We have an incredible pile of testimony of all kinds and some small percentages of trace evidence, radar confirmations, and some even say we have photos of unusual craft. But what Ufology boils down to is a series of discontinuous events that introduces a kind of chaos into the social fabric. Many attempt to perceive an order there by connecting dots and then they make the claims and theories that they will.
If it was all garbage then it all would have died long ago, like one's childhood belief in Santa Claus. We were convinced once but now we know better. However, Ufology persists in presenting a genuine mystery as confirmed with each passing decade and the occasional new case that presents some continuity in the mystery. Albeit there are shifts, from saucers to triangles, from contactees to forged documents. Trying to sort out human perpetuation vs. an actual anomalous event is an ongoing chore.
Too often I think we lump all this discontinuity together instead of trying to discover real starts and stops to the phenomenon. These slides are simply two more obscure moments that someone is trying to thread a needle with the proverbial camel. It doesn't fit. It's just trying to fill in the empty spaces that beliefs have grown around. None of that has anything to do with witness testimony. In fact, in this case the witnesses who took the pictures are long dead.
Perhaps I should have put that last line of mine in quotations. What I was suggesting is that in the pantheon of Ufological writing and investigation, readers, you and I included, will decide what we champion and what we believe based on what agrees with us, on which version of order makes sense. For some it's obvious Linda Cortile was floated out her bedroom, that the coast of Turkey produced video images of real aliens aboard their craft and that Dale Spaur really continued to see a spaceship he affectionately named Floyd. But others dismiss it all outright.
The debunker and the believer stand firm on their beliefs for no particular reason that we can all agree on, just the reasons that agree with them. The seeker persists until the gaps between skepticism and positive suspicions are relinquished by a genuine new finding that identifies a clear start, a clear finish and what actually happened inbetween. I haven't seen that happen yet. I even still doubt myself on occasion.
These slides perpetuate discontinuous thinking IMHO and just because Santa's boot prints are in the fireplace cinders doesn't mean Santa exists. But then again, Carlos Santana claims that his contact with an alien intelligence is what prompted his return to the music scene. So in an irrational world we find our reasons for our own truths and that's all Ufology will add up to given the limited tools at its current disposal.
We need different thinking to move this quest forward instead of trying to unearth the myths of the past.
