Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Slow Swan Song


Time to begin the final walk down these wonderful paths with you.

This will be the first of a very short series of opinions that I have about the status of several of the anomalies that we've looked at over these six years. But first, I want to dispense with a duty to all of you and whomever else might stumble across this blog as long as it rests-in-state [and peace] here.

When I agreed to various people and to myself to caretake certain resources of possible interest to researchers now and in the future, I took on a moral burden [at least that's how I view it]. For awhile, that duty was somewhat achieved by my attempts, however inadequately, to partially mine every one of these resources and share them with you in that way. 500 posts later we've done some of that.

But others may still have intellectual research needs. To do what I can [within reason] I am going to reassert one thing and add another. The reassertion is that any responsible person may [with some prior notice] visit these archives for research purposes anytime [again within reason] that I'm in Kalamazoo. The address of my home, and the archives, is 818 South Park St. /// Kalamazoo, MI, 49001.

As a reminder of what these archives are, they consist of my personal files of course, plus the SITU/Ivan Sanderson files, the Ruppelt files, the George Hunt Williamson files, the John Timmerman files, the notebooks of Paul McCarthy [for his Colorado/McDonald PhD thesis], and a large quantity of the usual books, journals, documents, et al. It is a UFO-heavy archive, but a fairly substantial general anomalies archive as well.

That's the reassertion of something that longterm readers already have seen. The addition is my e-mail. It is < mswords@att.net >. Obviously that is useful for warning me of your desire to show up here in person sometime. I will do [again within reason] one further thing. If someone has a pretty specific request for information, and it is something of some research import [not a mere whim which has crossed the mind], then I'll read the request, and if feasible try to be of service. I cannot be "on-call" Anomalies Central, and I'm sure you folks realize that.


Well, on to my first statement of opinion ............

UFOs are real. The percentage of doubt in my mind is so small that I'm tempted to slide from mere belief into certainty. But we should define the term.

People want to use the term Unidentified Aerial Phenomena {UAP} --- fine if that's their view. For me it's the coward's way out and almost useless for accomplishing anything but protecting one's butt. There are OBVIOUSLY unidentified aerial phenomena --- anything which seems off the ground that the viewer can't classify clearly fits that vague label. I have interest in some UAP reports like thunderbirds, mothmen, witches on broomsticks, strange atmospheric phenomena, flying men, ivory-billed woodpeckers, and on and on. But this is not about some useless vague category which then must have its subsets more strongly defined. My interest lies in the subsets. In this case: UFOs.

UFOs for me are, hypothetically, either physically-present aerial technology or the result of some such technology, the characteristics of which exceed what our Earthly engineering has accomplished. In short some form of non-terrestrial technology which we have nevertheless encountered here on familiar old Earth. And it is THAT hypothesis which I believe is nearly beyond doubt.


And I believe that it has been nearly beyond doubt for a very long time --- at least since 1952. Minds which cannot see, after reading cases like Red Bluff, Rogue River, Coyne, Boianai, Levelland, Arnold, Moore, General Mills, Nash-Fortenberry, RB-47, ... Lord, this list could go on nearly indefinitely .... are minds so fearful of error that they are crippled with paranoia.



To see the reality of this, one has to immerse oneself in cases. Few have done so. Not all who have conquer their own irrational enthusiasms and end up making the job of the scholarly student harder. I will let you in on a strange observation, however. I have found that it is EXTREMELY rare even among UFOlogists [especially public figures] to have actually done much work in the files. Translation: despite their "authoritative BS" they don't know UFOlogy. They usually know all sorts of sociology and gossip [just like the debunkers], but their assertions are the products of ego and/or an excitable wannabe mania, at best it is the product of extremely narrow interest in some small piece of the whole. As to the debunkers: they are a strangely bent lot. They seem to enjoy lifetimes of cockadoodle strutting, mocking other human beings, and trolling to get fun out of irritating people. There may be some worthy severe lifelong skeptics out there [Menzel, Klass, and Csicopians in general are NOT them], but the majority are just intellectual criminals.

One further thing: if the evidence is so persuasive, why are "we" as a culture where we are in our attitudes about UFOs? I've answered this so many times here that I can't count. But the thing which, in the majority, sets the foundation for any open-thinker to feel their way through this 50+ year sociology is: Read UFOs and GOVERNMENT!! OK, 600 pages. But as Aristotle said to Alexander the Great: "There is no Royal Road to Mathematics." Truth and clear vision often have a price.

................  That's my view of UFOs in brief. Everyone will have their own, of course. My own is the product of quite a lot of years not spent casually, so I feel that I've at least earned that opinion.

I've no interest in arguing this by the way. If deeper interest exists, the Blog is full of explanations, as are books like UFOs and Government, Grass-Roots UFOs, the Journal of UFO Studies, as well as lots of things done by others smarter than myself.

The next time I'll be blowing off steam on several other of the anomalies --- that "list" will probably take more than one post --- but the number will be small.

