The UFO Iconoclast(s)

Michael Heiser engages in some very interesting debates at his UFO Religions site:

http://michaelsheiser.com/UFOReligions/

The thrusts are many but his usual and current nemesis is Monsignor Corrado Balducci.

Balducci, the Vatican’s premiere demonologist, thinks that UFO creatures, even those that allegedly abduct humans, are, perhaps, of a higher nature than us, and more spiritually evolved, thus denigrating the idea in some UFO quarters that abductors and UFO aliens are maligant and/or evil as one blog commentator has it:

Balducci the Individualist

There’s a problem with infusing, continually, religious elements in the UFO debate, and that problem is the mixture of theological myth with ufological myth: UFOs are a phenomenon (or phenomena as we contend) and not a tureen into which every cockeyed hypothesis should be poured.

Religion is itself an amalgam of hopeful theories about God, human life and morality, and an afterlife perhaps.

Ufology is a potpourri of screwed-up and, sometimes, unique conjecture, which doesn’t need one more set of variables based upon the idea that there’s a God (and demons) who have something to do with UFOs.

The only link between UFOs and God, or between ufology and theology, is that God is an unknown and UFOs are an unknown.

That’s it.

Michael Heiser is brilliant and his views follow suit.

He keeps the UFO/religion debate intellectual.

But let a few UFO fanatics or evangelical Christian/Islamic hooples get into the fray and all hell will break loose, and not the Hell of theologians, where the Devil can be accomodated.

Opening the UFO disussion to Christian fundamentalists is akin to Pandora opening her chest of evils, which have afflicted mankind for millennia.

But if you can’t help yourself, go to Michael Heiser’s blog and sites.

You will not be engulfed in nonsense, as is the case elsewhere in the UFO universe when religion gets added to the UFO mystery.

Theoretical physicists have suggested that parallel universes exist alongside our Universe.

The theories have sobriquets such as The Multiverse (a Michio Kaku favorite) or the many-worlds interpretation of Quantum Physics. (See Wikipedia for more.)

The hypotheses intrigue, and are as certain as all the other hypotheses extant in the world of physics; that is, parallel universes have as much validity as string theory or the so-called Big Bang theory – not much.



But for the sake of argument, let’s examine the possibility of a parallel universe to ours, or many of them, as they pertain to UFOs and flying saucers.

We think some flying saucer/UFO sightings may be insertions from universes existing in tandem with ours, intersecting on occasion by mistake or design.

We have to separate confabulations by UFO hoaxers (which are more numerous than ufologists allow) and misinterpretation of military prototype aircraft – the Arnold sighting for instance – along with other prosaic-possible episodes, such as the Mantell tragedy -- from the UFO data and accounts.



This leaves a residue of sightings that might conform to theoretical intrusions by artifacts from universes snuggling up to ours.

The WW II “foo fighters” are possible inter-dimensional intrusions, as were the Washington D.C. appearances in 1952.

The little-beings outside UFOs that showed up in Europe and South America in the 1950s seem more phenomenological than extraterrestrial, but “invasions” from a universe not too dissimilar to ours could account for those sightings.



And what about the abduction phenomenon? Of all the “explanations” for those episodes, the parallel universe explanation makes the most sense. And why?

The movement between our dimension of space (and time) and another universes space (and time) would account for the lack of tangibility in abduction scenarios.

Kaku, for instance, talks about the possible insubstantial (maybe unstable) nature of atoms (and reality) if multiverses or parallel realities were to intersect.

Experiencers (abductees) report a weird kind of intangibility to their “kidnappings.”



And the world(s) they enter are somewhat like ours, but generally of a strange kind, yet not so strange as to suggest existences whose physics are completely foreign to ours.

The evanescent quality of abductions seems to confirm the many-worlds concepts of quantum physics, with all the attributes of quantum reality (if reality is the right word).

Today, when UFOs are more amorphous than structured, the possibility that they are artifacts, of some kind, from another dimension or universe, and maybe not an intelligent insertion but a random, accidental intrusion, with no meaning.



Once the convoluted UFO/flying saucer incidents are subtracted from the UFO oeuvre – the Roswell, Hill, Socorro incidents for example – the parallel universe invasions should be given some research time: the RB47 incident, the O’Hare sighting, and maybe the Stephenville, Texas sightings, among others.

When purported UFO incidents are expunged from the Bible – Ezekiel, Elijah, the God-dove at Jesus’ baptism, et cetera – the vast written material provided by mankind (prior to 1947) is devoid of flying saucer and/or UFO accounts that stand as bona fide sightings of the phenomenon.

The striking dearth of such events or appearances – excluding the scant mariner observations by Columbus et al. and the apocryphal stories about Alexander and Constantine, along with the metaphorical images in Vedic sacred writings – indicates that the general population of human observers and writers didn’t see or experience the things we know today as UFOs.

Thucydides, Herodotus, the Greek philosophers, the Conquistadors, Magellan, Captain Cook, Lewis and Clark, Livingstone, Thoreau, Dostoevsky, Melville, Bierce, Margaret Mead, and all the other explorers and writers we read or read about have nothing in their journals or oeuvre that comes close to what has become the “literature” of flying saucers and UFOs.



And the context of the few early UFO episodes – those often cited by ufology writers as proof of the ubiquitous UFO phenomenon – is mythological or religious, not historical or literary.

This plays into the Vallee hypotheses, not the Friedman theories.

That is, UFOs are either a kind of mythos, not the recent visitors to the Earth as Friedman contends.

Or UFOs are a product of the modern age, generated by, initially, Cold War anxieties and more recently as existential artifacts, produced by man’s intuition that we are alone, with no galactic companions and gods (or God) to assuage the mess we call life.



UFOs are not mystical as some ufologists believe, nor have been intrusions by a concomitant race hidden to man (so far) as Mac Tonnies portrays.

They haven’t been projections of human psyches, as Jung suggested.

(Early human strife would have provided such projections, and the Holocaust in particular, where no UFO sightings were recorded or noted, not even by Victor Frankl.

UFOs could be the bolts-and-nuts craft that Stanton Friedman has established his credentials upon, but the armada needed to fulfill his armload of visitors seems iffy for a number of reasons: intergalactic travel restrictions, support facilities (mechanical and sustaining supplies such as food and water), the unimportance of Earth in the great scheme of the Universe, et cetera.



One would expect that extraterrestrial races would not be that different, if Friedman et al have it right.

And the UFO configurations seem to hint at races not very technically different from us.

But UFOs exhibit behavior that is different. UFOs do not communicate, whereas Earth explorers always went out of their way to communicate with the strange tribes and life-forms they encountered.



UFOs could stem from time-travelers but, again, the number of UFOs seen in modern times would mean that creatures from our future (or past) have an inordinate interest in this time and place.

Even the great explorers of the past were small in number compared to the total human population, representing a scintilla of interest in what was out there while the primary human contingent (the rabble) went about their lives with not an iota of care for what lay beyond their immediate environment.



So UFOs from time seem problematic, unless almost everyone from the future (or distant past) found this time period obsessively intriguing.

Where does this leave us, conjecturally?

UFOs have not been a part of humanity in any significant way, as the lacunae in literature shows.

The few apocryphal sightings say more about the writers of that apocrypha than the reality they bent for various reasons, most self-aggrandizing.

UFOs – some UFOs – may be visitors from space (Friedman) or time (Goldberg) but not all of them.



Some UFOs are psychical projections, and hallucinatory, considering the dementia of many UFO devotees.

A few – quite a few? – UFO are hoaxes. (Dementia again)



Or UFOs are a counter-reality that impacts some Earthlings but not many actually.

And the import of that? None…none whatsoever.

Thus, UFOs are a game, meant for a few, not the (Spock) many.

Therefore they can be dismissed or ignored, and nothing will happen when they are ignored.

So fellow UFO mavens move on to something worthwhile…..

Hamilton, Lee, Rogers, Ash et al. have provided theories and demographics of life-cycles, for humans, animals, plants, even computer software.

And UFOs have (or had perhaps) a life-cycle also.

Discounting early UFO accounts as attempts to bring forth UFO life, as God (or nature) tried so often in the evolutionary process, beginning again and again, with failures aplenty (dinosaurs, Neanderthals, et cetera), we move to the modern era of UFOs, when UFOs came into being as “things” with a life entirely unique: 1944-1945



(The airships of the 1890s are not the UFOs that ufologists have been consumed with, but were human experiments, by aviation adepts.)

When flying saucers appeared for the first time, in embryonic form, as “foo fighters” in the World War II arena(s), that was the birth of UFOs.



By 1947 flying saucers had matured to a stage of “life” not unlike that of a pre-pubescent child, growing to a teen maturity in the 1960s, and then into full-blown adulthood until the 1990s.

From the 90s up to today [2008], UFOs became senile and old, actually dying in most instances, and appearing as “spirits” nowadays, phantasms or ghosts as it were.



And a rebirth of these things? Not likely, in their previous form anyway.

UFOs are dead and dying.

If a “resurrection” or new, evolutionary birth is afoot, flying saucers and/or UFOs will appear as a totally different phenomenon, in different form and appearance – even different behavior so that “ufologists” will not recognize them as UFOs.

Just as Jesus of Nazareth re-appeared, after His “death,” in an untouchable – noli me tangere – unrecognizable form, so too will UFOs re-appear, perhaps, or may have already done so, as amorphous lights and blobs of energy.



But as it is, flying saucers/UFOs were born, lived, and died, and the theology of UFOs is over, or needs a new intellectual process…..

We’ve raised some ire because of our suggestion a few months back that UFOs will only be explained when the UFO old-guard dies off, and a new breed of ufologist takes over.

http://ufoprovo.blogspot.com/2008/03/deaths-will-clean-ufo-palate.html

And a recent note from Chile -- http://inexplicata.blogspot.com/2008/07/chile-dying-days-of-ufology.html-- bemoaned the death of that country’s ufology stalwarts.

But why are old-guard ufologists so antsy or anxious to indicate or prove that UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin?

Some of the questions that might be asked of alien visitors are these:

What is the life-span of your species?

How does your species procreate?



How does maintain your species remain healthy?

What medicines or medical techniques can you share with Earthlings (to prolong their lives or make them better)?



Is death inevitable or has your species overcome death (except by Roswellian “accidents”)?



Is there life after death?

Do you have a God?



And so on…

You see, the UFO old-guard doesn’t just want to clear up the UFO mystery; there’s a survival instinct at work nowadays among those who’ve reached senility and are knocking at death’s door.

The Halls. Friedmans, Randles, Schuesslers, Steigers, even Clarks et al. are near that time when they’ll be meeting the grim reaper, as we’ve already noted.



So, of course, they’d like to know the answers to the questions above, for a number of reasons but most of all because they have concern – personal concern! – for how alien beings might answer them.

Therefore, those ufologists zero in on the extraterrestrial hypothesis because it may help them through those final years of their Earthly lives.

It’s not scientific, but when has ufology been scientific?

Now the job is getting our hands on alien visitors and pumping them for the ultimate answers to life – not for their sakes, but for ours, especially the old dogs of ufology.

While UFOs are evaporating into the ether, what they’ve been and what they are is more than creations of the human psyche.

How they’re perceived may be affected by human observation, in the quantum sense, but that doesn’t mean they’re not tangible artifacts.

(Neutrinos are “tangible artifacts” albeit of an immaterial kind.)

This goes to Platonic Forms, as we’ve noted here earlier.



The problem, as we see it, and hope to get more than a few to understand, is that the UFO mystery consists of phenomena; that is, UFOs are many things, not just nuts-and-bolts craft (which they have been in some instances), nor just ephemeral images, created by the psychic aberrations of man (or woman).

UFOs run a gamut of possibilities, and are not limited to the various explanations extant for them.

Stanton Friedman’s flying saucers exist.

Jacques Vallee’s amorphous, demonic (?) messengers exist also. (There are too many written references to them to invalidate the possibility.)



Secret military aircraft and weird atmospheric conditions account for many UFO sightings surely.

But beside all the mundane or even esoteric explanations lie a core enigmatic phenomenon that wipes away all the other phenomena, and it’s that phenomenon which ufologists (a term that really needs to be dispensed with) must address.

Jung’s psychic projections as an explanation is valid for some UFO accounts, accounts that, when validated, can be discarded.



Those accounts are the province of psychiatry, not ufological science.

Friedman’s “saucers” intrigue, more than most UFO explanations, and provide titillation for SciFi advocates, and should provoke science to check into the extraterrestrial possibility.



But as we’ve noted here, many times, science isn’t about to recapitulate and take on the UFO conundrum. It has always been and remains a scientific bête noire.

So where do we go from here?

Newbies to the UFO phenomenon must (and will we hope) pursue, without obsession, the core elements of UFO sightings that have been ignored or passed over by former and present ufologists.

And new sightings, of which there are a dearth, should be investigated with methodologies that have never been part of the present ufological arsenal.

UFOs are not created by mankind. They come from elsewhere, space or time, as Friedman posits or Goldberg suggests.

Some UFOs have been mistaken observations of Skyhook balloons and/or prototypical military aircraft.



And a few UFO accounts ring from meteorological phenomena that is so infrequent as to invite misperception.



But aside from these prosaic explanations, there is a residue of something strange and wondrous, in a poetic sense, or an ominous sense.

It’s nothing to get worked up about, in light of the world’s woes perhaps, but as a quasi-profound curiosity, UFOs should be investigated or researched by those who have the time and wherewithal to do so.

Those who’ve spent sixty unproductive years trying to fathom the UFO riddle should step aside, and let a new crowd of UFO devotees take over.

They won’t of course, but some will force them to, but the sheer power of new insight(s) and hypotheses that have substance.

We can barely wait for the UFO new-age….whatever it’s called.

For 60 years some persons have studied the flying saucer phenomenon, a few even making a career out of the thing called ufology.

In science many accomplishments have been achieved during the same 60 year period.

As examples, the following links touch upon a few of those accomplishments:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_the_United_States

http://www.scidacreview.org/0602/pdf/science.pdf

http://www.er.doe.gov/accomplishments_awards/index.htm

Now what are the ufological accomplishments we might list?

There aren’t any.

The study of UFOs, the research and investigation(s) have produced nothing, nothing at all that provides an inkling as to what UFOs are or even if they truly exist in tangible form.

Ufology hasn’t even come up with a working hypothesis which might lead to some kind explanation for the UFO phenomena.

This is shameful, considering the effort(s) that have gone into the study and ruminations about the elusive but palpable objects or images that have appeared in all the skies of the Earth, supposedly in numbers that indicate a UFO pandemic.

Taking all the materials about flying saucers and UFOs which have appeared since 1947, it is pathetically surprising that no one has made a dent in the UFO enigma.

Methodologies have been suggested, but have never been instigated in any viable way.

And while reams of “explanations” have been proffered, none – not one – has come close to resolving even one aspect of the UFO riddle.

Data accumulation about flying saucers and/or UFOs is rife, and some persons have done yeoman work in gathering that data, along with anecdotal accounts of sightings, even so-called abductions of humans by UFO entities.

Where does the problem lie? In the mystery itself: UFOs just can’t be explained or understood by humankind?

Are ufologists ill-equipped to fathom the UFO mystery, inept as it were?

Is a scientific, academic discipline needed and ufologists haven’t come up with one?

Nick Redfern gives voice to ufology’s premiere statesman, Stanton Friedman at one of his blogs:

http://www.ufomystic.com/the-redfern-files/saucer-reality/

But Mr. Friedman offers nothing concrete, just conjecture; interesting conjecture perhaps but containing a litany of UFO clichés that no longer provoke even a smidgen of response from UFO devotees.

Mr. Friedman’s analyses are old-hat, and lead ufologists nowhere unfortunately.

Redfern, along with persons like Mac Tonnies and Greg Bishop, also offer suggestions about what UFOs might be or where they may come from, but their suggestions, while intriguing, lack Friedman’s cachet, and only resonate with desperate UFO hobbyists who would love any kind of solution to the thing (UFOs) that gnaws at their curiosity gene.

The ufological dance has to come to an end, or has to take a new tack.

Paul Kimball’s idea that today’s ufologists must build upon (stand on the shoulders of) the work of old-guard ufologists like Jerry Clark doesn’t work for us.

http://redstarfilms.blogspot.com/2008/06/jerome-clark-on-anomalous-phenomena.html

That is a prescription for further failure. As old-timer Richard Hall, a logician of sorts, might have it: If the premise is wrong, everything that follows will be wrong.

And the premises of ufologists have been wrong, otherwise the UFO mystery would have been solved by now, as science has solved some of the issues it deals with.

Perhaps, as we state again, the UFO phenomenon is unsolvable, essentially so, like the mystery that is God.



But since we think UFOs are phenomena [sic], it seems to us that some element – one or two – could be resolved, at least.

And that might leave the core UFO mystery open to some brilliant person or group of persons of an Einsteinian bend who will uncloak the damnable things which remain unidentified.

We can hope….

Or have we already missed it.

A conglomerate of data or sightings – in flying saucer argot, a flap – with just one sighting of an inordinate kind (as Cullan Hudson notes) needs to take place in order for a momentous change to occur in the study or understanding of UFOs, flying saucers.

This hasn’t happened recently and probably will not, since UFO sightings of a bona fide kind are on the wane.

But was a tipping point missed in years past? We think it may have been, several times in fact.

1947 was a year of many flying saucer reports; the period 1951/1952 also.



But no one was prepared, in the early years of the modern UFO era, to understand the import of all the sightings that were taking place, and no one selected that one case which was the clue or tipping point that could explain the flying saucer phenomenon.

Everyone was flummoxed, including the United States Air Force, as evidenced by the failure(s) of Blue Book.

Could any kind of conclusions from previous tipping points be made today? Probably not, since the previous tipping points have been thoroughly scrutinized, although much after the fact.

Some ufologists will contend that other tipping points occurred, and they did. They will also say that current sightings [2007/2008] are high. They are not.

But current UFO sightings are vaporous, and without the attendant manifestations of previous sightings and episodes.

Those manifestations included radar trackings, up-close witness accounts, and an intuitive feeling by the public, media, and militaries that something important, even profound, was happening.



Some ufologists might take an archeological stab at previous tipping points, or they might look at them forensically, but most of the peripheral data will have been lost.

And that one unique sighting that was a tipping point or the tipping point will continue to remain lost in the UFO detritus that has accumulated over the years.

Opportunities upcoming, as improbable as they may be, should not be missed however.

Preparations for future tipping points, even just one tipping point, need to be in place.

This is where the UFO new-guard can do service, in the cause of explaining or removing the UFO mystery from the unknown category to the known category.

But it will take a real intellectual effort, and there are only a few persons in the present UFO community, or on the fringe of it, who might be able to pull that off.

Let’s hope for the best….

A New Yorker piece [Hello, Hal, by John Seabrook, 6/23/08. Page 38 ff.] about computers and the lack of verbal communication with them, had this to day about speech recognition [Page 41]:

“speech-recognition research is heavily dependent on the size of the data sample. Or “corpus” – the sheer volume of speech you work with. The larger your corpus, the more data you can feed to the learning algorithms and the better the guesses [you] can make.”

This applies to UFO research as well.

Skipping the early UFO accounts from before the Christian era, down into the Airships of the 1890s, one can take a look at what the UFO phenomenon has presented from 1947 forward to today [2008].

The first flying saucer reports, starting with Kenneth Arnold’s encounter, indicated that UFOs were tangible, “nuts-and-bolts” craft.



This was the general perception of UFOs, flying saucers, well into the 1970s, when, as we’ve noted before, UFOs became amorphous lights in the sky pretty much.

Today, UFOs have even lost the quasi-tangibility of lights, appearing as diffuse blobs or anomalous images in the daylight and night-time hours.

The “metallic-like” saucers of the 50s and 60s are nowhere to be seen, or rarely so.

The Tremonton, Utah images filmed by Delbert Newhouse, in 1952, prefigured the raft of later sightings that only consisted of “energized lights” flitting around in the skies.



(The seemingly substantive, triangular UFOs spotted in Belgium and Illinois or Phoenix are military prototypes in our estimation.)

What has happened is that the UFO phenomenon or, rather, phenomena, has gone from concretized craft to will-o-the-wisp things, with nothing but multiple colors or light intensities to distinguish them from normal aircraft.

This means that data – a corpus – need to be accumulated for serious ufologists to research, in ways that mimic what quantum or theoretical physicists do.



(Physicists use mathematical models and arcane methodologies to determine what reality or the Universe is made up of. Ufologists need to do the same for the phenomena that intrigues them.)

The change in the configuration of flying saucers may have much to do with what they are, intrinsically.

There is no doubt that flying saucers were once touchable, real artifacts of some kind. Too many persons witnessed them as real objects, of a metallic kind – the stuff that Stanton Friedman makes much of.



But then UFOs (flying saucers) transmogrified into something not so tangible. Why?

Abductees (experiencers) provide tales of intangible beings and craft in their accounts.

(While we think abduction reports may stem from something other than a bona fide kidnappings, as the Hills and others stated, one much allow for the possibility of the realness of those accounts, some of them at least.)



Those abduction stories supplement the change in flying saucers from hard objects to immaterial objects.

The UFO corpus for today – the date being accumulated – is that UFOs are more light than anything else.

And this is one path that might prove interesting, if ufologists can get in gear and do something other than redundantly ruminate over past UFO episodes.

From Wikipedia:

“The forms that we see, according to Plato, are not real, but literally mimic the real Forms.

In the Allegory of the cave expressed in Republic they are called the shadows of artificial replicas of real things.”

Are UFOs “forms”?

We think they may be.

And if they are. then what are the real Forms, that which the UFO “forms” are mimicking?

Jacques Vallee, and a few others, have been suggesting all along that UFOs represent another reality, a reality behind the apparent reality.

Even as a chair can be a Plato “form” with the real chair Form residing elsewhere – an “elsewhere” that isn’t exactly defined in philosophy or Jungian psychology (where Plato’s archetypes play an important role) – UFOs can be “forms” but where is the UFO elsewhere, where the real UFO Form may be found?

That is the question that Vallee (or Jung in his book on flying saucers) fails to answer.

Without the source or “elsewhere” of UFOs, it becomes difficult, maybe even impossible, to assess what UFOs really are.

But that’s what ufology needs to do: find the “elsewhere” that houses the UFO phenomenon or phenomena.

This means that philosophical disciplines need to be applied to UFO research and investigation.

While we eshew philosophy at another venue of ours, we think the methodologies of philosophy (and maybe quantum mechanics which is more philosophic than scientific) can be worked to attack the UFO enigma.

It will require effort of a serious kind, which we know ufologists are rarely up to, but that is what it will take to get to the core of the UFO reality.

And we know a few pesons who are up to the task, and prepared to make the mental (maybe physical) pursuit.

We’ll keep you apprised of their progress, if any…

The 1947 Roswell episode has tainted and continues to taint UFO research and scrutiny.

Joseph Capp at UFO Media Matters is obsessed with Roswell, Paul Kimball’s blog has been infected, and Stan Friedman and Kevin Randle have been ill with the Roswell “disease” for many years now.

For some reason, ufologists seem to think that the Roswell incident holds the key to the UFO phenomena, and the 30 year scrutiny – the initial story got shunted aside from 1947 until the late 70s it seems – of Roswell has mined everything that was and is available to mine.

The Ros”well” is dry, and ufologists can’t slake their thirst there, but they are deluded by the Roswell mirage.

It is time to move on, to other aspects of the UFO mystery.

Those aspects may be hidden or subliminal but intense research should be able to ferret out something worthwhile, if something worthwhile is actually there.

Sure, the Roswell story intrigues, in several ways, but it investigation of the imbroglio continue to come up empty.

Human behavior, military snafus, and the will to believe have been spotlighted, but UFOs?

Nothing tangible has turned up….none of the supposed debris, or alien bodies, or photographs of anything weird.

Peripheral materials have surfaced; FBI messages, anecdotal remembrances, Mogul balloons, even death-bed revelations.

But nothing that science or anyone could call “evidence” – not even circumstantial evidence, just hearsay and a flawed newspaper headline.



It’s time to move on…..really.

If Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is correct – and we think it is, with some caveats about how evolution was generated – then the idea that UFOs contain beings very much like us, from other (extraterrestrial) worlds doesn’t work, and can’t.

The evolutionary process, as Darwin explicated it, is unique to Earth.

The chemical make up, the geology, the vicissitudes of Earth’s history cannot and would not be duplicated elsewhere. The odds against that are 10ⁿ.

The physiology and mental make-up of mankind is a product of this Earth – if Darwin is right – and only of this Earth.



Creatures evolving on other worlds – even on some moons of the Solar System or Mars – would not be subjected to the same chemical/geological interactions that are specific to the Earth.

(The time-traveling hypothesis of some ufologists and/or the concomitant Earth civilization of some – Mac Tonnies comes to mind – might make sense within the Darwin framework, particularly the UFOs-from-our-future scenario, which we’ve addressed here previously.)

http://ufocon.blogspot.com/2007/05/ufo-inter-dimensional-or-time-travelers.html

Since most of the creatures spotted outside and inside UFOs (the Hill abduction is one) have features, physical attributes similar to those of humans – see our previous post -- those beings cannot have come from afar.

Even if we posit the Creationist “theory” of mankind’s rise to ascendancy here on Earth, the UFO inhabitants would be unlike humankind, unless God made them, on their world(s), in His image and He is a “gray.”



But that’s a stretch, even for us, and Stanton Friedman.

The uniqueness of Earth and its creatures – if Darwin’s theory is true – dilutes the extraterrestrial hypothesis, unless….

…unless the idea that we -- all things on Earth – were seeded by extraterrestrials, which is the SciFi version of Creationism.



Since we are cozy with the idea that UFOs are phenomena – many diverse things – we can allow a number of hypotheses, except for the one that says UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors from galaxies and worlds light years away, who or which evolved in the same way as we have on Earth.

That idea just doesn’t work in the context of Darwin.

When flying saucers – the hard metal kind (or so they appeared to be) – started landing in the late 1940s, the 1950s, and 1960s, debarking (usually) little beings, the appearances centered in Europe: Italy, France, Belgium, Spain….

The Rosa Lotti encounter [Italy, 1954], pictured above, represents the beings generally reported.

Patrick Huyghe recounts an episode of 1947 [in his Field Guide to Extraterrestrials, Avon, 1996, Page 38] in Villa Santina, Italy where two “little green men” accosted a professor of geology, Rapuzzi Johannis.



In North America, beings emerging from saucers were rather normal looking in the contactee stories, which can be discounted we think.

More reliable accounts described monster-like beings [Flatwoods, West Virginia, 1952] or goblin-like creatures [Kelly Kentucky, 1955].



South America, meanwhile, was reporting creatures with animal features, usually fur and/or fangs [Caracas, Venezuela, 1954], with several animal-like beings showing up in the 1970s.

Russian encounters had descriptions that likened the creatures to robots, usually tall in stature [Voronezh, Russia, 1989] which was antedated by a similar 10 foot tall, one-eyed being encountered in the Minas Gerais State of Brazil (the same area where Villas Boas had his CIA encounter) in 1963.



Nordic encounters [such as that in Imjärvi Mikkeli, Finland, 1970] indicated short beings (3 feet or so) with features that simulated an ice-elf.



The small, gray humanoids appeared after the 1961 Betty/Barney Hill episode, but those seem, to us, to be copy-cat descriptions, whereas the former and later encounters appear to be bona fide, at least in the recounting.



Huyghe reports in his book [above] a 1951 encounter in Salzburg, Austria that resembles the Higdon account (covered here previously) and an interesting report [Page 66, from Jenny Randles’ “Alien Contacts and Abductions,” 1994]] that took place in 1896 in Lodi, California, where three 6 foot-tall, delicate, strangely beautiful beings were encountered by two reputable witnesses.



Huyghe also gives pages to inanimate objects, mechanical in nature, from various sources that appeared emerging from UFOs and flying saucers for the time-frame of 1947-1977 but mostly in the 1950s.

Insect-like creatures have also been reported [Cooksville, Maryland, 1973] along with reptilian beings [Marzano, Genoa, Italy, 1978 and Mount Vernon, Missouri, 1983] plus amphibian creatures [South Ashburnham, Massachusetts, 1967 and Orland Park, Illinois, 1951].



The Pascagoula, Mississippi Hickson/Parker encounter of 1973, with elephant-skinned, robotic-like beings strikes us as bogus or hallucinatory, but that’s only a gut-feeling; Hickson acted as if in a transitional mental state that influenced his buddy, Parker much in the way that Betty Hill influenced Barney Hill in his 1961 account.



British episodes [such as that in Rowley Regis, West Midlands, England, 1979] often mimic fairy stories that are and have been ubiquitous in the British Isles for many years going back to the Middle Ages, and seem to represent, à la Jacques Vallee, something other than alien, extraterrestrial encounters.



We feel that an anthropological-sociological scrutiny of such reports might provide a clue to one aspect of the UFO phenomena – the creature element(s).

That is, do cultures and societies see flying saucers, UFOs, and such creatures as those listed above in ways that are skewed by their environments and societal histories?

This seems to be an area of ufological study that may be fecund with interesting insight(s) and information.

The difference between science and ufology can be seen, clearly, by comparing two talks: one by UFO “expert” Brad Sparks and another by physicist Michio Kaku on SETI and UFOs, both at Paul Kimball’s discursive blog.

Sparks regurgitates the Roswell/Mogul conflict, and Kaku examines the SETI mistake(s), with some asides about how any UFO study by science would kill the career(s) of the scientist(s) involved.

Sparks rambles, and digresses, which he readily admits. Kaku is concise and to the point.



The patina of Sparks’ exposition is one of staleness and conspiracy: the government, especially the Air Force, has policies that pit them (the AF) against ufologists.

Kaku avoids a SETI conspiracy – to defraud alien speculation – and makes it clear that the issue of alien civilizations (and UFOs) is a bit more complex than SETI or ufologists acknowledge.



Sparks is fixated on the Air Force, as are most ufologists.

It’s the United States Navy where the UFO mystery is flummoxed and controlled. The evidence is overwhelming, and we detail it at our UFO web-site.

The other thing is that Kaku is articulate, Sparks not. Sparks is not a speaker. Yes, he has some bona fide UFO credentials, but speech-making? Not his forté.

Kimball accumulates lots of material from ufologists and non-ufologists, but we find very little creative UFO hypotheses by Kimball himself.



Since this is the case, it would do well for Mr. Kimball to provide more Kaku and less Sparks, or any other ufologist of note.

You see, ufologists, aside from Stanton Friedman, just can’t hold a candle to the likes of a Michio Kaku.

Mathematics seem to be an intrinsic element of reality, not invented but discovered early on by early civilizations.

Some have even implied that mathematics (arithmetic) was provided by extraterrestrial visitors to the Earth over 10,000 years ago. [Sagan and Shklovskii, Intelligent Life in the Universe, Delta, NY, 1966, Chapter 33 ff.]



Leibniz and Newton’s discovery of calculus has become the primary methodology of modern day physics, classical and quantum.

But all math, including Euclid’s geometry, Hipparchus’ trigonometry, Lebniz’ calculus, Descartes’ algebra, et cetera, are contrivances; kinds of formal creation, manipulated by science to “prove” its theorems and hypotheses.



A clue to the UFO mystery, we contend, lies in mathematics, the real math, not the perverted math in practice by physicists and science today.

The movement of UFOs (flying saucers) seem to provide patterns that have so far been ignored or non-discerned by ufologists.

A mathematical pattern could very well be a signal or communication of some sort by those who brought and bring UFOs to Earth (from other worlds, other dimensions, or other times).

And do any symbols seen in conjunction with UFOs (as noted in an early posting here) have mathematical meaning? It seems that they may, but no one has taken the time to study the possibility, not seriously anyway.

Physicists have no idea what the essence of mathematics is; that is, science doesn’t know what math really is.

Science hasn’t pursued the mathematical reality, as that might take science into realms involving theological realities, and that is anathema to science.

But ufologists are not loath to go where science won’t go, so the pursuit of math and its possible connection to UFOs could prove interesting, even revelatory.

The speeds of UFOs, the flight patterns, the sound pulses, the numbers of UFOs in any one sighting could have meaning, obscure to human perhaps, but meaning nonetheless.

A group [The Einstein Fellowship] is working on the idea presented here and we will present any suggestions or hypotheses from them upcoming.

While some UFO aficionados think a few Biblical accounts are UFO-related, and some Hindu proponents do likewise with accounts in Vedic literature, the major events that have turned the tide of human affairs have nothing to with UFOs – nothing whatsoever.



The advances of Darius, Alexander, some Egyptian pharaohs, and the Roman Legions are recorded without UFO intrusions.



(The apocryphal stories of Alexander’s UFO sightings, even if true, add nothing to the history of the B.C. Persian conquests.)

The Middle Ages wars, famines, and diseases are also without UFO incidents.

The Normal Conquests, the Renaissance political machinations, the explorer era (including Columbus’ “discovery” of America – and his supposed UFO sighting), the Spanish decimation of Middle and South American cultures had no UFO episodes that impacted the peoples affected.



The Napoleonic Wars, the British colonizations of Africa, et cetera, the French and American Revolutions report no UFO (or anomalous) sightings of aerial things.

The American Civil War, the Bolshevik take over of Russia, the First World War, the Second World War (minus the minor flap of “foo fighters”), and the Holocaust provide no meaningful UFO stories, if any at all.



Mao’s usurpation of China, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraqi wars, the genocides in Cambodia and Africa, the assassination of JFK, the Moon flights, and other modern human events have not been altered or affected by UFO sightings at all.



There is not even an indication that UFOs or flying saucers have had a psychological impact on humankind, or even individuals who’ve seen them or think they’ve been abducted by UFO creatures.

(The few accounts of bizarre repercussions for some UFO observers cannot be definitively attributed to their sightings.)

This goes to the heart of our contention that UFOs have been and are relatively benign and without import for human civilization and evolution.

Ufologists who are absorbed by the UFO phenomena should rethink their priorities.

The running-in-circles that ufologists have been guilty of, in the past and even more so now [2008], has to stop.

