I was disappointed.

[Gene Steinberg]

Talk about interrupting, Spencer talked over everyone continuously. The most amazing thing about this guy is that he believes his pre-conceived asbestos suit of protection actually does so. Agreeing with all the criticism doesn’t neutralize it. It’s like Spencer wanted to be one of the critics of the material and sit on the other side of the table. But, of course, we all know that.
<O</O
One question, though. Only toward the end of the interview did Spencer give permission to post the book for everyone, yet the book has been available for a couple of weeks now. That would lead one to believe the actual interview took place a couple of weeks ago? Could you tell us the lead time for shows?

Three days to three weeks.

Yes, the interview took place a couple of weeks ago, before David left for his California trip. Spencer followed up via email to confirm his permission to post the book file, so we have it both ways and he can't back out.

 

[Chuckleberryfinn]

Either he is pulling our legs that this a "Blair Witch Project" stun using Roswell or the man is very gullible and borderline paranoid to destroy the "evidence" of the case. I think it's a joke, a stun, and I honestly believe he may be laughing that a bunch of people here are taking it seriously and will read his book.

I agree 100% that it's a joke. He wrote it, of course, and the rest of it is just a typical literary stunt. I will explain.

There are a number of books that Spencer may be trying to emulate. "Pale Fire," for instance, by Vladimir Nabokov, contains an introduction in which the "editor," who received the manuscript of a poem, explains why he is writing endnotes and why he presents the poem as he does. It's a big joke, of course, and the editor, an implied author persona of Nabokov's, becomes a character in the story who is clearly insane. Similarly, Samuel Clemens wrote a book called "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" that the editor, the persona "Mark Twain," claims to have received in full. He, too, is simply publishing the piece to preserve it for posterity.

During the so-called romantic period, particularly the Gothic sub-genre, a number of authors did the same thing. They'd pretend to have received the manuscript from a person who received the manuscript from a blind man who dictated it to a little girl, for example. It's a very common literary device. I think that Spencer goes it a step further by extending the feigned editorship joke outside of the text and into interviews and real life. I really don't think that we're supposed to take what he says seriously at all. The guy is a novelist, according to what he says on the show, and it doesn't surprise me at all to see something like this coming from a novelist. My professional training has been in literary criticism and this makes me qualified, I think, to interpret the literary qualities of the book. My BA and MA are both in literature and writing. To anyone who has studied literature in great depth, it's pretty obvious that the entire thing is a joke.

All of this is, more or less, why I focused on the folkloric aspects of the book in my original post on this thread. It will be fun to watch how this story becomes a part of the Roswell mythos.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

I don't disagree. I just feel he isn't good enough at those tasks for the work to sustain itself for very long. Or at least that's my fervent hope. He does seem to be a nice guy, though.

 

[Mogwa]

Bizarre interview. The man is either totally delusional or a very clumsy liar. Obviously a vanity press author trying to push a manuscript not good enough for a commercial publisher to touch. Money isn't everything; some people are motivated by a desperate need for recognition.
And once again I'll point out that milk chocolate is the chocolate of the common people. By demeaning it, David only proves he's an elitist lackey of the new world order...a collection of preverts bent on world domination who need the more expensive dark chocolates in order to complete their preverted rituals. I'm also sure these arcane rites involve the use of that "Brain Tonic" what Gene does commercials for. Chugging a quart of that stuff is like taking a Krell brain boost.
Probably.

 

[CapnG]

European chocolate is what chocolate is MEANT to be.

Back to the show! This guy threw me right off the bat when in the first FIFTEEN MINUTES he declared, "I don't have time for this like you guys, I have to work for a living" implying of course that Gene and co do not. What? Who talks like that?!

And then the course of the interview... I lost track of the number of times he said something like "I don't know" or "it's not my field" or "I'm not a researcher" etc. Then tell me, what... the... FUCK... are you doing?! That'd be like if I got a wild hair up my ass and decided to publish a book haut cuisine: sure I know it exists as a topic but I know NOTHING about it. Insane!

I think Stanton said it best on this matter when he illustrated the hypocrisy of Time magazine publishing an issue debunking Roswell. It had Roswell in big, bold type on the cover and was their top selling issue until the death of Princess Di. The message: Roswell sells.

