs an intellectual overhaul.

Paul Kimball and Joel Crook would agree I think.

The rubric “ufology” like the categorical UFO sobriquet is fraught with baggage that dolts have assumed in order to belong to the rampant discussion(s) of UFOs on the internet, not just here but everywhere.

I suggest that those wishing to make points in this arena do so with cited material and footnoted asides that come from material outside the internet swill.

After all, we’re not animals….or are we?

RR 

Ufology: A lack of dignity and class

One problem for the UFO phenomenon is that it is parented by a, generally, sleazy bunch of overseers.

In my objection to science, I didn’t note that its practitioners, scruffy as they may be, function with an academic decorum, generally, making their pronouncements, as crazy as they may be, acceptable to laymen and women, the media – the great unwashed even.

In UFO circles, we get such things as this: “Who Forted?” – A punny site, maybe full of great material (I’ve never sought it out because of its obtuse title) but one that sacrifices dignity and good taste for a catchy sobriquet.

Yet that’s the least of ufology’s problems. The core residents of the UFO community are crass and ill-educated, not just scummy-looking but scummy sounding and without logic or intellectual abilities.

The late Richard Hall, bless his soul, ranted about the lack of intelligence proffered by those who saturated the now-dead UFO UpDates. He was right, of course.

The mean-spirited and vulgar stance of some UpDate insiders drove off those with a touch of sophistication and reserve.

Why is the British/PBS show Downton Abbey so popular, even among the proletariat?

It smacks of a refined society that we in America, and especially among UFO aficionados, have long ago abandoned,

Add to that the psychotic ravings we get for comments here – not posted by the way – and we see examples of how society and civilization itself has sunk into a miasma of degraded and sometimes pathological behavior.

UFOs, as a phenomenon, has an uphill climb all by itself, to get acceptance by moderate and sensible persons who might have a chance at unraveling the obnoxious mystery.

Take into account that moderate and sensible persons have to skirt or overcome the dregs of humanity to get at UFO material and evidence, the chore becomes Sisyphean.

I try to maintain a modicum of sanity by associating with the likes of a Paul Kimball, or those Brits with their inherent reserve (Nick Redfern, Nick Pope, and David Clarke), or a Cullan Hudson.

And say what you will about Kevin Randle, he has never, to my knowledge, been vulgar or undignified at his blog or in person, a rarity for a man who’s been around the UFO block.

So, while I’m hanging in there with this blog, for a mite longer, I’ll be even less tolerant of goofy comments and attempted broadsides from a few psychopaths who still linger nearby.

But, as for ufology, I see it as a catch-all for all that is degraded in humanity – a place where the unaccepted members of society congregate to spew their vile, disgustingly stupid asides, and therefore will eschew the term as best as I can, because ufology as a word and a practice is demeaning to what man was meant to be.

RR 

UFOs and the Rabble

The problem with the UFO phenomenon is “ufology” – the pseudo-science that the great unwashed, the rabble, has adopted as their sobriquet.

One constantly reads (or hears) that UFO conjecture, or hypotheses, need “peer review,” a phrase taken from academia or science but never accepted as a practice by UFO mavens or researchers.

After all, who in “ufology” is qualified to pass judgment on the poncifs of their fellow ultrafidians? [Explanation: who in the UFO world is qualified to determine if ufological nonsense has validity or not?]

Take the re-constituted Roswell Dream Team for instance. Does the one lone objective partner – Chris Rutkowski – have enough clout – mental and otherwise – to thwart the faith-obsessed mind-sets of his team colleagues; that is, can Mr. Rutkowski stem the belief fervor of Dream Team members when their faith in the ET hypothesis takes hold based upon very circumscribed evidence?

And then we have the UFO skeptics, who bring to the UFO table all kinds of ruminations that have the gloss of serious scrutiny but, when examined carefully, only has the patina of objectivity and academic acumen.

(The evidence for cavalier skepticism is made manifest by the lack of academic or scientific credentials by those claiming to be skeptics: they are self-anointed.)

But the essential problem is not the Dream Team or skeptical cliques. It’s the sycophancy of the rabble. That UFO throng weighs in with predilections based upon facile psychological or sociological elements that border upon insanities of various kinds.

Take a look at the comments that abound at various UFO venues: UFO UpDates, Rense, Above Top Secret, and even here, among many others.

The ruminations are patently aberrant.

This has been the case with UFOs since 1947, when the phenomenon reared its head and became a fringe fascination for people themselves on the fringe (of society) or mental competency.