Constant reversion to Roswell [Kevin Randle, Stanton Friedman, et al.] and other past UFO or flying saucer events has been unproductive, to say the least.



Physicists provide a working template for how UFOs should be studied or conjectured about.

After Newton and Einstein, when classical physics were tempered by quantum physics [quantum mechanics and quantum theory], physicists have provided hypotheses about the basic building blocks of the Universe – string theory among them – and what the Universe is basically made up of or sprung from -- the Singularity.

Physicists haven’t been any more successful at resolving the questions in their related fields of study than ufologists, but ufologists haven’t provided new, paradigm-shifting hypotheses about what UFOs are.



Yes, there have been some interesting conjectures, such as that from Mac Tonnies (who posits a concomitant Earth race that is subliminal), but each hypothetical rumination actually end up being rehashed ideas that have popped up often, before, by quacks and legitimate UFO researchers, such as Jacques Vallee.

The “new” hypotheses” are wrapped in fresh language, but underneath lies the same tired, old speculations that arrived in 1947 and fleshed out in the 50s and 60s.

Meanwhile, physicists have presented new, original, creative ideas about the Universe and the building blocks thereof.

Their methodologies (math, calculus, et cetera) remain the same as that in Newton’s day pretty much. But the proffered theories are new whereas there are no new theories for what UFOs are.

The UFO phenomena are rooted, by ufologists, in prosaic and/or mundane subjective explanations.



As we keep reiterating, ufologists -- even the smart ones (and there are a few) – do not or cannot create a new paradigm from which UFOs can be researched or studied in their essence.

The accretions within or rather upon the flying saucer/UFO morphology just can’t be set aside by ufologists or the UFO community.

The reasons for this are emotional, psychological if you will, and almost ingrained it seems in the minds of those who are devotees of the UFO mystery.

It took courage for the quantum physicists to break with their colleagues who were immersed (and are immersed) in classical physical theory.



It will take courage by some ufologists – we need a new sobriquet for UFO study – to break with the past and those ufologists who just can’t let go of it.

It will take a new breed of ufologists [Heiser, Hudson, et al.] to bring about a truly fresh, invigorated hypothesis, or hypotheses, for the UFO phenomena.

Those tethered to the old explanations, and even the old UFO episodes, have provided nothing and must be set aside, ignored if any progress in solving the UFO enigma is to be had.

This is obvious, just as it was obvious to some physicists that Newton and Einstein had to be set aside in order to get at the real reality that those men sought but couldn’t quite get a handle on.

The epithet “ufology” has to be dumped and even the working name for the aerial phenomena, UFOs.

We’ve written this before, many times, and we understand that the UFO old-guard [Hall, Clark, Connors] and middle-guard [Kimball, Redfern, Bishop, Tonnies (maybe)] are not about to be shoved aside by what they see as newbies to the fray.



But that was also the case with the new physicists – Kaku, Smolen, et al.

They have broken with the physics past, the dogs barked, but the new physics caravan has moved on.

And so it should be thus with ufology – or whatever its new mantle should be.

Objective ufologists have to admit that the UFO phenomena is long-lasting but pretty much defunct as a topic worthy of time and trouble by anyone….and we mean anyone.

The effort by ufologists, as we keep pointing out, has been without result and import.

UFOs are a back-burner item for many ufologists, while others keep flailing the dead horse as the phenomena (phenomenon to them) appears, goes away, and remains elusive in the extreme.

Science and media are right to ignore UFOs, since doing anything about them – researching or reportage – will be time wasted, and there are so many others things in life that provide (or can) a rewarding existence.

But ufologists have a lot of time (and some money) invested in UFOs, and letting loose will admit stupidity, a life-time of inane concern for a phenomenon that means nothing in the great scheme of things.

Ufologists come and go (die or leave the UFO hobby heart-broken because it doesn’t allow resolution) but the phenomena goes on, even though nowadays UFOs are an ember of its once startling effect on those who’ve seen them and those who hope to see them.

It’s quite sad – pathetic even – to see vibrant persons (such as Kimball, Tonnies, Redfern, et al.) taking the prime of their life on Earth and throw it away on a phenomena that doesn’t mean anything to anyone who has a full understanding of the purpose of life.

Some try to incorporate UFOs into their mundane activities, but even that is silly. UFOs shouldn’t even get that little bit of attention. The phenomenon is a quirk in the evolution of humanity.

UFOs mean nothing to the long road that the gods or Darwin established for mankind.

But a state of denial or a severe blind-spot in the mind of ufologists persists. And it doesn’t make sense, of any kind.

All kinds of mental gymnastics by ufologists attempt to make UFOs pertinent to human existence but the ratiocinations are flimsy at best and often bolstered by ruminations that are nearly insane in their permutations. (See Joseph Capp for instance.)

UFOs are – or were mysterious – but the days of awe have long passed. UFOs are now merely a footnote to man’s time on Earth, like the Loch Ness creature, Sasquatch, or any other phenomena that Loren Coleman has spent a life-time pursuing.

Even the small amount of time we spend on UFOs is admittedly ridiculous, and we have no defense for our squandered time (and effort).

But we’re not normal, and those mentioned above are…or so they think.

The Carl Higdon 1974 episode fascinates.

Mr. Higdon, an oil driller, recounted (as Coral and Jim Lorenzen reported) that he was confronted, while hunting elk in Medicine Bow National Forest, by a “man” who called himself Ausso, and ended up inside a “transparent cubicle” -- eventually transported to Ausso’s world.



(The full story can be found online – use Google – or in such tomes as The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters, Edited by Ronald D. Story.)

It seems that many ufologists have dismissed the Higdon event as fiction, or delusional.

But Higdon’s detailed account has elements found in other “out-of-world” transportations, and we doubt that Higdon had any familiarity with the stories that are very much like his.

And those other stories did not originate in the UFO literature.

Two episodes of Higdon-like transportations appear in Jewish Pseudepigrapha; the first in The Book of Enoch and the second in The Book of the Secrets of Enoch where Enoch, who is scantily mentioned in The Hebrew Bible (The Old Testament), is taken up into other worlds by an alien or other-worldly being, and experiences people and places similar to those seen by Carl Higdon.

Higdon: Given “pills” as food, saw animals (elk) he was hunting in forest when confronted by Ausso, taken up to the heavens (from which he saw the Earth below), taken (after he “landed”) to a high tower where he saw a brilliant, rotating light, heard buzzing sound, saw gray-haired man, young girls and ephebic boys dressed in regular clothes, scrutinized by a wall from which sprang a glassy shield, told he wasn’t what “aliens” needed, and had an overwhelming disorientation after the experience.

Enoch: Taken by “others” to a place of luminaries, saw (normal) men, saw Heaven’s pillars and their fiery lights, saw brilliant stones and ornaments, and all the beasts of the Earth, fed milk and honey, saw “angels’ who had “no difference in their faces, or behavior, or manner of dress,” came near a wall built of crystals, saw a great light, became “afraid, and began to tremble with great terror,” returned to Earth to write of experience.



There are other accounts, Biblical, that mimic Higdon’s sojourn: the Ezekiel vision [Ezekiel 10 ff.] and the transportation of Elias [4 Kings 2:11]

But there are similarities in other various literatures and mythologies, such as that of Phaeton [Bullfinch, Chapter V] taken to the palace of the Sun, aloft on glittering columns with silver doors. And he saw nymphs, whose “faces were not alike nor yet unlike – but such as sisters ought to be.” And he saw the animals of the gods. Phaeton looked down upon the Earth. After a chariot test, he is told he is not favored by the gods, is thrown from a lofty tower and smitten by Jupiter’s lighting bolt, falling to Earth, dead.



An African myth – The Son of Kim-ana-u-eze – in African myths and Tales [Dell, 1963, page 87 ff.] relates how the son of Kim-ana-u-eze is raised up to the lofts of the moon and sun, is fed, has intercourse with (normal) people, is surrounded by beasts, and has occasion to experience things similar to what Higdon experienced.

Many subliminal UFO abduction tales contain “details” common to the Higdon story, and those found in mythological, medieval accounts, and especially religious experiences, often called ecstasy or rapture fervor.

But the common elements bespeak something other than a borrowing of “details.” The works are to disparate in time and place, and the “details” are arcane usually.

Higdon could have known about the Enoch literature, but that seems unlikely, as the Enochian literature wasn’t and still isn’t well-known. Also, Higdon’s account is just dissimilar enough to rule out “plagiarism.”



Moreover, Higdon, didn’t try to capitalize on his “adventure” – either monetarily or notoriously. He preferred to seek an explanation, ultimately hiding out from curiosity seekers, as Timothy Green Beckley noted in his account.

And the story told by Higdon, as bizarre as it appears on its face, has a patina of truth about it; the phantasmagorical aspects are too mundane.

So something happened to Carl Higdon. It was a relatively long time ago, as such things go, but the tale may contain a clue as to what ufologists should be dealing with when they get away from the nuts-and-bolts part of the UFO phenomena.

After all, UFOs, as we keep relating, are not just one thing; they are many, and some UFOs, or abductions, may have nothing to do with extraterrestrials as we understand the term in its SciFi context.

If UFOs are depicted in primitive petroglyphs and the stories in the Hebrew Bible are authentic [The Ezekiel vision and the Elias episode for instance], the message inherent to those early sightings remains cryptic.



AmerIndian myths and accounts of UFOs (or things similar to them) are still without clarity. The message, if there was one, was obscure and is still obscure.



The alleged Alexander [The Great] sighting(s) and Constantine’s “cross in the sky” epiphany, despite the accrued Christian context, were devoid of a clear message.



And the Middle Ages battles of UFOs seen in the skies left nothing to explain what that was all about.



In the modern era (of UFOs), starting with the airship occurrences of the 1890s up through the 1947 raft of flying saucer sightings and into the year 2008, UFOs (and their progenitors, if any) have provided no message to humankind, no decipherable message anyway.



The absence of any message – and UFOs have had ample opportunity to leave a message if the things wanted to – is significant.

Like God, after the Torah, and Jesus, in the New Testament, who spoke in parables, UFOs have been obscurant. Why?



If alien beings pilot UFOs (or some of them), they’ve had enough time to understand the human mind-structure, and ability to communicate or receive communication.

The hypotheses by some “ufologists” that UFOs have left messages, via symbols or symbolic behavior, is just flaky, unless UFOs, like God, are playing a game of some kind with humanity.



But because so many years have gone by, eons actually, the game of UFOs (and God) has worn thin, to the point that human beings don’t or shouldn’t care.

If there is a message being proffered by UFOs, we humans are either too stupid to get it or the message is a garbled mess, by insane creatures, a message that can’t be deciphered because it is totally irrational (like the message of the Creator).



Or there has been no message to be gleaned. UFOs just can’t communicate, or are as confounded by us we are of them, and choose to remain mute.

Either way, it’s a sum-zero situation, with no winners…..

A Canadian film-maker who likes UFOs takes umbrage with our idea that he and his cronies diminish the seriousness of UFOs by using them as a front for beer-drinking and womanizing.

Most ufologists think some UFO phenomena are serious matters, even going so far in some quarters to say they represent an apocalyptic omen.

Other UFO blokes (us included) think that UFOs are a benign (thus far), unknown intrusion of several phenomena, one of which may be serious (an alien presence of some kind).

Science eschews UFOs because the field has been, since day one, infected by crazies who have tried to use UFOs (sometimes successfully, as in the case of George Adamski) to augment their ego-needs.

Serious “ufologists” have distanced themselves form the crazies but there is a renewed effort, by the Canadian film-maker and his pals, to re-invigorate the nonsense element within the UFO community.

The recent release of some British government UFO files has created an environment that might generate a sensible interest by the public and media in the UFO phenomena.

But that sensible interest will be undercut by those who use UFOs as a pretext to act silly and be cavalier, all the time pretending to be investigating UFOs seriously.

The 1950s created an atmosphere of looniness about flying saucers, but with the alleged abduction of Betty and Barney Hill, UFOs took on a sinister aspect.

UFOs have a patina of eeriness about them that is more than subliminal, even though nothing untoward about UFOs has been proven, in the scientific or military sense.

But UFOs may contain a serious threat to humanity, or not. We just don’t know.

Yet, UFO aficionados who use the phenomena as an excuse to get wasted and traverse the world as playboys and playwomen do an injustice to those who want science and media, even the public, to give UFOs a bit more concern than has happened since the contactee days.

The party-people diminish UFO study as their ballyhooed shenanigans give continued credence to others that UFOs are the bailiwick of the fringe, and not anything that should be taken seriously.

So our plaint that the film-maker is subverting ufology, and the investigators he has shilled into his fun-loving approach to UFOs, is only that: a plaint.

The film-maker can have all the fun he wants, but let’s not use his tomfoolery as a template for ufology or UFO research.

Life is short, and partying is okay, if one is a hedonist or epicurean.

But for those who think there’s something serious going on, within the human condition, and that UFOs may be a part of that, then the UFO happy-crowd should be ignored or avoided.

There comes a time when objectivity must supercede subjectivity, and that time has come to the UFO phenomenon…….or, rather, the phenomena.

UFOs are not just one thing, and never have been.

The things or images seen in the skies, and sometimes on the ground, must be categorized, not in the “Close Encounters of the First, Second, or Third Kind” but along the lines of the classifications that are used in biology: species, genus, family, order, et cetera.



To allow the sobriquet “UFO” to define, as a generality, the diverse objects and lights reported by observers does a scientific disservice to the phenomenon, which should be categorized as phenomena, because that’s what the reports indicate – a varying spate of unusual “things” that have so far defied explanation.

Going back in time one finds obtuse reports of strange aerial phenomena that can’t be classified as one thing.

The modern era of flying saucers and/or UFOs suffers the same confusion; ufos and flying disks have never been described in a way that permits a singular definition.

Thus, ufologists, the serious ones, have been flummoxed by the extreme diversity that neophytes dubbed UFOs or flying saucers, not taking the time to differentiate the completely different aspects of the so-called unidentified flying objects.

As in biology, some species of UFOs could belong to a genus, such as Tangible Objects. The species name would be represent something concrete, solid.

Others fall into a genus of Intangible Objects, and the species would be Lights for instance.

(We expect that others would provide better categories, but we’ll use ours for now just to give you an idea of what we’re suggesting.)

The categories would have to include the Contactee or Abduction scenarios, in a genus of Phantasmagoria with species of Benevolent Contact and Sinister Contact.

(Remember, these are only our own lame suggestions.)

The classifications would have to have the patina of seriousness about them, an almost scientific hue.

And then ufologists could specialize in those areas of the classification that interests them, taking away the confusing or inchoate nature of ufology as it exists today.

This is one way to bring order to ufology, and a methodology that might allow some of or, at least, a few of the UFO sightings of the past to be placed in a perspective and UFOs of the future to be scrutinized by a disciplined approach, which is sorely lacking in the UFO community nowadays.

[See all the UFO blogs and web-sites to confirm our point.]

Our suggestion here isn’t beyond the abilities of some in the UFO community as it exists today.

But the suggestion here will be scoffed at by those who like the idea of a wild and wooly phenomenon which lets them keep the modicum of notoriety they’ve accumulated over the years pretending to be part of a select group privy to UFO secrets and information.

Nonetheless, we present the “biological” thesis to get ufology off the dime, so that the phenomena [sic] may finally have a denouement.

In light of the massive cyclone in Myanmar, dozens of tornados in The United States, and a gigantic earthquake in China, not to mention the Lebanese conflict, the various African crises, the South American volcano, what do UFOs have to do with it all?

Nothing.

In the real world, UFOs impact nothing….not the culture, not societies, not civilizations, nada…zilch, zip.

UFOs are for muddled dilettantes. That’s it.

So let all “ufologists” put UFOs in the proper perspective and move away from the pretense that they matter.

What keeps science and media rather far from the UFO phenomenon is that the activity of UFOs/flying saucers has always been sneaky.

Sneaky may attract militaries, and some UFO devotees, the brave and/or naïve kind, but sneaky doesn’t attract scientists or media.

Science deals with quantum particles, which are not only sneaky but crazy. Moreover, quantum particles are theoretical and allegedly infinitesimally small, so they can do no harm to the unsuspecting.

Quarks can’t blind-side those who are investigating them. (Or, at least, they haven’t done so thus far.)

And science can play and has played with quantum particles, but only theoretically (mathematically) so fear of the sneakiness is hypothetical, or non-existent in the mind of scientists

However, UFOs are large and appear surreptitiously (and always have).

UFOs that are military prototypical aircraft are cloaked in secrecy, and sneakiness. That’s there essence.

UFOs that are hoaxes are intrinsically sneaky.

But real UFOs are sneaky in a calculating way, intelligently sneaky. And that scares away science and media. (Media doesn’t have the acumen to deal with sneaky; it eludes journalists, who only attack sneakiness after the fact, not head on.)

Ufologists, most of them anyway, are thick-headed so they don’t see UFOs as sneaky, just a phenomenon that is inscrutable.

Even the abduction phenomenon or quasi-hostile actions of UFOs don’t frighten ufologists.

This isn’t because ufologists are brave souls. Most aren’t. But ufologists are a little child-like, and “sneaky” is a behavior that doesn’t register with most UFO researchers; they are in such awe of the phenomenon that the aspects they should be scrutinizing are often (usually) overlooked.

Science. On the other hand, prefers to deal with phenomena that are overt, or abstract. This is safe, and scientists are nothing if not cautious.

But for those who are fearless when it comes to UFOs, and this because stupidity lacks commonsense awareness, the sneakiness of UFOs, aside from the military kind, may be grist for research.

Is the sneakiness of UFOs geared to an agenda, or stems from caution on the part of the UFO progenitors?

Do UFOs elude mankind and ufological measurement because they are fearful of human beings?

This seems unlikely, as UFOs have broached aircraft and humans aggressively, even abducting some human (supposedly) on occasion.

No, UFOs are sneaky for reasons yet to be discerned, and we suggest that UFO researchers, real researchers, try to determine why UFOs are sneaky.

This seems to be an avenue for investigation that the militaries of the world, especially those in The United States, have pursued diligently.

And since ufologists can’t get militaries to open up, and never will get them to, ufologists have to analyze the “sneak factor” on their own, where pay-dirt, about the phenomenon could happen.

Meanwhile, be careful when confronting a UFO. The confrontation might be the last thing you experience in this life….or not.

The UFO phenomenon is being taking all over the place, especially into realms that smack of quantum theory.

(We’re guilty of a quantum evaluation ourselves.)

Once the UFO epithet replaced the term “flying saucers,” the phenomenon was opened to conjectures that have become more bizarre by the day.

Tangible objects that once dominated the unidentified flying scenario have been substituted by amorphous blobs of light and/or skimpy drones of a TinkerToy kind.



And now an article – one of many recently – in SEED magazine (June 2008, Page 50) presents the results of tests in Austria that seem to confirm reality is the result of observation.

We, Mac Tonnies, and others, have presented the hypothesis – hardly new – that reality may be chimera, created by someone of something, and we (humankind or each of us singularly) are a concoction from the mind of a master computer geek. (Some would call that geek God.)

The idea that UFOs are creations of the mind is not unique to ufology. Swiss psychologist Carl Jung posed the idea way back in 1958 in his work, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.



But many, if not most ufologists, such as Stanton Friedman and Richard Hall, think UFOs are flying saucers – physical, metal-oriented craft, and they have the weight of evidence in their favor – or they did.

UFOs of late have shown up as anything but tangible, touchable objects; they’ve appeared, as noted, in forms that belie anything concrete or firm.

This allows UFO theorizers to expand their hypotheses into areas once considered arcane, or metaphysical.

Does this do justice to the phenomenon? Perhaps.

But it also removes the possibility of actually getting proof of the UFO reality, which is the bugaboo that haunts the topic.

Ufologists keep trying to prove to “outsiders” that UFOs are real, when any commonsense view of sighting reports and legitimate photos/film/videos indicates that UFOs are indeed real – that is a given, or should be.



The question that should be, must be focused upon is “What are UFOs?”

This is where the door is opened to all kinds of crackpot ideas, along side some valid querying.

And thus the investigation or research into the UFO reality has become very muddied.

Fortunately a few UFO devotees – mostly outside the UFO mainstream – have taken the quackery in stride, ignoring it pretty much, and have begun to look at the phenomenon in unique ways, often scrapping the whole ball of UFO wax that has accreted over the past 60 years.

This new group of “ufologists” -- they eschew that title – can be found in links at the right of your monitor screen here.

Seek them out if you really want a more “scientific” view or approach to the UFO mystery.

And skip the party-going UFO conventioneers and UFO socialites. They’ll merely waste your time and divert you from a real scrutiny of UFOs.



They are named at our companion blog – UFO Provocateur(s).

Mike Heiser is PhD who deals with Semitic religions usually, but he also has an interest, surprisingly, in UFOs.

Check out his new blog:

http://www.michaelsheiser.com/UFOReligions

This statement appears on a SETI blog (http://setiradio.blogspot.com/):

…we haven’t heard from ET (either via visits or via a signal)…

It’s part of an argument “in response to the article in MIT's Technology Review magazine by Nick Bostrom.”

A discussion has ensued from SETI proponents and others.

SETI is an interesting scientific endeavor, funded privately, hurting no one, and hoping to find other technological civilizations extant in the Universe.

We support SETI, but ufologists get rankled by one premise of the organization, and that’s the idea that ET (extraterrestrials) hasn’t visited the Earth.

SETI hasn’t received a signal from space – we discount the WOW signal – but it has only parsed a small part of galaxy and none of the Universe beyond, so the SETI search isn’t exactly a failure, so far.

But to deny that extraterrestrial visitations haven’t taken place is a statement of hubris, not scientific objectivity.

In the UFO field, there is, among all the possible explanations for the UFO phenomenon, Stanton Friedman’s alien space craft scenario.

(Yes, others posit ETs from outer space but Mr. Friedman is the face of the hypothesis for most UFO aficionados and everyone else.)

SETI hasn’t received a signal from an advanced (or any other kind of) civilization but it holds out hope for that to happen.

Ufologists have mountains of circumstantial and tangible evidence for UFOs, showing the things to be real.

We, and others, pose alternate possibilities for the origin of “flying saucers” and/or UFOs, and one of those alternate possibilities is that the phenomenon is primarily space craft from other worlds, other planets, and other civilizations.

Of all the explanations for UFOs, the alien space craft explanation is the most sensible when the reported sightings, landings, and perceived occupants are taken into account.

(That the sightings may be chimeras from other agencies, supernatural and otherwise, can be allowed, but visitations from other planets is the easiest explanation to swallow.)

SETI disallows the possibility, but ufologists have a lot going for them whereas SETI has nothing going for it, so far anyway.

So the condescending attitude of SETI devotees is really out of place and off-putting to an objective mind.

SETI should not be anathema to UFO confreres, but it is, and only because SETI is so smug.

While we give SETI props for its efforts, we join hands with the UFO community in eschewing the SETI stance about UFOs, even while we explore a slew of other explanations for the elusive enigma that is real, and sometimes touchable.

SETI would do well to try and score a real point. Ufologists have already done so.

Miranda Evjen says Hi,

I work with the Amazing Roswell UFO Festival held every year in Roswell, NM. This year’s festival will be held from July 3-6, 2008. I thought your audience might be interested in knowing more about the festival. I’ve including some information about this year’s festivities below. If we can offer you any more information, art or logos, please let us know at media@ufofestivalroswell.com


Media Contact: Alexis Kerschner, Rick Johnson & Company (505) 266-7220, media@ufofestivalroswell.com

ROSWELL, N.M. The City of Roswell invites UFO enthusiasts and skeptics alike to join in the celebration of one of the most debated incidents in history this July 3-6, 2008. The four-day event will feature guest speakers, authors, live entertainment, family-friendly activities and possibly an alien abduction.
The City is expecting more than 50,000 visitors during the festival and guests are encouraged to make travel arrangements early. Links to accommodations, an event schedule and more in depth information can be found at the new festival website

http://www.ufofestivalroswell.com/.

In early July, 1947, a mysterious object crashed on a ranch 30 miles north of Roswell. The Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) issued a statement claiming to have recovered a crashed “flying disk.” An article ran on the front page of the Roswell Daily Record and the next day, RAAF changed its statement to say that the object was a weather balloon, not a flying disk as they previously reported. This revised statement sparked immediate controversy and has continued to be a topic of debate more than 60 years later.

During The Amazing Roswell UFO Festival, guests can visit alien attractions, attend lectures, book signings and help uncover the truth about one of the most infamous cover-ups in history. Media passes are available now. Contact Alexis Kerschner at media@ufofestivalroswell.com to get your passes. For more information about the festival, visit http://www.ufofestivalroswell.com/

We have hundreds of UFO magazines going back to 1947 (Fate et al.)…..

What’s interesting is that the magazines are fraught with interesting conjecture and photos, by persons long dead and many still involved with the UFO phenomenon.

It’s somewhat enlightening to see what stories and positions were once taken by writers such as Jerome Clark, Kevin Randle, and debunker James Oberg, among others.

What surprises, somewhat, is how imaginative the UFO articles were. Nothing like them appears in current magazines (the few that exist) or in the plethora of UFO blogs extant.

UFOs and flying saucers once excited writers and readers, whereas nowadays there is palpable malaise about UFOs, with feigned excitement taking the place of actual excitement in the good ol’ days.

John Keel appears, as do Wendelle Stevens, Timothy Beckley, Lloyd Mallan, Ray Fowler, Richard Hall, and even the great Donald Keyhoe, to name a few.

While we eschew seeking the UFO answer from past UFO episodes, we do think that a cursory glance at previous flying saucer tales and conjectures would be entertaining, and perhaps a spur to refreshing the UFO dialogue and investigation.

If you have need of or seek a particular flying saucer tale or writer from the past, let us know, and if we have the material, we’ll scan it for you.

UFOs seem to have appeared to early man, as portrayed in cave paintings and other petroglyphs, and a UFO presence is palpable in Sumerian and Biblical accounts about 10,000 B.C.



Sporadic UFO accounts may be found in Biblical literature right up into the time of Jesus/Christ and for a period shortly thereafter.

Constantine’s UFO observation of 312 A.D. appears to be the last significant recorded sighting until the Nuremberg UFO “battle” of 1561.



UFOs remained rather quiescent until about 1890; that is, nothing blatantly unidentified is reported for the lacunae between 312 and 1561 and 1561 until 1890.

Our concern here is the dearth of UFO-like accounts in psychiatric circles for the period between 1890 and 1963, when psychoanalysts and other practitioners of the mental arts, including Freud and Jung, among others, were treating patients for hallucinations and perception anomalies, even dreams where one would think a few abduction-like anecdotes would have surfaced.



But no persons seeking psychiatric help recounts a UFO experience or anything resembling an abduction event.

Scouring the extant psychological literature for the period mentioned, we found no references, not one, that resembles the early UFO accounts in the Bible and none mimic the classic accounts from the modern era of UFOs.

It wasn’t until Betty and Barney Hill’s scenario was outed by their psychiatrist, and taken up as a template by hypnotists and pseudo-psychologists thereafter that UFOs got the on-the-couch treatment.



UFOs were not visible or recorded for those long periods we cite above, but during the heyday of psychoanalysis, 1890 to the early 1960s, flying saucers were prominent in he public/media mind.

Yet, no one under treatment for mental aberrations or emotional problems presented flying disks or UFOs as the progenitor of their plight.

After the Hill episode, however, one can a raft of UFO accounts that seem ideal for psychiatric scrutiny, many brought forth by amateur and professional hypnotists, seriously and haphazardly.

Where were UFOs during the open-spaces from during the Dark Ages and after the Renaissance?



And where were UFOs in the psychiatric arena when they were prominent is the public psyche, especially after 1947?

Something doesn’t add up. But it never does where UFOs are concerned.

That’s one reason why science and/or media won’t deal with UFOs seriously.

We won’t persist in the quantum aspects of UFOs, which we (and others) have done in recent months, but let us try to make a (minor?) point…..

UFOs operate as if they are quantum artifacts. And we’ve enumerated that aspect of UFOs in postings below, as has Bruce Duensing at his blogs (Intangible Materiality and UFO Paradigm Probe).

UFOs act like quarks; that is, they mimic the names arbitrarily ascribed to quarks by physicists: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom.

(You can find more about quarks and, of course, quantum by Googling the terms.)

UFOs, as we’ve indicated before, are macro-manifestations of quantum particles, not metaphorically or figuratively but in actuality.

They can be studied, scientifically, as such, which would eliminate the defensiveness (and foolishness) that permeates UFO “research” which we discuss in our previous posts here and elsewhere.

This also goes to the heart of our desire to see UFOs renamed, or re-invented as Alien Worlds Publisher/Editor Stuart Miller suggests.

Those who see UFOs as extraterrestrial craft won’t go along with this, nor will those who think UFOs are hoaxes, hallucinations, misidentified military aircraft, meteorological phenomena, or God’s angels.

But those who really want to find out exactly what UFOs are might consider a paradigm shift regarding the mysterious intruders, and work to bring about brand new investigation and methodologies to the UFO table.

We’re trying to do that with our physics/philosophy consortium, The Einstein Fellowship. And we think others in the UFO community, not locked into old-think about UFOs, might do something along the same lines.

That is, if they can muster some open-minded and objective persons who haven’t been liquored-up by flying saucers, and addicted to the merry mayhem that UFOs often generate.

That’s the hard part: scrapping the UFO accretions of many years and starting anew.

But it can be done, if UFO-interested persons set their minds to it…..

After the term “flying saucers” was ridiculed out of existence, UFOs became the epithet for the mysterious phenomenon (or phenomena) that various peoples keep observing overhead and sometimes on the ground.

Unfortunately for aficionados of the enigma, the UFO sobriquet has also evolved into a term representing foolishness (or worse).

Science and media, even much of the public sector, skews up their eyes and minds when UFOs enter the overt arena.

Getting past the laugh-factor is a hurdle that can’t be overcome; it’s too ingrained as a derisive element of the UFO conundrum, maybe even the essential element, to allow serious discussion of the things.

There are many reasons why this happened, starting with the military debunking of the 1940s and exacerbated by the contractee movement of the 1950s.

Media didn’t help, as newspaper stories and television accounts made light of sightings and the people involved in those sightings.

Media likes a good joke, and flying saucers and/or UFOs were (and are) grist for the lame attempt of journalistic efforts to appear funny, something reporters and editors try to foster to assuage the public’s disdain for media aloofness and condescending attitudes.

Science and scientists generally won’t touch the UFO debate with ten-foot poles. Science won’t even address the topic jocularly. UFOs are anathema in scientific circles.

But the phenomenon deserves serious scrutiny and investigation.

UFOs have more substance than quantum particles or black holes, and are even more intriguing in practical ways.

Science fools around with string theory but can’t tackle UFO theory? That’s not being scientific, just ostrich head-in-the-sand behavior.

Ufologists – a mantle just as tainted as UFOs – are at fault here too. Those UFO mavens have brought down opprobrium upon themselves and the phenomenon both.

By cavalier investigations and acceptance of loony accounts by loony people seeking publicity and a modicum of fame, ufologists muddied the very waters they were supposed to make or keep clear.

But that’s all water under the bridge. What should happen now?

UFOs as a term for the ongoing, but greatly diminished phenomenon, has to be scrapped, and replaced by a new terminology, and a new, more rigorous scrutiny, by persons who have no distinct connection with the whole UFO history.

This means that the Renses, the Clarks, the Friedmans, the Randalls, the Lazars, the Halls, et al. and the repository of UFO history have to be discarded and the phenomenon looked at anew, with new people, and new paradigms.

We’ve written about erasing the UFO past (in our tabula rasa post here), but that won’t happen so long as the current members of the UFO community remain intact and in charge of the UFO discussion.

But, perhaps, we can get the Tonnies, the Redferns, the Bishops, the Millers, and that “objective” ilk to restrain themselves when they take on “UFOs” in their colloquies with other devotees of the phenomenon.

Mac Tonnies has already started dialogues that stray away from UFOs as such, but he’s in a definite minority, and shunned by the UFO old-guard who need UFOs as their mantra because of the time and effort they’ve expended on UFOs, the term and accoutrements to it that they’ve tried to capitalize on, some to a greater extent than others, but all with an investment in the term UFOs that can’t be easily dismissed.

Nonetheless, if the phenomenon is to be resolved or explained, it can only be so by a fresh start, and a whole new group of persons, with new thought and new insights.

And that new group can’t be saddled with the badgered term “UFO.”

(The phrase "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" is too wordy for a sound-byte and too complex for the mental faculties of the public at large, or media. So that replacement doesn't work.)

As Alien Worlds magazine Publisher/Editor Stuart Miller has it, UFOs need to be reinvented.

He’s right, and the study of UFOs concomitantly.

We’ll address the issue further upcoming, and will suggest new terminologies for the besmirched mystery, even though even we will have to rework our blog titles and our outlook on those things that intrude now and then, causing minor uproars amongst persons whose curiosity hasn’t been sated thus far by anything or anyone who presumes to know something about UFOs….er, we mean…..ah….um…

Oswald Spengler, in his book The Decline of the West (and other tomes) posited that city-states (countries, nations, empires, et cetera) have a “biological” existence; that is, they are born, live, and die much like human beings and other flora and fauna.



This is, we conjecture, what has happened and is happening to UFOs (flying saucers and the strange aerial phenomena that have been reported by many observers).

Early UFOs appeared in ancient skies as chariots, shields, and sun-like or comet-like visages.



When they showed up near modern times, they did so as air-ships, dirigible-like flying vehicles.



They had matured from “hardware” and meteorological phenomena to actual craft, operated by beings or as self-propelled entities.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, they became adolescent, and appeared with substantial bearing and activity: they even inter-acted, foolishly, with humankind.



In the 1960s and 1970s they formed gangs and, by abductions and other intrusions (over head), terrorized humanity oftentimes.



In the 1980s they started to mellow, and their activity became benign and non-confrontational pretty much.



