Ufologers' Mind-sets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why was Philip Klass so viciously anti-UFO?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RR 

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

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

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

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

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

We only have the testimony of an anonymous informant.

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

Textual content of the letter:

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

It occurred to me over 40 years ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jose Antonio Caravaca/RR

UFOs treated shabbily...

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

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

Click HERE for an enlarged, readable image

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RR

Anti-Semitic Socorro?

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

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

UPI
From UFO Digest

In that article, the false Socorro symbol is proffered:

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

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

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

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

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

Or is this just a mere coincidence?

RR

UFO UpDates and Magoniax

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

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

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

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

UpDates is so over…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Technology the Indicator of an Advanced Civilization?

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

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

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

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

Oannes, the being from the sea who supposedly proffered these gifts is not unlike the Dogon visitors who told those peoples about their place of origin, a planet in the Sirius star system.

Click HERE for an online precis of the Dogon story.

But extraterrestrials would have to be significantly advanced to get here from the Sirius planetary environment, and one would think that such emissaries would seek out cultures and peoples who were much more advanced than the Dogon tribe, to whom they would communicate the locale of their home planet(s).

The chatter between the Dogons and the Sirians would have had to be something beyond difficult.

Even today, the Dogons do not represent an advanced element of Earth’s global society.

Either the Sirius visitors were inept at furthering the cultural evolution of the Dogons or the Sirius visitors represent a civilization that doesn’t regard technolocial advance as a sine qua non of their existence; technology is a prosaic tool, and other considerations make up the essence of their existence.

Or the visit never occurred at all.

For the sake of rumination, I’d like to address the second option above; that is, civilizations do not need technology to be advanced.

Perhaps it’s the music, the art, or social intercourse that is the high point of “advanced” civilizations, not the attributes of the ships that transport them hither and yon.

This would explain, perhaps, why UFOs have appeared in various guises, some not so futuristic as we imagine: the airships of the 1890s for example.

This would also explain, perhaps, why flying saucers have had a propensity to crash; they are not technologically refined, nor meant to be.

They are constructed to get here from there, much as Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci did with their rudimentary, by modern standards, ships.

If visitors sought out this planet, for whatever reason, they would impart elements of culture – music, art, writing, mathematics, and the like – rather than methods with a technological bent.

Technology wasn’t and isn’t their primary incentive or objective.

The artifacts touted by Ancient Alien theorists are aesthetic not technological: the pyramids of Egypt and Middle/South America, Stonehenge, the Easter Island moai, et cetera.

What the Dogon were and are mimics the alien races and beings - the alien cultures –that seem to have visited the Earth in the past and today.

UFO researchers, governments, military constructs have missed the point.

UFOs visit to impart refinement, high culture.

And that refinement or culture is so foreign to our understanding, we humans can’t grasp it, although one might find hints of it in such workings as that of the Dogons, or the Egyptians, or the Inca, the Olmecs, the Mayans.

The message of UFOs isn’t about nuts and bolts or plasmatic ships.

It’s about existence as a thing rarefied, transcendental, or, shall we say, spiritual?

RR

A resource for UFO sightings. overlooked by aficionados of the phenomenon

Copyright InterAmerica, Inc.

Intellectually scourged “academic” Immanuel Velikovsky developed a theory about how our planetary (solar) system and Earth were formed and subject to catastrophes that were recorded by humans in many histories and works, such as The Bible, (Asian) Indian hymns and stories, Greek myths, Egyptian hieroglyphic remnants, Homer, and many, many more ancient accounts.

His theory may be found in two works, Worlds in Collision [1950] and Earth in Upheaval [1955].

Science has eschewed Velikovsky’s theory, but his insights keep popping up as NASA and cosmologists scrutinize the planets in our system.

While Velikovsky insisted that cosmological events were what humans saw and recorded, one can look pass his interpretations to find what could be UFO sightings.

For instance, this…

In The City of God by Augustine it is written:

“From the book of Marcus Varro, entitled Of the Race of the Roman People, I cite word for word the following instance: ‘There occurred a remarkable celestial portent; for Castor records that in the brilliant star Venus, called Vesperugo by Plautus, and the lovely Hesperus by Homer, there occurred so strange a prodigy, that it changed its color, size, form, course, which never happened before nor since. Adrastus of Cyzicus and Dion of Naples, famous mathematicians, said this occurred in the reign of Ogyges’” [Worlds in Collision, A Delta Book, 1965, Page 158]

Velikovsky supplemented his theory in later books, Oedipus and Akhnaton [1960], Peoples of the Sea, Ages in Chaos, Ramses II and his Time, and Human Amnesia.

Astronomers made it a point to suppress Velikovsky’s views and have been rather successful.

But that’s not what we should be concerned with.

Our interest is in the cited works and accounts that seem to be sightings of UFOs.

Velikovsky’s books provide sources that resonate in ways that might – might! – support Ancient Astronaut theories.

The difference is that Velikovsky’s “catastrophic” intrusions don’t interfere with or interact with humans; his events remain observational, not intercessional.

Also, many of Velikovsky’s cited events were eschewed, it seems, by the Vallee/Aubeck book, Wonders in the Sky, probably because Chris Aubeck’s resource venue (Yahoo Magonia X) for many of the sightings in his and Vallee’s book was controlled by the machinations of UFO stalwarts such as Jerry Clark, who held sightings and input hostage to his (Clark’s) view of the UFO phenomenon.

I suggest you get your hands on Velikovsky’s books. Overlook the catastrophic theory if you like – a mistake, as I see it – and cull the events that bespeak UFOs in days of old.

If UFOs were as prominent as they appear to have been, their appearance belies current hypotheses about military misidentifications, mental aberrations, or trickery by entities out to flummox modern humanity.

The brilliance and edification of Dr. Velikovsky will enlighten you, in a number of ways; that is certain.

RR