UFOs should have been studied, as Jacques Vallee suggested and tepidly acted upon with his “Invisible College” idea, taken from the Rosicrucians or Robert Boyle’s Royal Society of London clique.

A small, qualified group of credentialed persons, from various academic disciplines should have banded together to study UFOs from the outset.

This didn’t happen at the overt level, and that explains the ongoing belief that MJ-12 may have legitimately existed or still exists: MJ-12 fits with the sensible idea of an Invisible College.

But any idea of a qualified band of UFO devotees getting together now is muffled by the onslaught of the rabble and the rabble’s use of the internet to intercede with ignorance in the matter of the phenomenon.

The vociferous clamor of the UFO underbelly drowns out or dissipates rational discourse.

We even experience that here, although we strive mightily to curb the waywardness of illogic and utter banality of thought that comes our way as comments on our topics.

UFOs, as a phenomenon, has been lost by the gargantuan storm of idiocies that have inundated the subject and continue apace now that the internet has opened the door to every asinine quidnunc who thinks what they have to offer is gold of the gods.

Can we, and a few other UFO bailiwicks, continue to ruminate within this maelstrom or cacophony of nonsense? Should we?

Paul Kimball and other sensate individuals have chosen not to. We like their withdrawal from the blatant UFO scene. And see it as a way out of the madhouse.

RR 

A must-read Book for UFO mavens and especially the few who visit Kevin Randle’s blog

Copyright 2017, InterAmerica, Inc.

Here’s the blurb from the cover of Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s book, “Inevitable Illusions; How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds” [John Wiley & Sons, Inc., NY, 1994]:

Everyone knows that optical illusions trick us because of the way we see. Now scientists have discovered hat cognitive illusions, a set of biases deeply embedded in the human mind, distort the way we think.

In Inevitable Illusions cognitive researcher Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini…opens the doors onto the newly charted realm of the cognitive unconscious to reveal the full range of illusions, showing how they inhibit our ability to reason, no matter what our educational background or IQ.

The problem(s) with “ufological thought” -- an oxymoron surely – is blatantly on display in many internet places where UFOs are the topic: UFO UpDates is one such place.

But a capsule site for erroneous thinking is Kevin Randle’s blog, A Different Perspective.

Mr. Randle isn’t the problem; he opens his blog to all comers (mostly) giving free reign to an admittedly few UFO hobbyists: ET advocates, exemplified by David Rudiak (who is a member of Mr. Randle’s Roswellian Dream Team), skeptics, represented by Lance Moody, Christopher Allen, and Gilles Fernandez, along with assorted nobodies.

Mr. Randle’s visitors continue to get immersed in the minutiae of the 1947 Roswell incident, hacking away at the tale, ad infinitum, ad eternum, and ad nauseum,

A scrutiny of the back-and forths, beclouded by Mr. Rudiak’s extensive displays of Roswell detritus, shows that the thinking behind the commentary is flawed, in ways that Piattelli-Palmarini examples in his book (pictured above).

The over-riding premise of “cognitive illusions” is footnoted by quasi-magical thought, the psychology of typicality, and heuristic “mental tunnels” which create bias. [Page 19 ff.]

Chapter Six of the book, The Fallacy of Near Certainty, provides references to capital and systematic mistakes with its naive forms of extrapolation. [Page 111 ff.]

The patina of Mr. Rudiak’s droning presentations highlight what Piattelli-Palmarini is driving at:

In the world of probability one cannot, even where the reliability is very close to 100 percent (or absolute certainty) – such as 95 percent – extrapolate. [ibid]

The specifics of “overconfidence” outlined, beginning on Page 116, derive from a 1977 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology [Fischoff, Slovic, Lichtenstein] where persons “certain of their subjects” thought they were 100 percent correct, and rated their probability of being wrong as one in a thousand, in ten thousand, or even in a million. [Page 117].

Mr. Rudiak presents his views with that kind of overconfidence.

That Mr. Rudiak knows his subject matter, Roswell, better than most, is obvious.

That skeptics (Moody, CDA, Fernandez) goad him into lavishing his knowledge on Randle’s readers creates an argumentative scenario which diminishes the basics of the Roswell incident and UFOs in general.

Roswell, no matter how one perceives it, tells us nothing about UFOs as they exist today. Or what their import is from past observations.

The details that Mr. Rudiak generously provides and Mr. Randle encourages are not debunked by the skeptical group. They engage, also, in many of the cognitive flaws that Piattelli-Palmarini outlines, such as not knowing or using Bayes’ Law when attempting to refute Mr. Rudiak or employ a “tunnel of pessimism” [Page 139 ff.]

