All You Need Is One!

A Cameo and Overview

Sparks and Tender
By Alfred Lehmberg
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It was sometime in early July. Space/Time coordinates indicate 1954 Connecticut. Specifically, place yourself just a few miles northwest of a pleasant little town called Ridgefield on three gently sloping acres. These acres are festooned with climbable apple trees and a few un-climbable pines.

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I was six or so. I remember hot summer night's Connecticut so full of shining stars and lightning bugs it was like the night sky flown down to swarm around your head like strobing bees! On one of those hot-humid nights in 1954 I was first imbued, imprinted, and otherwise energized with a new idea.

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UFOs. "Others..."

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Yes. On one night that summer at my home on North Salem road, very close to the beautiful—still healthy I understand!—Lake Mamanasco, there arose from my Father one evening a very singular and seminal commotion! Alfred Junior, a trained scientist and Schlumberger engineer who would later work, synchronistically (if tangentially), on Nuclear Propulsion Engines with Stanton T. Friedman... thought he saw a UFO...

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For my part, I only remember Dad pointing excitedly up into the sky at something I never saw myself, actually. Still, the occasion was enough to provoke energy and excitement from my High School Principal Grandfather, Alfred Senior, who exploded abruptly and clumsily from his bath in the commotion!

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"Grandy" would stumble outside shoeless, only towel-clad and still dripping, to see! My grandmother Suzi was upset and beside herself, and I remember my mother Twyla looking up into the sky uncharacteristically slack-jawed and incredulous... truly astonished!

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I looked and looked! Nothing!

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Later that evening, and in the exuberating wake of this strange commotion, the conversation among the adults ran rife with discussion and conjecture about the unknown, the outré, and the infinita cosmica-galactica. Heady stuff for any mind; assuredly my own. I soaked up all this "highly strange" like a young sponge.

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Indeed, I was profoundly moved by thoughts which had never before entered my young imagination and having entered would change me, forever, ever after.  See, the attitudes and reflections of my parents and grandparents that night were such that while they didn't remotely know what the UFOs were... their aggregate educated experience, coupled with knowledge of the huge UFO flaps going on at the time, was that the UFOs were happening, not "us," and not from "here"...

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Also? Whatever UFOs were and whatever they were about? They were about 200 times neater than Christmas! Yes, reader, Christmas... beyond the usual prosaic enjoyment of presents opened gleefully the following morning, you know? Christmas actualized as a night when anything could happen wholly beyond some errant religious implication! Christmas as a shared joy, increased! Christmas as that time when wishes become horses so beggars CAN ride! Christmas as a new beginning!

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Oversimplified? Perhaps.  Still, it was like that.  UFOs were somehow harbingers of the future opening before me like a wondrous flower.

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I finally went to restless sleep that night, at last. I dreamed of spaceships, alien beings, and magical technologies! I had been opened like a box of limited cognition to a startling new appreciation for the length, breadth, and surface area implied by an infinite universe, reader! This was my self-actualization. I was never, really, the same again...

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The next day we were to discover that the lights my parents saw were misidentified searchlights from the nearby Ridgefield Fairgrounds reflecting off a bank of low clouds.

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That's right.  Popped balloons?  Not so fast; cool your jets.

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Cause for disappointment and an intellectual reversal? Not at all! Sincerely! So fret not, reader, as it matters not.

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The *damage* was already done.  I pause to laugh.

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See... with regard to UFOs?  Grok this!  It's not the single case which disproves the actuality of same. It is; however, the single case which proves that actuality to which I allude!

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Does the reader think that out of all the many thousands of reported incursions by UFOs into human affairs... forgetting the reported human interactions with UFOs throughout a hoary human history... ...that there is not that one true UFO case? A case entirely trumping, by the way, any number of hoaxes and misidentifications?  Think about that. Let it further coil your short and curlies.

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Dad and Grandy made it quite clear. All you need... along with love? All you need is one. Da ta, da ta da... All you need is one... ...One is all you need... One is all you need... One is all you need...

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...Flash forward 40 years to 1994.

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I was two years into a bachelor of science program at a local Alabama university. College was engaged immediately after the completion of a 23 year career as a military aviation officer, combat flyer, aviation training officer, and for a limited time, even a major service school commandant. I was at the aforementioned university to secure a teaching credential, ultimately achieving same Summa Cum Laude. I mention the preceding only to reassure the reader's credulity. I've some measure of credibility... I digress...

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During a Fall term... on one very odd and singular route across the Troy University campus to class that I'd never taken before or would ever take again—readers can make of that what they will—I chanced to look at an adjacent bulletin board while enroute. There affixed I noticed a small text-sign from one of the Frats.  It reported on an unknown-to-me-at-that-point "Robert Hastings" they were hosting... there to give a special lecture that very night!

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The subject was UFOs.

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Inexplicably, I was immediately returned to that magic and enchanted minority of my years 40 plus summers passed, its hot summer nights, fireflies, and those same conjectured UFOs. There was no equivocation. I had to go!