In the 1990s, up to our time (2008), they have been on the wane, with occasional spurts of senile activity, as they start their descent into death, which should occur any time now.



We may be even be seeing the “ghosts” or spirits of UFOs, as they have perhaps already died in reality, as they have in the minds of many around the globe.



(Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire also acts as a precursor to the UFO phenomenon, and not just metaphorically.)

A number of UFO buffs have listed the best UFO sightings that prove the phenomenon is real.

Sure, UFOs are real. That’s not the question.

The question is “What are they?”

Stuart Miller [Alien Worlds magazine] likes Paul Kimball’s top ten UFO sightings in Kimball’s documentary, Best Evidence.



Mr. Kimball presents some very interesting cases, and leaves out some even more interesting cases, such as the Coyne/National Guard helicopter event of 1973 in Ohio.

The Kimball listing, along with others – even our own here at this blog – provide some intriguing UFO events, but none – including our own – provide anything close to an answer of what UFOs are, from whence they derive, or what is their essence.

After 60 years plus of scrutiny by UFO aficionados, some seriously investigating the sightings and/or supposed landings, not one person has solved the UFO mystery; not one UFO case provides bona fides for the phenomenon.



There is conjecture all over the place, and here too, at this blog.

There has been much conjecture about UFOs in the modern era, and almost as much for UFOs in previous eras, going all the way back to pre-literate ages.

Yet there has been no definitive answer to what some UFOs are.

Yes, some UFO events have been determined, such as the Gulf Breeze, Florida sightings (false), The Mantell pursuit (a Skyhook balloon), Roswell (an atomic bomb/balloon experiment), the Billy Meier photos (hoaxes), the 1964 Socorro landing (a Lunar Module test), the Phoenix Lights (military flares and a prototypical aircraft), the Villas Boas affair (CIA abduction), and so on.



But others are without resolution, and intriguing indeed: The Coyne confrontation (above), the 1948 North Dakota/Gorman dogfight, Shag Harbor, the Tremonton, Utah crafts (filmed), the Ann Arbor/Hillsdale sightings of 1966 (misrepresented as “swamp gas”), the 1561 Nuremberg UFO battle(s) – one of Kimball’s “best” also, and so on.



But the seemingly authentic UFO events and sightings are not explained, and remain at the core of the mystery, elusive as ever.

Listing UFO sightings doesn’t do anything to determine what UFOs are.

The listing is a kind of treading-water thing, to maintain some interest in the phenomenon, which would otherwise go the way of séance hoo-doo or the Loch Ness Monster fad.



UFOs keep popping up, and ufologists keep their avocation alive by cogitating upon them.

But no explanation is forthcoming, nor is one expected.

UFOs, like the existence of God, appears to be a matter for mental gymnastics only, and is forever destined to elude human understanding.

But for those with nothing better to do, UFOs will remain an existential raison d’etre, more or less.

Something that ufologists seem to ignore about UFOs is how they re-supply; that is, how do they replenish their energy sources, food stuffs, and other exigencies of space or inter-dimensional travel?

If there are as many UFOs sighted as reported, just from where do they get their sustenance?

Even if UFOs are robot-piloted, they’d need to have some place from which to re-fuel or re-energize.

And if they are “manned” by living species, how do they eat or get their food and other things like medicine and supplies?

Are there motherships someplace in the nearby ether that provides UFOs and their crews with all the needs that crop up?

The lack of any palatable answer gives a bit of credence to Mac Tonnies idea that UFOs are a concomitant Earth species, unknown to us humans pretty much but having access to Earth’s resources.

That aside, if UFOs are real, and they seem to be, why don’t these craft and their occupants need a recurring boost of travel-fuel or energy, and why don’t they need to have food on a regular basis, or if they do, where do they get it from?

(Yes, the Snippy and/or cattle mutilations may account for some ingestions, but the so-called armadas of flying saucers cried out for a larger buffet than what those animal dissections allow.)

UFOs can’t be flitting all over he place without a re-supply camp or site, if one considers how may of these things are seen and have been for so many years now.

Species have to eat or re-fuel, and their ships would need to re-fueling too, unless the things are a chimera or quantum unreality as Bruce Duensing suggests.

At any rate, we don’t see how all the UFOs that are reported and have been reported can exist without an overt or palpable source for the things that any space-travelers or worm-hole travelers would need, unless they’ve evolved into self-sustaining beings or entities, and have made their vehicles to be likewise.

But then, of course, there could be a Wal-Mart near Saturn.

Anything seems possible in the UFO universe.

It’s time to scrap everything that has been found out about UFOs, historically and accumulatively since the very first sightings – those in the religious texts (including the Indian epics) and everything since – Roswell, Lakenheath, the Hills episode, Socorro, Tehran, Phoenix, O’Hare, Stephenville….everything.

Ufologists should start from scratch, eliminating all the detritus that has encrusted the flying saucer/UFO mystery over the past sixty years, and begin fresh, new investigations of sightings extant.

Let the dead bury the dead, as the adage goes.

This isn’t just a plea for dumping UFO bilge overboard, but a suggestion that can take the enigma into a new arena of thought and research.

After all, the massive material gathered by many over the recent past has provided nothing of value, not a scintilla of useful information or data that comes close to solving the UFO riddle.

Surely this will upset the hoarders of arcane UFO anecdotes and fanciful accounts of flying saucer sightings. (They wallow in the plethora of irrelevant materials that make up the UFO literature.)

But a blank slate might just be what science and real UFO investigators need to get a real sense of what’s going on in the UFO pantheon.

The past can’t even be prologue. The phenomenon requires a clean slate upon which those who are interested in the anomalous things can scribble new thoughts about the mystery without being encumbered by all the nonsense that UFOs have acquired over the years.

This will take a strict discipline, and withdrawal symptoms shall affect many who now thrive on the glow and afterglow of previous UFO sightings.

Starting a new edifice is always daunting, and deep-sixing the UFO past will put many out of business, those who’ve invested time, energy, and materials they sell to each other and the gullible public.

But it has to be done, for the sake of a new UFO science and the desire to legitimate the phenomenon to newbies and scientists who scoff at the foolishness that UFOs have produced among immature, non-intellectual types who’ve besmirched the phenomenon by their shallow and/or inept research.

Let the blackboard be erased….

While there have been a plethora of descriptions of extraterrestrial visitors debarking from UFOs over the years, a lot of them have done so without apparatuses needed to breathe Earth’s air.

Abductees (experiencers), especially, indicate the “beings” taking them hostage are without extra gear, au natural apparently.



The creatures seem acclimated to the Earth’s atmosphere.

This either indicates that the “aliens” come from places with the same chemical make-up as Earth, or are from Earth itself (as the Tonnie’s hypothesis says), or the recounted visitations are hallucinations or bogus.

UFOs are real, of course, many stemming from misinterpreted military craft right here on Earth.

Some are psychologically or physiologically induced.



Some may even be craft from Outer or Inner Space.

But the UFO beings are another thing altogether. Seen coming out of UFOs, or sneaking into bedrooms and cars to kidnap human beings, those entities often do so with no adverse affects, during their sojourns of afterward, as H. G. Wells stipulated in War of the Worlds, where the intruders’ immune systems were not prepared for Earth’s germs.



(If alien visitors were affected, or had been, by Earths’ microbes, they wouldn’t keep showing up in the numbers reported.)

And wouldn’t some alien force from other planets (or dimensions) bring with them some kind of illness or disease foreign to Earth’s inhabitants? Maybe they have. (AIDS?)



UFO investigators haven’t done much with what we’ve present here, but they haven’t done much with anything ufological, since the UFO mystery goes on unabated, and seems destined to do so for a while, maybe never to be resolved.

Meanwhile, we’ll see if anyone can capture a UFO visitor, physically or by camera. But we’re not holding our collective breaths.

One factor that eliminates the Jacques Vallee and Mac Tonnies hypotheses that there might be co-inhabitants of the Earth who live in an isolated plane of existence or underwater as a full-borne civilization that interacts with human beings via UFOs, paranormal manifestations, et cetera is the non-interference in Earth affairs.

That is, the UFOnaughts or other-dimensional beings – the co-inhabitants – have not interfered and do not interfere, directly, overtly, or meaningfully, in Earth’s activities: warfare, pogroms, genocides, natural disasters, migrations, or anything of consequence.



And if there were co-inhabitants – subliminal or otherwise – evolutionary aspects, emotional and psychological more than physical, would force these entities to eventually become affected by the emotional elements that make up mankind.

No entities, imperceptible or sub rosa, could escape the influence of the beings that share the landscapes of Earth with these invisible residents as Ivan Sanderson put it.

Alien beings from extraterrestrial worlds could, possibly, be devoid of feeling, and that corresponds to that happens when UFOs interact with humans, especially in the abduction scenarios.

These entities are without compassion or empathy, if witness accounts have any veracity at all.

But co-inhabitants, if they’ve been interacting with humankind for the millennia that Vallee, Tonnies, and a few others suggest, would have, by evolutionary parameters, adopted or been affected in some significant way by the psychological machinations of humans.

This evolutionary effect is outlined in Lecomte de Noüy’s book, Human Destiny.

But nowhere is there evidence, of a credible kind, that UFOs or the entities that pilot them interact with humans sympathetically; quite the contrary.

This mitigates against the crypto-civilization thesis.

And, in some obtuse way, it augments the ET thesis, if one is inclined in that direction as an explanation for the UFO/flying saucer phenomenon.



Bruce Duensing has a blog, like Tonnies, devoted to the idea that human beings have “brothers and sisters” of a different nature, who share this planet, and have since time immemorial.

It just doesn’t work that way if Darwin, Teilhard de Chardin, and de Noüy are right, and the fact of non-interference seems to indicate that they are quite correct.

The aloofness, cold, indifferent interaction by UFOs and their beings (if any) should be a cause for paleo-psychological investigation, and the continuing colloquies about a shared civilization or group of beings (or things) that move about without feeling or empathy for the race that overtly inhabits this planet should be seriously reconsidered.

We don’t think so.

Consider every sighting or UFO event, even those that are iffy….

Abductions are serious and painful, physically and psychologically, no matter whether they are real or not.

The Maury Island sighting was disastrous, as was the Mantell episode.

Nothing good has come from the Roswell debacle.

Radiation burns and illnesses have afflicted some UFO observers.

Close encounters have not been jovial by a long shot.

Pilot observations and military contact with UFOs, here in the States and abroad, have not proven to be hilarious.

Persons have lost their jobs when they’ve reported flying saucer encounters, and some have committed suicide when they’ve become too involved with UFOs.

(Some may even have been murdered to keep what they knew from the light of day.)

The Hills didn’t have a fun-time when they had their UFO encounter, and ridicule has followed many who’ve had the temerity to report a UFO sighting.

We know that some in the UFO community think UFOs are grist for humor (or attempts at such), even going so far as to provide silly awards and encomiums for those besotted by the phenomenon.

Think of James McDonald, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, M.K. Jessup, John Mack, et alia and you won’t find a rib-tickler in any of their stories.

Even if UFOs are not a military or security threat to the United States or any other country on the Earth, they still do not provoke laughter among cognoscenti.

Only the demented would make light of UFOs…

The argument that UFOs couldn’t be constructions (aircraft) of the United States military, or else they would have been used in warfare situations extant, is bogus.

The United States military establishments have been holding back their most advanced weaponry, including fighter-bomber aircraft, for the eventual and inevitable war between the United States and China/Russia, countries that will form (and have already agreed to) an alliance against the United States of America.

[From Answers.com:

A strategic alliance

In 2001, the close relations between the two countries were formalized with the Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation, a twenty-year strategic, economic, and controversially, (arguably) an implicit military treaty. A month before the treaty was signed, the two countries joined with junior partners Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The PRC is currently Russia's largest customer of imports needed to modernize the People's Liberation Army, and the foremost benefactor of the under construction Russian Eastern Siberia – Pacific Ocean oil pipeline.]

The aircraft that is held in abeyance for this war, under the most severe Top Secret parameters, are often spotted, during test flights, as UFOs.



Does this preclude extraterrestrial visitations seen as UFOs? Not necessarily, if historic or prehistoric representations and account are valid.

But the idea of a vast armada of UFOs, circling the Earth, is unreasonable, even if one posits a base nearby (such as the back-side of the Moon or one on a moon of a nearby planet).

The fleet of UFOs needed to account for all the sightings that are reported, let alone those that are not, would indicate an alien presence that is tantamount to a de facto occupation of this planet already.

That no evidence of a purposeful occupation has taken place removes the ET hypothesis for the UFO phenomenon, even if one puts forth a benign observational exploration by alien visitors to this planet.

There are just too many sightings to provide credence to an extraterrestrial presence of a significant kind.

UFOs are a combination of many things, just as the Air Force predicated in its Blue Book files, from weather phenomena to hoaxes to misidentified aircraft – the secret military aircraft we allow for many UFO reports.



The Air Force had it exactly right: of the 12618 sightings attributed to flying saucers or UFOs for the Blue Book period [1947-1969], only about 700 remained unexplained, and those numbers can be used to indicate what ratio of UFOs seen currently are actually unexplained phenomenon (or phenomena).

Extricating hoaxes, misidentified aircraft, weird meteorological phenomena, et cetera, from all the sightings supposedly being reported to ufological organizations and media will provide a core or residue of observations what should get attention – serious attention – from UFO investigators and/or science.

And discovering the secret flying machines of the U.S. militaries, for the oncoming Sino-Russian conflict, should prove interesting all by itself…even more so, perhaps, than the UFO conjectures that have yet to provide anything worthwhile.

If UFOs are tangible vehicles, from an extraterrestrial source or sources (and that “if” is rather large in some quarters), how does one explain the various entity configurations that have appeared with them (UFOs) over the years?

That is, why do diverse entities show up in various, separate periods of time?

For instance, early accounts of the gods who arrived in space ships (or vehicles), except for the fish-god Oannes of the Sumerians, were human-like individuals, as is the case with the angels or messengers that appear in Hebrew Bible accounts.



While after that early time there is a general lacuna of UFO accounts where any entity is seen or experienced at all, in the late 1890s air-ships showed up in America that contained human-like beings who spoke English or definable dialects (German, for one).



The major spate of UFO sightings in which entities are supposedly observed came in the late 1940s and early 1950s when beautiful human-like creatures – like those from the Biblical era – made appearances (such as Adamski’s Orthon and Truman Bethurum’s Aura Rhanes).



But as the 1950s progressed, other creatures appeared, weird dwarfish beings and a clot of other entities with strange, non-human features.



Then in 1961 (a bit later actually), the Barney and Betty Hill creatures surfaced, the so-called “grays” that have become the fixture for UFO creatures.



A few other creatures surfaced in the 1970s, such as the Pascagoula beings that Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker encountered.




But the 1980s, until today, have produced little or no UFO entities; none that have captured the public interest anyway.

What does this tell us about UFOs and/or those beings which supposedly pilot them?

And what does the normal size of UFO entities tell us?

As you know, no gigantic or particularly diminutive (very, very small) creatures have been spotted or noted exiting or entering UFOs.

Giants were mentioned in the early Hebrew Biblical texts, and giants show up in Greek myths, but most accounts of the gods (Egyptian, Norse, Indian, et cetera) do not indicate that visitors from the skies – whether gods, demons, or alien beings – are considerably abnormal in physiognomy or stature.



Most gods were humanistic in kind, even when they sported animal features or disguises.



And UFOs themselves are not particularly abnormal in size or performance from what physical laws allow; even the huge motherships that have been reported are not beyond reasonable size for aircraft. (Dirigibles approximate them.)



Then what about the dearth of female entities?

Inside the Egyptian, Indian, and Greek pantheon of gods and ancient literature there are few goddesses such as Lilith in the Hebrew Bible, but female gods are few, compared to male gods, who predominate.



And in ufology only the 1950s contactee obsession with females and the Villas Boas case indicate that women were once part of the UFO phenomenon.



Most UFO reports lack any singular notice of women entities as part and parcel of extraterrestrial visitations.

Some abductee stories contain alien female aspects, but the abduction phenomenon is fraught with too many irrational elements to make the female presence within them credible.



There are drawings of what UFO observers have reported about entities they confronted or saw, but no forensic study of those observations is extant.



A study of these diverse UFO entities and the feminine lack should be grist for investigators, either the ET-believers or the crypto-human kind.

A serious analysis might go far in determining just what the UFO enigma consists of or means.

If the diversity of UFOs indicates a multiple alien or extraterrestrial presence here, why is there no apparent conflict between the visiting races?

There are too many different UFO configurations and humanoid-like pilots to allow that one culture is represented by the phenomenon, unless the culture mimics Earth, and doesn’t actually come from afar but, rather, is an intrusion from our past or future.

And if the phenomenon represents an Earthian origin (past or future), wouldn’t the phenomenon’s inhabitants be as confrontational amongst each other as countries here have been and still are?



One might suggest that the few alleged flying saucer crashes reported over the years (Roswell among them) were the result of “warfare” between the saucers, rather than a technical malfunction or bizarre accident.

But no current reports show a confrontational demeanor by UFOs.

That wasn’t the case years ago, it seems, as the Nuremberg UFO “battle” of 1561 indicated.



Did one alien race conquer all the rest, or has there been a peace treaty worked out since the conflicts of 1947?

Or are UFOs merely a phenomenon reflecting the idiosyncratic projections of humankind as Jung and a few others have suggested?

UFOs only impact a small part of the human race; that is, only a few human beings, relatively speaking, are interested in UFOs or flying saucers.

But Google UFO or flying saucer and you’ll find a plethora of web-sites and blogs where the main theme concerns the phenomenon.

For instance, Frank Warren’s blog – http://frankwarren.blogspot.com/-- is the Sam’s Club or Costco of ufology.

Mr. Warren’s blog is replete with UFO information, all kinds, in vast quantity and quality.

(It’s one of our favorite UFO hang-outs)

But Mr. Warren’s blog isn’t the only super-club of ufology. There are others just as chock full of UFO information, and we have some listed among our links.

And this is the problem. The UFO mystery is without focus, generally.

Science specializes. Technology specializes. Medicine specializes. Music, art, literature specialize.

Persons interested in the above categories determine what area of expertise they wish to pursue and they have at it.

In ufology, everyone – well, almost everyone – want to sink there teeth into the UFO buffet. No one wants to snack or partake of one foodstuff; it’s all or nothing.

This won’t resolve the UFO enigma certainly.

UFOs are diverse, maybe consisting of several kinds of things: real objects from alien worlds, machines or phenomena from the past or future, an unusual meteorological phenomenon, holographic images from a source or sources unknown, et cetera.

There are common factors or a common factor within the UFO panoply. But no one has the will or discipline to ferret out the common factor(s).

Until ufologists – or at least some of them – settle down to seek the elements within one aspect of the UFO phenomenon, the field of ufology will remain amorphous and irrelevant, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

A blogger who doesn't know the history of Edward U. Condon posts that he (Condon) was a hypocrite.

There's much more to the story:

The Condon Affair

I've identified what Angelia Joiner reported Mike Zimmerman saw in Stephenville. It was the constellation Corvus.

According to Angelia's report, Mike said he saw three lights: two white lights grouped closer together and higher, and the third one, a reddish orange color, closer to the horizon. Mike also said his compass indicated 115 degrees.

If you generate a sky map (e.g. via Your Sky) for Stephenville, Texas for the date and time in Mike's story, you'll see just what Mike's described. At azimuth 115 degrees, two blue-white stars (Gienah and Algorab, or Gamma and Delta Corvi) lie near each other, and below them, nearer the horizon, lies a bright yellow star (Kraz a.k.a. Beta Corvi).

These three stars constitute the "sail" of the constellation Corvus. The pulsating beams of light which Mike reported were the scintillations of the stars, which always appear much more pronounced when looking at stars nearer the horizon than when looking straight up.

I'm corresponding with Angelia Joiner about what I've found.

Andrew Sweeney

Addendum:

I've attached a copy of the horizon view from Your Sky. (Technical data: View toward horizon from 32°13'12"N 98°12'49"W, azimuth 115°, Thu 2008 Jan 31 6:05 UTC.) Your Sky allows images to be used in any manner, without restriction. The url for a backlink to Your Sky is http://www.fourmilab.ch/yoursky/

(I'm not affiliated, just a casual user.)

Segment One of an Unsolved Mysteries show from 1987 about UFOs and United States military aircraft:



Segment Two of the 1987 Unsolved Mysteries show about UFOs and U.S. military aircraft:

If all the alleged flying saucer and/or UFO crashes were true, that would mean a vast armada of alien craft was in situ around the Earth.

And many of those vehicles were subject to the whims of Earth’s topography and weather (even gravity) after the vicissitudes of a long journey through space or another dimension, causing them to destruct or crash.

The idea of deficient alien spacecraft flies in the face of a highly technical civilization visiting Earth for millennia.

Either some bumbling alien life force started visiting the Earth around 1947, but didn’t have the technical moxie that earlier space beings had.



Or an alien civilization produced a clot of vulnerable craft for the time period and just made it out of their area of the Universe (parallel or otherwise) and ran into trouble with an Earthian environment that befuddled the pilots of those craft or undid the technology that produced them.

It doesn’t make sense, unless there has been no crashed (or recovered) flying saucers and the tales about them are a concoction of muddled minds or tricks of Jacques Vallee’s metaphorical demons.

Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that “the medium is the message” (a concept that relates how newspaper formats, TV news broadcasts, and other media presentations are the message rather than the content within them) applies to the UFO phenomenon particularly.

That is, UFOs, as observed, are the message. What UFOs are, exactly, is NOT the message.

The UFO mystery has always been compounded by the various configurations of the things. From the air-ships of the 1890s to the flying saucers of the 1950s, to the triangles of the 1980s, to the gigantic lights of 2007 and 2008 – those observations are diverse and so varied that no one can say what a UFO exactly looks like. But that’s the message.

What UFOs are, in essence, continues to elude investigators of the phenomenon. UFO displays, however, are not elusive, but blatant.

Kenneth Arnold’s chain of flying boomerang-like objects, Mantell’s “Sky Hook” sighting, Reverend Gill’s aquarium object, Zamora’s egg-shaped container, Belgium’s flying triangle(s), O’Hare’s cloud-cutter, and Stephenville’s huge light all tell observers something – not what UFOs are necessarily, but something.



The one constant in all flying saucer and/or UFO sightings is the difference in the configuration and behavior of the reported “objects.”

The UFO medium is the UFO message.

But what exactly is that message?

McLuhan’s concept about media doesn’t have anything to do with meaning, in the philosophical sense. McLuhan doesn’t even provide a clue as to what the medium message is. He merely describes what the medium exudes: cool or warm sensory attributes. Meaning is thus abstract.

This is exactly what modern, abstract art is or does: provide sensory reaction, not meaning. Or not meaning in a logical or rational sense.



The reactive force of media’s McLuhan message, and abstract art’s message, may be likened to Carl Jung’s theory of the archetypes, where imagery has meaning, but that meaning is not relevant to practical, everyday living. The message is transcendental, and applies to the “spiritual” world, where Plato’s real reality pertains.

This is what UFOs provide (perhaps).

Capturing a UFO, despite the Roswell scenario, has nothing to do with UFO reality. Seeing UFOs, describing them, hints at a message that has so far proved elusive to ufologists.



We contend that ufologists are unable to fathom the UFO message because ufologists are inept generally, without the profound investigational acumen that is needed to unravel the UFO enigma….but that for our sister blog, The UFO Provocateur(s) – http://ufoprovo.blogspot.com.

A new discipline is needed to study the UFO phenomenon, one that is untainted by the errant thinking of the past (and present).

And it will take a group, like The Einstein Fellowship, to provide that new discipline…

The UFO Provocateur(s)

We have converted to video files (.mpg) our collection of movies obtained (some time ago) from the General Services Administration of the Air Force Blue Book collection of UFO movies (listed above).

They may be viewed online at our UFO web-site (http://ufos.homestead.com) or at our Google video site.

Material may be found at:

http://ufos.homestead.com/explained.doc

Ufologists aren’t seeking the truth about UFOs; they’re just seeking attention.

With the plethora of web-sites and blogs vying for that attention, the UFO phenomenon has become an embarrassment of vanity for those who pursue the things to enhance their own egos or self-loathing.

Displaying everything UFO-related won’t ever get to the heart of the UFO mystery. The panoply of flying saucer detritus merely showcases how discombobulated the UFO community is, with an obvious lacuna in serious research.

Nuts took over the flying saucer visitations in the late 40s and early 50s, and their progeny remains ensconced in the extrapolated phenomenon (or phenomena, if you will) today.

No matter how serious some ufologists pretend to be, their façade belies a need to be notable about something, and UFOs are the modus for their self-fulfillment.

UFOs don’t mean anything to them; it’s the modicum of fame or notoriety that they seek (and need).

A scrutiny of web-site or blog content proves how cavalier UFO research is, and how prominent self-glorification is.

Few blogs and web-sites take the phenomenon seriously – we’ve noted some that do in our blog listings on the right of your monitor screen – but one has to concede that they do entertain, which is primarily what flying saucers, UFOs, and ufologists have done since 1947.



Ufologists who make appearances on television assume an air of seriousness, but a twinkle in their eye or a quirk in their smile (Stanton Friedman is a good example) gives away the frivolousness of ufology. UFOs just can’t be taken seriously, and ufologists know this nowadays, so they play-act at being somber and quasi-scientific.

This psychopathology isn’t harmful however. It’s a fantasy that makes life bearable for many who would otherwise be mired in a truly humdrum existence.

UFOs make their lives palatable, providing escape from anonymity or existential ennui.



Maybe that’s the clue to what UFOs really are: a mechanism of the gods to assuage the boredom that life presents to the great unwashed masses.

Whatever the UFO reality, the one thing one can say about the phenomenon is that it has created a social construct that isn’t beneficial to mankind’s evolution but surely makes for a fun time among the meshuggahs who have made the phenomenon their “raison d’etre.”

Luke Ford's UFO DNA web-site is replete with superb UFO information.

You can access it here:

http://www.ufodna.com/

Mathematician David Hilbert’s “entscheidungsproblem” (decision problem) applies to algebraic and calculus conundrums mainly, but also applies to the UFO phenomenon: results cannot be conclusively proved, which Kurt Gödel established with his paper, “On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems.”

Hilbert and Gödel determined that what seems logical from outside a system was not necessarily true (or logical) within a system itself.

UFOs as a systematic phenomenon can be seen in that same light; that is, UFOs may appear to be real from a vantage point apart (outside) of the phenomenon but from within the phenomenon itself may not be real at all, or more “real” than anyone can imagine.

Carl Jung’s view that flying saucers are primarily a psychological manifestation doesn’t work here, as that view is from without the phenomenon but pretends to gather its truth from within the phenomenon, where conclusions can’t be made.

(Jung’s view from within is a chimera: a view from outside the phenomenon that appears to be from inside the phenomenon but is hardly that at all.)

The problem is unresolvable since no one can get inside the phenomenon (and never has been able to do so) to determine what the phenomenon’s real parameters are.

Looking at UFOs from outside has allowed for myriad conjectures as to what the things are.

And “truths” of what UFOs are have been argued, and determined, by various factions of the UFO community.

But such “truths” are not the real truth as such truths are not provable (or determinable) from within the phenomenon itself, which has remained beyond the scrutiny of observers and UFO investigators.

The brilliant recluse, Jacques Vallee, the intellectual Jerry Clark, and the highly intelligent Stanton Friedman can pose hypotheses about what UFOs are, and those hypotheses can be seen as true by others looking at UFOs outside the phenomenon itself.

But without access to the inside of the phenomenon, the “system” as it were, UFOs remain undecidable, and present the “entscheidungsproblem.”

No logic or (true) reality can be determined from within a system (UFOs) itself, and any truth determined from without a system (UFOs) has got to be false by virtue of a lack of an ability to encompass a total truth of a system, mathematical or otherwise.

This means that the totality of the UFO truth is beyond the ken of anyone, even those who (some named above) are skilled in logic, intelligence, and even Jungian intuition.

Mathematical truth, as noted, cannot be encompassed by even powerful logical systems [The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing by Martin Davis, W. W, Norton, N.Y., 2000, Page 118].

And UFO truth also cannot be encompassed by powerful logical systems (take note Richard Hall) so conjecture is futile, as it has been and will be.

Thus, pursuing the phenomenon is an act of folly, a madness that even Jung underestimated.

Both "UFO Hunters" shows (on the SciFi and History networks) Wednesday [1/30] were abysmally pathetic.

The Maury Island case on History got short shrift, diverted by pretend science and the SciFi effort was a case of talking heads and hypnosis for sightings that didn't get addressed by the "hunters" any better than what is done by arm-chair ufologists everyday.

Will the shows get better? One would hope so.

A new book from Dr. Michael Heiser -- The Facade -- which we highly recommend may be previewed and/or ordered here:

http://www.facadethebook.com/

Or blacks? Or Latinos? Or any other minority?

UFO witnesses and so-called abductees (experiencers) are invariably white, middle-class or lower class persons.

Aside from Barney Hill and Lonnie Zamora and a very few others, the predominant minority classes are under-represented when it comes to UFO sightings or alleged alien abductions,

Gays never report UFO sightings. (Closeted gays – homosexuals – may do so but those who are overtly gay do not.)

What does this tell us about the phenomenon?

It seems to confirm Carl Jung’s thesis that flying saucers are a myth concocted by the mind of Western Civilization man.



Or, if UFOs are real, tangible objects, they lie outside the interest or experience of those who are suffused with concerns that are more practical or hard-shipped.

That is, UFOs are the purview of those with too much time on their hands or have a need to make their boring lives more interesting.

The panoply of ufologists is comprised of those very middle-class blokes who have no credentials for anything significant.

Persons with careers that mean something are not attracted to ufology. And those who have economic survival needs are not inclined to see or report UFO sightings; they have more immediate interests.

Gays are completely involved with sexual seductions, so UFOs elude their conscious, existential endeavors.



What has sustained the UFO mystery is the rapt attention they get from all those who don’t have a stake in society or any societal cachet. The white, middle and lower-middle class UFO mavens or viewers of UFOs need something to confirm their humdrum existences, and UFOs fulfill a need to make their lives (somewhat) meaningful.

Gays, African-Americans, Hispanics, and other groups making up the sub-stratum of American society couldn’t care less about UFOs, and UFOs don’t impact them or their senses.



But Caucasian members of American society (and that includes white Canadians) have a need to or desire to feel part of the society which ignores them when it comes to making a difference in the world.

Mexico’s inhabitants, excluded by the wealth of its northern neighbor, also are quick to use UFOs to garner a claim to importance that they don’t have economically or politically.

So, one can conclude that UFOs are grist for the desire and needs of the red-necks and/or scruffy members of America’s middle class, with used to be called the Silent Majority, but is very noisy when it comes to UFOs.

The dearth, or complete absence, of photographs, and therefore, cameras apparently, during the O’Hare Airport sighting of November 2006 is mimicked by the January 2008 Stephenville, Texas sighting of January 2008.

This was also the case during the whole Roswell episode of 1947: no photos of the debris field, the debris itself, or anything else for that matter, excluding the press photos of balloon fragments allegedly belonging to the wreckage that was thought to be a crashed flying disk.



Since YouTube, Flickr, and other online internet photo sites are fraught with thousands of inane pictures, and ABC’s America’s Funniest Videos contains, each week, a plethora of idiotic video captures, one has to wonder why those cameras and cell phones are never at the ready when a UFO occurrence takes place.

This is also the case, somewhat, for so-called UFO abduction events. That is, some persons contend they are repeatedly abducted by aliens, but none of those persons has had the wherewithal to put cameras or other detecting devices in their bedrooms to capture photos or evidence of their UFO captors or the abduction episode.



Setting up surreptitious observation material is common among those who have children and think their nannies or housekeepers may be abusing the kids.



Even NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” has succeeded in capturing video of child molesters, without too much aggravation in setting up their stings.

So why don’t abductees do the same?

Some current History Channel programs (Monster Quest for one) show investigators arranging cameras and traps to capture evidence of unusual creatures of the paranormal or crypto-zoological.



SciFi’s “Ghost Hunters” does the same for ethereal beings said to inhabit (or haunt) places.



But when it comes to UFOs or alien abductions, cameras just seem not to be available.

This is part of the problem with the whole UFO phenomenon: it is betrayed by the klutziness of those who “see” them or are fodder for their kidnappings.

The Stephenville, Texas UFO sighting of January 2008 as reported by Good Morning America (ABC) and the Today Show (NBC).

Note GMA's Robin Roberts' comment about a lack of photographs (or cameras apparently, down there in Texas -- pertinent):

A paper by Charles Hamel

The third floor at the headquarters of Scientology in Clearwater, Florida is devoted to the investigation of UFOs.



UFOs, or rather flying saucers, factored in Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s life: he and his intimate friend, rocket-fuel scientist John Whiteside Parsons, associated with Naval Intelligence in the late 1940s and early 1950s and both became advocates for flying saucer technology which was being studied diligently by the Navy.

Parsons, who lived with Hubbard, was a founder of a government rocket project at California Institute of Technology that later became the famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

(Hubbard’s book ‘Dianetics” – the premise for Scientology – was used by some commanders in the Army and Navy as a kind of training manual.)



Hubbard, a writer of pulp science fiction, in a meeting with George Adamski during 1951, shared ideas about flying saucers and the “messages” that Adamski and Hubbard had allegedly received from flying saucer entities.

(Hubbard’s associations with Parsons, Aleister Crowley – the occultist – and Adamski helped fuel Scientology’s aura of secrecy and cultism.)



Hubbard had always maintained a secret UFO subset to Scientology that he shared only with his inner circle.

And in recent years that subset has become an aspect of Scientology that only the “religion’s” serious initiates study.

The Clearwater laboratory and/or research center has accumulated documents related to UFOs from Naval personnel who are Scientology members.