Piattelli-Palmarini gives several examples that, for me, show how the skeptics ruin their argumentation: Externally modulable and Subjectively incorrigible (where telling [Mr. Rudiak] that he is…inclined to commit certain errors does not immediately lead him to cease doing so. [Page 140]

UFO aficionados are inclined to be belligerent and illogical.

That’s the endemic nature of the UFO topic.

UFO UpDates provides the caustic examples of belligerency and illogic.

Mr. Randle’s blog isn’t as compassing, but it gives an outline of how far and how low the UFO phenomenon has driven academic civility.

Perhaps some of Mr. Randle’s habitués will seek out the book mentioned here and mend their ways.

(I doubt any will do that. They are victims of their own cognitive illusions.)

RR 

Why ufologists are NOT taken seriously

Here are some recent statements of Jerome Clark and Don Ledger at UFO UpDates.

From Clark:

"I don't pretend to be privy to what the gummint knows..."

"Of course it gives our ideas so much more credibility if we link those who threaten us to the gummint than to the real source, the mentally ill and the sociopathic in the population."

From Ledger:

"I think you have a lot to learn before you can claim to broaden anyone else's research in the UFO field, KK. You really do run off, hell west and crooked. Now you are attempting to weave Egyptian cotton out of bat-crap."

Do these two fellows think cutesy-poo words like "gummint" or "bat-crap" endears them to intellectuals, the media, or science?

Both men are smart guys. That they try to be cute only demeans their message(s), and their credibility.

They make UFO study look like an enterprise for goof-balls.

It's saddening to see how both men have devolved into blithering spokespersons for the UFO community.

RR

UFO UpDates tries to make Carrion into carrion

Former MUFON Director and current heterodox ufologist is being lacerated at UFO Updates, by the UFO old-guard (the UFO geezers) and ET die-hards.

Mr. Carrion had the temerity to show up inside UpDates with his anti-Roswell, anti-Arnold, and anti-everything else UFO stance.

(Smart guys, like Brit David Clarke, eschew UpDates, where the most rabid UFO mavens congregate to laud one-another and berate those who step outside the UFO orthodoxy.)

Jerome Clark, the aging UFO compiler who knows he’s squandered his innate brilliance on a quixotic phenomenon, isn’t necessarily nasty, but he is condescending; whereas the stupefacient Don Ledger adds his usual one and half cent vituperation to the besmogged atmosphere.

David Rudiak weighs in, of course, as he doesn’t seem able to work on new items for the Roswell Dream Team, which he is a member of, in name only it seems.

(Mr. Rudiak can’t handle new UFO material, as the old stuff has an obsessional hold on him.)

Stanton Friedman has shown up, as usual, to defend his ideas and work, which continues errantly and unabated, even though Mr. Friedman has got to be older than Methuselah but still going strong, defending the ET view with all the energy of a much younger UFO enthusiast.

Our friend Don Ecsedy has added valuable insights and information but that bounty is often overlooked by the heated and venomous List gang.

Mr. Carrion’s views intrigue, but the UFO stalwarts will have none of that. Mr. Carrion has to be eviscerated before his hypotheses take hold of the younger UFO crowd thus eliminating the self-adulating fervor of the UFO has-beens.

We suggest that Mr. Carrion run – as fast as he can – from the vampiric UpDate crowd before they eclipse his unorthodox views with their overwhelming load of bullshit.

RR

Ufologers' Mind-sets

Not surprised or stunned by the lack of intellectual or creative thought in the UFO community but greatly disappointed, I wondered why some notable and no-so-notable UFO mavens behaved and/or thought the way they have and do.

In our small circle of regulars we have the brilliant Kandinsky and the creative genius Jose Caravaca mingling with the significantly well-read and erudite Bruce Duensing.

But that’s about it when it comes to deep thought.

Outside our immediate circle we find Patrick Huyghe, Tim Printy, and Cathy Reason, who is a UFO Update habitué, unfamiliar to me, except for what I read by her at UpDates; each of these persons evoking signs of deep cogitation and eminent reasoning.

In the noted category, but not representing anything close to intellectual brilliance is Jerome (Jerry) Clark, and Stanton Friedman, among a few others you can name.

Now I ask, what make Stanton Friedman think as he does – gullible at times (the MJ-12 papers) and a believer in a vast armada of extraterrestrials visiting Earth (and crashing near Roswell)?

