On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 3:12 PM, wrote:
Larry,
In all due respect, I would like to voice my concern over some of your comments in the Feb 2010 issue concerning articles like the January 2012 piece and their ilk.
As a person in their 30s year old, with an interest in UFOs since I was a grade schooler, and a MUFON member for several years; I'd like to think of myself as representative of the "younger potential members" you describe. You suggest to adhere strictly to the mission statement would drastically change readership and membership of MUFON.
In my opinion MUFON should strongly consider who is their audience. Is your goal to simply increase existing membership or contrastingly to develop perhaps a "higher quality", as defined by MUFON, but perhaps more select membership? Keep in mind the latter might be a more profitable approach for the organization. The younger generation, I believe studies show, has grown up in an age of information overload and marketing hype. People like myself and my younger counterparts are deeply skeptical by our nature. Articles like the 2012 piece trot out, in my opinion, little in the way of fresh analysis. Yes the piece was well researched though it contained little skeptical interjection. All this information on 2012 is in much supply across the internet. What is lacking in my opinion is a fresh look at the topic of UFOs with a deep skeptical eye. I'd like to point you the Paracast podcast and forums as the kind of flavor of content I think would be good for MUFON to model itself after. MUFON has (perhaps modest) resources to examine new theories and look at cases in new ways. Scientific Study (or skepticism) does not need to be boring. Perhaps it is more challenging to develop content that is both skeptical and entertaining as it requires a deeper level of thought. However that is the challenge I would like to put forth to you. Too many other resources out there trot out the kind of nonsense that Hopkins refers to later in the same issue, that passes for entertainment to the masses. I think for MUFON to try and pursue similar entertainment topics will be a losing battle against the great flood of similar material freely accessible to the casual internet user. MUFON has a unique opportunity that Carrion seemed to understand. Perhaps I am in the minority but if MUFON becomes lazy in its intellectual pursuit of this topic you can expect me to cancel my membership as I can get 2012 theorizing elsewhere.
Elsewhere in your comments I again felt you were being intellectually lazy. You state "Let's face it, a UFO.... is a machine, a flying object. Aliens can or cannot be separate from the inclusion of the definition of UFOs as they are a necessary proponent in the guidance of the craft." I state emphatically: what? You seem to be stating as fact much which we do not know, only speculation. At least with scientific theories we have some evidence and experimentation that say two bodies gravitationally attract eachother or insert a thousand other scientific theories. What you state is pure speculation, albeit backed up by a lot of very flimsy circumstantial evidence and mostly here-say. It may seem a logical conclusion based on human produced fiction, but certainly this is not a good method to base theories on. We do not know what we are dealing with. Are they in fact occupants? How do we know those supposed objects we see in the sky aren't a new lifeform? A holographic illusion? A mass human psychosis? Sure we have stories of abductees relaying information given to them by aliens, but how can we know this information, if in fact it was relayed, is truth?
We know very little other than what we have by way of reports and trace evidence. Unfortunately the body of all of that data is at best inconclusive. There are also plenty of cases that Vallee or any other researcher who has looked at enough of this data, would support cannot not be explained by flying machines. Please use some more care in your language about the subject lest you taint advanced thinking about the subject.
Thanks for reading this. I would like to continue to support you and MUFON's efforts in investigating this mystery.
