The Paranormal Priority: UFOs?

For those bewildered by or obsessed with things at the fringe of reality, do such things as Sasquatch/Bigfoot/Yeti matter, or Nessie and Champ, or chupacabras, or ghosts?



Why do UFOs have more import, in our estimation, than those other “entities” listed above?

UFOs have a longevity that the listed items do not have.

What UFOs are or may be seem to have more importance in the great scheme of things.

UFOs have paranormal cachet that Bigfoot doesn’t, and certainly more than chupacabras have.



Even “ghosts” don’t impact observers in the same way that UFOs do.



And the Loch Ness monster or Lake Champlain’s Champ don’t provide any great ripples in the paranormal panoply.

UFOs have a cosmological underpinning or a metaphysical ambiance of some kind, deservedly or not.

If UFOs are extraterrestrial in origination, that is very important, for all the obvious reasons: what’s the ET culture? The intelligence? The theology? Et cetera.



If UFOs are an example of someone or something playing with the evolution or mind of mankind, that too is very important. (Need we tell you why?)



If UFOs are merely the fallout of secret military aircraft testings, that isn’t too important but it would quell the ongoing mystery assuredly.



UFOs may be observational trickery or real substantive craft, which is what we believe them to be.

Either way, they present a phenomenon that ranks up there with some of the best mysteries of history and time, like who really parted the Red Sea, or did Jesus really rise up after his crucifixion (and if so, why), or what caused Hitler’s megalomania, or does the Universe have a edge, or can we travel back or forward in time.



As a matter of fancy, UFOs may have something to do with time-travel, whereas Bigfoot doesn’t, nor Nessie, nor those other elements of the imagination.

UFOs get a priority because at the heart of the phenomenon lies a meaningful essence, it seems to us.

Time spent on the other paranormal or Fortean elements is just a waste of time, thought, and effort.

UFOs go to the top of our list of mysteries but do not replace more important issues, such as man’s inhumanity to man, or is God truly dead?



The pursuit of UFOs is, after all, only a hobby of sorts……

How Should We Really Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence? by Dr. Colin Ridyard,

An interesting, intelligent paper, with analyses of some UFO sightings.

Click here for the PDF

Who or What?

Underlying the whole discussion about UFOs lies the question of who or what promulgates the phenomenon.

A premise needs to be established, and a paper entitled Who or What Built the Universe? provides a premise that leads, or could, to a premise that should be created to address the UFO phenomenon.

Click here for a WORD document of the paper

Click here for a web-page version of the paper

A Rand Paper from 1968, reviewing the UFO status

This paper, released in 2000 for DTIC staffers, is a RAND report from 1968 reviewing the UFO phenomenon to that date [1968].

It's an overview of what was going on inside government agencies about UFO sightings.

Click here for the PDF

Those Mysterious Airships of the 1890s

A wonderful article about the phantom airships of the 1890s by Rudolph Umland appeared in The Prairie Schooner [Winter 1966/1967, Page 302 ff.]

You can access a WORD document of the article by clicking HERE

Or you can access the article as a web-page (using any browser) by clicking HERE

UFO Abductions: The Explanations

Gerald Eberlein's paper on the UFO abduction phenomenon presents an academic take on alleged "kidnappings" by extraterrestrials.

Click here for the PDF

UFOs & Aliens: Is There Anybody Out There?

This book, edited by Michael Pye and Kirsten Dalley, from New Page Books [A Division of The Career Press, NJ], didn’t inspire me to read it when I saw it advertised at the Anomalist web-site.

But I’m sure glad I did get a copy. It’s full of pleasant surprises, about UFOs, Roswell, and other UFO episodes.

Some of ufology’s BIG names appear in the contents: Stanton Friedman, Nick Pope, Erich von Daniken, Micah Hanks, Don Schmitt, and Nick Redfern among them.

I’d usually skip over Stan Friedman’s ruminations on UFOs – he’s too ET oriented for my taste in UFOs – and essays in this book are about the U.S. government’s UFO secrecy, A Cosmic Watergate, as you know, but he also addresses Star Travel [Page 157 ff.], for which the epithet “expert” applies. Friedman presents an overview of stellar travel, which is insightful.

