The Roswell Lacuna

The missing years of Jesus – from age 12 to about 30 – are not “documented” but there has been some speculation that he visited places far-flung from Judea; India and even England have been suggested, with circumstantial hints supporting those scenarios.

But things are quite different when it comes to the Roswell episode in July 1947. No one has a clue why the Roswell story absolutely disappeared for thirty years.

There was no mention – nothing at all, anywhere – about the incident from 1947 until 1978, when Stan Friedman opened the Roswell can of worms after being confronted with a tale about the so-called flying disk crash from a “witness” (Jesse Marcel, Sr.).



Our concern here is not what has transpired since 1978 but why there is no reference, none, to the Roswell “crash” during those intervening years, between 1947 and 1978.

We’ve scoured our vast batch of UFO magazines, newspaper clippings, and other UFO materials for some inkling of Roswell, and have, like others, found nothing.

This strikes us as particularly strange, if a flying saucer had actually crashed near Roswell, and its significant army base.

The canard that the people of 1947 were subservient to some amorphous military order(s) to keep silent about what supposedly transpired – a flying disk from another world crash near their community – is patently silly.

The people of Roswell, like others in the Southwest, were a hardy, non-wimpy breed – persons who came from hardscrabble stock, tough to the core, unlikely to be cowed by orders to keep their mouths shut – for 30 years.



And, as we’ve posted elsewhere, why did no one sneak a fragment of the alleged debris that was so wondrous in nature?

And why did no one take a photo of that wondrous debris, or the purported crash site, when cheap Kodak cameras were extant, and ubiquitous?

The thirty-year hiatus in information or recollection and reminiscences makes no behavioral sense.

Joseph Capp’s gung-ho support of Roswell witnesses belies the obeisant stance that these Capp-lauded witnesses undertook and maintained for over 30 years. Is such reserve concomitant with the lofty natures that Mr. Capp and others attribute to the panoply of witnesses who’ve surfaced after Mr. Friedman and a few others “broke” the Roswell story and the assumed cover-up?

The story, the witnesses, the resultant Roswell mythos don’t quite compute.

It’s that thirty-year absence of anything Roswell-related that undermines the hypothesis that extraterrestrial beings had a mishap in the desert near Roswell in 1947.

No one, with any American bravado or ethical behavior, would have kept quiet for 30 years, despite some vague warnings from military types. Many of whom would have moved on or died long before 1978 arrived.

This is what makes Roswell, for some of us, hard to swallow.

UFO Witnesses

Joseph Capp of UFO Media Matters is a rabid advocate for those who claim to have seen a UFO.



Mr. Capp believes that witness accounts provide the primary reality evidence for the UFOs phenomenon.

But cognoscenti know that witness testimony is the weakest link when it comes to evidentiary hearings of any kind.

Witnesses are notorious for getting it wrong because witness testimony is fallible in a plethora of ways.

But don’t take our word for it:

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

http://fds.oup.com/www.oup.co.uk/pdf/0-19-927809-1.pdf

Mr. Cap does a disservice to “ufology” by giving an imprimatur to witness accounts while eschewing other evidence, or pursuing a discipline that might unmask UFOs for what they really are.

The physiology, the psychology of witnesses are never scrutinized in a forensic way by UFO researchers.

UFO accounts are gathered, and the bizarre aspects of a sighting, abduction, or episode get all the attention, while the witnesses’ psychical and physical make-ups are overlooked.

Yet, Mr. Capp, good guy that he may be, is way off base by hyping witness testimony, overlooking the fact that witnesses are human beings with all the sensory and mental frailties that humans are saddled with.

UFO will not be explained by witness accounts. Witness stories have been the bane of real UFO research, beginning with the incredible Kenneth Arnold sighting of 1947, which is still be debated because of the various possibilities for what Mr. Arnold saw.



Mr. Arnold, a credible, decent man and pilot, examples exactly the problem with witness testimony without accompanying evidence, such as photos or trace elements.