Now, this guy says he's not making any money off this which I find weird. He's offering it as a PDF, and even encouraging piracy (not that file sharing needs encouragement...) yet at the same time donating the proceeds to a charity. What? Okay, noble sentiment but don't you think it would work better if people had to, you know, PAY FOR THE BOOK?

I don't get this guy at all. I know some people crave attention but really, this is... well, insane in every aspect of the situation and in every sense that the word can be applied.

 

[cottonzway]

I think this is one of those things that we look at once and move foward on. It's just noise IMO.

 

[Brian Now]

I haven't read the book, but the disclaimer alone should have disqualified him from being on the Paracast. I know even this show has to scrape the bottom of the barrel sometimes, but this guy was absurd.

Why do we people give these people this level of attention?

I really like wrap-up sessions in most cases. But in this case, the guest had already been correctly, and astutely put in his place by the 30 minute mark. There was no need for a wrap up session. I thought David rambled a little too long...I completely agree with David, don't get me wrong, but it was a little too much of the same thing.

One semi-unrelated thought: I'm not a geologist either, but I don't think it's so far-fetched to think that if a planet has a molten core then it will also have magma (and therefore vulcanism) towards the crust. What's the alternative, that there's a molten area with no gradual transition to solid?

 

[CapnG]

One semi-unrelated thought: I'm not a geologist either, but I don't think it's so far-fetched to think that if a planet has a molten core then it will also have magma (and therefore vulcanism) towards the crust. What's the alternative, that there's a molten area with no gradual transition to solid?

I don't think that's the issue. I think what David was saying was the fact that the earth is highly volcanic in no way relates logically to it's status as a "prison planet".

 

[Schuyler]

Why do we people give these people this level of attention?

Think of it as a public service. These sorts of issues should not go unchallenged. It's kind of like UFO Watchdog (sadly no longer being updated). I find that site extremely useful as a place of consolidated information on the worst Ufology has to offer.

 

[auntiegrav]

Just sad.

That was the worst show yet, guys. Don't you guys have some kind of "ABORT" button?

It just hurt to listen to it. Battle of wits with an unarmed man who brought dull wit to a gun fight. You even blindfolded yourselves and gave him a head start, and he couldn't pull off a couple of sentences that would say something useful.

My best take on it is this: He's just somebody's nice guy neighbor who offered to put the story into words. Apparently not even smart enough to try and make money on it, knows absolutely nothing about publishing and what he's doing. Anyone check with Lulu publishing to see if they control the rights to give out the pdf? Just wondering. He might say "All rights reserved", but is that what the Lulu agreement says? I don't think Mr. Spencer is the guy to ask.

Yeah. He's a big "sports fan" alright. Not that there is anything wrong with that.....but you can't expect the rest of the world to come down to the level of telling you what beer to drink and explaining every referee call for you.

If this is a prison planet, why does everyone have the same DNA as the plants?

 

[mike]

was a bit like watching a deer on the highway get caught in headlights, and typically the carnage seemed like it was in slow motion.
i couldnt help but feel sorry for the poor bugger.
i dont doubt the mass blaring of BS meter horns is on the money, though i can see why a geologically stable moon wth less gravity would be preferable to earth.

actually landing a mother ship here, may be akin to landing a hammer on an egg, our gravity well a little strong and our planetary crust a little thin.
imagine i fitted a VW combi van and an oil tanker with antigrav drives, i can still only "park" the van on the top floor of a multistory carpark.

it may be as simple as choice, i for example cant understand why ppl live near some of the earths active vocano's personally id rather be well away from that sort of activity and its potentials

and coming from a country that started as a penal colony, the idea is not so "alien" in concept to me.

i will prob read the book, though there are a lot of well pointed out red flags in regards to it.

 

[Graphimancer]

Nice guy or not, this fellow came across as a raconteur. Who doesn't know you can publish under a pseudonym? Who thinks that the lack of original documents would shield you from people who want to shut you down? Who gives to a charaty that apparantly doesn't exist yet--unless of course the writer himself is the charity? What writer is so willfully ignorant of copywrite law?

It's mind-boggling.

 

[louis belanger]

This is the most difficult show I have listened:not because of the hosts ,Steve and David,but because of the guest.When he was cornered, he was agreeing with them and when one of the debater agree , the discussion is over and this is what happened during the interview.It was tragy -comic.This was the second interview of R.Spencer I was listening and he is constant: let the reader decide and he can take any objections positevely and agreeing with the hosts.But I think that behind this comportment there is an agenda.The futur will tell us.As for the evaluation of the book,it is pure fiction.The best moment:when David talk about the anonymous author (s) of the bible.