Don Schmitt’s essay, Roswell in Perspective: The Human Response to an Extraordinary Event, will spook skeptics, if they only note Roswell in the essay’s title, but Mr. Schmitt’s overview is full of intriguing detail, even for Roswell cognoscenti, and one element made a point with me: that residents of Corona and Roswell kept caches of Brazel’s debris, hidden in all kinds of nooks and crannies. (I still think, that if there’s some truth to the Roswell story, someone must have kept photos or pieces of tangible artifacts secreted away. Someone must have had the presence of mind to squirrel away things that the military was allegedly gathering to maintain its cover-up, if there was a cover-up. Mr. Schmitt touches on the idea.)

Nick Redfern provides an essay on the Kingman crash, which has been resurrected lately in the UFO discussion arena. But Nick, as is his wont, provides an interesting element involving a contactee, Truman Bethurum. And Nick also gives a précis of the story that contains material that most UFO aficionados don’t know.

John White presents The UFO Problem: Toward a Theory of Everything, which is a cogent categorization of what UFOs may or may not be.

Nick Pope does his X-Files metaphor, while Kathleen Marden touches on Alien Abduction.

Micah Hanks deals with UFOs and Invisibility, and others write about doubt [Gordon Chism] , alien intervention [Jim Moroney], the military’s effort to kill the Roswell story [Tom Carey], and what UFOs might be, other than ET craft [Marie Jones and Larry Flaxman]. Erich von Daniken does his ancient alien thing with a nod to hybridization. (I’m a von Daniken fan.)

The book turned out to be enlightening to me, and will to you also, even if you think you’re a well-read UFO maven.

The book can be bought at booksellers, like Amazon, Powells, Anomalist, and at these web-sites too: careerpress.com and newpagebooks,com

Get a copy for your UFO library. You’ll not be disappointed, even if you’re a hardened skeptic.

RR

A book you must find, buy, and read!

This book is so full of important, interesting material, mostly from the period of 1947-1950, that it is essential for the serious UFO researcher.

Click here for the back cover, which recounts what's inside the book

The photos, news-clippings, and some hitherto unknown flying saucer information make this an exemplary source for UFO aficionados who want to establish a premise for UFO sightings today.

We recommend the book highly. (It's from our collection and not a review-sent copy.)

Nick Redfern's The REAL Men in Black: A Paranoiac's Handbook

Nick Redfern’s latest effort is one of his best; he never fails to satisfy or enlighten, and
he doesn’t this time either.

The RMIB, as I’ll call it, takes readers through the mystery commonly known among UFO aficionados and paranomalists as “the men in black” – a term derived from weird circumstances involving a UFO “researcher” – Albert Bender – and a cohort of his, Gray Barker in the 1950s.

Mr. Redfern provides exquisite details about the Bender/Barker “affair” which is a textbook case about paranoia and madness more than anything else.

But Mr. Redfern doesn’t stop there. He presents a host of other MIB episodes, which also, to this reader, showcase mental aberrations of various kinds, all psychotic in nature.

Chapters 4 through 12 provide a litany MIB cases or related events that psychiatry would have a field day with:

“It was a blistering hot day when Jane’s attention was drawn to three tall, golden-skinned, bearded men. They were dressed in black suits, black hats, black shoes, and very heavy, woolen full-length coats that…were also black in color…

A few weeks later…Jane was listening to a radio talk show…when one particular caller related her own…UFO experience…The caller’s encounter was followed by a visit from three men dressed completely in black clothing…This story gave Jane a jolt…[and she] wondered if she hadn’t been ‘marked or implanted’ by the aliens and if she was being followed.” [Pages 113-114]

Then in Part II of the book, Mr. Redfern gives readers all, and I mean all, the theories that have been proffered for the MIB phenomenon, including hallucinations, hoaxes, archetypal “tricksters,” G-men, and time-travelers among others.

The deep mental disfigurations are implied by Mr. Redfern, but he refrains from going so far as to say that MIB experiencers are nuts.

Mr. Redfern, if I’m reading him correctly, leans towards the “paranormal” aspect of MIB visitations, which makes sense even to those, like me, who think MIB events are products of the ill-mind.

Paranormality can account for some MIB instances, since a few persons visited by the black-clad personages have a semblance of sanity about themselves.