Peace, folks. All the best, and keep your eyes and intuitions open.

12 comments:

  1. Your blog and analysis has been a treasure... it is very cool to make it all available for further study. Thanks for your outstanding efforts to provide common fact based opinions. I too seem to be reaching saturation at trying to provide a similar service with my blog... albeit not with your resources. One question if you will..... those `physical' aliens that people interacted with in UFO events in the early days simply do NOT seem to be around anymore... any thoughts why?

    Rick Phillips

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    1. Mark Rodeghier and I have been noticing the severe drop-off of Close Encounter cases dating from about 1980 or slightly thereafter. Why? Who knows? This is graphable in the data for many areas of the world, even though anomalous lights and more distant object reports seem to remain fairly robust. Robert Powell is an outstanding serious case researcher for MUFON, who, thankfully, can operate on his high level of excellence without interference from an administration which still caters to the whacky edges of our field. His "inside" research team has seen several good cases, including radar-involved ones, but very few CEs, and no good CE3s, as far as I know. Despite the [formerly] continuous claims of "abductions" in the 80s and 90s {which numbers I have the GREATEST reservations about, and have a preferred hypothesis that the vast majority of these claims have nothing to do with core UFOlogy}, the UFO phenomenon seems to have "backed off" while still "displaying" more distantly.

      Why would that be? Trying to get into the heads of entities/agencies which one doesn't understand at all is foolishness, so I'll not claim even a good hunch. My first speculation was that things like CE2traces disappeared almost exactly when the civilian UFO community got scientifically linked up enough to test them in real high tech labs. While that might still seem to make sense, it wouldn't serve to explain the concurrent disappearance of the CE1s and CE3s. Maybe, if the agency behind this stuff wasn't as error-free as we tend to think of them, the elimination of CE1s [and thereby CE3s also] would be a decision to avoid leaving testable evidence behind, which, as it mounted from various respectable labs, would slowly force changes in our academic and cultural view of the phenomenon.

      Utter BS by me, but it's all I have on the question. "Motivations" are out of reach of our current data, and remain the best test of whether you and I are talking to a "researcher" worth listening to or not. Most of my UFOlogy friends don't talk of motivations except in the lightest of terms, but a few, sadly, have. The latter include almost all of the famous CE4 researchers who seem to vastly have overrated their ability to read their data with a flexible mind and rather have unconsciously fallen prey to their [desperate] need to get an answer.

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    2. Indeed... the bedroom alien abduction farce-fantasy has proved to be a large distraction.... I tend to lean in a very anomalous direction for the absence of all the 1950's aliens that had humanish characteristics.... that the UFO/Orb phenomena (then and now) is indeed a localized time-space disrupter if you will that changes the very nature of common consensus into specialized consensus phenomena...that said,,, I'd say the number of folks videographing the Orb phenomena is hotter and hotter - could be awareness, could be the equipment... thanks for your thoughtful reply.

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  2. Obviously you have not followed the lead taken by the scientists who have been working on Project Hessdalen for the past 30 years. Otherwise you may loosen your stand on the premise that UFOS are technological in nature.

    What they have found has direct bearing on the UFO community, yet few people have heard of the multi-national study nor its results. Despite the fact that what they are looking at does not have the name "UFO", the lights are very much like classic UFO cases. The lights move rapidly across the sky, change direction on a dime, change colour and shape and generally behave like any other "first kind" encounters in the literature.

    My own take on the UFO phenomenon is that it is a massive form of earthlight. It appears to be a electromagnetic "beam" which creates plasma balls (like ball lightning) in the atmosphere due to tribolumination, a known geological phenomenon. Tribolumination occurs when rocks are subjected to immense pressure. The lights (hence "lumination" in the term) change colour, change shape, move rapidly above the surface of the rocks, change direction on a dime...you get the picture.

    It can even account for the abductions which people experience all over the world.

    Here is how it could work in theory.

    Neurologists and neurochemists know that the brain is bathed in a sort of "electric-conductive" bath called cerebro-spinal fluid. It can be affected by electric impulses and shocks as anyone who has been treated with ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) will attest. Microwaves of certain frequencies can also produce effects on the brain, mostly hallucinations.

    Moving on from that, the earthlights that I suspect cause UFOs may affect some people by giving them hallucinations. The only reason why the reports of abductions are similar is due in part to how people expect these "abductions" to be through media reports and social conditioning. When the first reports came from Latin America in the early 60s, for example, abductees experienced pleasant things like Nordic looking women and sexual encounters. That was the current male fantasy of note and it was usually men who reported abductions. As time wore on, the negative reports of medical probes and "greys" began to circulate from the US and the people under the influence of earthlights experienced those types of "abductions".

    How can we explain entire families who experience abductions over the generations? In the same way that families can have generations of diabetes; through genetics. Whitley Strieber's family is one family of note who experiences abductions.

    That is my theory on the entire UFO phenomenon after more than 40 years of reading and thinking about it. I move from what is scientifically known to what could very well be the truth behind this ages-old phenomenon.