And what gives Jerry Clark the patina of an elderly curmudgeon who has a vast knowledge of UFO sightings but hasn’t provided an hypothesis or theory about what they are; that is, he hasn’t conjured up any scenario to explain sightings as he mounts them in a raft of books, only as a chronicler (not a historian surely, like Toynbee or Tuchman).

Why was Philip Klass so viciously anti-UFO?

What allows Bruce Maccabee or Don Ledger to think they have cachet about UFOs; neither has made a mark that counts.

Richard Hall was brilliant but marked by an image of grump. Why?

Let me provide and over-arching opinion about why or how Ufologists think the way they do or did…

Stanton Friedman appears to be a happily married man who loves his wife and family, which creates for him a mind-set that is comfortable and cushy. This makes for an optimistic view of life. Even as Mr. Friedman stokes the UFO filed with complaints of a Cosmic Watergate, the epithet itself tells us that he is locked into the halcyon days of UFOs (1970s) and political life when dramatic incidents were benign actually, only serious to those personally involved.

The UFO topic was moribund in the 1970s or, at least, not riled by major UFO events. (No, The Travis Walton or Pascagoula episodes didn’t ring the public bell as did the Arnold 1947 sighting or the concoctions of Adamski in the 50s and the Betty/Barney Hill story of the 1960s.)

The 1970s were a blissful time as far as UFOs go and Mr. Friedman was at the beginning of his fame as a “ufologist” – capitalizing on that “fame” with his Roswell splurge.

This modicum of fame, coming from a quiet decade, created the mind-set that engulfs Mr. Friedman today. His mental configurations were established by the pleasant vicissitudes of an era where he, free of a real job, was able to grow and sustain himself as a ufologist, thus formulating his movement along the UFO spectrum in the 80s, 90s, right up to now (2012).

His mind-set has been concretized by this euphoric, personal time-line.

Jerry Clark, who wrote callow pieces about UFOs early on for Fate magazine and others, thought he had cemented a worthwhile legacy. But in the 21^st Century he realized that he has no real legacy and this has made him bitter and condescending toward others. (His divorce, it seems, embittered him further.)

Clark is a non-entity among today’s younger UFO set. He is a no-show, without cachet about anything, although he’s tried his hand at a plethora of non-UFO activities and interests – to no avail, which exacerbates his bitterness and spiteful remonstrances at UFO UpDates where he is still seen by that site’s aging moderator as a UFO notable.

Richard Hall is all but unknown by today’s UFO aficionados. He was grump for not being able to capitalize on his UFO acumen, retiring near poverty and dying alone and destitute. But his legacy is cemented by his two-volume The UFO Evidence, which contains his pithy approach to UFO sightings with merit.

Philip Klass, long dead but still influencing today’s UFO skeptics, developed a mind-set aggravated by his need to be an expert about aircraft, which was usurped by things purported to be flying all over the Earth’s skies and followed by energetic believers in the idea that the things were highly advanced aircraft from outside the Earth.

Klass couldn’t abide the thought that aircraft, outside his desired expertise, was being exploited by men he saw as inferior to himself, in the intellectual area, especially about flying machines.

Klass took the rode that persons often take when their career toes are stepped upon – the rode of attack, take no hostages, and to hell with truth or civility.

Personages Randle, Maccabee, Ledger – Ledger the lesser known among any of the so-called ufologists – are settling into old-age, without garnering any public adulation for their extended UFO “research” and losing recognition among youthful UFO hobbyists.

Looking back to noteworthy UFO sightings and events, we do not see any person who stands out as worthy of our admiration for intellectual thought or creative interpretation of UFO sightings and events.

The UFO matter is not a deep well. It remains a pond (or puddle even) that hasn’t been dredged nearly deep enough to see what is at the bottom.

The mind-sets of ufologists is just that “mind-sets” – not reservoirs of elaborate thought or cogitation; ruminations without depth or creative imagination.

This is why the UFO enigma continues to "enig"….

RR 

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

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

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

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

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

We only have the testimony of an anonymous informant.

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

Textual content of the letter:

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

It occurred to me over 40 years ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jose Antonio Caravaca/RR

UFOs treated shabbily...

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

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

Click HERE for an enlarged, readable image

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RR

Anti-Semitic Socorro?

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

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

UPI
From UFO Digest

In that article, the false Socorro symbol is proffered:

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

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

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

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

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

Or is this just a mere coincidence?

RR

UFO UpDates and Magoniax

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

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

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

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

UpDates is so over…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Technology the Indicator of an Advanced Civilization?

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

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

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

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