 

[Chuckleberryfinn]

A raconteur, yes. Spencer has my kind of a sense of humor. This is exactly what makes the interview so great. The guy is friggin hilarious, though the book does get repetitive a number of times.

The telepathic transmission, the ignorance of copyright laws, the absurdity of his claim to have trashed the original documents to protect himself, ignorance of pseudonyms, wikipedia endnotes -- this guy definitely understands irony and unreliable narrator. I love it.

 

[Schuyler]

Just sad.

If this is a prison planet, why does everyone have the same DNA as the plants?

Well, THAT'S obvious!! The plants are prisoners, too!!

 

[schticknz]

Just sad.

Well, THAT'S obvious!! The plants are prisoners, too!!

Maybe the plants are the prison guards ... same dna ... different age...nda.

Anywayyy ... I'm about a third of the way through this episode so far, and my thinking so far is ... what a bloody idiot. Nice bloke but a bloody stupid stupid stupid idiot. Anyone who BURNS evidence like that should be hung drawn and quartered and then chopped up into smaller and smaller pieces until we reach planck length dimensions.

Of course its all a humungous boloni, and Spencer gets what he deserves. He seems to me yet another person trying to mythologise Roswell in some way but being incredibly dumb about the going about it.

But some questions come to mind ...

(1) Why did they have only a nurse to look at the aliens wounds??? You would kind of think that the military would bring in some big bloke with phds and things coming out of every orifice to look at it, wouldn't you??

(2) Just a kind of general Roswelly question regarding the small coffins ... which has to my understanding never been answered reasonably thus far into the whole Roswell mythos: Why would they need small coffins?? I know the aliens were supposedly small but wouldn't they put them in refrigeration units of some sort rather than bunging them in a coffin and then giving them a christian burial of some sort (thats what the use of coffins says to me). I'm sure the powers that be would want to study another lifeform like that up pretty darn closely, don't you think?? Just a question that has bugged me for years about the whole Roswell thing.

Annyway up ... I've yet to read the book ... still trying to find an e-book reader that won't bite my pants off regarding its cost etc etc ... so maybe these and other questions may be answered ... but somehow I doubt it.

Spencer though really does deserve a good thrashing for putting his head above the parapet like that, and not coming to the party with enough knowledge of the UFO field in general to make at least a half-hearted defence of (t)his material.

 

[cmbezln]

i honestly think there's a whole lot of people here that are looking into this thing waaaaaaaay too much....your theories are almost as inventive as the manuscripts themselves.

 

[CapnG]

i honestly think there's a whole lot of people here that are looking into this thing waaaaaaaay too much....your theories are almost as inventive as the manuscripts themselves.

At least we've done our homework...

 

[DamnDirtyApe]

I couldn't make it through more than about 15 minutes of the show.. had to turn it off.

Because I'm a masochist, I downloaded the PDF and browsed through it.
After glancing at words like "The Domain" and "The Old Empire" and had to double check to make sure I hadn't downloaded at old unused script of Star Trek Deep Space 9. Oh wait.. that was "The DOMINION" nevermind...

Needless to say, that PDf was the silliest sci-fi mash up I've ever see (although I'm not too familiar with Greer's works). Bad fan-fiction at best. Makes me long for quality hoaxes and scams like the Caret stuff.

For future shows it would be more interesting to just have dead air than have worthless guests like that guy. Or just have Gene tell stories of the old days in UFology. I'd even prefer to learn more about Dave's political views (told ya I was a masochist!)

 

[Frozen E.T. Burrito]

Wow, you know your ass is grass when Gene goes after you.

That's close to verbatim what went through my head as Gene started raising tone.

The part of me that is simply entertained by the whole culture of... well, "contact" really enjoyed this show... it was sorta funny hearing a mild con getting busted, and him KNOW that he's being busted.

The part that really likes to have my thought stimulated with interesting discourse could have skipped this one.

All in all shows like these help shape the overall personality of the show throughout its arc, and are rare... I vote it to have been worthwhile on enough levels to pay its own way. I suppose it could also stand as a lesson to those sitting around thinking up plots to "get into the paranormal business".