    Hoping that you have a good retirement from investigating anomalous phenomenon.

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  3. "Obviously you have not followed.... "--- what a snarky patronizing way to begin a post. Here's what I've "followed":

    1]. the entire Hessdalen business for decades;
    2]. the Yakima business for decades --- you'd know this if you'd read even recent postings on the blog;
    3]. the entire Persinger Theory, which "yours" is merely an echo --- I published some of his stuff while editor of the Journal of UFO Studies;
    4]. personal friends with people in the newest research alignment studying these "earthlight" fields;
    5]. know that they don't believe as you do either;
    6]. have studied the UFO case reports for decades.

    What that last tells me is that Earthstresses are MAYBE able to "explain" a few handfuls of cases as hallucinations, but for cases not in current or even ancient rift zones, cases high in the air or over the oceans, cases with ground traces, cases with auto engine stops, cases with burns and other physiological effects --- to casually float this inadequate thing as The Theory of UFOs is, well, ... good Lord, I thought I'd heard the last of this [and then to get it in a patronizing manner ---yep, great intellectual stimulation.]

    I can tell that you are a lost cause as to viewing the complexity of the things which are reported to UFO researchers, but I write this for the longtime readers of this blog, who deserve better. On the other hand, I too wish you a good retirement and happy peaceful thoughts.

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  4. Thanks Prof.
    One wonders, how much of this trend is explainable in some simple (or not so simple) sociological manner, (ie. changes in reports does not necessarily equate changes in actual experiences)?

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    1. We've worried about exactly that. The reason that Mark and I believe that the trend is real and not sociological though is:
      a]. it occurs all over the world;
      b]. it, therefore, occurs where the reporting opportunities are still active [i.e. the internet world has not taken over and civilian reporting mechanisms are still in place.]
      c] even in the modern screwed-up situation, you cannot find good-sounding CEs reported to no-investigation sites like NUFORC;
      d]. even MUFON's later improved research team set-up hasn't been able to get such cases.

      I think that this "disappearance" is very real.

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  5. I am interested in Ivan Sanderson because he had Al Bielek in his orbit way back in the early days. Bielek is fascinating to me in a repulsive sort of way because of his concocted machinations about his role in the Philadelphia Experiment, all of which I had a hand in debunking. We still have a web site up that itemizes how we methodically took apart Bielek's delusional claims. Any info you have on Bielek would be most welcome.

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    1. There could be hidden "insider" information on Bielek in the "chaotic" parts of the dump boxes, but, although I believe that he was very helpful with certain organizational matters [willing hands if you will], he did not seem to interest Ivan that much once he struck off into his Philadelphia Experiment stuff. Bielek was interested, naturally, in disappearance claims for the Bermuda Triangle, and Sanderson was putting together his Vile Vortices theory, so they had commonality. Sanderson viewed the anomalies as caused by the physical nature of certain geographical locations; Bielek apparently was interested in technology and conspiracy --- which obviously could not apply to Bermuda Triangle historical cases if such existed.

      As to "debunking": it can be "repulsive" to me if not handled properly. A skeptical analysis of any anomaly claim is a necessity in any honest investigation. This often threatens to become "a closing of the mind" to alternatives and what, regardless of the goodness of the claim, may still be there. It also can become derisive [a terrible message to the readers] and a witch-hunt dancing on a person's grave for no civilized reason. I trust that you have not engaged in any of these reactionary excesses, but they are often difficult to guard oneself against. For me, the USN information about using electrical techniques to create a magnetically-neutral look to a metallic hull, so as not to attract mines, is plenty sufficient to get the legend started on the wrong track, so I've not wasted much time on it.

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  6. Hi there. Thanks for responding. The website for the Bielek debunking is still up. My buddy Gerold put it together and you can have look to see if we overstepped the boundaries of fair investigation. The site is:
    http://www.bielek-debunked.com

    Funny thing that we're talking about this topic because out of boredom and curiosity, I sat through a first time viewing of an old movie "The Final Countdown", which has a small PX reference in the plot. Silly film and pretty mediocre by most standards.

    Bielek was also interested in mind control stuff; where and how he got that interest remains unknown to me. The PX story, depending on which version we think about (Carl Allen or Bielek, or....) was probably sourced in the research by the Navy to do several things, maybe all at once. What they actually accomplished is where we can speculate. The Navy is very closed about its business, more so than other branches of the military.

    You have a very interesting website; I should drop by to have a glance more often.

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  7. Well said Professor and I can't believe a half year has rolled by since I have read your posts. But at least I will get the opportunity to see you in person shortly.

    The number of good CE cases has diminished significantly as you noted. I can only speculate on the "why". Perhaps the lack of a lot of CEs since the 1980s is due to the phenomenon itself; perhaps it is due to the lack of reporting from military sources; or perhaps it is due to the myriad of non-CE reports that lower CE reports to the noise level along with a failure to properly investigate the real CE cases. Definitely a topic to cover over a few beers.

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