And UFO accounts go down from there, with many witnesses providing even less credentials than Mr. Arnold.

So, Mr. Capp has got to forego his christianized proselytizing on behalf of UFO sighters and try to come up with a better, scientific-oriented approach to UFO study.

That way, his credibility will be enhanced and UFO followers can get to the core of the UFO mystery, where witness testimony is unnecessary and irrelevant.

The UFO Dialectic

There isn’t one.

UFO discussion nowadays is fraught with passionate bias, but no real access to new thinking about the phenomenon.

UFOs, via ufology (the study of UFOs that pretends to be a scientific discipline), have been given short shrift by those who grab hold of discussions and demean the phenomenon by assy beliefs and self-aggrandizing colloquies.

The UFO waters have become so muddied by all the discursive blogs and web-sites about UFOs that no one can make sense of anything UFO-related.

No one is studying the phenomenon as it exists, but many are evoking UFOs (and flying saucers) as they existed, especially the Roswell anecdotal material.

Web-sites such as Frank Warren’s The UFO Chronicles merely pile on UFO account and sightings, without any scrutiny of those accounts and sightings.



There is no discussion about the UFO sightings at Chronicles, just account after account, and story after story.

This isn’t bad, in that discussion about UFOs at blogs, such as Kevin Randle’s A Different Perspective, contain commentary by Mr. Randle related to old UFO events, in his case, Roswell, and comments from readers that are tiresome in their repetitiveness and biases.



Randle’s blog is totally useless, whereas Warren’s blog (or web-site) at least has material about new and old sightings, although Mr. Warren’s efforts are just like many other UFO aficionados – lots of photos, witness accounts, and newspaper clippings, all avoiding scientific perusal or dialectic.

The mess that is “ufology” has corrupted the UFO phenomenon so badly that scientists, academics, and media won’t take the phenomenon seriously.

One would think that UFO fanatics would have learnt a lesson from the flying saucer follies of the fifties, that nonsense having almost eviscerated UFO discussion by any sane person(s).

The great Donald Keyhoe kept UFOs and flying discs from becoming a total laughing stock, but there is no one around today with his charisma and stoic demeanor.



We don’t expect a UFO dialectic or any scientific effort to determine what the phenomenon was or is.

The internet and the nuts who have glommed on to UFOs to showcase their inane thinking about them have made any serious discussion or study of UFOs virtually impossible.

As we’ve said many times, the UFO phenomenon needs a whole new makeover, and discipline that shakes off the ufology epithet and the persons who continue to flog UFOs with insipid and asinine discussion about them.

A closed, underground group might pull this off, and we hear there’s a movement afoot to do just that…

UFOs and the Death of God

While Nietzsche intuited the death of God and Richard Elliott Friedman deals euphemistically with that death (The Hidden Face of God, HarperCollins, 1995), sensible persons know that God died shortly after His Ezekiel visitation [590 BC].



(The alleged appearances in the New Testament are allegorical and Jesus is a tangible metaphor.)

Thus, UFOs have come to replace God in the psyche of many ufologists.

Some in the UFO community replace God with UFOs for psychological reasons, others for academic reasons, and still others because they have a lacuna in their souls.

Stanton Friedman, for instance, needs UFOs as God because he knows that God abandoned his people many times over the millennia, and more horrendously during the Holocaust. So UFOs have become a surrogate for Mr. Friedman.



Richard Hall needs UFOs to be God because he knows that God was absent during the American Civil War and most certainly is dead. So Mr. Hall, who is closer to death than life, needs to fill a void that the absence of God creates for those near to the afterlife.



Jerome Clark, in his study of early Christianity, knows that God is a thought, not a reality, so he keeps UFOs on his cognitive burners as a kind of replacement for a theological concept that intrigues him but is lacking in many ways.



