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Nick Redfern, Close Encounters of the Fatal Kind — 7/6/14

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DissectionStalker said:
BIGELOW is a Guardian in the mix!
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Actually I was thinking more about the actual Guardian Canadian UFO case which is indicative, in many ways, of just how loose UFO research can be & how different personalities and researchers will confirm and magnify very weak or hoaxed cases.
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Like all the other UFO cases The Guardian case comes in a number of different flavours and is instructive to say the least. Some like Rutkowski are a voice of reason, so how is it that others, like Maccabee, can support it, or at least did once:
I think there's bigger questions to be asked around the sociology of the UFO phenomenon. Perhaps stronger safeguards around what is promoted as legitimate investigation of serious cases is needed, to avoid all the significant consequences of promoting ufology as a belief system. It instead must be developed into a field of critical inquiry and sever itself from those tentacles that pull it down deep into pop culture & all cults in general.

For example the Nazis get a nod in The Guardian Case as well with all the blah blah blah about the "White Bortherhood" in the cryptic notes that accompanied the video tape sent out to various UFO researchers to see who would bite.
 
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I don’t believe it was mentioned in the episode, but the original radio reporter on the Kecksburg case also died in mysterious circumstances. First before he was able to air his original detailed report over the radio he was visited by men in black suits. Then he was killed a few weeks later crossing the street in a nearby town. The detailed report was never aired and is believe to have been destroyed.
 
Burnt State said:
You're overstating the case for my supposed belief in the UFO phenomena as being solely a controlled event manufactured by 3 letter agencies. I think it's a much more nuanced phenomena that has its roots in inexplicable, witnessed events, some recorded on multiple radars, sometimes leaving trace evidence or scaring the heck out of school children.

Some witnessed experiences are absolutely phenomenal and may have their roots in a culturally programmed psyche that may interpret certain human sensory events as aliens, faeries or leprechauns. And of course there is also the incredible role that advanced experimental aircraft have played in the history of ufological inquiry as obviously much of what's odd in the sky and appears to be just ahead of where contemporary tech may very well just be what it us, next generation, well guarded, human technology.

There are also these incredibly compelling stories like Pascagoula & Falcon Lake & RB-47 that simply defy simple, skeptical solutions. But I also know that the UFO phenomena is also a deeply rooted meme that has been perpetuated by other more psychologically disturbing themes such as UFO cults, contactees, gurus, disinformation agents & abductees.

It's quite a stone soup, brewed over time, many tentacled, and diverse in its ingredient components. It's just simply not one thing but has been used nefariously for various national and socially manipulative purposes across history. It is also something slippery, a part of us, something to make us think and IMHO something that is here to change us.
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Yes, what you call 'ufoology' is a mixed bag. Our species and its insights into the nature of reality are also a mixed bag, whose contents we attempt to sort out based on our very limited knowledge of both the cosmos and ourselves. I wonder how our species in its present state of evolution could be expected to 'make sense' of the full complement of variously acquired 'data' concerning ufos and the paranormal in general. You come down too hard, imo, on ufo researchers of the past 65 years, who have arrived at a variety of hypotheses concerning the origins of ufos and paranormal phenomena. 'Ufology' is a baggy umbrella term given the range of individuals [scientists, historians, insiders, outsiders, hoaxers, government agents, internet bloggers, etc.] who have played a role in interpreting these phenomena in public discourse. Your term 'ufoology' is too narrow (given the range of contributors to 'ufology' listed above) and expresses a harsh animus toward the several generations of ufo researchers who have dedicated their lives and energies to serious research into these daunting phenomena. The ETH adopted as the 'best available hypothesis' by many serious ufo researchers seems to be the source of your irritation and reactions. But it's just one of many hypotheses concerning the source of ufos, and no one I can see is shoving it down your throat. It's a big world with more ideas in it than any one of us can readily have at our disposal. A rejection of the data gathered to date by serious ufo researchers around the planet, working like all of us from the cultural and scientific perspectives we inherit and which change with increasing frequency these days, is ill-advised in my opinion. Instead we need sifting and winnowing of the available data in the light of new approaches to consciousness and 'reality'. I think that is the way Vallee proceeds, and he does not reject ufology proper. Why do you do so?









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I'm also open to skycritters.[/QUOTE]

How can we not be?
 
Burnt, in another post you wrote:

"I think there's bigger questions to be asked around the sociology of the UFO phenomenon. Perhaps stronger safeguards around what is promoted as legitimate investigation of serious cases is needed, to avoid all the significant consequences of promoting ufology as a belief system. It instead must be developed into a field of critical inquiry and sever itself from those tentacles that pull it down deep into pop culture & all cults in general."

A most desireable outcome. How many people and institutions will you have to control to bring it about? And how could you or anyone succeed? "It's everybody's world," as the poet said.
 
Constance said:
Burnt, in another post you wrote:

"I think there's bigger questions to be asked around the sociology of the UFO phenomenon. Perhaps stronger safeguards around what is promoted as legitimate inKYvestigation of serious cases is needed, to avoid all the significant consequences of promoting ufology as a belief system. It instead must be developed into a field of critical inquiry and sever itself from those tentacles that pull it down deep into pop culture & all cults in general."

A most desireable outcome. How many people and institutions will you have to control to bring it about? And how could you or anyone succeed? "It's everybody's world," as the poet said.
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All disciplines and fields of study evolve and develop over time. The choices to legitimize or professionalize them happen when you consistently see rigorous, self-reflexive thinkers responding to each other. More Hyneks, MacDonalds, and Vallees working together, in an unfetterted manner, sponsored by academia would be a good place to start.
 
