Greg Bishop's interview Diana Walsh Pasulka -- Encounters takes us into a more esoteric niche in ufology. Dr. Pasulka and Greg cover her forthcoming book Encounters, which in one way continues Pasulka's remarkable American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, and Technology. But Encounters is a "much deeper dive" at What's Happening at current ufology's borders by one more at home in the field. Observations on the multiplicative value of teamwork, about witness accuracy, and more challenging concepts like the "overview effect" form part of this fascinating discussion. (WM)

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Greg Bishop has been at the fringe of UFO relevance for a very long time. His pertinence is pathetic.

My pal, the Anomalist's Bill Murphy and I think my buddy Paul Kimball seem favorably disposed to Bishop, but why?

Bishop is a UFO flunky, and if you've ever heard one of his horrendously boring Radio Misterioso "programs" -- not a podcast but a smidgen of crap -- you know what I mean....

His promotion of Diana Pasulka derives from their initial contact during her work on that pitiful book of her's: American Cosmic.''

I panned the book as did Bryan Sentes, who is generally forgiving of academic efforts, but in this instance, her "Valley Girl" approach to the UFO phenomenon was a bit much.

That she hasn't made a mark in her field of academic study -- Religious History -- caused her to publish her UFO materials, where she has made an inconsequential but somewhat significant niche with persons at the fringe of Ufology, like Bishop.

Bishop promotes losers like himself, to no avail, but he persists.

That Bill Murphy sees value in him or Pasulka is distressing but there it is...

RR

The loss of Rich Hoffman as a FB "friend"

Rich Hoffman dropped me as a Facebook “friend” because of my SCU harangue – on Conjecture – about the effort being “pretend” research and wouldn’t, couldn’t get to the essence of the phenomenon, UFOs.

 
Here are some of his responses (from Facebook Messenger) and his final missive:

Here are my responses to him:

This started from a SCU announcement on FB from one of its members who was touting the latest (foolish) outing of the SCU members, an outing to gather “data” from a night of sky-watching; an endeavor I scorned on FB.

 
Hoffman’s YouTube announcement, seen in the Conjecture video, added fuel to my livid dislike of the pretense that these guys are doing something worthwhile and valuable.
 
Moreover, Rich Hoffman had become, for me, an archetype of the UFO geezer epithet I employ to single out such loony activities as that which SCU (and others) are engaged in.
 
Hoffman provides, on Facebook, surfeits of postings showcasing his non-UFO existence:
Ship cruises, sojourns to holiday venues, trips to sit in on UFO (UAP for him) gatherings, and pictures of flowers he likes – all okay for his FB pals but insipid as most geezer activities are,
 
That he believes and lauds SCU’s enterprises as ‘’scientific research” annoys. The SCU boys have shown some interesting visuals of UFOs and their behavior, but we all have seen a plethora of such videos and long-ago accepted the reality of UFOs, long before the public and news media acceptance of that reality.
 
SCU’s videos are nifty and their analyses intrigue but the horse got out of that barn when the AATIP videos showed up.
 
To keep foraging for “data” – a term SCU and other “research wannabes use to augment their pathetic enterprises – is a wheel spinning exercise in irrationality and borders on delusions of grandeur.
 
Feel free to comment. We’re in a private zone now where you won’t be excoriated by the rabble…
 
RR

Disclosure, disclosure, disclosure!

Copyright 2020, InterAmerica, Inc.

Dipping into Facebook Saturday night [8/1/20] – to check my media connection – I found several notifi- cations about new postings from the UFO UpDates group and administered nicely by Curt Collins.

For several days now, there, and in my Google UFO newsfeeds are dollops about the supposed acknowledgment by the Pentagon that its long-secretive, ongoing UFO study is about to announce that it thinks the UFOs [UAP] encountered by U.S. Navy pilots and other military are off-Earth vehicles.

A botched New York Times piece, revised after its initial publication, created the anticipation of “disclosure” by, from what I can tell, UFO fringers: persons not well-known or even known at all among the usual contingent of noted UFO enthusiasts.

These closeted or passive UFO newbies and UFO hermits are drooling at the possibility that the U.S. government may be about to tell the public (us) that UFOs exist and are from somewhere off the planet, the fringers hoping that the news is a disclosure of an extraterrestrial presence on Earth now (and for a very long time up to now).

What little contact I’ve had with the fringers indicates a hoary lot, disheveled and ignorant generally, rude and without class or taste of any kind. I could name them but a few have been around a long time, without making a ufological mark and are angry with me already for closing this blog to them where now they have to ask for “permission” to see my dopey renderings; e.g., skeptic Tim Printy for one and a mess of a guy, Roy Hale.

It’s good that Facebook is losing advertisers by the sh*tload and is about to be broken up by the government for deleterious behavior. This should clean the UFO palate there or mitigate the offensive effluvia.

We’ll see.

RR

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