L. Ron Hubbard always had a Navy connection, and some contact with the CIA. His wartime service was Naval, and “early biographies issued by Scientology say that he was flown home in the late spring of 1942 in the secretary of the Navy's private plane as the first U.S.-returned casualty from the Far East." [Los Angeles Times. THE SCIENTOLOGY STORY by Joel Sappell and Robert W. Welkos, June 24-29, 1990]

(Naval Research is the one United States government agency that remains committed to investigation of UFOs and has done so since early on in the phenomenon’s appearance.)



What Scientology believes UFOs are or what members know about them, is not available to outsiders and not even available to outer members of the “religion.”

But the inner core take UFOs seriously, and some even go so far as to say that L. Ron Hubbard didn’t die in 1986 but was transported aboard a UFO, “ascending” to the heavens where he exists even to this day.

Whether or not Hubbard knew more than most about UFOs can’t be determined by outside sources not connected to Scientology, and perhaps not even by most Scientology members.

But, again, as usual, UFOs impact another mysterious organization, and confound those who study the phenomenon.

The ruminations that Earth and human existence are a computer simulation (Virtual Reality) is not dismissed lightly by some in the scientific community, and accepted by many in the computer sciences.

Jaron Lanier provided a piece in Discover magazine [November 2007, Page 29 ff.] entitled “Are we trapped in some god’s video game?”

In it he quotes philosopher Nick Bostrom: “it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.”

The idea that this existence is “virtual” is not new. William Gibson's Neuromancer covered the topic in fiction [1984] and even Immanuel Kant touched on the possibility in his 1781 “Critique of Pure Reason” [Transcendental Aesthetic, Section II, Time, 7, Elucidation].

Therefore, if our existence is virtual, then UFOs have to be virtual also. (Virtual reality can’t subsume real reality, and vice versa.)

The scenario goes something like this, as Lanier has it in his Discover column:

“If a simulation is perfect in every way, it is by definition indistinguishable from the thing it simulates…

[Trying to determine the difference between real existence and virtual existence] people are interested in…the existence of an entity that can look into the lives of players in VR, a powerful player who is usually but not necessarily hidden. It’s similar to believing in a god…Some people imagine this creature as a pimply nerd in the sky who is running a cosmic copy of The Sims, who are us.”

Lanier’s suggestion of a kid/nerd would explain why UFOs are so confusingly variable in behavior and configuration, even schizophrenic-like.

Jacques Vallee’s other-worldly UFOs would be easily explained if UFOs are the by-product of the computer simulation that is life, our life.

That is, the nerd who has created us – our virtual reality – is an immature being, a kid as it were.

And UFOs are just one of the many aspects of this kid’s “game.”

Such a virtual reality would explain the nonsense(s) of humanity: wars, natural disasters, crime, and UFOs.

(It could also account for the esthetic aspects of this existence – the music, art, literature – but that for another time, and another virtual reality; one that runs parallel to our virtual reality, and explained by quantum mechanics.)

UFOs may be the clue to this game of god (or the gods); a clue that we’ve mistaken for a reality that doesn’t actually exist but which we have access to in our confined simulation.

But one can’t expect ufologists to render the clue meaningful as ufologists seem to be quirky avatars that our nerd/god created to make his game, and our virtual reality, more bizarre, for this nerd/god’s silly entertainment.

Earth is too insignificant to attract alien beings in flying saucers.

The UFO phenomenon can’t be explained by interplanetary alien visitations; the universe, even the Milky Way, is filled with too many planets that are more prone to invite visitors than Earth would.

The Earth is infinitesimally small in the cosmological context, and without vibrant attractive features. Even the water element is trivial by observational standards.

Unless UFO inhabitants have technologies that enable “them” to ferret out minerals or liquids that they need or find interesting -- and no UFO has exhibited such advanced technology – the Earth would remain invisible to them.

Alien explorers scouring the Universe or just our galaxy alone would miss the Earth by virtue of Earth’s inconsequentiality.

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune or one of their moons would create more excitement than Earth would.

But Earth-centric ufologists still think that this planet is a beacon of some kind that has attracted interplanetary visitors since time immemorial.

Sure, the UFO phenomenon exists, but would better be explained by time travel (from the past or future) or even a parallel universe or existence.

(The Mac Tonnies idea of a concurrent, unknown or hidden Earthian civilization accounting for UFOs is without any evidence, circumstantial or otherwise.)

Those who have astronomical acumen understand just insignificant the Earth is, in the great cosmological scheme of things.

As a beacon for flying saucers, Earth falls short by a long way.

And the vast number of UFO sightings and varying craft configurations (if real) indicate a sizable presence that means some alien culture has an inordinate interest and exploratory fleet available to waste time in Earth’s skies, or a slew of alien cultures have stumbled upon Earth and have been intrigued enough, to the detriment of all other planets in the galaxy or Universe, to remain on scene for millennia, and to what purpose?

A technologically advanced species wouldn’t find Earth’s radio or television broadcasts of such vital interest that the species would expend vast resources and time to seek the source out. It’s senseless on the face of it.

An argument can be made that UFOnauts are loopy and we human beings can’t fathom their thought processes or modus operandi.

That’s a possibility we admit, but hoping for a relief from Earth’s woes by such obtuse creatures makes little sense also.

And if flying saucers were or are an invading vanguard, the procrastination bespeaks something not sinister but inept.

No, cosmology doesn’t allow for alien or interplanetary UFOs, so the mystery has to be explained in some other way....or dismissed out of hand as worthy of further attention, which we’ve been advocating for some time now.

Ufologists have become archeologists of a kind; that is, with no serious UFO sightings in recent years, they’ve been relegated to exhuming the remains of UFOs past.

Without current UFO events of a Roswell kind or contacts and landings that can be likened to the French/Italian wave of the 1950s or the so-called abductions of the 60s and 70s, those interested in UFOs continue to perform exhumations on every flying saucer and/or UFO event they can resurrect from historical/news records.

Since the UFO bones have been picked clean, many times over actually, what else can ufologists do? Without new sightings – significant sightings – the UFO well is dry.

Many who were UFO aficionados have moved on or are moving on.

A few diehards continue to flog old sightings but more sensible folks understand that such flogging is futile. Nothing new can be gleaned from sightings that have been scrutinized to the point of imbecility.

Some diehards have taken to revitalizing the contactee genre. Others are absorbed in the old Skylab sighting(s). And still others continue to wave the MJ-12 flag.

An objective observer sees this as pathological, but with hoo-hahs running around the UFO community raising specters of governmental/military conspiracies (and some obsessed with their tainted images), what other conclusion can anyone come to?

UFOs are the basin in which the dregs of society are washing their feet.

We’ve seen one-time rational types sink into a morass of idiocy that bespeaks something not far from severe mental illness.

UFOs will appear now and again, almost subliminally. But the dying breed of “serious” ufologists will, as we’ve continued to maintain, die off with no denouement for them or the UFO mystery.

Finally, it’s time to give up the UFO ghost, not just because UFOs are irrelevant but because UFOs only lead to mental deterioration and a total waste of one as a thinking being with other purposes they should be concerned about during their short lives on this Earth.

An essay by Frank Trocco in Public Understanding of Science (1998) that examines the loony side of ufology and other fringe "hobbies" -- with an encomium for skeptic Michael Shermer:

How to Believe in Weird Things

There comes a time when reality must be acknowledged. And that time has come for ufologists and the UFO community generally: The UFO enigma is not going to be explained.

The UFO old-guard (Richard Hall, Stanton Friedman, Kevin Randle, even Jerry Clark, et al.) will pass-on and the phenomenon they’ve spent their lives pursuing shall not be defined, as it has not been defined for millennia, including the modern era when technology could have defined it, if it were definable.

This explains, to some degree, why ufology’s mavens seek confirmation from government agencies and militaries. The explanation, they think, which has eluded them, has not eluded some elements of governmental bureaucracies.

Many persons think that governments haven’t a clue either about what UFOs are or may be. But die-hard UFO fanatics believe otherwise; they think the UFO answer has been hidden by their governments, and they seek to get their hands on that secreted material.

Some UFO bloggers, by writing about everything but UFOs, give away their angst and semi-conscious belief that UFOs are not about to be revealed as a tangible reality. These bloggers resort to peripheral or unrelated matters, dipping their toes back into the UFO world when spurred to do so by some exciting sighting. (But sightings have come and gone for years now, and nothing has made UFOs a real reality for media, scientists, and those with a modicum of sanity.)

Is the UFO essence unfathomability? Or is the UFO essence a quantum element, requiring a Heisenberg or Dirac to unravel the physical or non-physical reality?

(As noted in our previous post, there are no geniuses in ufology, so one can’t expect a denouement from those quarters.)

Our belief is that UFOs exist, and have existed sine time immemorial. But, like God, UFOs are not about to give up their existence or reality to those without Gnostic knowledge or enlightenment; that is, the UFO rabble, which holds sway in the UFO community right now, doesn’t have a chance in Hell of getting to the bottom of the UFO mystery.

For all practical purposes, UFOs will remain undefined for them, and the general public – the great unwashed masses, the rabble.

And only the true cognoscenti will come to understand what the UFO phenomenon consists of – if they haven’t already.

During the 60 years (plus) that UFOs have been part of general human consciousness, and scrutinized by so-called ufologists, many things have been discovered and/or explained by the scientific community and geniuses in the arts and general population: vaccines for diseases, quantum proofs, the make-up of the universe (partially), the genetic underpinnings of human beings, et cetera.

But in the UFO world, nothing and no one has been proffered that explains or even comes close to explaining the phenomenon.

The early Greeks came up with insights that allowed such luminaries as Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Bohr, and others who studied the machinations of the Universe to provide truths about the phenomena they were absorbed with.

But in the world of “ufology” no one has come close to providing an explanation or even a smidgen of insight about the enigmatic appearances of lights and objects that bespeak intelligence or, at least, something physically strange.

While “studiers” of UFOs, such as Jerome Clark, Stanton Friedman, Jacques Vallee, and lesser lights, have gone nowhere, UFO reprobates continue to muddy the waters with their mid-life crises or misapplied verbiage across the UFO landscape.

The ludicrous concerns and hypothetical posturing of UFO hobbyists have tainted the UFO waters, and continues unabated to this day, with blogging that uses UFOs to stroke egos and create lists of who’s who in the UFO field.

Meanwhile, the phenomenon remains elusive and unexplained by those who’ve assumed the mantle of UFO expert.

Sixty years of nothing but frothy circumlocution hasn’t bode well for UFOs, and no one who professed or professes to be an expert in the field of “ufology” should be saluted, since they have produced little, if anything, that approaches an explanation or even a tenable hypothesis or theory about the mystery.

Is it understandable, then, why media, science, and serious elements of the general population eschew UFOs?

There is no UFO Einstein. There isn’t even a true UFO expert.

There are just some ragtag UFO mavens who live little, boring lives and need UFOs to keep themselves in some kind of make-believe loop.

That’s not tragic, just sad….very sad.

In 1977 Dr. Leon Davidson did an exegesis of the insignia (symbol) on Lonnie Zamora's 1964 Socorro UFO.

Here is that analysis:

NYUFO [New York UFO], run by Ken Oz, Is a UFO Resource Website dedicated to the theme of Ufology & UnderGround Conspiracy News, updated daily with new content.

It can be found at http://www.nyufo.com/

Check it out. You'll be amazed at the extent and quality of the material there.

The public, and especially the UFO rabble, seek out and pay attention to UFO sightings that reek of vibrant details which make the phenomenon even more bizarre than it is in essence.

And blogs or web-sites that inculcate sensational aspects of sightings, sometimes enhancing those aspects, go a long way to removing UFOs as a phenomenon worthy of scientific or thoughtful scrutiny.

Thus there is an underground UFO community that goes about studying UFOs without all the hoopla and babble the phenomenon has generated over the years and continues to create, exacerbated by easily created public forums and internet access for the great unwashed masses who thrive on vivid or imaginative UFO accounts.

Those underground studies of UFOs are accessible to only a few UFO aficionados, but there are a few non-underground UFO blogs and web-sites that remain viable as hypothetical fonts for getting to the truth or meaning of the UFO mystery.

No, we’re not talking about those UFO blogs and web-sites that are social networks for the UFO lonely or sexist purveyors of barely clad women.

We’re talking about blogs such as Stuart Miller’s new

http://alienworldsmag.blogspot.com/

or Bruce Duensing’s

http://paradigmprobe.blogspot.com/

Both Miller and Duensing attack the UFO phenomenon with open minds and creative rumination about it.

Fortunately they remain at the public level of UFO discourse.

But for those who wish to study UFOs quietly, without all the hubbub that the phenomenon engenders then we suggest they try to gain access to the undergound UFO community, where bonhomie and true UFO analysis is taking place.

Without some kind of dynamic evidence, the UFO phenomenon is doomed to die, if only because media, government agencies, and the public cannot sustain interest in such an evanescent presence.

Yes, UFOs have appeared and continue to appear in the skies but without some kind of specific tangibility, all persons, except UFO fanatics, will, psychologically, place the phenomenon on a mental backburner, maybe even dismissing the subject matter altogether, which is already beginning to happen.

Just as interest in the Loch Ness monster has diminished significantly of late, and the sasquatch, bigfoot, yeti search concerns only a few die-hard creature buffs, UFOs are, too, on the wane as a source of interest to the military constructs of the world, media (generally), and the public (en masse).

People can’t or won’t maintain interest or concern for any phenomenon or activity that doesn’t provide some kind of return – mentally, emotionally, physically, monetarily, et cetera.

Those in the UFO community, hanging by their fingernails on the cliff of their life-long and unrealized dream of a UFO denouement are fading fast, many in old age and at the edge of death or senility.

It’s too late for those mavens to alter their lives or avocational careers so they’ll persist in trying to rally support -- any kind of support – for their now perverse hobby.

But support is not forthcoming and will not be forthcoming, as 60 years of a non-return on investment in the UFO mystery has turned sane persons to other concerns.

Yet an entrenched few – those called ufologists – will stay the course. What else can they do? They are in debt up to their ears in the phenomenon.

But those who owe nothing to the phenomenon will, if they haven’t already, depart.

The phenomenon doesn’t care; it has been indifferent to mankind since time immemorial. (And those abductee accounts don’t matter; they re elements of a bizarre psychological malady.)

So, where can one who is mildly interested in UFOs go from here? They can pursue the sociological or psychological aspects of UFO sightings. That area of study is fecund with insight to the human condition – the human mental condition, which has been and is in a sorry state, since the Garden of Eden.

(We deal with human insanity in another venue.)

Between the desire, And the spasm
Between the potency, And the existence
Between the essence, And the descent
Falls the Shadow…

This is the way the [UFO phenomenon] ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

— Paraphrase of T.S. Eliot’s "The Hollow Men" (1925)

History is replete with double agents and Machiavellian mischief-makers, so why would ufology be devoid of similar practitioners of the art of deception?

Yes, ufology is steeped in conspiracy hypotheses, and always has been.

But lately the topic of disinformation agents is rampant, ubiquitous in the UFO community.

So, let us suggest some possibilities that UFO mavens would do well to consider, perhaps...

What if Stanton Friedman, a former government lackey, was recruited to take ufologists to Roswell and the MJ-12 scenarios to keep them from the real UFO truth?

Friedman’s zeal for Roswell and MJ-12 is way out of proportion to the whole UFO panoply, and his obsession with those two interrelated UFO episodes is just a bit too lopsided for a person who seeks the truth, the real truth, about the UFO mystery.

And then there is Richard Hall, a guy affiliated with UFOs and government for decades; a man who chastises as often as he can anyone who proposes alternative theories about the UFO enigma, he also zeroing in sightings and incidents that are destined to unfocus attention on intriguing elements of the whole UFO riddle.

Kevin Randle, who has been pro and con about Roswell, has muddied the waters for years with his “indecisiveness” – and he’s a member of the U.S. military.

Jerome Clark has the patina of an objective UFO researcher but he, like Hall, goes after alternative UFO hypotheses just as rabidly as debunkers like Phillip Klass, and to what end? To support questionable sightings like Socorro, taking researchers away from real UFO incidents?

How about Bruce Maccabee, who is affiliated with the Navy (the one U.S. military construct with UFO interests that have been overt and covert since 1947 and earlier)?

Maccabee is always quick to support, with seemingly “scientific” analyses, sightings that appear bogus to objective investigators, causing a rift in any straight line to the UFO truth.

And one can’t ignore the mish-mash provided by Canadian Errol Bruce-Knapp, whose UFO mailing list has done much to degrade the UFO discussion, by allowing quidnuncs a forum where they can make ufology seem as crazy as any psychotic endeavor.

What’s the intent and purpose of EBK’s carefully controlled presentation of certain UFO ideas and positions, other than to confuse the topic with the ramblings of many who would divert dialogue of a meaningful kind?

Another disruptor is Rense, whose anti-Semitic broadsides make ufology an outcast for any serious UFO investigator or scientist.

In England there are Clarke, Roberts, McGonagle and others who keep ufologists off-balance with their discursive and often insinuating posturings. To what purpose, really?

For those who think Bob Lazar and Doty, or any other bizarre UFO story-teller, are the culprits who’ve distorted the UFO truth, they’d do better to question the motivations and agendas of some in the UFO community who’ve insinuated themselves so deeply in the phenomenon, many with government or military associations, that their place at the UFO table is suspect, at least to those of us who take conspiracy theories somewhat seriously.

Ufologists and their minions like to suggest that UFOs and flying disks have been among human-kind since time immemorial, intervening in human affairs, as recounted in the Hebrew Bible, surviving Sumerian stone tablets, the Indian epics (of the sub-continent and those of native North American Indians), some “literary” remnants of the Olmec, Mayan, Incan, Aztec cultures, the Polynesian sagas, and evidenced by the Easter Island statues, several African tribal legends, along with multiple references in ancient mythologies (Greek, Chinese, Japanese, British, et cetera).



But where in modern civilization are those interventions?

Sure, UFOs have been and are (apparently) all over the place. But why are they not intervening today, as in Africa, where genocide is taking place, and flooding is wiping out whole villages at the time of this posting?



Where are the god and his angels who once helped the Hebrews/Israel?

Why doesn’t Allah or Yahweh appear to the tribes fighting in the Middle East, as once happened on a regular basis, according to Biblical scholars and the “UFOs as Alien Gods” believers?

Or do the flying objects of the modern era (1947 forward) carry a whole different batch of aliens – cold, aloof, indifferent?



Did the UFO gods of old die off? Or become bored with humanity?

Are the current UFO “gods” or alien presence the diabolical offshoot that UFO abductees implicate in their experiences?



Or do UFOs have nothing to do with humanity, then and now?

Something or someone(s) intervened in the human condition, maybe even creating it, but that something or someone(s) are not the same thing as that manifested by the UFO phenomenon.



The UFO phenomenon is a psychological aberration as much as it is an observable phenomenon.

And the aberration has not been helpful or misfortunate for humans, as was the case several thousand years ago when interveners destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, or gave visual sustenance to Constantine.



The gods of old were a totally different breed from the beings that supposedly pilot the UFOs seen in the skies during the past 60 or 70 years. And both remain elusive.





A reasoned and/or reasonable colloquy between science and the pseudo-science of ufology does not exist and cannot exist, because both sides in the issue are entrenched in their particular orthodoxies.

Scientists are infused with mathematical constructs, that are about as real as UFOs, and ufologists are suffused with amorphous evidence that is difficult to explain.



Moreover, theologians are not helpful, since they attribute the early visitations to a hierarchical God (Yahweh or Jehovah, or even Allah) and science eschews that possibility, while ufologists spin the theological position into an alien presence that was mistaken for gods.



Tying the old gods to galactic visitors doesn’t mesh with what UFOs present today: a non-interactive intrusion that is, so far, meaningless, while the gods of old at least had an agenda that seemed obvious, albeit bizarre in its own way.

So the gods that visited early man – in dreams, fantasy, or actually – and the UFO aliens – predictably evanescent – are, on the face of it, not one and the same.

And the sooner that ufologists disabuse themselves of the notion that UFOs and once-upon-a-time angels, fairies, and wee people are the same thing(s), in kind, the sooner that the UFO mystery might be resolved.



But we’re not holding our collective breaths...

In March 1966, Frank Mannor of Dexter, Michigan and his son saw and reported a strange object hovering over a field on their farm.

At about the same time, a group of Hillsdale College students also saw a strange object outside their dorm windows.

Dexter, Michigan is about 10 miles northwest of Ann Arbor, and was (and is) a lake area.

Hillsdale, Michigan is about 70 miles southwest of Dexter.

J. Allen Hynek, at a press conference about the sightings, suggested the sightings were of swamp gas, and the rest is history, as many of you know.

Here’s a scan of the Hillsdale paper about the Mannor sighting. The paper misspelled Mr. Mannor’s name: Manor [sic].



Time magazine, as was its won’t of the time, scoffed at the sightings:



And here are drawings by the mother of 12 year-old Susan Merrill of Hillsdale who also reported seeing some flying objects that same week:



There was a plethora of sightings in Michigan that week of March 20th; in Detroit, Nankin and Taylor Townships, and several other places.

One RRRGroup member covered the Dexter sightings for The Detroit News.

The objects seen and reported by both Mannors and the Hillsdale students were not swamp gas, as J. Allen Hynek came to acknowledge eventually.

But what were they?

Our sister blog – Forensic Ufology – will evaluate these sightings.

More newspaper clippings from the 1966 episodes can be seen, in their totality, at our UFO web-site – http://ufos.homestead.com

Here are three segments of a late 1980s Geraldo show about UFOs and abductees.

The first (opening) segment contains an overview of the UFO phenomenon (and abductees) plus astronaut Deke Slayton talking about his UFO encounter.

The next two segments are Bruce Maccabee discussing UFOs (with slides), including McMinnville, Trindade Island, et cetera.

Here is a 1984 “In Search Of” segment about Roswell that includes Jesse Marcel talking about his part in the military cover-up of the incident.

What’s interesting is that Marcel undercuts the UFO metal stories by saying “it couldn’t be bent” (while other witnesses have stated how the recovered metal, when folded, would resume its original shape).

And the distance from Roswell where the UFO (or UFOs) crashed seems much further than current accounts have it.

Also, Peter Gersten presents an FBI document from the period that seems to confirm the Mogul balloon explanation.

Here is a 1984 “In Search Of” segment with Peter Gersten and Ray Fowler talking about the military cover-up of UFO sightings.

(An Air Force spokesman presents the military view.)

Stan Friedman is the face of ufology and the UFO phenomenon itself.

And this has not been a good thing, although we love the guy.

Mr. Friedman has kept the Roswell debacle alive for 30 years now and his defense of MJ-12 has been and continues to be another thorn in the side of serious UFO researchers.

Media worships Friedman, because he’s articulate and visibly knowledgeable, even though UFO insiders know that Stan Friedman’s views are fraught with wheat and chaff and he has failed to separate them in a meaningful way.

And keeping Roswell on the UFO front burner, along with the bogus raft of MJ-12 documents has had the most deleterious effect on UFO investigation and sensible media coverage than any other aspects of the UFO mystery.

Mr. Friedman has a professorial demeanor, and this has given him cachet with media and many UFO mavens.

But he has been and is wrong, about Roswell, and MJ-12. He also has been an avid researcher, but only to bolster or confirm his views and beliefs; he isn’t an objective truth-seeker, although his pursuit of the UFO truth has been seriously maintained – just wrong-headed.

Stan Friedman – not by anything he has done directly himself – has pulled the spotlight and media or scientific scrutiny away from other “ufologists” who are and have been more rational and more objective about the UFO conundrum: Clark, Randall, Vallee, Aldrich, to name a few.

Stan Friedman has made UFOs his career and source of living, and that is no lame feat. Others would have liked to capitalize on the phenomenon as much as he has (Richard Hall for one) but they don’t have the pull with media that Friedman has, and Stan is not to be faulted for that.

He’s been a willing partner in the media charade about UFOs, giving media and the scientific community a seemingly coherent and sane view about the elusive phenomenon.

But his influence and sway has been the worst thing that could have happened to ufology. It locked UFOs into a stasis of semi-serious study of things that have nothing to do with the real phenomenon.

And Stan’s hypothesis of a “cosmic Watergate” – while a great sound byte that media adores – has created a backlash among scientists and politicos who eschew conspiracy theories at their very premise.

Media created Stan Friedman, and media continues to use him for their own purposes. That’s not his fault, but his complicity, to maintain a livelihood, has not been good for ufology, or those damnable UFOs either.

Here’s a listing of 1967 UFO sightings, photographs, et cetera from the erstwhile mimeographed newsletter Saucer Scoop, published by Joan and Ron Whritenour of St. Petersburg, Florida:



Saucer Scoop was (and is) a great resource for sightings and information that hasn’t appeared elsewhere in the UFO universe.

(We have several issues/copies from which we’ll cull more material upcoming.)

A 1980 PM Magazine segment about some little-known UFO sightings, including triangular UFOs.

A UFO documentarian we used to know had the following on his blog recently [8/23]:

In two comments at one of his UFO Mystic posts, Nick Redfern hits the nail square on the head with a spot-on analysis that will make many people within ufology cringe, or complain, or argue... but that won't change the fact that he's absolutely right.

Nick writes:

I predict that ufology will never be anymore than a subject that attracts a few thousand people on a regular basis (and maybe less now).

Many ufologists confidently think that the world is waiting for them to finally deliver the ET goods and go down in history.

They’re not. Most people outside could not care less about the petty arguments in ufology (and don’t know about it anyway) and unless someone really makes a major breakthrough (along the lines of proving that Roswell was ET, for example), we will not be remembered by science, the media or the public.

A good many ufologists are ego-driven and full of self-importance. But at the end of the day, we are just a group of largely unrecognized people who argue with each other, and publish things here and there that get read by a few thousand people. And that’s it.

Same as it ever was. Same as it always will be. I think the biggest problems facing ufology are (a) the image that we have with the scientific community and with the media - namely that we are all viewed as nutcases, eccentrics etc; (b) the fact that we lack any hard evidence in terms of something tangible that can be studied and proved to be anomalous (rather than different people having different opinions on something that remains enigmatic or unresolved); and (c) that we lack large funding to really devote to a deep study of the data.

I’m not sure how we change things, but I believe that things can only change if we can find some form of hard evidence to support the idea that UFOs exist.

But that will only ever happen (I personally think) if UFOs are literal nuts and bolts craft. If they have far stranger origins, it may well be impossible to get tangible, hard evidence. In which case, we may be perceived by the human race of the late 21st century and 22nd century in the same way that we view people who - 100 years ago - searched for fairies, or knocked on tables trying to contact the dead, etc.

In other words, we’ll be viewed as a group of people who looked into some unusual areas in search of the truth about aliens, but never really found any hard evidence that proved ET was visiting.

Ironically, if ET really does land, I personally think that ufology will be swept away in an instant as the public demands answers from the media, who in turn demand answeres [sic] from the government and the mainstream scientific community.

We may get a brief 5 minutes to say “we told you so,” but that will be it.

Unless we stumble on it first somehow.

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

We've been saying the same thing all along, but coming from Nick Redfern, it has real cachet.

In our video archives we found a 1979 or 1980 ABC 20/20 program about UFO sightings, explaining them as tectonic plate shifts that cause electrical discharges which are often mistaken for UFOs. The hypothesis is discounted by virtually everyone nowadays.

A portion of the 20/20 segment covered the 1975 Travis Walton “abduction” and has one of the early interviews with Walton in situ.

Here is that portion of the 20/20 show:

Twenty years ago, ABC-TV’s 20/20 presented a UFO segment devoted to UFO abductees and Budd Hopkins work with them.

The segment (presented here in three parts) has an interview with Betty Hill, snippets of the 1950 Mariana, Montana UFO clip and 1952’s Tremonton, Utah UFO fleet, and an account of the 1986 JAL sighting.

Also Blue Book is referenced with mention of MJ-12 and Project Aquarius.

Harping on the mendacious ufologists doesn’t preclude us from lauding those in the UFO and arcane communities whom we (and you) can trust implicitly, unquestionably.

We’ve had dealings with the major ufologists and paranormalists over the years and those on the periphery of both, and these are the people we know to be totally ethical and moral in thought and deed.

We may miss a name or two here initially but, over all, if you don’t see a name of a person who shows up prominently in the UFO and/or paranormal world, you can assume we think they are without merit, as researchers or human beings.

(We cite the reprobates elsewhere, as we’ve noted in a previous post.)

So, here are those we know to be decent and true in their writings, dealings with others, and life generally….(in no particular order):

Stanton Friedman, Jerry Clark, Kevin Randle, Nick Pope, John Greenewald, Jr.

Frank Warren, Stuart Miller, Jan Aldrich, Bruce Duensing, Joseph Capp

Nick Redfern, Loren Coleman, Patrick Huyghe, Rick Stokes, Jenny Randles

Vincente-Juan Ballester Olmos, Denver Page, Joe Harvat, and Jacques Vallee

(There are some in the UFO and paranormal camp with whom we’ve had no communication or dealings so they owuldn’t be listed here or elsewhere, but the famous and not-so-famous persons who show up on UFO UpDates and in other popular venues are persons we have had contact with, and we don’t consider them trustworthy for many reasons, which are explained elsewhere in the RRRGroup panoply of web-sites and blogs.)

Some UFO mavens investigate and ruminate on the UFO mystery; a few actually research the enigma, and have for many years.

There are individuals who propose far-out ideas and hypotheses, and considered anathema by their UFO peers. That’s expected in the rough and tumble world of UFOs where ego is everything.

Then there are the parasites and sycophants who pilfer material from others for their blogs and web-sites, pretending they are actively serving the UFO community.

And of course there are those who do nothing but cavil about the endeavors of others who are enchanted by the UFO phenomenon.

[Emended]

UFO researchers – the serious ones – are in a world all their own, consumed by UFOs and related issues.

More about this elsewhere.....

A search of military and NASA archives easily provides the material that “proves” the Roswell incident, Socorro sighting, and other (in)famous UFO sightings were and are the result of military (Navy and Air Force particularly) tests of various balloon types.



The Moby Dick and Intrepid tests of the middle and late forties explain Roswell and the Stratoscope LI program and the Stargazer program of the early and mid-1960s explain Socorro and other UFO incidents.





Richard Hall played down our assumptions when we first presented them a few years ago, and why?



Mr. Hall has devoted himself to UFOs for many, many years, and his ego won’t allow him to acknowledge his errant and incomplete research for all those years.

The cavalier and half-hearted, belief-oriented studies by Hall, Friedman, Rudiak, and others were and are obviously going to be defended by those men, but that’s a psychological problem, more than a problem of lazy methodology.

A perusal of the balloon archives shows conclusively that Roswell, Socorro and other “sightings” are prosaic, but UFO believers who’ve devoted their lives to mistaken analyses can’t and won’t accept the proof.



Bona fide (credible) UFO researchers who want the balloon archive list can request it via e-mail, and we’ll provide it.

Exegeses of the specific incidents can be found at our UFO web-site and this site:

http://stratocat.com.ar/ovnis/indexe.html

A few newspapers (most foreign publications), and some UFO web-sites or blogs continue to report UFO sightings.

But seeing a UFO doesn’t bring the “objects” down to Earth. The phenomenon remains and has remained elusive, despite thousands of sightings over the years.

One ufologist (Brad Sparks) insists that a thorough perusal of the United States Air Force archives of flying saucer accounts will bear fruit. How so?



What if those old AF files do show – as some well-publicized accounts already have – that something tangibly strange has invaded the skies over America and elsewhere?

Where does that take us? Where has it taken us?

Science won’t get involved in the UFO brouhaha, and ufologists have resorted to internecine sniping out of boredom with the enigma.

(See UFO UpDates for egregious examples of the squabbling.)

What is grist for study is the psychological and/or sociological parameters of the UFO community. Mental instabilities and deviant behavior is rampant in UFO circles.

(See Rense.com and UFO UpDates for examples.)

And grammarians will find a plethora of teeth-gritting errors by UFO writers and commentators, even some who are published authors.

(See UFO UpDates for many errors of spelling and punctuation – not typos but actual repeated errors such as putting quote marks inside periods, like this: He’s a bona fide “ufologist”.)

While UFOs continue to elude conclusivity, those who’ve adopted them as a life-style offer reams of study about the deviant and even criminal mind.

(We’ve provided the names and “crimes” of the more blatant perpetrators elsewhere, as some of you know.)

For examples of minor dementia, seek out the inserts from UFO buffs by Error Bruce-Knapp, the moderator at UFO UpDates, a mail list, where several guys and a few women pontificate insanely and get full run of Mr. Bruce-Knapp’s venue.



These people have carte blanche at UpDates, which makes obvious the need for moderators and editors who have enough good sense to monitor their venues so that UFOs keep the spotlight rather than the crazies who’ve adopted the phenomenon to assuage their mental and existential deficiencies

Sure, scientists will eschew such sites as UpDates and Rense or the anonymous responses at UFO blogs, but those who delve into human behavior and mental illness are remiss by doing so.

The panoply of behavioral malfeasance is on display in spades at UFO emporiums in ways like no other.

To ignore the psychological sicknesses endemic to the UFO mystery is a greater disservice to science than the continuing shunning of UFOs themselves,

After all, what is more important, a strange light or object in the sky or persons who are on the brink of psychopathic mayhem?

Here is an excerpt from a NOVA broadcast (circa 1980) about UFOs; the excerpt shows how errant and gullible ufologists can be:

The hypothesis that UFOs are projections of the human psyche (postulated by Carl Jung, Jacques Vallee, and others) is not exactly correct.



UFOs often sneak up on airplanes, people, and radar. They aren’t pre-thought in a calculated way.

They appear from the psychological mechanism of externalization – the apperceptive processes which function on a preconscious level and therefore readily [become] conscious.¹

And UFOs, those that are not secret military or misperceived aircraft, or misperceived natural phenomena -- that is, real UFOs) -- may very well be “created” as a kind of Freudian unconscious wish-fulfillment; a perverse wish-fulfillment perhaps, but nonetheless a psychological necessity for those viewing UFOs.

This means that real UFOs – the truly unexplained kind – derive their “tangibility” from the mind of persons who externalize their desires to experience other realities.