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I'd have to cut Dr. Petry's philosophy of education class to get there, an important one much enjoyed, but it seemed a small price to pay. That night I was in attendance at Mr. Hastings' lecture.

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Arriving early, the Troy University auditorium was, somewhat surprisingly, packed; the atmosphere was rife with an expectation not all my own. Unabashedly, I was a boy, again, and beside myself with anticipation.

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I thought I knew what to expect, but was surprised regardless. On the stage behind a cheap podium and a university slide projector stood a nicely bearded, well spoken and entirely rational looking gentleman. He was obviously an educated person, about my age, and dressed in a suit and tie. Startlingly, he began selling naught but well supported if astounding ideas, and those for free. The reader can write me for a transcript similar to the lecture I heard, or find the gist here: http://www.ufohastings.com/ Sober stuff... if jaw-dropping.

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Hastings' talk was astonishing if the listener was paying attention. I paid attention. Verily, reader. Robert Hastings was an abundant spark. Myself, a genuine truth-seeker of some sincerity and well into a majority becoming increasingly askance and akimbo with conventional wisdoms? I was the driest tender.

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Began then (a result of Hastings' spark), my own researches and inquiries into this most important story errantly loath to be told. Why? I would know even as it ultimately cost me that second career as a public school teacher:

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https://alienviewgroup.blogspot.com/2016/01/terminal-ufos.html ...With little regret, I've never looked back. I digress.

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Flash forward 12 more years to present times...

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In twelve years my interest in UFOs translated into some small notoriety included in a Ufological "community" of *truth-seekers* and... uh, ...other persons. That community is a world-wide, highly connected, supremely educated community, and it is awash with talented persons on both sides of one very contentious aisle... succinctly dividing those with real intellectual courage and those without? That's this writer's take...

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Anyway...

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The result of a small memoir written in the honor of Mr. Hastings over at UFO UpDates—for his auspicious kindling of my altogether enjoyable (if costly?) ufological conflagration—Mr. Hastings shot me an E-mail of kind appreciation and queried if I might be interested in what he was up to lately...

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Of course, the reader will have heard the metaphor regarding that feral ursine defecating copiously beneath a leafy canopy... I would be most interested, of course, to the point of extreme prejudice!

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We began our communication with a few E-mails leading to an agreed upon time for a phone call. Cue the Spielberg/Williams collaboration "Close Encounter" music. Yes. It was that kind of interview.

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...Damned if my *blaze* isn't booted to a new energy level!

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Consider, reader. Everyone has heard the *official* gloss on the subject of UFOs...

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"UFOs are intriguing, yes, in a distractedly academic sort of way," errant and conflicted *officials* parrot (and I paraphrase), "...but in the *final* analysis, no credible evidence exists to support a UFO conjecture to begin with, and in the second place, however UFOs are manifested as some kind of new"aerial phenomena"... they are in no way a threat to national security. UFOs, then, can safely be put beneath concern, consideration, and small contempt..."

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Excuse me? Be not fooled, reader. This is scientific reductionism at its absolute worst! Verily, the preceding paragraph of accurate paraphrase is naught but the collected and then furiously hammered feces of a scurvy male bovine quadruped! BS, reader, and smelling as sweet!

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In an issue of UFO Magazine I iterated the researches of Frank Feschino and how they applied with regard to UFOs and a "...threat to national security..." Additionally, I've written effusively with regard to the impact of UFOs and National Security via contributions by Richard Dolan!

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Ladies and Gentlemen! UFOs are an abundant and obvious threat to National Security... (which may be good news, still, for rank and file global inhabitants, I'm thinking)! A competent, sincere, and diligent jury is in, rendered its cogent verdict, and already left the courthouse to sell honorable books on Amazon.com!

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See? The preceding is a song sung to the tune of what Project Bluebook top-kick Edward Ruppelt stealthily referred to as our Military's "many lurid duels with death." Think in terms of "ordered" conflicts involving our military with UFOs pursuant to a standing "Shoot-Down" order... ...translating into a huge material loss, the deaths of many WWII battle-tested persons... ...and, at length, the selling and degradation of the aggregate American soul into a morass of secrecy without oversight!

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There is no hyperbole, there is data and documentation, reader! Does the preceding not at least have the flavor of a threat to national security?

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Robert Hastings would have you prepare your cognitive surfaces for an additional cosmic *coat*, brothers and sisters, and the rest of the story!

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See, UFOs exert an influence into the modern Atomic age, too! They did not stop their interactions with the military in the 1950s! I caution that this is no airy conjecture of the addled mind, Sir and Madam!

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Robert Hastings' contribution to the ufological milieu will prove to be a clear-eyed scholarship and historical dot-connecting of the first wash. Moreover, Robert Hastings is not the only one to so indicate the unsettling interaction between our Armed Forces and the indefatigable, very real, *Other*!  ET is extant!

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There have been many, actually. I've mentioned only Feschino and Dolan. Hastings' contribution provides; however, for even sharper resolution to a single issue... so as to make the distinction for his contribution more visible in this single but very compelling area.

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The punch line? Buckle up!