Bruce Maccabee is agnostic about UFOs one day and a believer on another day, just as variable as his belief in God is. UFOs come and go in his mind, just as God does. Mr. Maccabee knows, however, that God is dead, and UFOs are nearly so.



There are many deranged people in the UFO community, named at our UFO web-site, who need God, but in that absence, have created a belief system based upon the UFO phenomenon.

These people can’t come to grips with the death of God, so they’ve made UFOs into God, to assuage their “spiritual” debilitation.



Peripheral UFO aficionado Joseph Capp recognizes, almost unconsciously, that young people have no yen for a God, knowing that God is irrelevant, which is as good as dead in their minds, and some see UFOs as an interesting, real replacement.

Sci-Fi writer and über-geek Mac Tonnies runs intellectual circles around the concept of God, whom he knows is dead, and does the same with UFOs.



UFOs and God are amorphous concepts that Mr. Tonnies plays with, because life is plaything, and God and UFOs are toys for his fecund mind.

Abductees (so-called experiencers) are so distraught by the unconscious or pre-conscious recognition that God is, indeed, dead, they’ve taken to hallucinating about being taken to Him by His “messengers” who visit them at night or during daytime catnaps.



The motivation for their alternate reality is a need to replace the dead God with a still extant God, who resides in other-worldly spheres (UFOs and other realities) just as Elias and Ezekiel did, maybe even as Jesus/Christ did.

UFOs for the Greg Bishops, Nick Redferns, Paul Kimballs. Bruce Duensings, Linda Moulton Howes, and other intellectual types are a coolish replacement for he idea of God, whom they know is long dead, and ineffective as a player in the game of life.



UFOs have the attributes of God – the long ago chronicled attributes before He died: mysterious, uncommunicative, able to perform feats that mere mortals can’t, and ubiquitous.

So while God is dead for cognoscenti, UFOs have come to replace Him (or It), but as we contend, one shouldn’t get too attached to the UFOs as God concept, since UFOs are themselves dying even as this is being typed.

And some in the UFO community (Cullan Hudson for one) knows this, and take comfort in an existentiality that is really real.

The Roswell Fixation

The July 1947 “flying disc captured” episode in Roswell, New Mexico continues to absorb UFO mavens.



Kevin Randle, a Roswell investigator of note, has been fixated, for many years, on the so-called Roswell witnesses, especially Jesse Marcel who was the Intelligence Officer for the 509th Bomber Group at the Army/Air Force in Roswell.



Stanton Friedman is a Roswell groupie, and has been since the late 1970s. He believes that extraterrestrials crashed a flying saucer (maybe two flying saucers) in and around Roswell and Corunna, New Mexico.



He continues to flog the Roswell incident.

One interesting Roswell web-site can be found here:

The Roswell Files

And there are dozen, maybe hundreds more Roswell sites and blogs extant in the internet universe.

For UFO aficionados – the quasi-fanatic kind – Roswell is the Holy Grail of the belief in the alien (extraterrestrial) visitation hypothesis of “ufology” – ufos (flying saucers) contain explorers from outer space.

There is a mystery or two stemming from the 1947 incident in Roswell, but it can’t be deciphered by the fixation on contradictory witness testimony, Joseph Capp and other witness-defenders notwithstanding.

Kevin Randle is remiss by persisting in the illusion that the minutiae of Marcel’s testimonies over the years will provide a Roswell denouement.

But he has a batch of blog-followers who have assumed his obsession and debate the trivia of Marcel and a few others, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

Roswell is interesting, we grant these people that. But it hasn’t been approached forensically by any ufologist, ever.

The overt details – the obvious “evidentiary” aspects – of Roswell have been mined and talked about for years now.







But those details haven’t been investigated with scientific or even journalistic rigor by anyone in the superficial discipline of ufology.

Dr. Randle – he likes to flaunt his Ph.D – should be an expert on Roswell but he has diminished that expertise by his obtuse fixation on the lies and/or truths of Jesse Marcel and others who’ve obtained Roswellian fame from the writings of Friedman and a few other Roswell quidnuncs.

