George Knapp - March 15

[CapnG]

Decrying all memories as equal is a frequent and fraudulent claim debunkers use to prop up weak arguments. Memory is a funny thing. I couldn't tell you what I ate for dinner last thursday but I can clearly recall the more traumatic events of my childhood. I'm guessing Jesse can do the same. The reason being partly because memory is plastic. The more time you spend thinking about something, the more it literally carves itself into your brain. Short term vs long term memory and all that.

 

[Gareth]

lol

I dont know about all your Roswell stuff Tommy, you might be right.

But putting the Aurora air ship event up on a pedestal over everything else seems kind of ridiculous to me.

 

[Schuyler]

I guarantee you any ten year old kid, especially in the forties, knows what balsa wood feels like and looks like. I don't think claiming Marcel MIGHT not remember what he saw in any way debunks the evidence he has presented. It's a bull shit argument. Here we have someone telling us what he saw. You can't deny he's telling you what he saw, so you attack the person--for no good reason and with zero evidence with some song and dance about how 'memory is a tricky thing.' If you can't call him a liar outright, then you call him mentally incapacitated even though there is zero evidence for any such thing.

I remember completely when Sputnik was launched. I remember walking into the front yard when I was 8 years old with my father, looking up in the sky, and seeing the blinking light (of the booster). I remember when Alan Shephard went up when I was 11. I drew a picture of his sub-orbital flight. I even remember, quite clearly, witnessing the coronation of Queen Elizabeth on TV, the Nixon/Kennedy debates, etc. People do remember those kinds of important events. You can't just discount them based on your own belief structure. It's an insult to the integrity of the person.

This reminds me of the old lawyer aphorism: If the evidence is on your side, pound on the evidence. If the evidence is not on your side, pound on the law. If the law is not on your side, pound on the table. Here we have a credible witness whom no one can find anything negative about, so you just choose to disbelieve him, then rail on about there being no evidence.

 

[Tommy Allison]

Roswell was never about aliens.

There are plenty of great explanations out there, and you're not going to disuade the true believers who continue to believe the lie of Roswell.

What a lot of people don't know is that the Germans were way ahead of the United States in the areas of plastics, as well as a whole host of technologies.

If there were ever aliens involved, which there weren't, someone somewhere would have spoken out, and shown us once and for all conclusive proof.

A Single Person may keep a secret. A conspiracy of lies and deceit? When you hear people talking about being told to keep quiet, that's a lot of strong arming that the government would have to maintain for how many decades?

People come and go in the government. People are fired, or quit. There are always grievances somewhere, and someone I imagine over the last 60 years who worked with, next to, or touched an alien should have been able to squirrel out something that resembles proof. Nothing.

My take on Roswell is NOT like other people's. The reason? Roswell put the focus and attention on ONE event, more than any other. Why?

When you can answer the why, you'll understand why I think the Roswell incident is completely without merit. If I explain it to you, you'll simply dismiss it. If you look for yourself, you'll have a shot at comprehending the why of perpetrating a hoax like this one.

 

[Tommy Allison]

Decrying all memories as equal is a frequent and fraudulent claim debunkers use to prop up weak arguments. Memory is a funny thing. I couldn't tell you what I ate for dinner last thursday but I can clearly recall the more traumatic events of my childhood. I'm guessing Jesse can do the same. The reason being partly because memory is plastic. The more time you spend thinking about something, the more it literally carves itself into your brain. Short term vs long term memory and all that.

I don't disagree with you.

I believe that certain memories are more important than others, and the brain preserves them differently. However... I've had some things pop up over the years that I was so sure were a certain way, and come to find out they were something else, which has given me great pause when it comes to the reliability of memory.

Some things you never forget. Seeing an alien space craft is one thing. Seeing a box of junk your dad brought in is something else.

 

[Gareth]

Tommy, would I be right in thinking this hard nosed position your taking with Roswell is a new one? That youve only recently come to these absolute conclusions?

 

[Tommy Allison]

My position on Roswell, changed dramatically after a chance encounter with someone. This someone was nobody I knew. They started speaking to me for no reason, and wanted to discuss UFOs and the like.