This would explain the diverse configurations of UFOs, since each person externalizes a different view of their personal wish-fulfilling reality.²

UFOs thus realized remain intact and extant, until the person or persons generating them loses interest or is diverted from further psychologizing.

This was the case with the mysterious green fireballs that appeared to Doctor Lincoln La Paz and other scientists in and around Albuquerque, New Mexico in November 1948.



From November 1948 though January 1949 green fireballs invaded New Mexico skies and were seen by La Paz, other scientists, plus intelligence officers and Defense Command people at Kirtland AFB.

A conference was set up in February 1949 with such scientific notables as Edward Teller, Dr. Joseph Kaplan (a world-renowned authority on physics of the upper atmosphere), and Dr. La Paz, among others, to discern the origin of the green fireballs.

The conference concluded that the green fireballs were a natural phenomenon of some kind and recommended that an investigation be started by the Air Force’s Cambridge Research Laboratory, whose purpose (ostensibly) was to study natural phenomena.

In late 1949 Cambridge established Project Twinkle to solve the mystery; the project called for establishing three cinetheodolite stations near White Sands, New Mexico.



When the Korean War started, Project Twinkle silently died (allegedly), along with official interest in green fireballs.³

Once more important events intruded, the desire to see green fireballs (to investigate or measure them) was gone and the fireballs disappeared for officialdom pretty much.

(Green fireballs reappeared sporadically, into the 1950s, and the history of them can be read at:

http://www.answers.com/topic/green-fireballs )

(One can also conclude that the observation or measurement of the fireballs affected them in the quantum sense, but since they didn’t just change, dying as it were, the quantum affect doesn’t seem to apply.)

The observation of the green fireballs, with the Twinkle Project, is not atypical; other observations and projects – notably Project Blue Book, after the Condon Committee scuttled UFOs, also disappeared, even though UFOs were (and are) still being created by those who continue to foster their alien wish-fulfillment: People want extraterrestrials to save humankind from the woes it experiences.

So, persons don’t project their visionary imaginings on the skies or other people; they actually create UFOs, “tangible” UFOs, by a psychological process known in psychiatric circles as externalization.

Abductees take the process even further, but that for another time.
-------------------------------------

[1] Psychiatric Dictionary, Fourth Edition, 1971, Hinsie and Campbell, Page 290

2


3 Britannica Library Research Service

This is an e-mail to us, with a link to a blog that visitors here should find interesting:

Guys,

I laugh out loud every time I read all the Area 51 idiots talking on the web forums and discussing all the black ops the Air Force is involved in.

I am retired Navy and I learned a long time ago from some fairly high ranking officers one thing. F*cking Air Farce [sic] can't keep a secret. Ever since what ever went down around Roswell and else where ,when they ran right out and told the world and everybody had to backtrack and cover the dumbsh*t's asses, the USAF has never been privy to jack sh*t of real importance or secrecy.

EVERYTHING has been under the control of the Navy Department. There is so much money buried in Navy's budget that nobody even questions it. Hell most of the over runs on ship construction is actually funds siphoned off for other secret ops. Everybody bitch's and there is an "investigation" maybe a fine but the same companies still keep getting contracts and nobody says a thing. It is a game.Who built Greenbriar? The Navy. Who maintains all the embassy's around the world? The Navy.Who maintains Camp David? The Navy. We all know how screwed up the army corps of engineers are. There are no looky loo's sitting on mountains around NAS China Lake. No bozos, sitting in boats off San Nicholas Island off the coast of California either. NAS Adak Alaska sure has a lot of activity for a base that is closed. Nice long runway and hangars still being maintained.

I will give you a link to a web site that discusses a 1 BILLION dollar construction contract awarded by the Navy. Read the article and back track on the company's, the directors of the company's and the sub contractors involved. If you find a person's name or a subsidiary "google" it. Guys remember the Navy has closed a boatload of bases recently, Adak.Alaska ,Iceland, Puerto Rico, are closed ,Gitmo mostly has no personnel. Why the contingency planning. The Navy has the Seabees's who do this for the Navy (I was one). They have even approved adding another Seabee battalion to the active fleet at a time when they are decommissioning ships and squadrons. So why the Billion dollar contract? LOOK at what the other contracts the companies that are involved in this one also have. It will make you go Hmmm?

http://www.washingtontechnology.com/online/1_1/31008-1.html?topic=contract-awards

Oh and could you please send me the password to your papers? It you do, I'll let you see my blog about an incident that happened to me.

Heck I'll show you now:

http://governmentsecretsaucer.blogspot.com/

Tim Ritchie

UFOs, as we’ve noted earlier, have morphed from chariots of the gods, to mysterious airships of the late 19th Century, to attendant lights of WWII, to flying saucers of the 50s, to human-capturing ships of the 60s, to airfoils of various kinds in the 70s and 80s, until their latest incarnation as delta-shaped craft of the 90s.



In 2007, UFOs have gone back to erratic lights in the sky pretty much.

What hasn’t changed is how UFO investigators and researchers go about scrutinizing the phenomena.

Ever since the Arnold 1947 sighting, and the Maury Island episode, ufologists have applied a mix of inept evaluations, including interviews of witnesses, photographic and video enhancements, and hypnosis (a remnant of Mesmer’s 18th Century suggestive technique).



What was de rigueur in 1947 for investigating crimes or scientific anomalies has been replaced in the 21st Century by physical and psychological forensics and scientific disciplines that were not even imagined in 1947, such as DNA analyses and quantum perturbations.

But ufology’s investigatory camp has remained tethered to the old practices, and that’s why the UFO riddle continues to be unsolved.

Friedman, Randle, Hall, Rudiak, Maccabee, Hopkins, Jacobs, and the dead among them, Hynek, Mack, Sprinkle, et alia are or were locked into the methodologies of the past, from which no results, of any kind, have been forthcoming, even after 60 years of their scrutiny.



Even those who are culled for TV interviews, such as the recent one with Larry King on CNN, provide nothing but the same old rhubarbs that have worn thin by the retelling of them, over and over again, with nothing new ever added to the material.

These are the old-guard of ufology. But there are new investigators or theorists who aren’t beholden to the methods or ideologies of the past.

The new breed of UFO investigators can be found in the blogosphere surely, but many are extant in an “invisible” academic milieu, which was made archetypal by Jacques Vallee.



Some of the new breed who are not invisible (or academic necessarily) include Mac Tonnies, John Greenewald, Nick Pope, Bruce Duensing, Joseph Capp, Frank Warren, Dirk Vander Ploeq, Stuart Miller, and Vincente-Juan Ballester Olmos, among a few others.



Some are not youngsters but they are persons who haven’t concretized their thinking, as have those who insist on holding forth with egotistical barbs at UFO venues where silliness often overtakes serious discussion.

However, there is also a sub rosa set of ufologists who research the UFO phenomenon and discuss, with no holds barred, arcane and obtuse explanations for the mysterious sightings which have flummoxed the old-timers.

This subliminal group may not be any more successful at providing a UFO denouement, but perhaps their imaginative ruminations and technical expertise, along with their forensic schooling, will take UFOs out of the hands of the mummified ufologists and help place the enigma in the arena of science, real science, not the faux science of ufology that has allowed UFOs to escape their final detection.

While UFOs have changed their configuration over the years, ufology hasn’t – until now.

How difficult is it to capture a UFO….or God; that is, physically, tangibly, actually?

Major military establishments, such as those of the United States, Russia, China, and Britain have had occasion to capture aircraft from their counterparts: Russia (the U.S.S.R. when it happened) got its hands on Gary Powers’ U-2, China got its hands on American planes in Viet Nam, the U.S. got it hands on MIGs in Korea, et cetera.



Is it unimaginable that a “flying saucer” or UFO has not been captured – gotten hold of – by some military construct at some time or other?

Such a craft could have been gathered from a mishap, or shot down, inadvertently (mistaken for an enemy airplane) or purposefully.

(The “mishap” possibility is what keeps the Roswell story alive.)

But how does God figure in this?

The gods or God made appearances on the Earth, as related by the Hebrew Bible [Genesis 3, 17, 18; 3 Kings 19; Tobias 6; et cetera], the Mahabharata, the Upanishads, the Iliad, the Aztec and Mayan codices, and other historical or mythical treatises.



Jacob, in the Hebrew Bible, wrestled with an angel, or as properly translated, Jacob wrestled with God [Genesis 32], and was injured (dislocated thigh joint).

UFOs or flying saucers are purported to have occupants, some seen and some interacting with human beings on the ground or aboard their craft.



But in either of the scenarios (gods or UFO occupants), no one has been able to subdue and capture either a UFO (alien) being or a god, not even an angel.

The gods and extraterrestrials remain elusive.

(Why no one has wrestled a flying saucer pilot to the ground or no abductee has punched one out while being kidnapped is grist for the passivity of human beings in dire straits, as was the case with Jews as they were being taken away during World WAR II, and in earlier pogroms.)



So, we’re left, for now, as to what can be done, or what has already occurred when it comes to UFOs or their tangible reality, flying saucers?

Have the strange flying machines been able to escape every attempt to nab one? Have they been able to fly, free of accident for the thousands of years that they’ve been experienced by humankind?

The “freedom from mishap” explanation doesn’t fly. What alien culture could create a machine that never malfunctions?

Unless those machines are the encapsulating vehicles for the gods (or God). We all know that the gods (or God) can’t be captured.



So, either we take the view that UFOs are like gods or the machinery of the gods and can never be subdued, or we accept that UFOs are just extraordinary craft of alien beings or the mysterious militaries of this Earth and can be, with due diligence, captured, brought to heel, by extraordinary means – means that are not outside the technological abilities of human beings in A.D. 2007.



Or, as noted above, have UFOs already been garnered by some Earthian military? Even circumstantial evidence is meager, but not totally hidden.

And if a UFO has been downed, why can’t another be?



It’s too bad that ufologists are such a pauperish lot; if they had some real monies, they could mount a “Capture a UFO” campaign, once they stop their internecine (and silly) conjecturing.

Do you wonder why some ufologists are so cranky and mean-spirited?

Here’s a clue; a letter in The New Yorker [July 9 & 16, Page 8] from Jon Jeffryes of Madison, Wisconsin:

…archives are a symbol of information elitism – to view those documents you first have to get to [the archives], making…original documents impossible to view for vast numbers of people. Digitization democratizes that information by making it viewable to anyone who can find an open internet connection.

Mr. Jeffryes is referencing an article in the magazine about literary and manuscript archives, but his sentiments apply to ufology, and here’s how…

A few ufologists have, over the years, spent inordinate amounts of time and some monies to get to UFO archives in various venues (Washington D.C., New Mexico, London, et cetera).

The information gleaned was used to create books, to supplement convention appearances, and to create an aura of expertise that the UFO hobbyist didn’t have.

But with much of that archival material now online, and provided by such groups and individuals as Black Vault, Project 1947, NICAP, David Rudiak, Nick Pope, and others, the likes of Stanton Friedman, Kevin Randle, Jerome Clark, et alia have to be non-plussed that their steadfast work over many years has become diminished, and their once lauded expertise – because of that exclusive access to UFO materials – can now be assumed by ufology’s great unwashed masses.

With so much material online – material that was not available just a few years ago to the UFO quidnunc – everyone can now conjecturize about UFO sightings and footnote that conjecturing with actual archival material that relates.

Everyone can now be an expert, and many think they are.

But the UFO old-guard can still maintain a respectable visage, if they come out of their self-created ivory towers and allow a free-wheeling dialogue about UFO issues and information that they used to keep (and still do pretty much) to themselves.

However, this would require a softening of access (to them) and an elimination of hubris that has taken hold of these people – hubris that accumulated because they had information that the rest of us didn’t have, but do now.

UFO stardom no longer exists. The elitists in ufology have been watered down by the internet and the mechanism of blogging. Everyone’s an “expert” nowadays.

This may not be a good thing, but it surely is a lesser evil than having a few self-appointed grandees calling the shots.

Disregarding the mysterious airships of the 1890s, the World War II “foo fighters” and the 1946 Ghost Rockets over Scandinavia, the “flying saucers” that Kenneth Arnold reported (in 1947) didn’t exhibit any extraordinary characteristics, as he himself thought, initially, that they might be jet aircraft. (See the Project 1947 Arnold statement.)



George Gorman’s 1948 encounter was with a light similar to the earlier foo fighters.

The 1950 Great Falls. Montana UFOs and Tremonton UFOs (1952) showed nothing out of the ordinary.



But flying disks immediately thereafter displayed flying traits that seemed a bit beyond what Earth aircraft had developed….seemed to.

The Washington D.C. incidents of 1952 indicated that “flying saucers” were able to out-maneuver whatever airplanes (jets) were extant at the time.



The various craft of the 1950s reported to land and debark entities didn’t portray any technology considered to be highly advanced, and the abductee reports of the 1960s only identified interior designs that ere Sci-Fi-like; the actually flying of the disks that kidnapped the Hills and others was not particular to the events described.



The Rendlesham UFO, the RB47 UFO (touted by a few as significant), were prosaic, however the 1976 Tehran disk seemed to flout aerodynamics beyond the Earth airplanes of the time, but that UFO and later sightings stopped short of the right-angle maneuvers and abrupt stops and starts that Donald Keyhoe found interesting.



In the current time-frame of sightings – the Belgian delta disks, the Phoenix lights, and the O-Hare “cloud” – all operated within the parameters of known aircraft.



And the panoply of Mexican UFOs display balloon-like traits.



So UFOs, once thought to represent alien craft with superior technologies have devolved into flying triangles, floating lights, and slow-moving anomalies that wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) concern Earth’s militaries and shouldn’t make ufologists re-gaga themselves as they once did when flying saucers had a curious, other-worldly panache.

To maintain a semblance of rationality – even sanity – one has to eschew UFO web-sites, web-logs (blogs), and the UFO community itself.

The madness that afflicts human beings on occasion is rife in the UFO world.

That’s why science and academe refuse to get embroiled in any discussion of UFOs, flying saucers, or related accoutrements; the topic is hounded by, circumlocuted by, persons who, for all intents and purposes, are not mentally well.

(We name the craziest and sickest at our UFO web-site.)

Anyone outside academia or the scientific community who is interested in UFOs would do well to avoid such UFO sites as rense.com or UFO lists, such as UFO UpDates, where the inmates are in charge of the asylum.

Black Vault is a reputable site to browse but, again, true intellectuals will avoid it, only because of the taint that UFOs get from less credible UFO venues.

Mingling with the UFO crowd has the tendency to infect thoughtful persons, like hysteria does to neurotically inclined individuals; reasonable people become addled by association with the UFO nuts, mainly because UFO maniacs want to destroy reason and scrutiny of their adopted topic out of fear that the whole fraudulent UFO edifice might come crashing down if it’s examined too closely, by serious investigators and researchers of the strange things that occasionally intrude on humankind.

There are thoughtful “ufologists” (as they call themselves) and they too are named at our UFO web-site.

We don’t present a cursory glimpse at the UFO wackos . We actually provide a perusal, with documentation, about many who’ve sneaked into the UFO community only because membership is not scrutinized as it is in proper and legitimate enterprises.

For those who don’t give a fig about whom their associates are, visit every UFO site you can find, and support the ones that you think are worthwhile, but be forewarned: you may come away nuttier than a fruitcake in the process.

Frank Warren (whose blog may be found at http://frankwarren.blogspot.com/) posted the following about the circulating Haut (Roswell-related) affidavit at UFO UpDates:

From: Frank Warren
Date: Sun, 01 Jul 2007 13:18:58 -0700
Subject: Re: The Walter G. Haut Affidavit

Fellow Listers,

Extracted from:

Witness to Roswell: Unmasking the 60-Year Cover-Up by Thomas J. Carey and Donald R. Schmitt
…
I would like to make it clear, that the following views are mine alone.

First I question how the affidavit was done in regard to Walter's declaration.

When Dennis & Wendy interviewed Walter in 2000, he was often confused and had difficulty remembering various things during the session(s); in my unprofessional opinion it appeared to me he was exhibiting the initial stages of either Alzheimer's and/or dementia.

That said, he did in fact (in response to a question) answer in the affirmative regarding seeing (substantial) wreckage and or bodies.

I haven't viewed the tape recently, and am relying on my written notes from when I did, but will be reviewing it again today. According to my notes, I counted 4 times where he said he didn't see anything!

During an appearance on Larry King in 2003, Walter, again, appeared very confused and in this instance could not finish the segment. Prior to unexpectedly exiting the interview, King asked, "Did you, Walter, ever see any of the wreckage?"

Walter replied, "No."

As one can see the affidavit which no doubt was signed by Walter Haut was written in a very clear and concise manner including times, dates, names etc. From what I have seen myself e.g., the interview by Wendy & Dennis, as well as the public appearance, albeit brief, this was a man that would have much difficulty - to be polite - in accomplishing this task.

So, I am very curious as to how this declaration was performed; was it prepared by someone else - perhaps Schmitt and Walter just signed it? Were questions asked in sequence, and he answered them? I think this paramount in evaluating the worth of the affidavit.

Obviously, placing Ramey in Roswell on the 8th is monumental, and most certainly needs to be looked into, again.

Finally, for clarity, I don't question the fact that an extraterrestrial craft/s was recovered, i.e., the Roswell Incident, or the post cover-up; I question Walter's involvement regarding his seeing wreckage himself, and or bodies; furthermore, given his own contradictory statements regarding his actually seeing wreckage and or bodies, in my view, the affidavit that is now on the table doesn't carry much weight.

Respectfully,

Frank Warren

Tao – the Way – is how the Universe (reality) is seen by followers of Taoism.

UFOs are a manifestation of Tao. UFOs have their own yin and yang; that is, they are real or they are not: they have substance or they don’t.



Tao (or dao) is a “religious” concept. UFOs have their own religious-like component. UFOs are a matter of faith, since no one has produced a UFO or any aspect of a UFO that is more than circumstantial.

Many believe in UFOs religiously. Others are agnostic about the phenomenon. And most are atheological about UFOs – they do not believe UFOs exist or have ever existed.

UFOs have the same intangibility of Tao. Neither can be defined explicitly, nor can one put their finger in the side of either.

UFOs, like Tao, have created a “way” – and that “way” is exhibited by so-called ufologists (many of whom can be located via Google), and the “way” is palpable by experiencing the qi (life force) that ufologists have created over the years, even in the absence of a concrete reality.



Wikipedia, in its posting about Tao has this:

A common theme in Taoist literature is that fulfilment in life cannot be attained by forcing one's own destiny; instead, one must be receptive to the path laid for them by nature and circumstance, which will themselves provide what is necessary.

UFO believers dunk themselves in the phenomenon. Their destiny has been laid out for them by the Tao of UFOs.

Ufologists often sacrifice the mundane, practical life for a life enwrapped by UFOs, usually to the detriment of an existential ethos or a sensible, prosaic life-style.

Tao is all encompassing. And UFOs are also – for some.

As Wikipedia relates:

The Tao is elusive and intangible. Oh, it is intangible and elusive, and yet within is image. Oh, it is elusive and intangible, and yet within is form. Oh, it is dim and dark, and yet within is essence. This essence is very real, and therein lies faith.

For us, we continue to practice “wu wei” – non-action, but (as Wikipedia states), “not inaction [just] rather a harmonisation of one’s personal will with the natural harmony and justice of Nature” where UFOs have insignificance pretty much.

President Harry S. Truman dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands Japanese, men, women, and children; this to end World War II in the Pacific.

This despicable act was followed by the establishment of the security apparatuses that closed off government information under the rubric of Top Secret.

(See A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the origins of the National Security State, 1945-1954 By Michael J. Hogan)

Truman wasn’t the Missouri bumpkin that was his façade. He was a Machiavellian apparatchik who established an American apparat.

And that apparat allowed, even fostered, foreign intrusions into the United States government.

But that for another time…

The point here is that Truman had an inordinate interest in flying saucers, and did much to discover what they were as he tried to create a U.S. military presence that consisted of flying sauce-like craft.

That he dissembled when he discussed flying saucers, even as he was pressing his apparat to find out their origin, can be seen in this news-clip – note the subtle but obvious obsession that he provides:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YKMW6jR0Ac

The so-called MJ-12 documents may be bogus, but they represent, by inadvertent co-incidence, a group or groups that Truman established to discover the nature of flying saucers.

The 1953 Robertson Panel, instigated by the CIA, was an extrapolation of Truman’s covert interest in flying saucers, which the CIA and its predecessor, the OSS, carried out from 1945 until the present day.



(Bureaucracies have a life of their own.)

Truman, as progenitor of the U.S. government’s interest in flying saucers and UFOs, set in motions the NSA’s interest (beginning in 1952) and caused the Army (its Military Intelligence Division) and the Navy (its Office of Naval Intelligence) to make forays into the UFO mystery.

Eventually, the Air Force took part in investigating UFOs, but it has always been the CIA where the focal point of the phenomenon has been.



(Naval Research has been primarily responsible for the attempts to duplicate UFO technology, as we note elsewhere.)

Truman knew that flying saucers existed, and that they had a tangibility which indicated their origin was somewhere outside the United States.

His obsession, masked as it was publicly, spurred various agencies of the United States government to pursue the matter, which they do even now, despite the canard that the Air Force abandoned their effort after the 1968 Condon Committee report.

Ufologists would do well to examine the archives and private memoranda and letters of Truman, a man who could kill whole populations and who could keep hidden any material that might tell the public they are being visited by extraterrestrials or a phenomenon with origins closer to home.

A pilot sighting of a meteorological event over the United Kingdom has UFO hobbyists gaga:

[http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=30484]

Like the O’Hare “sighting” last November [2006], this observation has UFO believers drooling or frothing at the mouth.

But, as usual, there is nothing more than an observation of something unusual, and paltry circumstantial evidence which doesn’t exactly show that the pilot glimpsed an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

At the 60th anniversary of the (in)famous Kenneth Arnold sighting near Mt. Rainer and the Roswell episode(s), with nothing at all proven about UFOs from those events and many others since, ufologists and UFO mavens are chomping at the bit to re-invigorate the subject, grasping at any straw that resembles an unknown flying object.

The UFO community consists of older gents and ladies, plus a few younger geeks, none of whom has the strength or wherewithal to spur science, the military, the government, or media to take UFOs seriously.

Thus, the rabid enthusiasm for anything that smacks of a legitimate UFO sighting, even when that sighting is obviously prosaic.

The internet has spread the UFO phenomenon thin; too much input with too little substantive progress in resolving the enigmatic and transient “flying saucers.”

So all we have are a bunch of hyperventilating geezers rehashing old sightings and pumping up newer sightings, even those that are clearly not alien space vehicles.

This misplaced fervor should put the nail in the UFO coffin, finally.

For those who like civilized dialogue about things UFO and/or paranormal related:

http://www.department47.com/

The UFO phenomenon, still unexplained, in toto, has the amazing ability to rankle humanity and those in the UFO community particularly.

So-called ufologists are back to attacking one another in 2007 just as they did in the 1950s.

What goes around comes around apparently.

The catalyst for the neo-venom is Roswell, which continues to evoke emotions of a diverse kind.



Those who see Roswell as proof of an extraterrestrial visitation (via a flying saucer crash) are incensed with those who posit alternative scenarios, such as a military mishap, a misinterpreted balloon accident, or a loathsome medical/radiation experiment.

A current brouhaha has David Rudiak, an optometrist by profession and a creative, thorough UFO investigator by choice, pitted against Nick Redfern, a writer and UFO investigator who has provided several alternatives for the Roswell episode, including his most recent “theory’ (in his book, Body Snatchers in the Desert) that the UFO bodies were mentally/physically afflicted Japanese detainees being experimented upon by the U.S. government (using balloon-like aircraft) in New Mexico, June and July 1947.

David Rudiak believes that extraterrestrial beings, in flying saucers, crashed near Roswell in 1947 and the United States government has been covering up the incident since that time.



Rudiak has mustered much circumstantial evidence, as has UFO celebrity Stanton Friedman (among others).

Redfern has other detractors besides Rudiak but he also has supporters, including the open-minded editor of the UFO e-zine, UFO Review, Stuart Miller, who is no slouch when it comes to the UFO phenomenon.



The current vituperation, however, is as uncivil as it can get in “ufology” with Rudiak blasting anyone who dares to suggest that Roswell may be anything other than a mal-visitation by aliens from outer space.

Redfern, and the Roswell agnostics, are holding their own but the pro-ET ufologists are getting rabid, as the 60th anniversary of the Roswell incident approaches.

Roswell is not the whole cup of UFO tea many in the UFO community say but for some it is, and Rudiak is one of those who thinks that Roswell is the smoking gun of the UFO mystery.



That he (Rudiak) can barely contain himself when any other view that the extraterrestrial hypothesis surfaces goes to the heart of why scientists, serious scientists, who have their own dust-ups (string theory for instance) to contend with, ignore UFOs: the dialectical environment is toxic.

But this has how it has always been in UFO circles. The civilized Donald Keyhoe, who also believed in the extraterrestrial explanation and the military stonewalling about UFOs, also met with opprobrium by colleagues who thought UFOs might be something other that alien visitations.



But the intensity of the present confrontations are unique, in that name-calling and invective are part and parcel of the “discussion” while dialogue and bonhomie have been set aside as each side tries to score points with objective or naïve observers.

(Redfern and Miller remain gentlemen in the scuffle.)

Will the current atmospherics subside any time soon? We hope so. Otherwise pertinent new hypotheses for the UFO enigma may be stifled.

And we wouldn’t want that to happen, would we?

The process by which the host, the Eucharist, used for Communion in the Roman Catholic Church changes into the body and blood of Jesus/Christ is called Transubstantiation.



The change isn’t a metaphorical change but a substantial change, a real change of the bread and wine into the body and blood of the Church’s crucified Son of God.

[Wikipedia's take on Transubstantiation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation]

UFOs, those that approximate the look of the host (round or disk-like and white) and represent “real UFOs” (not hoaxed UFOs or military UFOs, or any other kind of UFO that has a prosaic explanation) can convert from visual stimuli to actual, tangible flying craft: the transubstantiation of UFOs.



The conversion from a wave phenomenon to a particle phenomenon is a quantum event, of course, but there is more to it than that.

The actualization of an evanescent image to a palpable, physical object is not a miracle but unique event brought about by the physical properties of quantum mechanics.

For UFOs, as with any other quantum measurement, the observation brings about the actualization; that is, the observation (or measurement) of a UFO makes it real, changing it from a Jungian or Vallee-defined artifact to a bona fide object, with definite physical properties.



Just as the bread and wine in a Catholic mass is changed into the body and blood of Christ, which is a physical transformation also, a UFO changes from a perceived but amorphous entity into a object exhibiting physical traits and behavior, but only when it is objectively observed or measured (by eyesight, radar, or film/video).

(The paranormal search for ghosts and spirits, if it follows the same procedures with serious measurement, will also produce results that are concrete or substantial, but only if the measurement is scientifically sound.)

Transubstantiation is a quantum effect. UFOs are quantum manifestations, as we’ve noted here before. To obtain a solution to the UFO enigma, the phenomenon must be addressed in the same way that a quantum event is addressed.

The “incantations” during a Catholic mass bring about Transubstantiation. While incantations won’t produce a UFO (usually), the proper experimental “rites” should, if the observer is truly expert at his or her craft.



So, ufologists might re-evaluate their procedures, looking to the Church and/or quantum science for guidance.

Then, perhaps, the UFO mystery will be solved, finally.

Our friend Brian Miller found the following photos at http://swapatorium.blogspot.com/:





The photos were provided to Swapatorium by Nick from Square America (http://www.squareamerica.com/) who would like more information about the photos (date, locale, etc.) and the circumstances of what appears to be a UFO sighting by the children pictured.

Use the Swapatorium and/or Square America links above to contact Nick directly.

When has a flying saucer or UFO (real or not) brought anything but bad repercussions to the person or persons experiencing the thing?

Elijah, in the Hebrew Bible, is taken up “into heaven” by a UFO and never seen again. Ezekiel is visited by a UFO and ended up being assassinated while in Babylonian exile.



Constantine sees a UFO (a sign of the cross) in the skies during a battle, converts Rome to Christianity, and the world’s religions have been in contention ever since.

Moving forward to our time, there’s the Roswell debacle, which has left no one connected to it unscathed by (bad) rumors and innuendos, including those who weren’t there but who have made it a staple of their careers or life, such as Stanton Friedman, a one-time reputable physicist of sorts and now a pariah in the scientific community.

Frank Scully ruined his journalistic career by glomming on to the Aztec UFO crash, which (real or not) sunk him and the two men (Newton and GeBauer) who provided him the inside information about the episode and were indicted for fraud eventually.

Donald Keyhoe, a retired Marine officer, whose life terminated with no answer to the UFO question and his reputation in disarray and dishonor by those outside the UFO community, died forlorn and disillusioned.

J. Allen Hynek’s astronomical credentials have been totally discredited by his association with UFOs.



Dick Hall, Hynek’s colleague, lives in near-poverty, without recognition by anyone outside the UFO crowd.

Travis Walton has been scourged as a fraud.



Betty Cash and Vickie Landrum (in 1980) encountered a UFO and suffered health problems for years afterward, and the loss of jobs also.

Dr. James McDonald, a prominent physicist, committed suicide after a period of opprobrium from those who once respected him but who turned on the Ph.D. when he delved into the UFO mystery.



Morris K. Jessup, a noted astronomer, also committed suicide after his foray into the UFO enigma.

Ed Ruppelt, head of the Air Force’s Project Bluebook, died of heart attack in 1960 at age 38.



Air Force Staff Sergeant Charles Moody suffered, allegedly, radiation poisoning after being “abducted” by a UFO in 1975.

Betty and Barney Hill have been excoriated and called hoaxers after their account of a UFO abduction.

Lonnie Zamora, whose Socorro sighting of 1964 is considered on of the best UFO encounters on record – we disagree – has become a recluse, and won’t discuss the incident during these last years of his life.



Police Officer Herbert Schirmer was or was not abducted by spacemen in a UFO (1967) and ultimately lost his job and wife in the aftermath.

Harvard professor John Mack was vilified by his colleagues when he started to investigate the UFO abduction phenomenon and was killed by a drunk driver in London before his illustrious career was totally ruined by an association with UFOs.



And look at all the so-called UFO abductees that Dr. Mack (and others) took to heart: they are looked at askance by even their family members, as well as being ostracized by society as a whole.

Bruce Maccabee, a research physicist with credentials in the UFO community has lost some of his cachet because he authenticated the obviously fake Gulf Breeze UFO photos created by Florida building contractor Ed Waters.

Then there are the investigators of UFOs and the phenomenon they represent: Jerome Clark, Kevin Randle, David Rudiak, Nick Redfern, and the myriad other lesser lights of the UFO community. They have been sidelined by the academic and scientific communities, and pushed to the back of the intellectual line because they’ve purportedly subverted their mental acumen to solve the UFO mystery. (They haven’t but society thinks they have.)

Yes, UFOs have not proven to be propitious for those who’ve settled around them. The UFO curse is one that permeates the whole UFO culture, in one way or another – sometimes subtly and sometimes not.

So Dante’s dictum at the beginning of The [Divine] Comedy applies:

The old saw that too many chefs spoil the broth applies to the UFO kitchen.

Everyone has an opinion nowadays, but in the UFO community everyone thinks they’re an expert. And hypotheses are a thick as a swarm of flies on a cow-pie.

This was the problem when “flying saucers” became mainstream in the 1950s and the situation has worsened exponentially ever since, so that now, in 2007, everyone, and we mean everyone, thinks they have some expertise when it comes to UFOs.

The so-called debunkers (such as Donald Menzel, Phil Klass, The Amazing Randi, and James Oberg) thought, and think to this day, that UFOs are just puff.

The believers (and they are too many to name, but you know who they are) think UFOs are the be-all and end-all of everything that one lives for.

But it’s the “experts” who hold sawy over the UFO phenomenon, and they’ve done a disservice to the enigma, by their inordinate sniping and errant conjectures about the mysterious “things” that have been seen sporadically for thousands of years and very much so in the modern era.

The clutter of nonsense about UFOs have diminished the validity of some conjectural opinions, which are interesting (Jung’s, Keyhoe’s, Vallee’s).

This clutter, from the fringe elements of society and even the fringes of the UFO community, can’t be stomped out. It is exacerbated by UFO web-sites and lists where almost anyone with a view, no matter how nonsensical, gets a hearing….if they play by the fascistic rules of the moderators.

A suggestion by us, at a science-oriented web-site, sponsored by a prestigious science magazine, that some scientists should look at the UFO “evidence,” was met by a “we’ve got better things to think about” and “those UFO nuts make my skin crawl” (among other epithetical remarks).

This categorical distancing is not just from some smug physicists and scientists but from even those who appear to have open minds about things in this world and universe which are strange, even stranger than UFOs.

It’s the “crap” that true UFO experts allow to pass, or which they often even take time to comment about that has produced the stink that pervades the UFO panoply.

Of course there’s no way to curb the nonsense. It’s way too late for that. But perhaps, when the old UFO guard passes, a new crop of “ufologists” may be able to take up the UFO riddle and invest it with some credibility.

Until then, however, don’t hold your breath; just hold your nose.

The Universe is comprised, primarily, of materials and forces that are hidden from view. These hidden elements are assumed by their effect on things that can be seen or detected. Some have also been theoretically intuited.



UFOs -- real UFOs – could also be detected by the very science that perceives the hidden Universe; that is, UFOs may be evidenced by their effect on things that they have been overwhelmingly attracted to: aircraft, military installations, swamps, and lonely travelers on the road.

UFOs as visualized or photographed entities have proven to be ephemeral and evanescent.



Hidden UFOs, on the other hand, would be attractive to physicists who thrive upon things which are not tangible, such as quantum particles, light waves, and strings.



If, for instance, a person goes into an ADD trance or affects a ponderous pedantry, one can hypothesize that they’ve been or are in the vicinity of a hidden UFO.

If an airplane goes off course or has a near-crash, one can conjecture that the plane was visited by a UFO.