Yes, something happened at Roswell in July 1947, and that something might be, could be clarified if persons like Nick Redfern, Paul Kimball, and our colleague Anthony Bragalia have their way.



But they have to sweep away the errant detritus that Randle and his ilk continue to strew in their path to the truth.

World UFO Space

A blog for UFO believers (with some interesting links):

World UFO Space

The UFO Destroyers

Who is killing ufology, and thus the UFO mystery?

Stanton Friedman would be a suspect, but despite his fixation on the extraterrestrial hypothesis (that UFOs are from alien civilizations) and his promotions of the MJ-12 hoax and Roswell confusion, he keeps UFOs alive in the minds of many media persons and a slightly interested public.



So he’s not a UFO Destroyer.

Jacques Vallee, the UFO guru for members of the flying saucer intelligentsia, proposes that UFOs are an overt manifestation of a “tangible mythology” [our term, not his].

One aspect of the UFO mystery may well be mythological in nature, but that aspect doesn’t address the physical elements that have accompanied sightings, and alleged landings.

Vallee’s tangible mythology is more evanescent than not.



But Vallee is no UFO Destroyer. He may be on to something, but hasn’t made his case in a definite, scientific way. Nonetheless he has mustered a panoply of circumstantial evidences for his hypotheses.

Physicist Michio Kaku is no UFO Destroyer but, rather, a voice of reason from within the scientific community.



But his views are so amorphous that they are platitudinous and useless.

Deceased astronomer J. Allen Hynek was no UFO Destroyer in his later years, but had been near to doing in the UFO phenomenon when he was a spokesperson for the United States Air Force.



The momentum of his turnaround continues to this day fortunately.

Kevin Randle, who is obsessed with correcting the UFO record, zeroing in on old sightings and episodes, is wasting his and our time with the minutiae of historical UFO events. But he is no UFO Destroyer.



He just wants someone in authority to accept the (past) evidence.

Richard Hall and Jerome Clark, two past UFO experts, have given up the flying saucer ghost pretty much, appearing now and then to bolster former and present colleagues.





They are not UFO Destroyers, even though they are no longer significant players in the ufology game.

The UFO second stringers, Nick Redfern, Greg Bishop, David Clarke, Andy Roberts, the UFO Hunters, Paul Kimball, and a plethora of ufological mavens are not UFO Detroyers.





These people pursue the UFO enigma in context of other things that interest them, paranormal things and less mysterious things, like music and drink.

Mac Tonnies, a sci-fi writer and buff, puts UFOs in such a discursive arena of weirdness that he diffuses the topic, but he’s not UFO Destroyer, taking a benign neglect attitude toward the mysterious lights and images that others see as UFOs.



So who are the UFO Destroyers?

Whitley Strieber is one, having made a fictional mockery of the phenomenon, and persisting in his quasi-religious take to he point that many interested persons have discarded UFOs as something that science might be able to decipher.



Then there’s a small group of confused and addled persons who sneak in and out of the UFO arena, venting their spleen because they have gone unrecognized by UFO cognoscenti.

Let’s call them Alfred, Regan, and Lesley.



They gather ideas from others, either stealing those ideas or bifurcating them with gossipy innuendo and a mental haze that puts their psychological well-being into question.

They are UFO Destroyers because they degrade the phenomenon with their ignorance and wholesale purloining of ideas that others generate about UFOs.

And the final group of UFO Destroyers are those who hoax photos or generate sightings to give them a prominence that they could never achieve in a more credible arena.

These include the former contactees -- Adamski, Van Tassel, Bethurum, Fry, Angelucci, et al. – and present day hoaxers, such as Billy Meier.







The UFO phenomenon needs a focused approach, a discipline that is scientific in nature.

It isn’t getting that, and those above, whether they are a UFO Destroyer or not, haven’t been and are not helping to bring that about.