This happened about a month ago, and I didn't really ascribe my change in thoughts to it, but I would say it started with this conversation.

To this day I don't know who this person was. Stranger still is this evening I received a phone call in a language I did not recognize.

This person told me a few things about how intelligence agencies work, and how they've always worked, and how people get used for the benefit of a goal.

I got up to grab a cup of coffee, and when I went back to the table the person was gone.

They never came back to the table.

Needless to say, it was odd to be sure.

 

[Gareth]

Weird.

The reason I asked is because Ive never seen you speak like this in the threads when the show that week was about Roswell is some way or another. I also got the impression that it was a new position based on your enthusiasm (like you just had an epiphany or something).

Care to talk more about the stranger and what you were told? And more importantly maybe, why you believe what you were told?

 

[Tommy Allison]

Weird.

The reason I asked is because Ive never seen you speak like this in the threads when the show that week was about Roswell is some way or another. I also got the impression that it was a new position based on your enthusiasm (like you just had an epiphany or something).

Care to talk more about the stranger and what you were told? And more importantly maybe, why you believe what you were told?

That's the funny part. I run into all kinds of people when I'm out and about. This was one of those days when I was out by myself. I went to the cafe down the street from me. I almost never go there, because their prices are obscene.

Get my coffee, grab a chair and there was nobody else at the coffee shop, except me. That's when this conversation took place. I have no idea why this person started talking to me, or have any clues as to what their motivation could have been.

The jist of the conversation was loosely about UFO's, and it drifted to the whole thing about how people get used all the time for the greater good. I got up to get a refill, and the guy was gone.

As to describe the guy, I'd say he was mid 40's, maybe early 50's, taller than me, and heavier build. Not fat, but big. White guy, nothing striking about him.

 

[Gareth]

And this guy was the reason for your sudden unswerving Roswell position?

(Just for the record, the problem I have with your arguments is that you seem so sure. You might be 50% right or 100% right, but when someone argues something so strongly that you dont truly know to be fact, it comes off looking the same as some diehard believer arguing in favour of ET from Reticuli.)

 

[CapnG]

Some things you never forget. Seeing an alien space craft is one thing. Seeing a box of junk your dad brought in is something else.

Yeah... but if your dad tells you the box of junk IS an alien spacecraft, I'd think you'd remember. Which is of course exactly what Marcel says he dad did in fact tell him. As I recently said in another thread, whether or not you believe Marcel saw wreckage has no bearing on him actually having seen it.

I get what you're saying about memory being fallable (none of us have digital noggins) but to make the claim that because memory can fail that it DOES fail is a bit of leap. It would be like saying "I went to England once for a week and it rained the whole time, therefore it's always raining in England." It's assumptive, faulty logic.

 

[Tommy Allison]

There are plenty of reasons why I don't believe Roswell involved Aliens.

Some of which came about after my conversation at the coffee shop.

I want people to figure this out for themselves, the same way I did.

 

[Tommy Allison]

Yeah... but if your dad tells you the box of junk IS an alien spacecraft, I'd think you'd remember. Which is of course exactly what Marcel says he dad did in fact tell him. As I recently said in another thread, whether or not you believe Marcel saw wreckage has no bearing on him actually having seen it.

I get what you're saying about memory being fallable (none of us have digital noggins) but to make the claim that because memory can fail that it DOES fail is a bit of leap. It would be like saying "I went to England once for a week and it rained the whole time, therefore it's always raining in England." It's assumptive, faulty logic.

I think you missed the point of my comment.

Just because my dad said something, doesn't make it true. Just like Jesse's dad could have said something, it doesn't make it true. If someone tells Jesse's Dad something, it doesn't always make it to be true.

 

[Schuyler]

Are you saying you saw a blinking lamp from the spent rocket body or just that you saw the rocket body and it seemed to vary in brightness?

The second. It was a cloudless night and in the fifties there wasn't as much light pollution as there is today. I remember the light making a trajectory across the sky where all the other stars were stationary. I remember specifically that my father explained to me that we couldn't possibly see the satellite itself because it was so small, but we could see the booster, which was quite large. He was intent on this point.