What always surprises me about Mr. Redfern’s forays into the unknown is his encapsulating accounts of demons and devils, since he is non-believer in things with a religious patina. (And I don’t think he believes in God.)

Mr. Redfern, in The Real Men in Black, gives readers, as is his wont in all his writings, between-the-lines insights and details, not minutiae necessarily, that can take readers to other areas of paranormality, which are touched on, and subliminally relevant to the whole panoply of the fringe reality.

So, if you’re a seeker of truth, and want a manual about one element in the weird world of UFOs and the paranormal, get Mr. Redfern’s book.

You will not be disappointed.

The book is published, nicely, by New Page Books, a Division of Career Press, and can be found at Amazon, among other booksellers, and can be had via NewPageBooks.com I surmise.

RR

Life, death, life and UFOs: The witness failure(s)

The book, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience by Pim van Lommel, M.D. provides extensive data and information about the so-called near death phenomenon or the NDE (near-death experience).

The author covers virtually everything about NDEs, including an extensive account of Quantum Mechanics in relation to the experience.



Most of you have read or heard the accounts of persons who died and “came back.”

What I want to zero in on are a few of the descriptions that the dying or dead witnesses provide; namely, the beautiful music and beautiful flowers they experience, and how this relates to UFO reports, as they has been presented by persons who’ve experienced that phenomenon, also.

Every NDE account that Dr. Lommel provides from the literature and his own accumulated reports, from his practice or that of colleagues, tells of the dead/dying person’s hearing “beautiful music” [sic] and seeing “beautiful flowers” [sic] on their way to a blissful landscape after transitioning that tunnel with a light at the end of it.

But no one, and I mean no one, has reported exactly what kind of music or what kind of flowers they experienced.

Were the flowers gladiolas, petunias, roses, dandelions?



Was the music classical, operatic, chorale, jazz, rock, even hip-hop?



No one has ever provided a definitive account or identification of the music or flowers.

Did no musicologist, opera buff, composer, or musician have a NDE?

Did no horticulturist, avid gardener, or flower enthusiast ever have a NDE?

That is, why does no one provide an exact, precise descriptive of the music or flowers, if the experience is a real one and not a metaphor of the mind?

Now, this also applies to those who witness UFOs, in the sky or up close and personal.

Has ever an aeronautical engineer seen a UFO and can provide a description of the design that corresponds to his or her expertise as an engineer of aircraft?

Has ever a chemical engineer or metallurgist provided a description of the smell or patina of a UFO that has appeared near them?

Has a pilot ever – really – provided an actual account of what a UFO did in the context of its flight; that is, has anyone with flying acumen given an account that explains or shows the proclivities of flight by a UFO, in ways that indicate they actually took in the experience in a way that was or is real – Kenneth Arnold, Gorman, or Lt. Coyne, notwithstanding?



No UFO report by a witness of a UFO has ever provided a forensic description of what was seen or experienced; the details come after the fact by UFO investigators and/or “researchers.”

No UFO report has ever been definitive, in portraying what a UFO or flying saucer was constructed of in essence.

Yes, Scully gives details that resonate in his account of the Aztec crashed flying disks, but that’s second or third-hand information, and concocted as most UFO mavens think.

But no UFO witness, with credentials that count – engineering, chemical, aeronautical – has given a report that provides actuality – no one.

This means, on the face of it, that either NDE’s and UFOs are chimeras, or that witnesses to either are incompetent or without credentials that allow them to be professional in their reportage.

UFO Review

Esteemed British publisher Stuart Miller produced some of the finest compilations of UFO material found anywhere.

His UFO Review was a fount of interesting, insightful takes on the UFO phenomenon and its mavens.

While Mr. Miller has gone subliminal since the failure of his exemplary Alien Worlds magazine, we still think of him fondly.

Click here for a PDF of a UFO Review issue with items by and about Nick Redfern (Saucer Spies), The Scully/Aztec "hoax" (we believe the story), and a plethora of other things that you'll find worth your browsing time (cartoons, UFO people, and other fascinating stories.

Enjoy....