Sure. Why do you think university science departments discourage new faculty from pursuing research into ufos and other anomalies? Why do the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, and other federal agencies still fail to sponsor grant requests from such scientists? Why was it so easy for organized hoaxers and their paymasters in the UK to drive international scientists and technicians out of the crop circle fields with their research unfinished? What are the most powerful institutions in the world's nations that have engineered the disrepute into which ufos and other anomalies have been driven in the public mind for the last six decades? You prefer to blame serious ufo and paranormal researchers for not 'developing their disciplines' rather than blaming the PTB who have made institutional sponsorship and support of that research unattainable. That does not seem rational.
 
There's no question of the many academic and gov't biases that prohibit proper research. And I still feel that the antics of people like Klass who chased beloved James E. M. All ver hill and dale, doing his best to discredit legitimate research and even causing problems for MacDonald at his own academic institution, can bear a lot of blame for the ufo laughter curtain & related public humiliations. But how much of this has been collectively calculated by the PTB to hide things vs. that rational, pragmatic brain that insists there can be no such thing as UFO's is more germane to the matter. I'm not saying that the gov't doesn't perpetuate their own ufo mythology, but more that society itself takes simple cues and extrapolates the power of disinformation all on its own.

However, I don't blame quality researchers for pursuing their disciplines and their passions. They've taken them as far as they could with the resources they had in difficult, uncooperative spaces. But I do agree with what Carrion said when he was on The Paracast recently and heavily critiqued the majority of "researchers" who perpetuate stories without proof and/or cultivate mythologies like crop circles are made by aliens. It's they who push the field always to the margins of social unacceptability and slow down the legitimacy factor i.e. David Jacobs' abduction work.

BTW I find rationalism to be overrated in most respects, standing directly opposite the UFO & paranormal conundrum which requires imaginative thinking to breaks the bonds of the debunker. I don't mean by this that we should be making leaps of logic in the patterned wheat field or see aliens at every unknown light in the sky. I feel that the phenomon is a creative one requiring equal doses of creativity to respond to it. That will require the discipline to be accepted so that broad research can take place.

So in other words, we've done ourselves in. Just check out the Zeta Reticuli site and see how invention and mythology damn the discipline. In the age of the internet it's hard to even get a clear line on real research as so many rely on shoddy, disreputable claims to fuel their own beliefs.
 
Academia follows the money in the form of governmentally funded research. The public has been persuaded by the US government since the Robertson Panel that to report ufo experiences leads to ridicule and should lead to ridicule. The PTB have owned this show -- that which we are allowed to see and what we are persuaded to think about it -- since the late 1940s-early 1950s. See the Pentacle Memo thread for an obvious example recognized by only a few (in particular Vallee and Hynek) in 1952-53 and only recently being researched deeply by Anthony Bragalia. The last people to blame for the ufo circus these days are the persistent citizen-researchers of the last six decades who have against great odds discovered and written most of the ufo history available to us, including the testimonials of the experiencers which we must take into account.

You wrote:

"In the age of the internet it's hard to even get a clear line on real research as so many rely on shoddy, disreputable claims to fuel their own beliefs."

That is why it's necessary to ignore that dreck and seek out and read 'real research' by ufologists, which Isaac Koi's searchable database makes it easy to do. The internet enables too many individuals ignorant of most of ufo history and research to sound off from the limited perspectives of the hobby-horses they select to ride.
 
Philip Coppens wrote this incredible book that I reviewed “The Lost Civilization Enigma: A New Inquiry Into the Existence of Ancient Cities, Cultures, and Peoples Who Pre-Date Recorded History” and he devotes a chapter into the explanation on why "they" in archaeology academia don't explore the topic of lost civilizations and prehistory that contradicts what the establishment is true.

As I wrote in my review... imagine if an archaeologist found evidence that Two factions of the Rama Empire were either obliterated in an all out war with Atlantis, or the two factions destroyed themselves which caused the total collapse in the then-existing Global Community which set civilization back centuries and cleansed the world of almost all evidence of their existence.

You go to your professor whose entire career centered around teaching these specific facts that revolve around specific dates, names, and other figure.... and you show him the new evidence of an advanced civilization almost like ours existed before recorded history. This professor flips out because you just proved everything he thought was the truth is now wrong or - to be kind - incomplete.

The professor cries out: "BUT WAIT! I have this 50 year old text book that says that civilization began this way, and we started out with stone knives an bear skins, hunters and gatherers 44,000 years ago! There's no way that NEW INFORMATION is right! I denounce the discoverers of that are liers and their evidence is a fraud!"

There are a handful of areas in academia that is hell-bent on perepetuating their own facts and their interpreation of facts - The new facts and evidence can't withstand the firepower of academic rigitity from Death Star! There are entire academic departments and even campus buildings devoted to "this" line of thinking. They are devoted to finding evidence that only perpetuates what they teach already. Don't confuse us with new facts when our minds are already made up with the old facts... that might actually be wrong.

Doesn't seem rational? No, but it's a completely human reaction.

Now... Nick Redfern and his book that proves that there is interest in paranormal and supernatural... that is if you believe what he writes as much as I believe. There are secret branches of the Government - Sneaky Peep Black Ops Boogie Men that I like to call the "Committee of They" (You know what THEY say...) that have various intents in what happened to lost civilizations and alien involvement in our evolution.

Essentially they talk out of both corners of their mouths - the deny in flying saucers when it's their jobs to cover them up. They think most of us are so stupid we'll believe anything... June Cleaver still thinks they were Weather balloons.
 
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