Traces & "Stuff"

...America made great, again?

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I observe a night time vastness holding "heaven," friend, and "hell." These are the two potentials, plus the history made, as well... but not the one a cheat contrives to satisfy the "winners," and not the "social treatment" kind, nor that one from "born 'againners."
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History as it really was—Coolidge was a monster. History as it really was—religion? An impostor. History as it really was—the *poor* get bitter dealings. History as it really was—The truth? It has no meaning!
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Where is truth's fidelity in a system based on war. Where's the efficacious where the boldest lies implore. Where's it writ so clearly large "that money matters," much. See, we are sold a bill of goods... for psychopaths and such!
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Unjust manipulation is the fiber of our culture. The rules are made for bloody gold, and the *maker* apes a vulture. The *winner* wrote the words contrived to rake the booty in! He's always been the *victor*, mind, "a taker"... he who "wins."
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Some say it's entertainment that the masses always crave. Our Roman history's legacy, infotainment's latest craze? React to flash, and bored with facts, you grovel for sensation? Though, confronted with real HAPPENSTANCE, you feel a scared deflation?
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Distraction is preferred, I know, to copping to this truth, but you're disserved by ignorance! You're LIED to! What's the use? UFOs are ridiculed, derided, and disdained... DESPITE the work respected—trace evidence obtained!
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So ask me, "What's a trace case"? ...and I'll try to fill you in. It's something really left behind... by UFO's, my friend! A scorching of the earth, or such, even marks on human beings, it's proof of an anomaly one foolishly demeans!
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...See, if talking just ONE trace case, it should blow the whole thing up! For just one stinking trace case—bring whole cultures to a stop! For the solitary trace case, grind the whole mess to a halt! Be CERTAIN there are HUNDREDS! These preclude your use of "salt"!
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...But we're *not prone* to looking... blamed on "forecast implications"…? If your threatened summer/country homes might come to liquidation? If the loss of specious *dollars* is to turn uncaring eyes? Then please consume some fecal stuff, freak out, go mad, then die!
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I've heard it said that panic follows saucers in our skies! That millions would go "raving mad" for all to see them fly! "Suicide ... hit the ceiling"—and millions more would starve? Well, I just flat don't BUY it—not a ribbon, pot, or shard!
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Would we do this... if we found "folks"... ...who'd never used a spoon? Would we do it if we found a race of sentients on our moon? Too? I'm not impressed with those who fall (in light of strange new days); a truth of need's, inevitable... be it son or ME who pays!
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Culture gets away with murder, and we tolerate in it... ...what we crush out individually, so diminish bit by bit! On guard for serial murder when it's from the single person, but unmindful when "the system" does it, and it's done it ... to perversion!
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I'm just a soldier and a teacher and I've more than paid my end. I don't tax-cheat on my Uncle Sam, and I've been a loyal friend. I don't bully, I don't lie, and I give an even break; too, I speak my mind objectively... I'm on the level, not the make!
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I eschew the stunted bunkie who likes his "comfort" where it's static—where it's built to suit the boorish style of the "skeptical fanatic." Where one's "comfort" draws the lifeblood from the one who does without...? All the trappings of their "lesser" lives, then, mere booty for your "shout"?!
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It's rational that we are watched... use the postulates of Drake. Reported in our skies, I'm sure—reality's at stake! Traces HAVE been left—they go eschewed, unwatched ... unstudied, and the *pillars* of our culture? ...Non-disclosing, soiled, and bloodied!
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They know more than they're telling; we deserve their "contribution"! Some voice against complete collapse, or the people's retribution! I want a world truth aspired—though the "heavens" crack and fall! No longer hanging over me? So, I'll clearly hear her call.