The Flying Saucer from Mars and CDA

Back in the day I thought that this book by “Cedric Allingham” corroborated the Adamski alien contacts and story:



Here are the Adamski-like photos that Allingham purportedly took of a flying saucer that allegedly came fro Mars:





But the story was a hoax, concocted, for some bizarre reason, by respected and credentialed British astronomer, Patrick Moore:



And who was the journalist who unmasked the hoaxer and the exposed the hoax? Our favorite skeptical thinker, Christopher Allen, known here and in the UFO community as CDA.

Click here for the story

CDA has cachet with us and with those who like clear thought, gentlemanly argumentation, and skepticism in its revered and best sense.

So when you read his comments here and elsewhere, take a moment to appreciate his bent of mind and research acumen.

Bruce Duensing!

Bruce Duensing is a brilliant man.

His blog -- Intangible Materiality -- is flush with incandescent insights and highly intellectual ruminations.

Click here for access to his blog -- and scroll down for edifications of a unique kind.

A Socorro-like Sighting (in the same time-frame/locale)

Artist's (wrong) rendition of the La Madera sighting

26 April 1964 12:30 La Madera, New Mexico, USA

A bright, metallic, egg-shaped object was seen on the ground.

At 12:30 p.m. Orlando Gallegos observed a bright, metallic, egg-shaped object about 70 meters away, on the ground, north of La Madera, New Mexico . Blue flames appeared to circle the base of the machine, which was silent and about the length of a telephone pole. Scorch marks and four imprints were found, according to Police Capt. Martin Vigil.

Also on the same day, a thirty-foot wide silver, inverted bathtup-shaped UFO was sighted near Truth of Consequences, New Mexico by a Mr. Mitropolis. It was seen a quarter of a mile to the east, flew up over a mountain, then down out of sight near the Caballo Reservoir. Orlando Gallegos observed a bright, metallic, egg-shaped object about 70 meters away, on the ground, north of La Madera. Blue flames appeared to circle the base of the machine, which was silent and about the length of a telephone pole.

Scorch marks and four imprints were found, according to Police Capt. Martin Vigil. An object was observed. Occupants of the craft were seen. Ground traces were found. Animal reactions to the object were reported.

One blue-metallic ball, about 20 feet across, around 300 feet away, was observed by one male 35-year-old witness at a ranch for over one minute (Gallegos). No sound was heard.

Source

N.B. This sighting either confirms the lunar-landing hypothesis -- the lander being tested in other New Mexico locales (a bit far-fetched) or Zamora's craft made other appearances or landings, indicating something more than a lander was involved.

Socorro Recap

A site that most of you may be familiar with but should re-visit is the Dave Thomas site, which provides a recap of the explanations for Lonnie Zamora's Socorro UFO sighting of 1964.

Mr. Thomas writes that Zamora saw a lunar-landing test. (We agree)

But check out Dave Thomas' reasoning by clicking HERE

For us, the Socorro insignia/symbol that Zamora drew, which has been flummoxed by Stanford's intrusion into the episode, is the "smoking gun" which will explain who or what is responsible for the Socorro sighting.

Confining our blogs....

Today, Wednesday, May 25th, 2011, comments to this blog were not automatically sent to us for moderation. I had to go into our e-mail service and retrieve them, which allowed me to scrutinize responses more judiciously than usual, and without them being sampled by other here.

I continue to be distressed by the slovenly thought-processes that are exampled by what purports to be critical thinking about our postings.

In dialogue with other bloggers and friends, I’ve decided that we shall confine comments here to those that reflect intellectual, open-minded rumination, and not knee-jerk response to things written by us and others, which torment an ingrained belief-system or narrow-minded, non-objective cogitation.

There are several (many, actually) commenters we look forward to hearing from but a few that irk us with their bigoted, snotty, unthinking commentary.

From this point on, more so than our usual fascistic deletion of comments that we don’t like, we’ll not be approving comments from some who visit here.

We have a respect for some of you -- your intellectual proclivities, your open-minded objectivity, even-handed skepticism, and your genteel approach to our oblique and beleaguered postings, some of which I agree are over the top.

Your comments will continue to be registered here.

But if you send us a comment that doesn’t appear, and it’s not the fault of our blogging service, you know where you stand with us.

So don’t go away angry…just go away…..