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UFOs have been effortlessly able to interact with the strategic nuclear capability of the United States and other countries... readily demonstrating to recent times an ostensibly impossible ability to both activate and deactivate our atomic missiles at their whim... ...and they have been doing so for decades!

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...Pause a moment to let that sink in. You say not so? OK... well...

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Check out this URL at the NICAP site: http://tinyurl.com/p9z8v to get a liberal, even heroic, dose of some much needed cosmic kick-ass! The reader begins to appreciate that the indomitable *other* is in no way threatened, militarily, by such as the likes of us!

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No, we are presently as easy to thwart as was Alexander the Great on one of his famous encounters with them! Indeed, we are still a canoe of South Sea Islanders rowing out to a 21st Century Aircraft Carrier and brandishing our stone tipped spears!

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Do a little wade in the aforementioned detailed (25 pages!) paper, discover that the crossing stones are likely pretty much where Robert Hastings has indicated they are... and know that there's a book  to take you all the way to your OWN conclusion on these startling issues!

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Did I hear some murmuring out there with regards to the production of a book? Two things:

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One... you're wrong, shut up... ...this book will transcend mere sincerity, and two? When in hell did it become a reflexively suspicious act to be caught producing a book? We are indeed NOTHING without our books! I'll leave it to the reader what is good and bad about that. The books remain and there is no shame in most of them, damn it!

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Seriously... back to the point... what high strangeness did happen at Malmstrom AFB, (...and nuclear missile facility!) Montana in 1966 and 1967? What bizarre occurrence transpired in 1975 at the same location? What completely inexplicable incident happened there in 1992? 1995? 1996? Yes, feel the hair start to rise up, chillingly, on the back of your neck, too, reader!

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How about similar activities at F.E. Warren AFB (...and nuclear missile facility!) Wyoming in 1965? Ditto 1973 and 1974? Ditto 1980 and 1981? Let that further frost your incredulous cookie!

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...Carrying coal to Newcastle I know, but what occurred regularly at Walker AFB (...and nuclear missile facility!) between the years 1963 through 1967...?

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What went on at Ellsworth AFB (...and nuclear missile facility!), South Dakota in 1966? 1992?

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The aforementioned Spielberg/Williams soundtrack rises to crescendo...

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Robert Hastings' investigations reveal that real folks, quality people... ...vetted soldier/citizens... 18 persons of well scrutinized eminence in Hastings' aforementioned NICAP paper alone... were affected and effected by the highly strange reality our government denies and soft-soaps, in the aggregate, to this very day!

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Further, let's pause a moment to consider. What are the deleterious effects of these duplicitous subterfuges from *officialdom*?

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Consider, does not such indolently authoritarian sophistry as this only serve to discommode an abused citizenry?  Does not the former only invalidate a government that makes itself further irrelevant? Does not this heinous egregiousness do naught but further wound the pioneer spirit and national soul of America? I think the reader appreciates, too, that just now is perhaps not the best time for those kinds of infidelities to further manifest themselves, eh?

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...And further consider reader, whatever is occurring at Strategic Missile Commands all over the United States, our bases are either being mocked by something which renders them impotent and ineffective at the drop of a tin-foil hat... (let that sink in), or crazy people are in charge at these bases and have reigned supreme over a period of years! Neither prospect is acceptable to the reader, I know, even as I am challenged, myself, to be able to justify a rational third possibility. Indeed and still, nothing else seems to completely fit the facts.

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Drawing to a close, why go to the trouble of getting to the bottom of this *thing* that by all accounts will cause us such trouble? Why mess with this bull? Why pick this scab? Why kick over this rock? Why obviate our inculcated ignorance and encourage disgust with same? Why should Hastings exacerbate a rebellion in this matter and of this magnitude?

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Simple. Moreover, there are a multitude of reasons, actually. I add the reader likely knew them herself. I'll iterate just a few.

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We do it for an intellectually solid place to put our individual feet down! We do it to improve the aggregate reach and total grasp of citizen individuals! We do it because individuals are strengthened by the truth even as they are weakened by untruth! We do it because individuals should have more respect for our children! We do it because individuals pay for the right to be able to make an informed decision about matters! We do it because individuals should BE aware of what they can be MADE aware! We do it because individuals know they have to live in futures they themselves make to a degree! We do it, finally, because it is the future, and in the future what doesn't change... causes death... and ignobly dies itself!  A staid status quo is, ever, death!

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I could go on. So could the reader, if the reader but reflects a moment.

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Is truth better? Always.  Even uncomfortable, it is before and not lurking behind.

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That's what those "Matrix" films were all about, remember? Truth is better for you, those you love, and for the art; we can produce living and breathing existentiality in the clean free airs of an informed philosophy inherent in efficacious society! I don't overstate this.

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This sincere truth-seeking is what drives Robert Hastings is this writer's suspicion, at any rate. Hear his lecture if you can. Visit the URLs indicated above; buy his book where it is available. See his Documentary! The consent you inform, good reader, is your own.

Note: UFOs and Nukes (five freakin' hours!) ...Streaming (Steaming!) on Amazon.

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Read on.