My guess is he had read that in the newspaper along with the transit times. Back then, of course, in 1957 this was the Biggest Deal Ever and people were intensely interested, and also scared. My neighbor built a bomb shelter in his back yard. Today it's not at all unusual to see a satellite transit. We have a hot tub, and our joke is that it is literally impossible to look up in the sky and NOT see a moving light somewhere, so if there were a UFO up there we'd miss it entirely through inattention. We are sometimes on the flight path to SeaTac.

 

[Astroboy]

Tommy vs Tommy

Replace Roswell with Aurora:

Aurora was not an Extra-Terrestrial event.

In 112 plus years, NOBODY credible has come out with ANY kind of proof on ANY of these crashes you're talking about.

How does that happen? How is it that someone can keep a secret for 112 plus years and not talk about it or have some kind of material proof of it?

It's a joke. It's a scam. It's an absolute fabrication.

When the day comes and there's some kind of disclosure, I'll open my mind to some of this, but for me, the last 112 years of the so called Aurora Crash has been more than enough. The lack of truth, the lack of credible witnesses, the lack of EVIDENCE, someone somewhere knows something, but nobody is talking or showing anything.

It's all about making money off of the fantastic claims of people who are either dead, or were too young to form a real memory of what they saw.

I declare Tommy the winner of the debate.

 

[Schuyler]

I think you missed the point of my comment.

I'm not sure what your point is any more, Tommy, but I notice you make that comment a lot, that people miss your point. Maybe they do, but I'm not sure it's their fault, since you claim so many people do it so often. You might as well have that phrase stored as a macro. It allows you to fall back and regroup. I don't think you've made a very good case against Roswell myself, but, of course, that's fine if you do. Karl Korf (excuse me, Colonel Karl Korf) also came to the same conclusion and wrote an entire book making his case for the Mogul. So you're in fine company.

What really has me interested, though, is your sudden change of heart, based on the encounter you reported, which truly is bizarre. It's almost like a MIB thing with that odd conversation and disappearance. I'm not understanding cause and effect here, but no matter--it's strange. I mean, look at it from everyone else's perspective:

Here's Tommy, a stalwart Paracaster, who has expressed irritation about the horseshit on the Roswell case, in tune with everyone else here and echoing many of them, but is otherwise fairly circumspect. Then he has an encounter with a very strange guy, almost MIB in nature, then changes position to stridently claiming Roswell is false AND suggesting even more obscure 1897 Aurora Texas, with no witnesses and a wide reputation as a tourism hoax is actually a BETTER case!

I'm left here kind of reeling and saying, WTF just happened? This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It's almost as if you've been hit with a Neuralizer.

Oh, wait!.....

 

[Schuyler]

I declare Tommy the winner of the debate.

Jesus Christ, astroboy, you are just fucking with my mind tonight. I saw that post and said, WTF did that come from. I never saw that post! Time to shut down for the night.

 

[Gen]

if we set the standard of proof so high that abject speculation on what might have happened is deemed more reasonable than the original account, I think we may have gone too far.

When we build the Paracast Hall of Justice, I want this quote carved into the wall, first thing.

 

[Tommy Allison]

To even equate me to Kal Korff goes far beyond the pale.

Believing the Roswell Crash was Extra-Terrestrial, BLINDLY, without looking at what other events were taking place in 1947, is a lot like being blind, and trying to draw an elephant after being only given a hair.

There is so much more to this than the fraud that continues to this day.

 

[CapnG]

I think you missed the point of my comment.

Just because my dad said something, doesn't make it true. Just like Jesse's dad could have said something, it doesn't make it true. If someone tells Jesse's Dad something, it doesn't always make it to be true.

That has no bearing on Jesse's memory, which WAS your original point. If someone lies to me and I remember it then it's still an accurate memory even though the information was false. You've moved the goal post from junior to senior now.

I want people to figure this out for themselves, the same way I did.

See, this is what's wrong with the paranormal field. If you're going to just keep it to yourself, why even bring it up?