RR

The Robert Taylor 1979 UFO Encounter

On November 9th, 1979, Robert Taylor, a forester in Scotland, had a weird encounter with a strange “craft” in Dechmont Woods near Livingston, Scotland.

The incident is often referred to as the Livingston Incident or the Dechmont Woods Encounter and can be read about at UFO Casebook:

UFO Casebook

Or at Wikipedia:

Wikipedia

And here is a link to a YouTube video about the incident:

YouTube

What interests us, besides the nature of the alleged encounter, is that the described “craft” is highly reminiscent of a Hughes prototype for a lunar or Mars capsule to house astronauts:



And here is a graphic of another UFO sighting in Scotland:



And a representation of a Scotland event in 1964 (around the time of the Lonnie Zamora/Socorro sighting, which we think was a sighting of a Hughes lunar-landing prototype):



A CIA operative, Bosco Nedlelcovic, who communicated with us in the 1970s, told us that the CIA was engaged in staged flying saucer events – The Villas Boas case (as outlined in Nick Redfern’s book, Contactees, Chapter 20) and the infamous Scoriton incident in England (covered here in an earlier blog post).

We conjecture that the Robert Taylor episode was a CIA-staged event, using the Hughes prototypical craft, which was ensconced and tested in the British Isles in the 1960s/1970s time-frame.

Fate magazine’s account in 1980 outlines the event in a way that corroborates, we think, our Hughes/CIA view:

An intriguing, subliminal UFO incident (from 1968)

A 1968 NASA sponsored flight to the Artic to film and study the Aurora Borealis ended up providing an obscure, on-the-ground UFO sighting.

A reporter, Sally Remaley, with the expedition spotted what seemed to be a line of flying saucers on the ground.



Here is an excerpt of her account, taken from the FATE magazine piece, as provided by UFO BC, a superb site for obscure UFO sightings, past and present:

“But when I glanced out of the window I quickly forgot about being cold. Far below on the icy surface were three round glowing lights arranged in a straight line. Each light was huge; all were the same size and perfectly round, they were luminous, glowing with an inner white light completely different from any other thing we had seen in the Arctic.

These lights were so different, in fact, that at first I just stared, fascinated, trying to memorize everything about them before they disappeared behind us.

They were not at all like lights of any settlement or village I've seen from the air and I have flown a lot. Settlement and village lights are bright like stars; these were softly luminous and glowing. They were not like lights on a boat, ship or any familiar flying craft. They looked like flying saucers landed on the ice. And if that's what they were they were huge ones.”

Here is her drawing of what she saw:



The ground saucers seemed to form an arrow, pointing to what?

Click here for the full account by Ms. Remaley

For us, it’s this kind of low-profile UFO sighting, unsmudged by UFO mavens, that might provide clues to what the phenomenon is.

The Need for Metaphysics and Common Sense (in ufology)

In the preliminary stages of change in the study of UFOs, sparked by Paul Kimball, Nick Redfern, and us (among a few others: Moody, CDA, Gilles Fernandez, et al.) there has to be some quiding principles of and for thought.

Mr. Kimball, at his blog -- The Other Side of Truth -- is addressing some of the issues for the new ufology.

And, for our part, we keep the ball rolling with a paper by James Williams that provides an exegesis of Alfred North Whitehead's thoughts on common sense in Process and Realty.

The paper, for those with intellectual stamina, outlines how metaphysics and life can be enhanced by proper thinking and observation.

Click here for Willams' paper (a PDF)

Ufology, a term we hate and hope to see discarded in future, and the study of UFOs need a cataclysmic paradigm shift.

Kimball, Redfern, and the skeptics, Moody, Christopher Allen, Fernandez, along with our small part are at the forefront, we hope, of a major change in how UFOs are discussed, studied, commented on, and viewed by media, academe, science, and the public.

This posting is a small step in that direction.

The Socorro craft (and other UFOs) "explained"

Click here for a (technical) paper that references the Socorro craft and other UFOs, with an explanation of their propulsion et cetera.

This is a pro-UFO paper for those who desire something scientific and/or technical to bolster their views, about UFOs, including the "mysterious" Socorro craft reportedly seen by Officer Lonnie Zamora in 1964.