Of course, there would be no physical remnants to investigate or examine, but that hasn’t stopped ufologists before, and it doesn’t stop theoretical physicists from arriving at their certitudes.

If a blob of light or gleaming object in the sky is not evidence for “flying saucers,” then surely the occasional vibrations or eerie feelings that one experiences are proof that UFOs are near, just as the perturbation of galaxies and star clusters are proof that dark matter or dark energy has intervened.

The one area where the presence of the hidden UFOs might prove worthwhile is during those alleged abduction cases which, if the abductees (or experiencers) were trained to note the details, could certainly verify that UFOs exist, even though they are not available to the senses in an overt way.


The problem is that ufologists don’t have the skills or training that physicists have, so those hidden UFOs will continue to go undetected, while the meaningless visible UFOs will still get all the attention.

But our suggestion here might spur further research into the hidden realm of UFOs.

We certainly hope so…

The Ezekiel encounter [circa 6th Century B.C.]



The 1608 Nice, France visuals



The 1917 Fatima incidents



The 1948 Chiles-Whitted episode



The 1952 Washington National Airport sightings



The 1953 Penderecki event at Fairy Lake in Ontario, Canada



The 1956 Lakenheath-Bentwaters radar/visual contacts



The Exeter, New Hampshire sighting(s) of 1965



The 1966 Ann Arbor/Dexter-Hillsdale, Michigan sightings



The Coyne Helicopter confrontation over Mansfield, Ohio, October 1973

Over the years, military services have succeeded in designing and flying aircraft that can take off vertically and fly subsonically, often with little or noise.

Here are some designs:











And here is a paper [WORD format] from our UFO web-site about NASA’s role, currently, in the design and manufacture of VTOLs, many seen as UFOs by the uninitiated:

http://ufos.homestead.com/nasa.doc

More to come…..

We’ve addressed, elsewhere, why science ignores UFOs, but what about the general public?

Although UFO hobbyists continue to cite Gallup polls showing that many persons think UFOs are real and some have actually reported seeing one at some time or another, the vast majority of persons here in the United States and abroad shy away from the topic. It’s not cool to talk about UFOs or admit to knowing anything about them.

And the younger generation, generally, does not care about UFOs. What do UFOs have to do with being hip or trendy?

UFOs are for kooks and weirdos, as media sees it, and bloggers, who are not into the subject, report UFOs as a joke usually.

Ufologists (to use the term that identify UFO mavens and give them, they think, street cred) have been inept, that’s a given; they’ve botched the topic with internecine squabbling and self-glorification, but mostly by treating the phenomenon cavalierly, while pretending to study it seriously.

Also, when outsiders (and even insiders) scrutinize web-sites, blogs, and sites that pertain to UFOs (such as Rense or UFO UpDates), they are struck by the lack of humor (real humor) or wit.

And the subject matter is often beclouded by pedantry or obscure insights to UFO minutiae.

Some bloggers are sexist, narcissistic, and self-aggrandizing.

Others are so far out that they are unreadable.

Even the sensible web-sites (Black Vault is one) are shunned because no one, outside the UFO community, will admit to having an interest in UFOs, They don’t want to be excoriated by their peers.

And this situation is not going to improve. The UFO phenomenon has been tainted from 1947 on, and that taint was exacerbated by so-called contactees of the 1950s, that bizarre bunch who claimed to have been taken aboard flying saucers and transported to places and planets that turned out, after astronomical study, to be nothing like what they purported to have seen.

Then the alleged abductees, who say they’ve been kidnapped by UFO occupants and medically examined (which may or may not be true), cause rational persons to lift Spock-like eyebrows to express incredulity.

So even baby-boomers, who are far from cool themselves, will have nothing to do with UFOs.

And teens or the 20 to 30 year-olds, who stroke the culture, won’t even acknowledge UFOs or anything peripherally related for fear of being called a dweeb, nerd, or geek.

Moreover, even those of us who are steeped in the UFO culture, like a person who’s alcoholic or homosexual, will never admit to our “disease.” It’s embarrassing.

Thus, UFOs will remain a non-topic for the present generation. And those who still linger in the UFO milieu? Well, they’ll have to continue to hide their identities and addiction. It’s just not cool to believe in UFOs.

The documents purporting to show a government-instigated “flying saucer” study group, The Majestic Twelve, aka MJ-12, have been put on the ufological back-burner it seems.

The documents -- forgeries some say; actual government issues others say – are, unlike Roswell and every other UFO event, grist for a final determination of authenticity or fakery. But ufologists are unable to conclude one way or the other.

How difficult has it been to either certify the MJ-12 papers or to debunk them?

Well, it seems that the MJ-12 documents are in that ufological limbo where every other UFO episode resides -- and we mean all other UFO episodes.

While one of the main proponents for the authenticity of the MJ-12 sheets, Stanton Friedman, has scrutinized them rather thoroughly, he, and others, have not been able to convince others in the UFO camp that the documents really represent what they say they represent.



And those who think the documents are fakes have not been able to convince Mr. Friedman and others that they are bogus.

This is one of the reasons why UFOs and accoutrements to the phenomenon are looked at askance by science and thoughtful persons: no UFO or UFO-related incident is or has been conclusive, or even circumstantially promising.

If ufologists can’t resolve the MJ-12 material, one understands why they can’t come to any definitive conclusions about UFO sightings, since UFO sightings are of a much more complicated nature than the mundane, although supposedly secret, documentation from the Majestic Twelve group.

MJ-12 isn’t a cold case, by a long shot, having surfaced in 1984. And forensics could be applied to the content only, since the originals have never been available and only photographs and copies have circulated.

Our point is that if ufology’s most “expert” members can’t clear up the MJ-12 conundrum, how can anyone hope that those same “experts” will provide an answer to the UFO enigma.

They can’t, and they haven’t. That’s why the UFO mystery remains just that: a mystery.

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

N.B. Wikipedia has a complete entry about MJ-12 which can be seen here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_12

While there are many theories explaining (or trying to) the Stonehenge megaliths and site, an almost obvious interpretation is that the initial creators of Stonehenge (circa 8000 B.C.) were emulating the craft that brought them or provided “supplies” to them, much in the way that the Cargo Cult peoples emulated World War II aircraft they had seen delivering supplies in the Pacific.





Just as the Akkadian peoples and Egyptian scribes depicted the gods who provided them with cultural artifacts, the Stonehenge creators did the same, but in a more realistic and tangible way, with a construction that duplicated the craft they were familiar with.



Stonehenge’s evolution has been dynamic, with the original site comprised of large stones, ground cover, earthworks, and vegetation insertions that duplicated “flying saucers.”



At some point, later than 3000 B.C., the heft and importance of the craft or “saucers” that interacted with the British Isles people were simulated by megaliths that everyone identifies with Stonehenge.



If exact dates could be determined for construction variables, those could be compared with UFO sightings for the same time periods, which would help serious ufological anthropologists, perhaps, with proof of alien visitations that came in waves.

S. Shklovskii’s contention, in his book with co-author Carl Sagan, Intelligent Life in the Universe [Dell, NY, 1966] that there was an extraterrestrial visitation in and around Sumeria 10,000 years ago, as suggested by Soviet ethnologist M. M. Agrest, is supplemented with von Daniken-like assertions that many extraterrestrial visitation took place for periods before and after 10,000 B.C.


Stonehenge represents at least one of those visitations and very likely many visitations since the Stonehenge construct was imaginatively updated from about 10,000 B.C. (as some scholars date the beginnings of Stonehenge) to 1600 B.C. when further elaboration of the site seemed to stop.

The history of the British Isles, including the legend of King Arthur, is replete with strange occurrences that bespeak of visitations by advanced or superior cultures, well before the Roman invasions of the common era (circa 43 A.D.).



But it is the Stonehenge repository that creates, more specifically than any other site, anywhere else in the world, including the ancient AmerIndian cultures or Egyptian civilizations, a replication that depicts, dramatically, the vehicles that transported alien galactic cultures to Earth.

It should strike some who engage in fringeology that the various phenomena indicated by our title above are without concrete actualization.

With all the technical equipment extant, and some going back to the early 1800s (photography), no UFO, no Bigfoot (although we like the Patterson film), and no Loch Ness serpent (even allowing for the current eel video) has been verified by such equipment.

UFOs have been photographed, but not one photo or video has provided absolute or even circumstantial proof that the thing photographed is a substantial phenomenon that requires the scrutiny of science.

The amorphous UFO situation has left the phenomenon to persons without scientific credentials; men and women who, because of a lack of academic disciplines that apply, accept the evanescence of UFOs as a kind of reality worthy of their time and efforts.



The same is true of Bigfoot, Sasquatch, the Yeti.



The Loch Ness appearances have also been photographed (and witnessed) by scores of people. But not one photograph or video brings the observations into the arena of reality.



Nessie is as elusive as ever, along with her wooded companion, Bigfoot, and her aerial counterpart, UFOs.

There are no photographs of the Roswell flyover or crash, just some controversial debris that continues to spark debate among the fringers.

There is no video or photograph of the recent O’Hare sighting, and cameras were all over the place the day that UFO allegedly showed up.

No corroborating pictures of Patterson’s Bigfoot, before or since.

No unblurry, authentic pictures of Nessie., then or now.

And cameras, as we’ve noted have been around for 200 years, with a gazillion photographs, of everything under the sun, virtually all of them distinguishable as the thing captured.

But not UFOs, or Nessie, or Bigfoot.

So why do fringers persist?

The obsession with these creatures and aerial phenomena cannot be explained by scientific curiosity, because scientists, actual ivory-tower academics, are not, as a rule, curious about the things named here.

So what causes persons, a few not totally insane, to incur the loss of their short-lived existences by pursuing these transient and/or fictitious entities?

Well, we could trot out our usual etiology of psychosis, but that would be too easy or glib, and wouldn’t account for the few quasi-rational persons (James McDonald, John Mack, Donald Keyhoe, Loren Coleman, Jerome Clark, et alii) who’ve explored the phenomena named here.

There has to be something else at work, something that spurs a small group of human beings to give up a rational life for the life of a societal outsider, persons who don’t care about the plight of Darfurians, or how the war in Iraq is going, or how many people are dying of AIDs or cancer, et cetera.

We’ve taken on the personalities in the UFO community elsewhere. Maybe it’s time to seek the smoking gun that creates the UFO, Bigfoot, Nessie fringers rather than spending time trying to understand what the reality of UFOs, Bigfoot, and Nessie is.

The point may be that it’s the human mind we’re supposed to be fathoming, not the phenomena named here. They (UFOs, Bigfoot, and Nessie) are symbols that are supposed to drive us to find out why the minds of some are afflicted by such intangibles.

And when we find out why some are so easily distracted and existentially remote, then maybe we’ll have achieved an evolutionary thrust that moves man from nonsense to meaningful purpose.

Samuel Beckett’s “existentialist” play, Waiting for Godot, written in the late 1940s (published in 1952) was a harbinger of the plight of ufologists.



Vladimir and Estragon, the main characters, like ufologists, represent persons (humanity) waiting for something, in the guise of Godot.

(Some interpret Godot as God but Beckett disabused them of that meaning.)

We think that Beckett was prescient, in that he anticipated the arrival of UFOs at the public level in 1947 and the following years of no answers about where they come from, if they’ll arrive at all, and what they represent.

The Observer (cited by Wikipedia) had this to say:

"By all the known criteria, Waiting for Godot is a dramatic vacuum. It has no plot, no climax, no denouement, no beginning, no middle, no end, it frankly jettisons everything by which we recognize theater, it arrives as it were with no luggage, no passport, nothing to declare, yet it gets through, as might a pilgrim from Mars".[8]

Doesn’t that sum up the UFO problem, the UFO mystery?

In the play, other characters tell Vladimir and Estragon that Godot will arrive sometime but he (or it) never does.

Vladimir and Estragon continue to hope and wait for Godot’s arrival, just as ufologists and UFO devotees hope and wait for UFOs to arrive, tangibly.

The mystery of UFOs is as palpable as the mystery of Godot.

We and real ufologists (plus their minions) sit by the wayside, like Vladimir and Esatragon, accepting the excuses for the UFO delay, hoping that when the UFOs actually arrive, they will be explained or understood, and our waiting for them will not have been in vain.

But we get the feeling that the wait will be interminable and Godot, er the UFOs, will not be arriving any time soon or in a way that satisfies our longing.

Yes, we’re admirers of Jacques Vallee, but he is wrong.

The Vallee hypothesis that UFOs are a control system, altering, encouraging, manipulating humankind, for good or evil does not fly.

History, and the vicissitudes of human activity, from time immemorial show that UFOs have had no effect on civilization, or a negligible effect, one that has only tweaked human activity in the most insignificant way.

(The one UFO event, if it was a UFO event at all, that might have altered society in a propitious or, as some think, malicious way, would be the sighting of a cross by Roman Emperor Constantine in the 4th Century, which made the Roman Catholic Church the “official” religion of the Roman Empire, and ultimately Western civilization.)

When a UFO (or God) led the Hebrews out of Egypt (which some contend is a myth but which we think is a bona fide historical event), the UFO (or God) impacted the Hebrews only, and that in a benign religious sense, not in a revelatory or practical sense. (It didn’t save the Jews from pogroms or the Holocaust.)



The Nuremberg sighting of the 1561 (which is listed by a documentarian as one the top ten UFO sightings of all time) didn’t alter society, not one iota.

Gutenberg, the inventor of movable type and printing as we know it, a hundred years earlier, had more of an impact on humanity than any UFO before or since.



Vallee’s contention that UFOs as psychical projections or actual images from a super power or force may be true, but the corollary that such projections or images are meant to further humanity’s mental (even physical) evolution is not borne out by the historical, anthropological, psychological, evidence.

Since 1947, what have UFOs brought to the human table? Nothing but wisps of curiosity by a dedicated band of UFO devotees whose impact on nations, governments, ecological systems, economic philosophies, even military accoutrements has been and remains nil.

When a few French and Italian citizens encountered dwarves in “flying saucers” during the 1950s or the Irish peoples saw the wee people running loose around their farms, what developed from those happenstances, in a way that altered human society and moved it along significantly? Nothing.



The UFO phenomenon that Vallee addresses may be likened to gnats disturbing a picnic crowd. The phenomenon had been and is without power to change society.

Lee Harvey Oswald, and his co-conspirators, with a few gun shots in 1963changed American (and world) society much more drastically than any UFO sighting ever has.

And if, as Vallee suggests, the change is long-range, what are the UFO generators waiting for? The phenomenon has been around before mankind could talk.

Yes, Vallee may be on to something, but what he’s on to is so petty and ultimately benign it can be ignored, except by those who need a good mystery, no matter how inconsequential, to keep them amused.

Michio Kaku, in his book, Parallel Worlds [Doubleday, NY, 2005, Page 20] writes that civilizations trillions [sic] of years ahead of us could possibly find ways to leave their dying universe, via worm holes or black holes – time warps, and travel to other younger or warmer universes.



(Kaku’s context is our dying Universe, which is a bit in the future: trillions upon trillions of years from now.)

If civilizations require many trillions of years to develop the methods that allow the kind of travel Kaku postulates, the UFOs seen by humankind for thousands of years don’t fit an evolutionary time-line that trillions of years represents.

That is, UFOs observed and photographed (real UFOs, and there are some) do not portray advanced designs, as we’ve noted elsewhere here.



Interstellar cultures or civilizations from other universes that have evolved – and Darwin’s theory applies, as he noted himself – to the point where they can maneuver between universes or galactic distances consisting of incalculable light-years would certainly have vehicles much more refined than what UFO observers have witnessed: chariots of fire, cigar-shaped craft, dirigible-like airships, crude flying saucers, delta-wings, et cetera.



So one can rule out the Kaku beings as the progenitors or occupants of UFOs.

But what about time-travelers, from our not-too-distant future or antedeluvial past?

The designs sported by the elusive UFOs do not provide evidence or encouragement that they come from Earth’s future.

They (the designs) are too prosaic and time-oriented to Earth’s historical time-lines, meaning that UFOs are steeped in aerodynamics that mimic pretty much what the aerodynamics of the time when they’ve appeared; that is, UFOs looked like balloon ships during a time when airships were under design or prominent by standards of the day, or UFOs looked like rocketships and circular craft when both were being considered by aircraft designers extant.



Even if Vimanas (from the Hindu books of faith) were real, they didn’t present a vision from Earth’s far future, but what if they indicated something from Earth’s pre-geologic past?



That’s a possibility; a remote one, but a possibility nonetheless.

However, the occupants of those aircrafts from an original creation on this Earth, which somehow disappeared, don’t fit the evolutionary patterns or fossil records that exist.

UFOs from the past would have had to be designed by peoples who had reason to seek out time-travel, because the Earth was about to regenerate or they had a curiosity that belies the evolutionary time period that would allow such advanced thinking.

(Evolution from the Earth’s creation to life forming doesn’t allow a previous advanced civilization to arise before it would have been destroyed by a cataclysmic event that began the evolution we’re part of.)

For some reason or another, UFOs from other universes or parallel worlds (dimensions) doesn’t work, if Michio Kaku’s estimations are correct.

UFOs from intergalactic worlds is also problematic, but workable as an hypothesis if black holes or worm holes are considered. But the advanced design conundrum remains.



UFOs from time – future or past – also do not resonate for the reasons cited.

So what are we left with? The continuing mystery of the phenomenon, which isn’t being seriously addressed by anyone in the so-called UFO community, despite protestations to the contrary.

A man named E. Arthur Bryant reported a UFO sighting for April 24th, 1965 in Scoriton, England, the County of Devon, near Dartmoor.

Mr. Bryant also noted, in letters to the Exeter Astronomical Society, other sightings.

What is fascinating about the Bryant incident is his alleged contact with beings in that “flying saucer” – one of whom referred top himself as Yamski, apparently a reincarnation of George Adamski who had died only hours before (April 23rd, 1965).



The whole, intriguing affair was covered in a book by British UFO investigator Eileen Buckle, The Scoriton Mystery, and a booklet by Norman Oliver, Sequel to Scoriton.

Bryant provided “technical gear” (supposedly pieces of Thomas Mantell’s airplane crash from Mantell’s UFO encounter on January 7th, 1948 over Kentucky) and avid descriptions of the interiors of the crafts and the beings therein.



He also divulged information that was only privy, allegedly, to George Adamski and supplied to him (Bryant) by Yamski and his saucerian colleagues.

Norman Oliver, initially a believer in the Bryant encounter, ended up discounting the whole affair as a hoax, with some Machiavellian elements.

Ms. Buckle continued to believe Arthur Bryant and even got an assertion of truth from him as he lay dying in hospital, June 24th, 1967.

(The Bryant/Yamski mystery was confounded by a brouhaha between Ms. Buckle and Mr. Oliver, which became confusingly tendentious.)

Like all UFO incidents, the Bryant story is filled with interesting, but strange details; some provable as erroneous and others not so easily dismissed.

Ms. Buckle’s book is still available, but at premium prices, and Mr. Norman’s 44 page sequel might still be around (we have a copy), and available through some British UFO groups. (You might try UFOreview.net to see if Stuart Miller can provide a copy.)

We’ll have more about the Bryant “encounter” as it antedates the Michalak/Falcon Lake of 1967. (Was Michalak’s flying disk the same one as Bryant’’s – there are similarities – or did Michalak borrow his tale from the Buckle book?)

Meanwhile, Adamski devotees should find the Bryant “contact” thought-provoking.

If there is anything that is true about the UFO phenomenon it is the observation that the hallucinated or real crafts seen over the years (from ancient history to today) have, like animated species of the Earth, have evolved, albeit at a faster pace than the biologic entities that make up life here.

Flying anomalies of the past, the airships of the 1890s, the flying saucers of the 50s, and UFOs, right up to now, have all assumed a physical shape just one step ahead of what mankind created to fly.



Some suggest that the progenitors of UFOs (aliens or “divinities’) have been using the phenomenon to enlighten humans about the possibilities of flight; namely airfoil designs that enhance lighter-than-air craft.

We pose the possibility that UFOs, whether a figment of the imagination, actual aircraft (from sources yet unknown), or mental stimulations from the creators and/or manipulators of human beings, have evolved according to the theory of Darwin: natural selection (or survival of the fittest).

Early UFOs were depicted or written about as if they were chariots, sometimes astronomical phenomena (suns, comets, meteors, et cetera).





While there was a dearth of UFO sightings during the Enlightenment period [1700s], the resurgence in sightings or visions picked up in the late 1800s.

(That dearth during a period of intellectual stimuli is grist for investigation.)

With the airship mystery at the turn of the century – 1890-1899 – UFOs presented an evolutionary set-back however, since earlier UFOs were more aerodynamic (sleek and futuristic).



(This may be likened to the throwback in the evolution of man, when Neanderthals appeared but couldn’t compete, evolutionarily, with Cro-Magnon man, the first real homo sapiens.)

The lacunae of dynamic UFO sightings, from 1900 to 1947 – there were some but not many – indicates, to us, a re-evaluation of, an adaptation by, the phenomenon.

For what reason or by what instigation is anyone’s guess.

Nonetheless, the UFO phenomenon then progressed through the flying disk stage to the cigar shape and back to the saucer shape before settling on an egg-like configuration in the 1960s.











After that the phenomenon evolved into delta or triangular shapes, some transfiguring into blobs of transient light.





Today [2007] the phenomenon has regressed, in the mind of man or actually, to the 1950/1960 configurations, only a bit less hardware bound or mechanical in appearance.





The natural selection of UFOs became blunted by something in the late 1980s and 1990s. What stymied the evolution is yet to be determined, but it is palpable, if witness reports and authentic video/film are authentic.

We’ll pose an hypothesis, however, upcoming….

It’s obvious to even the most laggard UFO buff that the United States government and its military (along with a few other countries of the world) has know about and has investigated flying saucers and UFOs since 1947 and maybe before.

The Projects Sign, Grudge, Blue Book, and such entities as the Roberson Panel, plus documents garnered by way of the Freedom of Information Act show, overwhelmingly, that various U.S. agencies, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, and others, have scrutinized UFO sightings for years, maybe even capturing one of the elusive craft that was once designated “flying disk.”

And aside from the disclaimers, with provisos that the phenomenon, even in its tangible form (flying saucer), posed and poses no threat to the security of this country or any other country, the military continues to seek more from the appearances known as unidentified flying objects (or, in military-speak, unidentified aerial phenomena).

It’s even possible that if a flying disk has ever been downed, the military got their hands on it, and have back-engineered some of the technology that now shows up in Stealth, Aurora, and other esoteric aircraft of the Navy and Air Force.



But where do those possibilities take us?

The United States military constructs would kill to have a threat from interplanetary visitors made obvious. Such a disclosure would guarantee massive funds and a profound imprimatur for an expanded military presence here, and in other countries as well.

Just as the threat of terrorism has brought new agencies into existence, with vast amounts of monies to keep them extant, an alien hostility would do even more.

This is what undercuts the conspiracy theories of UFO fanatics, who think the government and its military adjuncts are holding back UFO information or covering up data and materials that prove an extraterrestrial existence has penetrated Earth’s skies and even its populations.

The militaries of the Earth have always, if history is any guide, conspired, not to be secretive, but to create circumstances and scenarios to enhance their status and prominence – from the time of Alexander (and before) to now, and the Iraq war.



If UFOs (flying saucers) were a threat, ever, no one in the government here or elsewhere has acted with determination.

Yes, there have been incidents, sparse and mostly generated by hysteria (Rendlesham Forest is one, and there are a few others), but none have turned out to be significant within a confrontational military context.



So, as we contend, UFOs are benign, unless one accepts the Jacques Vallee hypothesis that maybe UFOs are corrupting our culture and civilization in abstract or psychological ways.

But that for another time….

Click here for a paper [PDF] about paranoia in the UFO community (and everywhere!?)

UFOs are queer, certainly. But the fixation on some UFO stories are even queerer.

For instance, Roswell, and the minutiae of that episode, continue to provide grist for reams of blog detritus (ours included), book deals, conferences, and ongoing back-and-forths, such as that at UFO UpDates currently where David Rudiak, a Roswell junkie, Kevin Randle, and a slew of UFO mavens are re-cogitating what the Ramey photos of the Roswell debris show.



Like the Iraq war, Roswell is an episode from which no one can or has emerged unscathed. Everyone connected to the incident has been vilified, by someone, at some time or other.

And those who keep digging into the muddled affair are sullied, by someone, sometime, or always.

Rudiak, the most imaginative and ingenious of UFO “researchers,” continues to beat the dead horse of Roswell, and is followed in that psychopathic obsession by Kevin Randle, Stanton Friedman, and a few other Roswell die-hards.



What ever happened at Roswell, a denouement of the complex circumstances is not in the offing, and even if it were, the UFO phenomenon will not be explained by a Roswell resolution.

It’s time to move away from Roswell, or else, like Vietnam and now Iraq, the whole UFO mystery will be totally done in, if it hasn’t been already; Roswell having made saps of ufologists and other UFO hobbyists from day one.

Yet, there are other UFO incidents that are equally dooming for bona fide UFO investigators.

UFOs are like quarks or strings; they are a palpable but not clearly defined phenomenon, but one that is muddled by corrupt evidence, hare-brained witnesses, and UFO investigators who seek fame and maybe fortune in an arena where education and expertise or scientific disciplines are sorely missing and not necessary, by a long shot.

Zeroing in on the forensics of Roswell, or Rendlesham, or Kenneth Arnold’s misinterpreted observation, plus a hundred or so other UFO sightings and/or landings has proven nothing, nothing except that ufologists are a resilient lot, one with little comprehension of what should be considered or not considered when UFO accounts are proffered.

UFOs may be likened to J. Allen Hynek’s swamp: a muck and mire from which even sure-footed travelers cannot escape by diligent and thoughtful inquiry. The phenomenon is held by and has been held by fringe-terrorists – persons so consumed by their own faith that they provide a daily jihad that has scared off science and reasonable seekers of an answer to the UFO enigma.

But that’s been the way of things, whether it was a Church condemning Giordano Bruno and others for forward thinking, or Muslim fanatics wishing to convert, by force and intimidation, those who would stray from the path they think is the right one.

The blithering obsession with Roswell, MJ-12, the Hill story, the Phoenix lights, or the O’Hare figment have all created a mental and sometimes physical quagmire from which some have not been able to extricate themselves.

And that is why UFOs have remained strangle-held for sixty years.

It’s time to move on.

Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh shot himself on Sunday, July 27th, 1890, and died from that gunshot the following Tuesday, July 29th at 1:30 in the morning.

Van Gogh’s mental state has been the topic of many articles and book chapters; not just for the period leading up to his suicide attempt, but for the whole of his life.

(Some have postulated that Van Gogh became deranged by the use of absinthe, a narcotic that was popular among artists. Others suggest Van Gogh was troubled by bi-polar etiology -- manic-depression. And one Ph.D – Wilfred N. Arnold, in Science, May 12th, 2006 – wrote that Van Gogh suffered from an inherited disease, AIP or acute intermittent porphyria. There are other diagnoses.)

But Van Gogh wasn’t psychotic, not at first anyway. He was subject to observations of UFOs after 1888, maybe before, and those observations affected him, as they would affect any hyper-sensitive person: an artist with the nature that Van Gogh had fro example.

Here are three paintings that show, not exaggerated stars but UFOs, all done in the year 1889.







Was Van Gogh subject to more than observation of UFOs, like an abduction for instance?

He often painted alone, at night, as this except from an 1888 letter to his brother Theo recounts:

“One night I went for a walk by the sea, along the empty shore….”

And this from “Van Gogh: The Man and His Work” by Pierre Cabanne [Prentice-Hall, N.J. 1963, Page 160]:

“Night fascinated him….He would settle himself on the bank of the Rhone, sticking candles on the brim of his hat to give light, and paint the stars [our emphasis], his nocturnal sunflowers…

He was taking visible things as a starting-point from which to attain to the heights of revelation.”

This is what mystics do and have done. It’s also what abductees, real abductees, and UFO observers would feel, after an actual UFO incident.

And abductees would go mad, as Van Gogh did, if they were actually kidnapped, or even just had a vibrant UFO experience.

Van Gogh saw UFOs, painted them, and had psychotic episodes because of them.

Then he shot himself, in the stomach.

What do UFO observers and abductees (experiencers) do? They go back to business and life, as usual. No wonder we (and others) discount their anecdotes.

Click here for a paper (PDF) that explains why the UFO Hypothesis doesn’t work.

(More papers on this subject will appear here shortly.)

Did the Bard see a UFO (or anything like it)? Not as far as we can tell from his oeuvre.

So what has he to do with the UFO phenomenon?

The mystery of Shakespeare (Did he actually write the works attributed to him, or were they penned by another, or others?) is analogous to the UFO mystery (Are UFOs the product of one alien presence or the product of many alien intrusions, some paranormalistic?)….

Shakespeare’s plays, and poetry, seem foreign to the life of the gentleman farmer; he didn’t seem to have the sophistication or intellect that the plays portray.

UFOs are a bizarre phenomenon, to say the least, but are they one phenomenon or many? Or are the interpretations bifurcated rather than the phenomenon itself?

The inconsistency of style and content in Shakespeare cause scholars to attribute the plays to his contemporaries, some afraid to produce them for fear of royal retribution because of the content, and some to provide creative posturings that wouldn’t affect their status in Elizabethan society: Christopher Marlowe, Edward de Vere, Sir Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, et alii.

UFOs present a similar dilemma. Do they represent one reality, or many realities?

Those familiar with the phenomenon know that UFOs showed up in ancient times under guises that were familiar to those witnessing them: chariots of fire, clouds of lights, shields of war, and so on.

Those could have been the disguises of the UFOs themselves or the interpretive attempts of those who saw them.

In the modern era, one finds the airships of the late 1800s, then lights following war aircraft (foo fighters) and ghost rockets after the war, with the crescent-shaped craft of Kenneth Arnold, and flying disks of all kinds from them on, intermingled with cigar-shaped craft, weird lights in the night skies, landed craft of various design, and lately triangular flying machines (among other configurations).

Some of the appearances show sophisticate design, while others show primitive design, if any design at all.

Shakespeare’s plays appeared similarly. Some sophisticated, some bizarre, and some almost primitive in style: Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, The Tempest, Titus Andronicus, Troilus and Cressida, Cymbeline, King John, et cetera.

The poetry was homoerotic. Shakespeare was not.

UFO abductions have sexual overtones, some are benign.

UFOs, like Shakespeare’s plays, are all over the place, and thus both UFOs and Shakespeare present similar problems for scholars, assuming there are some UFO scholars of course.

What are the sources or source for Shakespeare’s output? Surely it couldn’t be the folksy man from Stratford-on-Avon.

What are the sources or source of UFOs? Certainly it can’t be the U.S. military, alone.

But UFOs could be the product of a malevolent (or playful) alien race, just one with chameleon-like abilities they employ to deceive mankind, for who knows what reason, or the products of many extraterrestrial races.

Either way, just as with the Shakespeare conundrum, UFOs may never be resolved one way or another.

That’s the fun of them…and that’s all it is….fun.

While UFO devotees report many UFO sighting per day – most are misinterpretations – there are no simultaneous sightings of bona fide UFOs; that is, no UFOs are seen at the same time, in different locations.

And that has been the pattern for flying saucer/UFO sightings since people have been recording their appearances.

This would seem to indicate that the UFO presence comes down to one contingent: one UFO fleet, that replenishes its array of “crafts” every now and then, causing what UFO mavens call “flaps.”

This one UFO fleet contains a cigar-shaped mothership and a bevy of smaller, aerodynamic contraptions, each fit for a specific mission it seems, including abductions of human beings, if one wants to get silly.

Reconnaissance appears to be the main mission, but if UFOs are Earth-made, flights are primary testing occasions. However, recorded UFOs from pre-flight eras seem to rule out the Earth-made scenario, except for those UFO sightings that are misinterpreted (which account for the vast majority of UFO reports since the airship observations of the 1890s and the sightings from 1947 on).

But what is the source of this one UFO fleet? Is it extraterrestrial? Is it Earth-oriented, from a hidden civilization, as suggested by Mac Tonnies’ cryptoterrestrial hypothesis? Does the fleet come from Earth’s future? Or past?

Could the fleet be a psychic manifestation, a la Jacques Vallee, controlled by super-beings, once thought to be the gods (or demons)?

Or are they a unique phenomenon, brought into existence eons ago, by some human (or other) mechanism, and continue to appear, now and then, as an evolutionary tweaker?

Whatever the source, there is only one fleet of saucers – UFOs, and they have raised psychological havoc with a few human beings who keep them “alive” by paying attention to them: the ufologists and their lapdog followers.

No, it’s not the obsession that UFO aficionados have for the 1947 episode but, rather, the apparent raft of pathological liars that inhabited (and still inhabit) the Roswell, New Mexico area.

When one studies liars and lying, it becomes obvious that only a small segment of a community has the tendency to lie, about anything.

But in Roswell, it seems, if Kevin Randle, Karl Pflock, and others are correct, that a host of Roswell citizens not only lied but had a penchant for embellishment and outright falsehoods that exceeded statistical groupings of pathologies for any segment of a society or community, about anything, at anytime, or anywhere.

That is, the confluence of liars in Roswell was well beyond the extreme end of the scale for any pathology, anywhere…..unless…

Unless Roswell’s witnesses to an alleged flying disk crash were and are telling the truth.

But Randle, an others, show that this was not the case. Tales told by many “witnesses” did not conform to the facts, and the rate of inconsistency was abnormally high.

Sure, there have been and are liars running rampant through the UFO scenario, but they are not accumulated in one concentrated area, no matter what UFO incident one can cite, as those in Roswell were and are.

This pathology is grist for psychologists and sociologists, but such professionals are not found in the UFO community. And outside the UFO arena, such professionals couldn’t care less, UFOs so badly tainted by fraud and nonsense of all kinds.

The lying and fraud perpetrated upon the public and even government officials by regular citizens exceeded and exceeds anything that conspiracy buffs attribute to the Air Force, CIA, FBI, et cetera in the Roswell incident.

