Vitriol is good?

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

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

Here’s Mr. Chernow’s piece.

So, vitriol has a lofty genealogy it seems…

Chris Rutkowski gets it exactly right!

The demise of ufology

Are you a UFO tyro?

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

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

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



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

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



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



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

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

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



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

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



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

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

The Apotheosis of Mac Tonnies

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

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

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

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

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

Bragalia's take on Tonnies' book

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

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

But the effort is futile and moot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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



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

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

A Geezer Rant

Old guy Dennis Balthaser has the temerity (and errant gall) to list Anthony Bragalia alongside known UFO do-badders in an aside in a March 2010 web-offering:
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"Fortunately for those of us seriously interested in the subject of Ufology, there is support for the existence of UFOs from many impressive sources, which I will share with you. As with all of my research however, there are some individuals that claim extraterrestrial UFOs do exist, but I have to question their claims based on their record, lack of scientific data, omission of references, etc. That list of individuals would include Bob Lazar of Area 51 fame, Phil Schneider about the Underground Dulce New Mexico base, Lt. Col. Phil Corso, with no references for his best selling book 'The Day After Roswell', Tony Bragalia about Roswell, and several others. I am hopeful that in time new information will surface, which will allow me to retract my current views on those mentioned above."
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To imply that Mr. Bragalia’s work lacks references is not to know what Mr. Bragalia provides when he posts UFO materials at our blogs (The UFO Iconoclasts, et cetera) and elsewhere.

Balthaser is an uneducated bloke, as one can tell from his appearances on various UFO shows (from the History Channel, et al.)

We once saw and heard him say this:

Those sightings collaborated [sic] these witness reports of sightings.

He meant corroborated, but that would require an education in grammar and language use, which he and most ufologists lack.

Balthaser is among that clot of ufologists whom we’ve listed (earlier here) as on the terminus express – they are on the slippery slope of life, near to death because of age.

Fortunately for ufology, the geezers, like Balthaser, will pass on -- sooner than later – and the UFO palate will be cleansed of the fetid nonsense these old guys have spewed and keep spewing in such a manifold way that ufology and the UFO topic itself have been virtually destroyed by their incandescent ignorance and lack of fundamental academic decency.

The Zarkon Principle(s)

We recommend, highly, this hard-to-find book:



And we recommend a blog by a "disciple" of the original Zarkon:

The Truth Uncensored

N.B. The Blog (above) currently deals with Ray Stanford, who is a darling of the UFO crowd, because of his (flawed?) 1976 book about the 1964 Socorro UFO "landing."