Those damnable UFO pieces feigning scholarship

Copyright 2020, InterAmerica, Inc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RR

The “Black Hole” that is Ufology

Copyright 2020, InterAmerica, Inc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RR

Reframing Ufology, with dolts?

Copyright 2017, InterAmerica, Inc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RR

The desperation of Ufology and its practitioners

Copyright 2017, InterAmerica, Inc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RRR

Facebook: A New Nazi-like Regime?

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

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

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

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

Is there the intrinsic evil in Facebook that underlay Nazism? 

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

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

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

RR

Death but not Transfiguration?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ramey memo people don’t even come close.

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

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

RR