But the will to believe overtakes commonsense when it comes to Roswell, and that is a pathology we’ve addressed elsewhere, many times.

The UFO mystery has been and is nothing more than a gigantic, non-tangible jig-saw puzzle, from which nothing worthwhile or useful has emerged.

Time, monies, lives have been wasted searching for a solution to a phenomenon that brings little more than curiosity to the human table.

Believers, die-hard investigators, skeptical agnostics and rabid non-believers alike derive nothing from the UFO phenomenon, except the kind of camaraderie (or anti-camaraderie) that crossword, sudoku puzzlers (and antagonists) share.

Kenneth Arnold purportedly saw, in 1947, nine, gleaming objects flying near Mt. Rainier. And so?

Ezekiel was taken up to the heavens by a flying something-or-other long before that. And?

Something or someone left remnants of a balloon or debris from another world in Roswell, 1947. So?

Betty and Barney Hill were scooped up, dreamily or in actuality, by a flying saucer and examined by the occupants of that “saucer.” Therefore?

Lonnie Zamora saw an egg-shaped craft from this world or another in Socorro, New Mexico, 1964. Thus?

More recently, residents saw shifting lights and/or a triangular object in the skies over Phoenix, Arizona, 1997. Consequently?

And even last year (2006), some bystanders saw something strange hovering above O’Hare airport…….

What has this produced in the way of useful or even tangential information of a viable kind?

Scientists scoff at UFOs, but their disciplines have done little better with their “phenomena” – Big Bangs, Quantum enigmas, String Theory, Dark Matter.

What have those elusive conversational pieces provided humankind, in practical, useful terms (and we discount space travel or knowledge about Mars et cetera as hardly more practical or valuable than UFO data)?

UFOs, and the study of them, as we’ve noted oft times here, provide escapes from reality. And the devotees of the phenomenon are exactly the kinds of persons who need escapes from their realities; many barely beyond Neanderthalian thinking and culture.

Yes, UFOs are existentially impotent, even if they turn to be real. But so are many other things one can site: golf, grilling burgers, studying Christianity, blogging, mountain climbing, making another UFO documentary, and so on.

Yet, the active curiosity will go on. What else do Neanderthals have to do?

You want UFO info and other interesting news from the nether world?

Click here to access Stuart Miller’s excellent site, UFO Review which (while the e-zine itself is on a reprieve) has links, by scrolling down when the page opens, that cover everything from soup to nuts (and we fit the latter category according to some).

The links are juicy, to say the least.

Click here for a paper by Jacques Vallee, in conjunction with J. Allen Hynek, that may indicate Vallee’s approach to UFO studies he’s conducting at the present time; reworked, of course, with UFO data.

From 1946:

This trip was made in support of Project Helios. The primary purpose was to visit present or potential suppliers of materials need for the project. A major point of interest is the view on plastic films under consideration for the balloons. Pliofilm still seems to have most potential; nylon and polythene (polyethylene) are nowhere near mature enough to be seriously considered.

Content

Since 1946 when the first plastic balloon program was started at General Mills, our engineering staff has been extremely interested in the prospects of contributing to stratospheric manned flight experiments. On project HELIOS, a gondola and balloon system was designed and built. In subsequent years, tremendous improvements in plastic balloon systems have taken place. This proposal covers the design and fabrication of two gondolas and of two balloons. It is planned that one gondola will be instrumented and flown unmanned on a 128 TT balloon to an altitude of approximately 90,000 feet. The second gondola would be a demonstration flight with a human observer to 115,000 feet on a balloon of 2,700,000 cubic feet capacity.

Content

This report describes the first outdoor inflation and flight attempt of a full-size pliofilm balloon on April 24, 1947. Purpose of the test was to obtain data on (1) proposed method of inflation; (2) use of plastic ground cover; (3) behavior of the aerostat at low wind velocity; (4) weighing off the aerostat; (5) rate of ascent; (6) operation of appendix; (7) excess lift for safe take-off without dragging; (5) balloon suspension system; (9) behavior of suspended parachute. Several preconceived opinions on these points were found wanting. A suspension harness failure precluded an actual flight. Nevertheless, the experiment was very revealing, producing information vital to any future attempt. Prior to the first outdoor inflation, a trial inflation had also been successfully made at the balloon loft.

Content

Between June 1946 and May 1947 the contractor has designed and built the gondola and auxiliary equipment for Helios to within 75% of completion, and has tested and built seven large, and several small balloons made of various plastic films. Through trial and error it has been shown that the present design will fly if the proper plastic film is used. The ideal balloon material has not yet been found, but an adequate plastic film, polyethylene, is now in production and 500 lbs. of this film will be available for assembling in June. A balloon which loses practically no lift in twelve hours has been developed. It has a diameter of 70 feet and a volume of 165,000 cubic feet. By stressing the cellophane-taped seams, it is possible to use a film of lower tensile strength and keep the weight of each cell below 100 pounds.

Content

The New York University Balloon Group was organized in November, 1946 to develop and fly constant level balloons that would carry Army Air Forces' instruments aloft for the long range detection of nuclear explosions. In 1947, while awaiting the delivery of the polyethylene balloons to be used in these flights, tests were made using clusters of neoprene, meteorological sounding balloons. In June, flight operations started in Alamogordo AAF, NM where three full-scale flights were launched. One of these, NYU Flight #4, was last reported over Arabela, NM. From a recent examination of the Weather Bureau winds aloft reports and of the ground tracks of the two subsequent NYU flights, it appears that Flight #4 is a likely candidate to explain the debris later recovered north-northwest of Arabela

N.B. The 1940s Project Helios should not be confused with the recent Helios Project

The full reports from which these excerpts derive may be found at our UFO web-site.

A blogger recently pondered why The Anomalist (http://www.anomalist.com/) would include our postings in their daily listings of web-site and blog renderings.

Since The Anomalist only occasionally transports our serious musings to the daily links, we assume they prefer our goofier efforts, as a kind of comic relief.

The Anomalist is an equal-opportunity source for materials and thoughts at the edge of practical life, never editorializing or censoring (except by omission perhaps), and always providing fair shot to all of us who deign to be noticed.

We recommend visitors here use the link above to give The Anomalist site a go, and buy a book or two while you’re there.

(We’ll buy some books ourselves, once The Anomalist finds all our blogs, even the obscure, serious ones.)

Augmenting our post about the Navy and a dirigible crash at Roswell, we provide this (which might clarify the distorted and incorrect information that a blogger posted to discredit our effort):

"The airships employed by the Navy after WW II included the operating types used in the war, as well as some modified and several new types/classes. The G and L-types were used briefly in the postwar period. By 1947 all of the L-types had either been sold, stricken or placed in storage. Some of the G-types were still in service with the Naval Airship Training and Experimentation Command in 1947.

During WW II the designations that applied to these four airship classes were ZNP-K for the K-types, ZNN-G and ZNN-L for G and L-types and ZNP-M for the M type.

In 1947, the Navy’s General Board modified the airship designation system by dropping the “N” which stood for non-rigid. This was done because the board had scrapped the rigid airship program. A f t e r t h e “ N ” was dropped, the designations became ZPK, ZTG, ZTL (T was used for training vice N) and ZPM."

The United States Navy didn’t just fly blimps and dirigibles willy-nilly as a discontented blogger makes out.

The Navy experimented with – seriously experimented with – balloons of all sorts, from the pre-1947 period until 1961, with even a few attempts to employ ballooning for its missions after that.

We present the crash episode, in as much detail as we have so far, elsewhere.

As to why we don’t open those files to the UFO rabble, the superficial accounts by others – using public records rather than private, archived records (not available in a cursory search of the internet) – causes us to share our findings only with those who don’t have self-serving agendas they need to bolster.

UFOs are neither the black plague nor the Second Coming.

UFOs are neither cancer nor untold wealth.

UFOs are a benign (if one discounts some of the abduction stories) phenomenon that a few have dedicated their waking moments to.

But having UFOs as one’s “hobby” isn’t a bad thing. It’s equivalent to hunting, gardening, painting, playing golf and a hundred other innocuous activities that usurp the time of human beings.

In all the years that UFOs have been spotted, none have brought disaster such as that of 9/11 or the Holocaust.

But for a rabid few, UFOs bring out the worst in human behavior. Persons who normally would be genteel and civilized often turn into mad dogs when someone teases their hobby or raises questions that provoke the importance that they’ve errantly given to the phenomenon.

Of all human activity, only terrorism and murder are worse than the mean-spirited attitude of most UFO mavens.

Sure, there are a handful of sincere and dedicated UFO researchers who’ve put the phenomenon in perspective. But the bulk of the UFO community consists of hard-boiled cranks and dispirited individuals.

Why this is so baffles us, as does the tendency of some in the UFO community to pretend they are truth-seekers but who have warped some events and incidents that, if the truth were known, the real truth, would destroy their narcissism and self-aggrandizement.

UFOs are interesting, and evoke curiosity. But sane persons place them in context, of the world and the ultimate reality that confronts all of us.

Unfortunately, insane persons will continue to denigrate and attack anyone who deems to belittle the inordinate importance that they put upon the mystery and themselves.

And that is a reality only a psychiatrist should deal with….

Bona fide (real) UFO researchers, such as Stanton Friedman, Jerry Clark, Kevin Randle, Brad Sparks, and Bruce Maccabee, have done the legwork for us and the rest of the UFO community.

(We didn’t add David Rudiak, who is imaginative and thorough to a fault, to the list because he allows too many “maybes” and “could haves” to his presentations, as he did in this exchange about Roswell for UFO UpDates:

“Bessie Brazel could conceivably have been at the Foster on July 4 & 5. The first day of the annual regional rodeo in Capitan was July 4 and it was the big event of the year. Mack Brazel might very well have picked up his family in Tulerosa, driven to the rodeo in Capitan on July 4, then taken the family on up to the ranch later the same day. At this point, on July 4, the family maybe picked up debris, as reported in Brazel's interview. Maybe Bessie Brazel's memories stem from this. In one account from Bill Brazel, his father first drove the family home before proceeding to Rowell to report his find. So if this happened, Bessie Brazel would have been there maybe late July 4 through early July 6. Another possibility is Brazel driving them home on July 5, then going to Corona that night, mentioning what he had found, and first being told about the flying saucers.”)

The bonafides investigate UFO episodes by visiting sighting locales, interviewing witnesses, perusing archival materials; then write books, or flesh out their web-sites and, blogs, and sometimes attend conferences to present their findings and conjectures.

UFO side-liners glom on to that work and those conjectures, rather than doing their own homework or studies and nit-pick or attempt to refute something minute among the vast enterprise that the group above produces or has produced.

With UFOs there are often hints of things that might explain or clarify the enigma, and actual researchers try to find out more from those hints.

Interlopers, too lazy to pursue sightings or data on their own, seek to undermine the work mustered by true ufologists.

(Even David Rudiak, despite his surmising, as noted above, has provided more relevant material than almost anyone else in the UFO community, but he’s often found in the backwaters of ufology because his work is too imaginative or unique for the common UFO maven or media to follow.)

We find that blogs and web-sites have provided a haven for those not able to set up their own sites where comments are the coin of the realm, and often those comments are based upon the work of others.

Connect the dots one comment-generator told us recently. We told him to connect the dots himself. We provided some clues, gathered from searches and our raft of UFO materials gathered over the years, and hoped that this might lead some to go further with our suggestions or meager hypotheses.

But our gadfly couldn’t extrapolate from the material presented, and if he found it wanting, ignore it – which is what a sane person would do.

We think he should get off his ass and do some original work himself, not parasitically use our efforts (as lame as they are) to try and score points with the rest of the laggard UFO crowd.

But it’s the true investigators who get short-changed by that kind of UFO mooch.

The work of James McDonald, John Mack, Ron Story, Brad Steiger, and dozens of others, who’ve paved the way for the current crop of UFO hobbyists, should not be besmirched by a few informational ruffians, using pseudonyms or anonymous as a crutch to criticize work they are incapable of doing on their own.

And bloggers, even us, can’t presume to have attained the heights that the persons named above have attained.

This doesn’t mean we’ll be less iconoclastic. It just means that we know who is the wheat and who is the chaff.

From 1931 on, the United States Navy conducted test flights of dirigibles and blimps, contracted with the Goodyear Company.

World War II brought a recovery in the early 1940’s when the Litchfield Naval Air Facility and the Goodyear Aircraft Corporation employed as many as 7,500 people at one time. Dirigibles or “blimps” were built at the Goodyear Aircraft Corporation.

In the summer of 1947, the Navy was testing newly configured dirigibles, using the Army Air Force Holloman Base in New Mexico, then known as the Alamogordo Air Field:

Built by Goodyear Aircraft Corporation.
M-1 to M-4
M-1 Length 310 ft. Helium capacity 625,000 cu ft.
Powered by two 550 hp Pratt & Whitney Wasp engines. Cruising speed 60 mph.
M-2 - M-4 Length 310 ft. Helium capacity 647,000 cu.ft.
Powered by two 600 hp Pratt & Whitney engines.
Lift of 10,000 lbs.

Dirigibles were flown from Alamogordo to various air bases in New Mexico and Texas.

In July 1947 a flight from Alamogordo to the Roswell Auxiliary Army Air Field No. 2 was struck by lightning and crashed in an area East of Arabella.



What details we have been able to muster can be found at our password-protected UFO site, open to bona fide UFO researchers and investigators.

A perusal of UFO web-sites and blogs will show a distinct hysteria by UFO devotees; an hysteria that has become endemic to the whole panoply of UFO enthusiasts, even those who are in a state of deep denial.

The Roswell episode has been finally discounted as the UFO panacea. It will, according to all sensible UFO mavens, not be resolved, because it has become convoluted by a loss of witnesses (to death), a loss of government paperwork, a loss of credibility among the general public and even ufologists themselves, and a backlash of malaise for being front and center for many years with no real denouement in the offing.

And ufologists are themselves to blame, having inflamed the topic with a sh*tload of cacophonous material, most irrelevant or spurious.

But it’s not just Roswell. It’s the whole UFO continuum of nonsense: theories that are without foundation, UFO internet sites clogged with extraneous copy (such as items about bigfoot, Jesus’ Second Coming, crop circles, partially clad women, and a slew of other non-UFO detritus).

That lack of focus or the lacunae of scientific discipline has killed the UFO enigma once and for all. As one UFO wag stated, the O’Hare incident wasn’t a resurgence of UFO activity but a goodbye.

UFO’s old guard, as one respected author noted, is near death: Stan Friedman. Richard Hall, even the buoyant Jerome Clark, who is 60 years old now and not far from the Grim Reaper’s sight.

Who, in the UFO world, can maintain the interest, the one-time excitement generated by UFO sightings and imaginative hoaxes?

The blogger who boasts 1000 postings, touting quantity over quality?

The writer who has been relegated to defending his good name, having been besmirched by asses and ne’er-do-wells?

The archivist who presents everything but the kitchen sink via his web-site, merely adding fire and consternation to an already flummoxed topic?

The woefully inadequate “anonymous” commentators who vent their spleen but cower behind the internet’s ability to cloak their identities and lack of intellectual credentials?

Yes, there is havoc in the UFO world, but it is self-inflicted, and we could not care less….

UFOs have more of a reality than “strings” – the basic elements (building blocks) of existence according to some physicists.

Lee Smolin, in his book “The Trouble with Physics” [Houghton Mifflin, 2006], argues against the obsession that most physicists, academic researchers, and scientific facilities have with string theory.

(Wikipedia provides a succinct overview of the discursive theory at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory for those who aren’t familiar with the concept.)

The problem with string theory is that no one can confirm by tests or experimentation the existence of strings, a dilemma similar to that for UFOs.

There is a difference however, and it’s this: UFOs have a tangibility, a record of being there (or here), whereas strings have no record – nada, nil, zilch.

Yes, UFOs exist and have existed for some recorded time. What they are remains a mystery. Those who “study” them – so-called ufologists – have botched the scrutiny of the enigma by ineptness and hubris (traits that also apply to many physicists if we read Smolin correctly).

UFOs , as a mythology and a reality, are dissipating as a major concern, for the militaries of the world, governments, or the public at large, because they’ve been spotted and photographed (perhaps) but have yet to show any profound malevolence or any practical worth as a phenomenon (except to UFO mavens who remain gaga by the idea of UFOs).

String theory may or may not be bogus. UFOs are not bogus, but they aren’t part and parcel of anyone’s life, unless persons have made them so (which is a sad commentary on the purposeless existentialism of some folks).

String theory is fun to contemplate. UFOs also. But that’s all either of the concepts are.

While we contend that the Navy has been the most diligent military organization (in the United States) investigating flying saucers or UFOs , other military constructs have not been laggard in the pursuit of the UFO enigma.

The Air Force, obviously, has been involved, ineptly, as has the Army, not so ineptly.

The Electronics Technology and Devices Laboratory, U.S. Army Laboratory Command (LABCOM), Department of the Army, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey has been, and continues to be, the place where UFOs (and other esoteric phenomena) are studied for military applications.



One classified program, and maybe the primary Army UFO program, was (and is?) Black dome which, in conjunction with the Sylvania corporation, has tried to establish quantum parameters for building and/or communicating with flying saucers – UFOs.

Here are extracts, pulled from Army archives, that deal with some of the studies that took place (and are taking place) inside the Army confines, secretly and overtly:

“Quantum transport for Bloch electrons in a spatially homogeneous arbitrarily time-dependent electric field is presented. Using a vector potential to describe the electric field, a natural basis (the accelerated Bloch states) for describing Bloch dynamics is employed to revisit the Kohn and Luttinger theory of electron transport in the presence of randomly distributed impurities. This basis, which treats the intraband effects of the field exactly, is also used to extend a recent treatment of quantum transport of Bloch electrons obeying nondegenerate statistics, interacting with phonons, to the multiband case. In particular, for the above-mentioned problems the quantum transport equations are derived from the Liouville equation for the single-particle density matrix with use of the accelerated Bloch states as a basis; results explicitly manifest all possible quantum effects to lowest nonzero order in the scattering strength, such as intraband and interband scattering, interband Zener tunneling, and nonlinear transient transport in a homogeneous electric field of arbitrary time dependence and strength. We find, for either impurity or phonon scattering, that, in addition to the usual intercollisional field effect, the collision integral involves products of field- and time-dependent matrix elements of the scattering interaction at different times instead of the usual ‘‘golden-rule’’ result, the latter being obtained only in the limit in which the field dependence of the matrix elements is neglected.”

And:

“The isolation usually encountered in optics between the part of a field that is of interest and its source motivates the consideration of a radiation mode weakly coupled to a quantum-mechanical source. After the introduction of some refinements into the quantum mechanics of a damped radiation mode, the field is expressed as the sum of two parts, one due to the source (the source field) and the other due to the loss mechanism (the "vacuum" field). The characteristic function for the field is calculated up to second order in perturbation theory. This function is then compared with the characteristic function for the field in the presence of a classical source. A method is exhibited by which a classical source can be found such that the two characteristic functions are identical when averaged over a half cycle. In particular, the two sources yield the same expectation values for the instantaneous amplitude and energy of the field. The description of the equivalent classical source must be given in statistical terms, in general, and requires only a knowledge of and , where S(0) is the dipole-moment operator of the quantum-mechanical source unperturbed by the mode under consideration (but otherwise arbitrarily complex, with the possibility of strong coupling to other modes). The theory is illustrated by a consideration of several simple sources—a two-level system, a harmonic oscillator, and a blackbody—for which equivalent classical sources are found. The two-time correlation functions for the field obtained with the two types of sources are compared and are shown to be the same up to first order in ?t, where t is the difference between the two times and ? is the inverse of the field relaxation time; the physical meaning of the second-order difference in the correlation functions is discussed. A limiting process, in which both the coupling to the source and the damping become small, is suggested as a method of adapting the results to free fields, but it is pointed out that for discussion of a single mode, a free field is physically less satisfactory than a damped field. It is concluded that, within a reasonable approximation scheme, the source field may be described classically (the "vacuum" field furnishing all the necessary quantum-mechanical properties of the total field).”

“The theory of Brillouin scattering is extended to incorporate birefringence. The necessary modifications to the Bragg laws are derived by the methods of physical optics. An integral equation method is used to calculate intensities of the first-order lines scattered by longitudinal and transverse acoustic waves in an infinite slab of birefringent crystal. This calculation also differs from those of previous authors in taking full account of internal reflection. Depletion of the incident beam is accounted for. No restriction is made to acoustic propagation parallel to the crystal faces. The intensity formulas for various cases of acoustic mode and incident optical polarization are found to differ in geometrical structure, and the differences can alter the intensities substantially.”

And this…

“A millimeter- or submillimeter-wave combiner using a quasi-optical open resonator to effectively combine the power output of several solid-state oscillators to a single-frequency is described. The combiner makes use of a symmetrical concave spherical resonator with dielectric wedge launchers as energy couplers. To demonstrate feasibility of this concept, experiments were carried out by using two InP Gunn oscillators at 60 GHz, and a combining efficiency of 54 percent has been achieved.”

What the Army has found, or developed, is grist for UFO investigators who think there’s been a government or military cover-up of UFO related information.

We’ve provided specifics of the Black Dome project at our private UFO web-site, which is open and available to bona fide UFO investigators.

Mr. Hill’s ionization and quantum measurements of UFOs are outlined in this extract from his book, entitled above:

http://www.iprimus.ca/~mallet/paulrhill.shtml

The book’s excerpt is presented by Orbwatch.

Sure, there have been UFO sightings by contemporaneous celebrities (Jackie Gleason, Arthur Godfrey, John Lennon) and politicians (Jimmy Carter, former Senator Richard Russell of Georgia) and one in the 1490s by Christopher Columbus, but no others by the historically gifted and greats of civilization.



Famous writers would certainly have noted any strange apparitions they experienced; that’s what writers do.

But nothing from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Poe, Verne, Ambrose Bierce, John Updike…you get the litany.



Some artists have placed UFOs into their paintings – medieval and Renaissance artists…



but none of the great painters of later eras (Van Gogh, Monet, Picasso, et al.) and none at all in the contemporary art field have depicted a UFO sighting, other than a fictional one.



And no musician has ever indicated they saw something strange in the skies: Monteverdi, Beethovan, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Bernstein, et al.



No renown mathematician or scientist (except for Halley of comet fame) has seen a UFO either.



Why is it always persons on the fringe of society who experience UFOs?

(Yes, we know that we’ve posited ufologists have never seen a UFO either, but that fringe conglomeration is another matter.)



One clue to the UFO enigma may be who sees the things, and who doesn’t.



This isn’t a matter of perceptive anomalies necessarily. We think it’s something deeper, more profound perhaps, but not trans- cendental since UFO observers are, by and large, a common lot – not in the same league as the cultural icons named above.



There comes a time when the old investigative paradigms have to be jettisoned, since they haven’t worked, obviously, and a new approach proffered, no matter how painful that might be to the egos of those who’ve invested much of their lives in the study of UFOs, or how hurtful it might be for UFO observers to recognize that they are not members of the cultural elite but are only a select segment of the hoi polloi.

Again, a primary UFO sighting, according to some ufologists, was the May 20th, 1967 incident at Falcon Lake in Manitoba, Canada, recounted by Stefan Michalak.

For an excellent analysis of the event, by bona fide ufologist Chris Rutkowski, go to this site:

http://ufo-joe.tripod.com/cases/michalak.html

As usual there are discrepancies and reportorial mysteries in the affair, as is always the case with UFO stories.

Rutkowski believes the incident to be genuine, and Michalak, whom Rutkowski knew personally, to be an honest man.

Something happened at Falcon Lake, and that something happened to Stefan Michalak, but was the occurrence a real UFO event?

We draw your attention to some of the things that don’t add up:

Michalak’s citation of the area where he encountered the UFO, after not locating it for investigators initially (adequately explained by Rutkowski we think), did not allow for an object of the size described by Michalak to arrive or depart as he indicated without some damage to the flora of the site.

Michalak did try to capitalize, unsuccessfully as it turned out, on the incident.

Michalak’s denial of drinking before (or during) the event is disputed.

And the burns suffered by Michalak, on his upper torso, as pictured here….



supposedly coming from a grating system on the UFO, in the form of a blast, show specific markings, not a diffuse burning that would occur if, indeed, a spewing forth of chemicals or anything else would have emanated as indicated by Michalak.

Moreover, the burns would have been greater, cause more visible damage, to the upper part of Michalak’s chest if the blast came from a grate on the UFO in the location that Michalak drew. (See illustration above.)

Michalak fell upon or bumped up against something hot; he wasn’t burned by a blast of toxic substances, from a vehicle hovering above him.

Like the Trents, and most other UFO witnesses, the accounts and the evidence always have elements that preclude a clear designation of what really happened.

The truth of UFO accounts, everyone of them, is marred by such glitches.

This is why we scoff at UFO accounts, but have to admit that UFO sightings occur; the evidence is overwhelming.

But it’s the nature of UFOs that remain unexplained, and accounts, like that of Stefan Michalak, at Falcon Lake, in 1967, don’t help decipher the UFO mystery.

David Benford, professor of plasma physics and astrophysics at the University of California, Irvine, presents an interesting hypothesis in “What We Believe But Cannot Prove” edited by John Brockman [Harper Perennial, NY, 2006, Page 226].

Professor Benford’s suggestion is that evolution may have created a panoply of universes, with intelligence, and “Our universe may have arisen from selection for intelligences that can make fresh universes…and [an] Ur-universe that had intelligence could make others,” thus selection would be amenable to forming new life, and “Once life-forms realized this, they could make smart universes” whereby if that “did occur, then we are an inevitable consequence of the universe mirroring intelligences who came before, in some earlier universe…”

Now if we take Mac Tonnies’ Earth-centric notion of crypto-terrestrials and rework it with Dr. Benford’s Ur-universe of intelligences that may have ordained life here and/or pre-existed on (or about) this planet, we might have a working hypothesis for the presence of UFOs, an hypothesis that doesn’t rankle the scientific community or those who don’t see any tangible evidence for Tonnies’ parallel civilization.

The July 17th, 1957 sighting of a UFO or UFOs is touted by some ufologists as one of the best, or the best, evidence for the reality of UFOs.

A full account of the episode may be found at http://www.ufologie.net/htm/rb47.htm

And here some excerpts from the text found at the above web-site:

[The radar on the RB-47] detected electromagnetic signals that were actually emitted by an object itself.

the signal moved up the scope, as it would if the scope was 180° out of alignment.

it had moved up the scope on the right-hand side of the aircraft, it then crossed the path of the RB-47 and proceeded to move down the scope on the left-hand side. In other words, whatever was emitting the signal flew a ring around the RB-47

the pilot, Lewis Chase, saw a light coming in from the left, at approximately the same altitude as the RB-47. At first he thought it was another plane, but it was only a single white light, It then blinked out at a point to the right front of the aircraft.

At 4:39, Chase spotted a huge light to the right front of the RB-47

At 4:40, McClure reported two signals, at 40° and 70°. Chase and McCoid reported seeing red lights at those locations.

At 4:48 AM, radar station Utah requested the position of the signals that McClure was receiving, and they immediately confirmed that their radar had detected the objects at the same location.

As the RB-47 attempted to pursue, the object appeared to stop suddenly. Chase could see that they were gaining on it, and they over shot it. At 4:52 it blinked out, and simultaneously vanished from McClure's scope and the ground radar!

the object suddenly blinked on again, simultaneously reappearing on McClure's scope and the ground radar at 4:52! They began to close to within 5 miles of the object, when it suddenly dropped to 15,000 feet and then blinked out again, once again vanishing from the scopes and ground radar.

it finally faded as they neared Oklahoma City

As one can see, the UFO was not a tangible object visually, but a light source.

Radar on the plane and ground saw the “object(s)” as tangible.

There are other cases similar to the RB-47 episode – the Coyne helicopter incident of 1973 and the 1976 Tehran sighting.

Such sightings, and the RB-47 sighting in particular, are evidence of nothing; well almost nothing.

They are merely (and we use the word “merely” explicitly here) quantum manifestations – not at the usual infinitesimal level but at a macro-cosmic level, as we are argue elsewhere.

The electromagnetic manifestations of the RB-47 incident mimic Dirac’s studies of the electromagnetic radiation light, which produces particle and wave results to observers, which can be measured with radar and other instruments.

And specifically Max Born’s 1926experiments with quantum mechanical probability provide the clue as to what the RB-47 crew experienced:

“The probability amplitude for an electron in the state n to scatter in the direction m provides its own intensity wave…and the absolute value…turns out to be a physical probability of the associated particle’s presence.”

What the RB-47 crew saw and measured (eliciting changes in the light because of the effect of measurement/observation of quantum artifacts) was a quantum manifestation that, for us, represents most if not all “lights-in-the-sky” sightings.

For ufologists to posit the extraterrestrial hypothesis, sometimes subliminally (Clark, Hall, Sparks, et al.) but usually overtly (Friedman) rather than explore the quantum possibilities shows that ufologists are not familiar with what physicists are thinking, especially how quantum may be a reality at local and non-local levels, and manifesting in ways that can be experienced optically rather than only theoretically.

[See Kaku, Susskind, and Greene]

As for flying saucers – the “nuts-and-bolts” sightings, we’ll continue to deal with those as mostly misidentification of secret and not-so-secret military aircraft, or the fabrications of persons seeking to validate their humdrum existences.

Platos’s template for society – the ideal (utopian) city-state consisted of The Elite Guardians, The Soldiers, and The Masses.

Wikipedia provides this (about the government of that city-state):

Socrates points out the human tendency to corruption by power and thus the road from timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny: ruling should be left to philo-sophers, the most just and therefore least susceptible to corruption. That "good city" is depicted as being governed by philosopher-kings; disinterested persons who rule not for their personal enjoyment but for the good of the city-state (polis). The paradigmatic society which stands behind every historical society is hierarchical, but social classes have a marginal permeability; there are no slaves, no discrim-ination between men and women.

And Wikipedia says this about Plato’s view:

Plato says that a tyrant's nature will leave him with "horrid pains and pangs" and that the typical tyrant engages in a lifestyle that will be physically and mentally exacting on such a ruler. Such a disposition is in contrast to the truth-loving philosopher king, and a tyrant "never tastes of true freedom or friendship".

The second argument proposes that of all the different types of person, only the Philosopher is able to judge which type of ruler is best since only he can see the Form of the Good. Thirdly, Plato argues, "Pleasures which are approved of by the lover of wisdom and reason are the truest".

Plus this (Wikipedia):

In Books VII-X stand Plato's criticism of the forms of government. It begins with the dismissal of timocracy, a sort of authoritarian regime, not unlike a military dictatorship…The third worst regime is oligarchy, the rule of a small band of rich people, millionaires that only respect money. Then comes the democratic form of government, and its susceptibility to being ruled by unfit "sectarians" demagogues.

Finally the worst regime is tyranny, where the whimsical desires of the ruler became law and there is no check upon arbitrariness.

(A further elaboration of The Republic can be found via Google.)

Gimabattista Vico, the 18th Century social theorist/philosopher, takes the Platonic ideal and forms it into a practical theory of governance whereby “good honest men would be supreme lords….[forming a] natural aristocracy.” {Scienza nuova, 1097]



“The peoples (Vico writes)…[should] do decent and just things rather than talk about them, because they do them instinctively, not from reflection.” [ibid, 1406]

And Vico goes on to note that “Hence the men who have neither counsel nor virtue of their own are…formless…defective.” [ibid, 1408]

And “It is the men who pursue nothing but their own private interests…the doltish men who…never remain content with the same thing, who always love and affect new things; who in a word are called the vulgus.” [ibid, 1409]

Finally “peoples so far corrupted have already become slaves of their unrestrained passions – of luxury, effeminacy, avarice, envy, pride, and vanity – and in pursuit of the pleasures of their dissolute life are falling back into the vices of the most abject slaves [becoming] liars, tricksters, calumniators, thieves, cowards, and pretenders.” [ibid, 1105]

What has this to do with ufology?

It provides insight to the ufological community as it exists today.

Are there any “Elite Guardians” in ufology? Honest men who are without the vices listed by Socrates, Plato, or Vico?

We can think of only one: Richard Hall presently, and James McDonald and John Mack who died before assuming the needed role.

All others are suspect or tinged by opprobrium.

The Platonic Soldiers, those in ufology who carry the torch for truth, such as “Isaac Koi,” Nick Pope, and a few others, are above reproach and scandal.

But if one wonders why science or decent men eschew UFOs and/or ufology, one need only discover web-sites and blogs where anti-semitism reigns or material is interspersed with sexist pictures of scantily clad women to whet the appetite of lascivious internet visitors.

Ufology needs an intellectual (philosophical) elite, that’s certain, but it can’t get that from the current crop of UFO habitués.

The “governing body” of ufology went by the wayside with the demise of Donald Keyhoe, The Lorenzens, and a select few who have gone underground (Jacques Vallee) to avoid the vulgarity and sleaziness of those who’ve usurped the UFO mystery and bent it to their nefarious and corrupt desires.

That’s one of the reasons – and not the only one – that UFOs are anathema to those who proceed with integrity and ethical behavior or thought.

The Earth, while distinctive from orbit or the Moon, has no distinguishing features from interstellar space.

What would attract extraterrestrials to make a sojourn to Earth?

The argument from Stanton Friedman (and others) that nuclear explosions caught their eye, and worried them – “The Day the Earth Stood Still” hypothesis – doesn’t conform to the ufological stance that UFOs (flying saucers) have been around since the earliest days of mankind, as cave paintings and early historical records seem to suggest.

The idea that alien civilizations picked up our broadcast signals can also be ruled out, if the early visitation scenarios are true.

And if ufologists suggest it’s the teeming life here that brings (or brought) alien visitations, the panoply of UFO sightings, with all their diversity, indicates that somewhere else in the galaxy, or beyond, life is teeming also, with beings that are much more interesting than those found on Earth.

With Saturn, Jupiter, even Neptune and Uranus offering far more visual interest that Earth, is the prospect of creatures, human and animal plus flora, that much more compelling than anywhere else in the solar system, or the vast universe itself?

That Earth is a galactic zoo or the outpost for humans who were seeded here begs the question of why here and nowhere else in the vast universe, places closer to the originators?

The uniqueness of man may be debated amongst cosmologists and theologians (which is grist for another blog of ours – rrrgroup.blogspot.com) but if UFOs contain beings with conscious thought, and intellectual prowess, the uniqueness idea goes by the wayside.

Are UFOs manifestations of another civilization here on Earth that parallels the obvious one (ours) but has remained secret over the millennia, the Mac Tonnies hypothesis?

The absence of tangible, or any other kind of evidence, for such a civilization makes the Tonnies concept hard to swallow.

Are the visitors from a parallel universe, abutting this one? Or time travelers from our future (or past)?

Either of those suggestions makes more sense than the intergalactic visitation hypothesis, but is it viable? The answer is yes, but not addressed fully, if at all, by ufologists (or scientists).

And the reasons that might allow for such inter-dimensional or time-traveling visits by others are much more amenable to discussion than the hackneyed extraterrestrial one.

That is, if UFOs really exist at all…..

Bona fide UFO researcher Jerome Clark coined an epithet for those who are skeptical about certain UFO sightings that ufologists deem authentic: pelicanists



Mr. Clark’s coinage comes about because one ufologist (James Easton) had the temerity to suggest Kenneth Arnold’s famous flying saucer sighting of June 24th, 1947 was of pelicans.

(Mr. Clark and other ufologists think Arnold actually saw alien spaceships. We’ve suggested elsewhere that Arnold saw a bevy of Navy test airplanes flying out of Whidbey Air Base in Washington State.)

Here is a drawing that Arnold made of his sighting:



Here is Fate magazine’s rendition of the Arnold sighting:



And here is a later version of what Arnold says he saw – we don’t know why Arnold altered his observation):



And here are some pictures of pelicans in flight:



















And here is a map of pelican migration patterns:



Also, Mount Rainier (in the Cascades) is subject to temperature inversions, especially between the winter thaw and summer season (June).



Temperature changes at various mountain altitudes causes inversions (when he warm air bumps up against pockets of colder air), distorting observations through those inversions.

Here are two photos of Mount Rainier in June, with weather fronts that evoke inversions:





So while Jerry Clark, whom we respect and admire, has created a bon mot for the UFO skeptic – a barb that lesser UFO lights often employ – in the Arnold case, the suggestion that he (Arnold) saw a flock of pelicans, and mistook them for supersonic aircraft of alien design is not out of the question.

A semi-popular blog has a piece about angels and UFOs (a Biblical slant).

The author suggests that UFOs (or their occupants) are manifestations of Satan or the Satan archetype – Fallen Angels. (We were hard-put to follow the hypothesis.)

The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) does have several accounts of angels and God communing with human beings.

One of the more interesting meetings between angels, maybe even God, Himself, appears in Genesis 18, Chapters 1-15, where Abraham sups with three angels and The Lord.



Other angelic visitations appear in Genesis 21, 1-18; 3 Kings 19, 5; Daniel 6, 22; Tobias 6, 1-9; et cetera.

Early visitations of the gods, angels, and the Hebrew Yahweh, plus the angels of the Qur’an (The Koran) -- Surat at-Takwir, 19; Surah Ghafir, 15); Surat an-Najm, 4-6; Surah Maryam, 17-21; et cetera -- bespoke of the beauty (androgyny even) of the visitors.



Oannes is mentioned in Sumerian clay tablets, and the Egyptians had a panoply of gods they worshipped, but none had the configured physiognomy of the angels and God in the Hebrew texts, nor did they appear in the way that the messengers of the Hebrews or Assyrians did – in chariots of fire or suddenly, with an aura of light and a body that was not different from those of their human hosts.



An angel was said to have released the Apostle Peter from jail (Acts of the Apostles 12. 6-10) but that’s about it for the Biblical angels



The angels disappeared and God disappeared.

UFOs reappeared, sporadically. Constantine the Great saw one in 312 A.D. And various chronicles mentioned sightings of flying somethings-or-another right up into the modern era.

But no mention of angels come into the accounts, unless one accepts Joseph Smith’s Moroni as a bona fide visitation.

The AmerIndian tribes of the Yucatan, Middle and South America also have records of visitations by gods from the air, up until those empires were decimated by some catastrophe or the Spanish. Angels, however, don’t factor in to those renderings either.

Historical Chinese, Japanese, and sub-continent (mostly from India) records also speak of sky visitors, but the visitors are flying machines rather than beings.

Then in the 1950s, a spate of tales about flying saucer provide angelic-like descriptions of their pilots and occupants: Adamski, Fry, Angelucci, et al.



But eventually a raft of encounters with dwarfish beings, disembarking from saucer-like craft, took hold and filled the UFO literature until shortly after 1961 when Betty and Barney Hill told of an abduction by small, gray beings, with large eyes, and little else they could call human.

The beauty of the early historical visitors, the “angels,” was totally gone.

Reptilian creatures, huge, furry or robotic monsters became part of the UFO fabric, but the small, gray or colorless creatures were prevalent, and ubiquitous.



What happened?

Did the angelic visitors return to their “heavenly abode”? Were their initial visits only salutary and temporary? Or were they killed off by the species that now inhabits UFO lore, and flying saucers?

No matter what happened, the angels of old have been supplanted by the passionless, oddly morphed creatures that inhabit the UFO myth today.



And human beings, mostly the credulous sort, should be wary of encountering those who replaced the benefactors that showed up several thousand years ago, to help human beings, not to perform quasi-autopsies on them.

When one studies the accounts of so-called alien abductions (by UFO occupants usually), one will find many of the attributes that accompany carbon monoxide poisoning, as garnered from various health-sites:

Headache
Dizziness
Nausea
Flulike symptoms, fatigue
Shortness of breath on exertion
Impaired judgment
Chest pain
Confusion
Depression
Hallucinations
Agitation
Vomiting
Abdominal pain
Drowsiness
Visual changes
Fainting
Seizure
Memory and walking problems

Some of the sources of such poisoning:

Anything that burns coal, gasoline, kerosene, oil, propane, or wood
Automobile engines
Charcoal grills (charcoal should never be burned indoors)
Indoor and portable heating systems
Portable propane heaters
Stoves (indoor and camp stoves)
Water heater that use natural gas
Gas water heaters
Kerosene space heaters
Charcoal grills
Hibachi grills
Propane stoves
Cigarette smoke
Propane-fueled forklifts
Gas-powered concrete saws
Indoor tractor pulls
Swimming behind a motorboat
Spray paint, solvents, degreasers, and paint removers

Investigators of the alien abduction phenomenon would do well to check the stories of abductees (experiencers) for details which might show that abductees were not taken aboard an alien spaceship and medically examined but, rather, had hallucinations evoked from past experiences, brought about by their proximity to carbon monoxide.

The above, along with psychical (psychological) illnesses, should account for most if not all alien kidnapping tales.

Click here for a PDF of the Air Force Research study of the Roswell episode.

The PDF can be found in a CD from Progressive Management, and clarifies the Roswell incident in ways that UFO investigators would do well to emulate.

With a spate of tornado activity in the America Midwest March 29th, storm chasers and trackers were able to obtain much video of the transient funnels:





Storm chasers sometimes are notified of possible or actual tornados or they pursue weather patterns that might produce cyclonic winds. By so doing they are able to capture or witness the temporary storms, and document the destruction they often wreak.

UFO hunters, on the other hand, neither anticipate nor follow through immediately, as storm chasers do, when their phenomenon – UFOs – are sighted or are thought to make a reappearance in the vicinity of their original visual observation.

UFO hunters are thus only able to “investigate” the aftermath of a sighting, as news media does after a tornado has struck; both are rather impotent compared to what storm chasers do.

UFO hunters are relegated to debating inane issues, as one can note by going to UFO Updates (at virtuallystrange.net) and noting the protracted, senseless, and show-off discussion between Lan Fleming, Martin Shough, Brad Sparks, and James Smith about the Apollo 11 mission where something odd was seen by the astronauts.

The discussion is trying to verify whether the thing seen was a piece of mylar, a door panel, or something else, and the UFO hunters have brought everything to bear on the topic from gravity displacement to retrograde rocket thrusts. None has anything thing to do with UFOs as such, and the flamboyant debate is merely showcasing the esoteric knowledge the debaters have about NASA things flying in space.

(There is also a migraine-inducing “debate” going on between the aforementioned Shough and a woman called Cathy Reason. Both flex their scientific acumen, in public it seems, to show they are highly intellectual or wise. But the back-and-forth has nothing to do with UFOs and one wonders why it appears at UFO Updates and not in another venue or, more sensibly, a private domain.)

Storm chasers get the goods. UFO hunters are self-aggrandizing or ego-stricken. And by that measure, one can see why UFOs remain unexplained, and why sensible, intelligent folks eschew the topic.

Allegedly God intervened on behalf of the Hebrew peoples when they were freed by the Egyptian pharaoh Rameses, as recounted in Exodus of The Old Testament.

But that’s been about it.

God didn’t prevent further pogroms, and wasn’t visible during their attempted obliteration by Hitler.

And what about the various indigenous Indians of the Americas who were massacred by Spanish conquistadors and colonial settlers?

Where was God then?

But what about UFOs? Where were they, and where are they during assaults on humankind?

Even if one discounts early historical references to strange aircraft in the skies over Earth, one can’t avoid the anecdotal accounts of UFOs during recent wars (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, et cetera) nor their supposed presence during the devastation of peoples by marauding armies (as in China during the Mao years) or Darfur (today).

UFOs, like God, do not intervene in catastrophes (earthquakes, hurricanes, and the like) and UFOs do not attempt to save people in dire circumstances.

They do appear innocuously and sporadically but for no apparent reason and to no human avail.

And what does this have to do with Stanton Friedman? Well, Mr. Friedman is the archetypal extraterrestrial ufologist: he believes UFOs are visitors from other worlds, with purposes unknown (thus far) by human beings.

Mr. Friedman, like the Hebrews after Exodus and the Darfurians now, hopes that UFOs will save mankind from itself we’re guessing, or UFOs will provide an epiphany of some kind for Earthlings.

But that hope is what went by the wayside for the Mongolians and Tibetans as they were being slaughtered by their Chinese neighbors, as it has for many peoples of the World who have been subjected to cruelties and horrific inhumanities in the modern era, when UFOs are said to actually exist, by way of the evidence, as cited by Mr. Friedman (and others).

And UFOs, if one accepts their ubiquitous presence from 1947 to today, have not, affected and, it seems, will not affect, a behavior that might alleviate human suffering.

What does that say about the essence of the mystery, the UFO agenda or motivation for being here, or appearing here?

God is gone or dead (according to Nietzsche and Richard Elliott Friedman – no relation to Stanton – in The Hidden Face of God).

And UFOs? They are as moribund as God, for all practical purposes.

Stanton Friedman? Alive and well, but not about to have a UFO revelation we’re sorry to tell him.

No matter how hard UFO aficionados and Dr. Lynne Kitei press former Arizona governor Symington, the government, and media, the so-called Phoenix Lights will not end up being the clincher UFO followers are hoping for.

The O’Hare sighting is not about to be explained and won’t bring the UFO mystery to a conclusion either.

The French disclosure of its military files about UFOs merely confirms what everyone knows: strange things have been seen and are being seen in the skies.

But the French files, like Blue Book before it, don’t tell anyone anything about those things that people have seen and sometimes photographed.

The history of flying saucers is replete with sighting flurries and media interest, even public hysteria, but nothing has come of it, and nothing will.

Some, like Kenneth Arnold, way back in 1947, and Lynne Kitei, now, will try to capitalize on the sightings they are identified with, and they’ll make some money or garner a modicum of fame, but the UFO enigma will remain unresolved, and continue a slow fade to meaninglessness.

UFOs have become the folklore, even the mythology, of the modern era, but yet have not impacted society or civilization in any palpable, significant way.

UFO hobbyists and even “serious” investigators have got to come to a realization that their fixation is not about to become overt; UFOs are not going to be explained by any government, any scientist, nor any “ufologist” – not now, not in the near future, and maybe never.

But the UFO community, rife as it is with dreamers and losers, will stay rapt and intrigued, because what else do members of that forlorn community have going for them?

No, the Phoenix Lights, the O’Hare episode, the French connection, and all the UFO sightings extant will not bring about a UFO denouement.

And do UFO fanatics really want one?

The picture above is a representation of what Oskar Linke says he saw in the Russian Zone of Berlin, July 1952.

His account (below) from The Mystery of Other Worlds Revealed [Fawcett Publications, 1952] by Antony Terry (Berlin Correspondent, Kemsley Newspapers, London), as you can see for yourself, is peculiarly similar to the account that Lonnie Zamora provided for his Socorro sighting of April 1964.



Had Zamora seen the Linke story? Was Zamora’s account fabricated, or are the two events related by the Hughes’ connection; that is, did Hughes Aircraft and Design replicate the 1952 Russian test in the area of Socorro, New Mexico, in 1964?

What is the Hughes connection to Russian space technology? (We’ve shown the lander design that Hughes Tools used for its moon lander design (which resembles the Socorro craft.)

Investgators who want to foist the ETH (extraterrestrial hypothesis) on a gullible public and UFO audience won’t pursue the possibility. It would destroy their belief system and, in many cases, their livelihood.

Although UFO abductions have abated recently, those who say they’ve been abducted – calling themselves “experiencers” – continue to becloud the UFO environment.

Abductees (experiencers), we contend, suffer from delusions, particularly “deliria oneirica” – a delusional state that mimics a nervous or psychotic breakdown.

Some say these people suffer from a form of sleep paralysis or related disorders.

Others say the stories are made up, cries for attention by some very disturbed people.

But lets assume for the moment that persons are taken from their beds, cars, tractors (usually at night) by extraterrestrial beings (or demons from another dimension) and that the incidents they relate are true.

What can one make of their often horrifyingly frightening tales?

All we have are the aftermath of their experience. And that is where the solution to the abduction mystery might be found.

We have noticed that most, not all, abductees end up lashing out at the world, and those who question their accounts.

Some have become mean-spirited and nasty. Others accept the incident as a nightmare-like occurrence that needs clarification.

Some hope to make money off the happening.

But what if, pretending the abductions are real, those who have been abducted were programmed (brainwashed) to provide what UFO mavens like to call disinformation? That is, aliens (extraterrestrial beings) use the kidnapping scenario to plant misinformation into the addled minds of those taken aboard the alien ships, misinformation to throw off human inquiry into the agenda of the visitors from other worlds?

What if some persons are now “Manchurian Candidates” – persons programmed to kill investigation into actual alien intrusions that would be much more detrimental to humankind than the lifting of a few people from their nightly sleep for medical scrutiny?

What if the rabid propaganda from some (via blogs nowadays) that everyone is dishonest or hoaxing is a red-herring while they are, in reality, spreading false information to undermine the truth of their stories: a reality (they were actually abducted) or they are indeed psychotic?

The only person we’ve come across who strikes us as honestly forthright about his event is WB. One person we know about has become morose and another is too incendiary to be considered truthful, concocting a story to further aims of a mercenary kind or, more dangerously, is creating an atmosphere of distrust to mask an agenda that undermines more than the UFO inquiry.

The abduction phenomenon is scary, in more ways than one. And there is no way to get to the bottom of the mystery, since most experiencers are adept at covering their psychopathology with the tactic of attacking others while they go about their nefarious deed, all the time proclaiming that it’s others who are sick, not them.

To read more about the abduction phenomenon, here some sites that should prove enlightening:

http://skepdic.com/aliens.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_abduction

http://www.csicop.org/si/9805/abduction.html

Sure UFOs exist – unidentified flying objects (and unidentified aerial phenomena), even “flying saucers” if you insist.

(Some of the Iconoclasts have seen Tremonton-like lights, and a glowing rectangle – reported in Detroit newspapers and Fate magazine; plus one Iconoclast caught an early-morning v-formation of sliver-gray or dimly lit objects flying too fast to be birds or airplanes and too slow to be meteors or descending satellite debris.)



Yes, UFOs are a reality, but what are they? That’s the continuing but less demanding question for most Earthlings, who have other things about which they are concerned: taxes, jobs, gasoline prices, warfare, starvation – existence itself.

Rabid UFO mavens, and they’ve come into their own since blogging has arrived on the social scene, believe almost everything that enters the UFO universe.

A few are more cautious (Clark, Randle, Hall, even Stan Friedman), weighing the “evidence,” hoping the enigma will be solved – someday.



Others are vehemently opposed to anything UFO-related (Menzel and Klass were examples).



And some question certain aspects of the UFO anecdotal panoply.

For instance, something happened in Roswell, that’s certain. The newspaper accounts at the time indicate that.



It wasn’t a weather balloon or secret Mogul detritus that caused the stir. (Mogul is a canard since the U.S.S.R. didn’t even have an atomic test before 1949, and the United States had no indication that the Russians were able to do so in 1947 when Mogul was supposedly established to detect fallout from A-Bomb tests occurring in the Russian motherland.)

But what exactly happened in Roswell? Why didn’t anyone spirit away some of the alleged wreckage that was said to be strewn all over the landscape? (Were all of the Roswellians so afraid of the United States military that they cow-towed to the reported threats made by Army personnel and gave up the “souvenirs” they had their hands on? Rebels and outlaws were extant in the Old West well before 1947, so it seems odd that none existed in New Mexico, circa 1947.)

Where were the Kodak Brownie cameras that other community citizens used to snap photos of everything and everyone that met their fancy? (One can find dozens of photographs after World War II which show that cameras were rather abundant, and used to document everything from sunsets to cars to memorabilia of a lesser import than pieces of an alien aircraft.)

Where are the Roswell witnesses who don’t have some flaw in their background or story?

Where are the flying discs and alien bodies that no one, reputable and in situ at the time, saw or touched?

Yes, something happened at Roswell but it wasn’t Redfern’s Japanese corpses or Ramey’s pieces of tin-foil. But what was it?





What about the Betty/Barney Hill episode — the alleged abduction and examination by UFOnauts?



Yes, something happened to the Hills. They had an experience, surely. Mrs. Hill didn’t seem pathological during her life-time and not in 1961 when she says she was aboard an alien ship, probe by entities that were not human.

But was Betty and Barney Hill’s experience a true flying saucer kidnapping? That has yet to be determined, regardless of the unquestioning belief by most UFO believers.

What about the so-called ten best UFO cases that one UFO sideliner is highlighting with a badly done documentary making the rounds, in pieces, on the internet?

Every case, and we mean every case, has a discordant element that science and skeptics, even some UFO truth-seekers, find inconclusive.

Yes, the ten cases may be the “best” of the UFO breed, but that just goes to show how pathetic the UFO evidence is; how unverifiable, when it gets right down to it, the UFO experience is.

Yes, UFOs exist, they are real, but what they are, what they mean, still is grist for skeptical evaluation.

That UFO true-believers get livid with those who question the UFO “faith” has to be ignored, eschewed even, since truth, and the search for it, are more important than the self-aggrandizement of many UFO devotees.

That’s the skeptical milieu.

This is a photo (not a Photoshop-manipulated photo!) from 1950, the same year that the Trent photos appeared.

Note the similarities.

Meanwhile, lets have a go at finding out the provenance of this snapshot.

The person who comes up with the source will get our booklet of UFO newspaper clippings for the period 1948-1968.

From an anonymous source:

I hate to tell you this, but this photo is old news. It's been on the "ufocasebook" site for quite some time, in the "best UFO pics ever taken" section.

Here's the link: http://www.ufocasebook.com/bestufopictures3.html

Scroll about two thirds of the way down, or so. The caption alongside the photo says "March 3, 1977 Walter Schilling took this photograph in Hamburg, Germany. The object possessed a strange rotating effect with a glowing fluorescent mast. The UFO was close enough to the ground to create a 30 foot shadow."

Whether it's a fake or not is another matter, but at any rate, this is no "long lost McMinnville Photograph."

Sorry to burst the bubble.

RRRGroup….

Attached are three enhancements. [of the “lost Trent photo”].

The first photo…is compensated for motion and focus. By compensating for motion on the object in question, the rest of the picture changed:



The second photo…is a crop and adjustments. After the adjustments were made, I reduced the size again (for email purposes). Notice on the left side of the object, there appears to be some type of vents or ribs in a dark outline:



The third photo is the same as the second one… [and] has brightness adjustment.

The second [object] in the picture is just there smaller, to show more contrast. The top appears to be an indentation, with a protrusion from the center. There is also one from the bottom. The object reminds me of a Roulette wheel and spindle. I'm not calling it that:



Unfortunately, there is also pixelation produced in the three pictures.

There are too many people that tend to pass photos off as being Photoshopped.

Also, unfortunately, there are too many times that people fake this type of thing.

I am not a debunker, but only my own skeptic. I am not an expert, but with working on the motion of the original picture, I would tend to believe the object in question is real because of the difference in motion between the background and the object.

Both appear to motion blur but in different perspectives.

As far as my belief, I would also have to call this inconclusive. It is too bad that you don't have a higher res pic. Hopefully, you can show that the negative came from the same roll.

Denver Page

On May 11th, 1950, the Trent family of McMinnville, Oregon took photos of a strange object flying above their farm.

This is one of the original photos:



Is the picture below the “lost” Trent photo, obtained by SMC in Phoenix, Arizona, showing the object (or model?) nearer to the ground, and at an angle precluding a bona fide aerodynamic craft?



More to come…

The problem that has always confronted UFO enthusiasts is that the field (ufology as it’s preposterously misnamed) is rife with those who look at (and have looked at) the enigma with belief-blinders on.

For example, night sightings of UFOs invariably indicate the observer has seen green, red, white or yellow, blinking lights, (sometimes blue): a clue that the UFO is something prosaic, like an airplane or dirigible.

Other worldly craft would, in all likelihood, not have the same authenticating beacons established by agencies to protect aircraft in the skies of Earth.

Moreover, what alien culture would have the identical color spectrum as that of Earth? The odds against a similar retinal response between extraterrestrials and Earthlings are phenomenally long.

If anything, a real alien visitation would be of such a strange magnitude that observers would not be able to readily explain it or, perhaps, even visualize it.

And what about so-called alien abductions?

Would an alien presence need to slink into bedrooms to take humans for a medical examination when persons walking, running, driving alone are readily available for the taking, without the fuss of teleportation through bedroom walls?

(The Betty/Barney Hill, Travis Walton, Pascagoula violations establish the template for alien kidnappings, but even those incidents are not without their problems of coherence.)

The sightings of daytime UFOs (flying saucers) are often misinterpretations of unusual aircraft (as we note elsewhere) or mundane phenomena (birds, clouds, wind-blown debris, balloons, meteorological quirks, et cetera).

But what about radar returns that indicate a faster-than-possible Earth aircraft or the immediate abrupt changes (180 degree turns ) that are often reported? Or pilot visualizations that have an air of accuracy about them?

Commons sense leaves in those instances, and a new study paradigm must be invoked.

Yet, the vast majority of UFO fanatics will not, cannot, undertake the intense scrutiny of such reported events as they (the fanatics) are often (usually) locked in debates about sighting minutiae which has little chance of explaining the thing that was picked up by radar or seen by observers (pilots, for instance) who have the acumen to decipher what they saw or measured.

Common sense is elusive in the UFO community; just take a dip into the ramblings at UFO UpDates or read the comments of bloggers, who prefer camaraderie to the pursuit of truth -- this side, or the other side.

Emanuel Swedenborg had visions that showed him beings on Saturn, Mars, Venus, and other planets of the solar system.

The descriptions of those beings [The Earths in the Universe] were appropriated by George Adamski for his various lectures and books, including “Flying Saucers Have Landed”(co-authored with Desmond Leslie) and “Inside the Space Ships.”

The planets, as NASA probes show, did not, could not, and cannot support life of the kind Swedenborg and Adamski described.

So what is one to make of the “insights” – especially since Swedenborg was not considered a charlatan as Adamski is?

Swedenborg’s visions have always been considered to be part of his epiphany; that is, he experienced Cosmic Consciousness [Richard Maurice Bucke, 1901].

But Adamski seems to have taken his “sightings” from Swedenborg’s accounts and others.

Yet what about other accounts of extraterrestrial life, such as that of Betty Andreasson-Luca or Billy Meier?

Are those accounts edifying in any way? Do they correspond to “sightings” and “visions” that may be precursors to a transcendental epiphany?

Alien abductions (the Andreasson scenario) or visitations (the Meier hoax) are missing the elements found in accounts by Socrates, Ezekiel, Constantine, and Malcolm X (to name only a few).

Alleged real visitations are not self-aggrandizing, or terrifying, as is the case with almost all UFO/occupant sightings and alien abductions.

Persons who have an actual UFO event do not capitalize (or try to) on their experience.

And those who have a real epiphany, such as that of Saint Thomas Aquinas, do not go forward with their mundane activities; they change, psychologically and fundamentally.

Having visions of other-worldly beings is either a harbinger of a transcendental awakening, a psychotic-induced episode, or a contrivance meant to fraudulently convince others of a special occurrence from which the perpetrator can derive money, notoriety, or some other self-serving accoutrement.

Swedenborg had visions, albeit visions that did not and does not coincide with reality as we know it.

Adamski had sightings (not visions) that were induced to commit fraud. Meier’s sightings follow the Adamski model. And Betty Andreasson? Where is the fundamental change in her life-style?

So what about all those who say they’ve seen a UFO (or a flying saucer)? Or say they’ve been abducted by occupants of them?

Are they Swedenborgian? Or Adamskian? Or somewhere in-between?

You make the call.

UFO mavens have many hypotheses about the origin and/or source of UFOs.

Some think they are interplanetary or extraterrestrial. Others think they emanate from a hidden creation here on Earth. And still others think they are manifestations from parallel universes, or the future (maybe the past), or are figments of a devious co-humanity entity (or entities) that exists to have malicious fun with their Earth counterparts.

The problem with any of these hypotheses – they aren’t theories by a long shot – is that the course of human advancement is Darwinian; that is, human progression derives from accidents and happenstance, and technical achievements are often (if not always) the result of abstruse connections. (See James Burke for more on that aspect.)

What are the odds that an extraterrestrial race evolved exactly, or nearly so, as the human race did? And with the same aeronautical progressions that the Montgolfier or Wright brothers began?

The alleged flight characteristics of UFOs are too similar – despite 180 degree turns – to human aircraft flight patterns to bespeak an alien presence.

The alleged observed antics of UFO occupants is also too similar to human endeavors -- soil sampling, medical procedures, et cetera – to indicate an alien culture.

The similarities to human activity, found in UFO sightings, could indicate that UFOs come from the human future, or past, but those Burkian connections would have to have taken place all along the way (backward or forward) to allow UFOs and their supposed occupants to behave as they do. The chances for that are astronomical.

What about Jacques Vallee’s contention that UFOs are the product of a co-habitable race (maybe “spiritual” in nature) that exists to tweak humankind, for beneficial or nefarious reasons (or both)?

The idea is religious in nature, which is not a bad thing in itself, just not scientific.

The hidden civilization concept (crypto-terrestrials) is fraught with so many untenable conditions – technology that has remained incognito to human societies and a presence that is virtually invisible except for its flying machines – is as near to ridiculousness as one can posit.

No, UFOs are not from another world, or a hidden world here on Earth, or from our future (or past), nor are they the products of God’s evil twin.

UFOs are, as Carl Jung hinted, the mandalas of a mad society whose wishes and delusions have made them “real” – or so it would seem.

A “discussion” threaded at UFO UpDates (an amalgam of UFO nonsense) is taking place that pits Jerry Clark, Dick Hall, Stanton Friedman and others against the proponents of an “hypothesis” (no theory yet) which outlines the idea that there is another civilization on Earth that is hidden, and has been for millennia, and accounts for UFOs (flying saucers).

The most recent advocate of this idea is Mac Tonnies, who has a book coming out delineating the idea. The epithet for the “hidden, advanced civilization” is "crypto-terrestrials" (coined by Tonnies we surmise), and supported by Bob Shell, and few other lesser lights of the UFO community.

The idea is bizarre, but should it be outside the bounds of ufological discussion?

Maybe a paper by Jonathan E. Adler, a professor of philosophy at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, might be helpful in resolving the dispute.

Click here to read Dr. Adler’s ruminations….

Click here for an erudite paper by Diana Palmer Hoyt about UFOs, the Condon Report, et cetera.

You can forget about the imbecilic thread at UFO UpDates re: the 1965 Helfin UFO photos by clicking here to read (via PDF) a scientific analysis of the photos in a 2000 paper for the Journal of Scientific Explorations by Druffel, Wood, and Kelson.

Click here for a 1968 Rand report about the UFO dilemma.

Click here for the American Philosophical Society's site that lists contents of the Philip Klass collection -- UFO detritus, and more -- much more.

Click here for a paper, via PDF, by Edward Halerewicz, Jr. outlining the propulsion technologies of Deltoid Aerial Craft that mistakes them for UFOs.

Click here to access The Encyclopedia of Astrobiology, Astronomy, and Spaceflight (for the UFO entry).

When supposed alien craft scour the landscape, sometimes landing (in the old days anyway), or abduct people, what do they obtain?

Aliens, via UFOs, check out military establishments, but not the Pentagon or NATO headquarters. They scan military bases or remote military fields; they don’t even peruse, and never have, military engagements, such as World War I, Korea, Iraq, et cetera.



When alien beings kidnap (abduct) human beings, they always take the non-intelligentsia.



If alien beings have the ability to transport through walls, and abscond with people, why don’t they intrude on museums and take some of the great art works of the world (as Alexander, the NAZIs, and other militarists have)?







Why no theft of the works of Shakespeare, Beethoven, or interest in the pyramids or the Golden Gate Bridge?









What is the benefit of soil samples? Or cow udders? Or the innards of Travis Walton or Betty Hill?





Either alien visitors are without culture, or are interstellar cretins – if they exist at all.

Here are drawings, by observers, of purported UFO (flying saucer) occupants (waving, looking, piloting):

Rex Ball in Geneseo, New York (1940):



Reverend W.B. Gill in New Guinea (1959):



Barney Hill in New Hampshire (1961):



A nurse in Cowichan, British Columbia (1970):



A 28 year-old witness in Vilvorde, Belgium (1973):



The sightings never resulted in anything tangible, and the UFOnauts’ sightseeing seems to have dissipated, replaced by occasional lights in the sky.

This might explain why ufologists are changing the enigma’s sobriquet from Unidentified Flying Objects to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. It not only sounds more scientific, but actually represents the mystery as it exists today.

The 1964 Socorro/Zamora sighting is outlined at The UFO Reality blog which you can access by clicking here…

Misinterpretation of aerial craft (balloons and airplanes) for UFOs is a given.

Here are some that have been so misidentified….

This is one kind of balloon that was prevalent in the skies of the 1890s (et cetera) and viewed by some citizens as something more than just a balloon…



Here are other aircraft that have been misidentified as UFOs….





















There are others, and analyses, at our web-site, of some sightings resulting from mistaken aircraft.

Kenneth Arnold's sighting and Betty Hill's Star Map: obtuse evaluations

While most ufologists think the alleged O’Hare UFO sighting back in November [2006] and a raft of other sightings since has enlivened the moribund UFO phenomenon (as far as the public and media is concerned), they couldn’t be further from the reality.

What has happened, and always happens with UFO events, nothing develops from the sightings.

When Pavlov’s dogs salivated, as ufologists have been over the O’Hare event, the dogs at least got some food when the bell rang. The O’Hare bell rang, but no food came forth, or looks like it will.

There has been, as in all UFO cases, no payoff. The conditioned reflex remains blocked.



When B.F. Skinner wanted his chickens to peck for food, they sometimes got it. Operant conditioning allowed food to be dispensed some of the time. With UFOs, nothing is dispensed. The UFO enigma remains intact, and when that happens, people and media – conditioned by the usual non-resolution – eventually stop pecking.

If something had come of the O’Hare sighting, or the Roswell incident(s), or any other UFO episode, then one might expect interest to be generated, anew in this instance.

But those not subject to the UFO hysteria of the past, got their hopes up with the O’Hare vision, then nothing.

In a society, conditioned by immediate or near-immediate gratification, the absence of anything concretely satisfying from the O’Hare (or any other current UFO sighting) will provide a negative impact, even more so than in the past, as people are more cynical than they were just a decade ago.

So, ufologists can dampen their errant enthusiasm once more. After all, that’s what the UFO phenomenon is all about: all show but no substance.

Jacques Vallee imagines that UFO entities look something like these represented here…









And everyone is familiar with the Roswell/Betty Hill/Walton kind of occupant….







Then there is the Pascagoula entity…



And there are dozens of other representations of flying saucer (UFO) occupants – no photos (real ones that is) but lots of drawings.

But we question why there is a dearth of occupant sightings nowadays. Yes, some UFOs continue to be seen, but why aren’t the “occupants” disembarking, as they did in the good ol’ days?

Dr. Bruce Cornet is a scientist who actually studies UFOs and other anomalous elements in the real world.

Ufologists can see how investigation and scrutiny of their topic (UFOs) should be done by following Dr. Cornet’s PowerPoint presentation, he was kind enough to provide us, about the Manta Ray aircraft and other prototypical craft that have been mistaken for UFOs.

Click here to access his two-part presentation…..

The great Otto Binder addressed the meaning of alleged symbols seen on UFOs in a 1972 article for Saga’s UFO Special magazine:



Fate magazine presented, several decades ago, a piece on messages from alleged extraterrestrial beings that included this:



Lucius Farish (a true UFO investigator) along with Dale M. Titler wrote about symbols for Official UFO magazine (mid-70s) that included these representations:













The above symbols were either “photographed” on the UFOs or drawn by those who saw them on a UFO.

Why are there no such representations seen on UFOs purportedly flying overhead today?

Either the space aliens have become illiterate or the military has wised up and removed such designations from their prototypes.

(The Zamora/Socorro symbol is dealt with in detail at our web-site.)