• lehmberg2002@gmail.com
• http://www.alienview.net/

Whose call? The call of my muse, you biliously sneering skeptibunker of small imagination, smaller intelligence, and sub-microscopic, even concave, courage! Something could be said regarding meager scrotum size. Zero sack. The reader knows who's addressed...
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Whose voice? Why, the inner one of course—the only one of which I'm sure! I can't hear it in the clutter of your media's exhortations to burn and consume. I can't hear it in the frothing of your Pat Robertson, or Jerry Falwell... even the ineffable John Ventre ...that UFOs are agents of Satan…
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In fact, the more they froth and bubble that too convenient conjecture, the more I am convinced that the INVERSE must be true! It is these who ape capering demons and evil nixies, and not the inevitable ET. Nes't ce pas, Reader?
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I can't hear it in a general deafening silence; a silence un-punctuated by even an indirect or private exhortation for me to shut the f**k up—Well, except for that homocentric, filled with themselves, or murmuring few, and they've protested too much. Slanderously so!
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Hey, I'm not making any traditional apologies—just telling you what you'll see when you learn to *grow* again.
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To the few pieces of *hate* mail regarding my "negativity"—"Bother" said Pooh, and then lifted a cloth cheek to fart derisively! These thoroughly impacted persons miss the point!
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All of my expressions forcefully exhort the positive! That's your problem with it! And, besides which, if you are so inclined, you could pound sand up a well-prolapsed pore, by the freaking by!
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...But pause, instead, to hammer some of that mortar out of your otherwise flaccid rear, take a deep, cleansing breath, and then? PUSH!
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…Feels good to get the sand out, no? You have no idea...
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Go all the way! Have some nice, raw cruciferous "veggies" with the magic garlic vinaigrette, and REALLY clean yourself out. Now, when you go out and glance up at the sky, you can actually see what's in it! It's all there if you watch for it! To look is to see, see?
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...And there's stuff in it, boys and girls, stuff with length and breadth—stuff round, stuff firm, and stuff fully packed! "Stuff" indeed … stuff beyond dreams—yours or mine!
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...With regard to OTHER matters? With regard to the sub-popular but still Reviled, Risible, and Revolting Net Scum who can say what they damn well please (...beyond vile!) and remain unrepentant, unapologetic, unremorseful, to go entirely unpunished? These juice-sucking slime-ball low-brows who are without fidelity, a shred of constancy, define inconsistency, and are themselves perhaps, even what they would accuse? These rabidly feral yet cowardly weasels who whisper and smirk and are themselves a the sneered fecal smear they pretend to decry?
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...These are dead entities to me, scuttling roaches who only command enough attention from me to step on them in a compassionate attempt to put them out of their misery. I should just let my cat play with them. Hmmm...
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...Here kitty-kitty! Stay tuned. Restore John Ford
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Read on.

Conventional Wisdom for Feebs, Dweebs, and NCC's

Conventional Wisdom for 
Feebs, Dweebs, and NCC's

by Alfred Lehmberg

There's always a lot of myopic griping from the ufological luminary about Ufology not deserving its identification as a "breeding ground for nitwits, crackpots, and cuckoos" (NCC's).  ...And there's lately been considerable moaning about its infestation by same.  

To this end, extant and name-called NCC's are rather arbitrarily identified by some largely self-appointed, self-validating, and self-grinding ufological gatekeepers in a baldly-approached and androcratic attempt to clean their "ufological temple" of that "undisciplined dross" and "intemperate corruption"... yea and verily...  Yea and verily, my brothers and sisters, holding short of overturning the counting tables of the money changers, of course! 

...A man's gotta eat. Only, how well and as a result of what.

Though, wait! What about the provenance of that so-called "undisciplined dross of NCCs?  Where does it come from?  What compels the corruption and the foolishness of that highlighted "dross"? 

To be sure, this writer offers that the conjectured foolishness can only be the result of the baldest ignorance on our part.  On that point, this writer would agree with the most Strident SkeptiBunky.  Where that SSB and this writer diverge is that the SSB won't cop to the boundless pervasiveness of that ignorance.  He won't admit the contrived and engineered enormity of it... the daunting scope of it... his part in it. He thinks he's aware and outside of it. That any of us could be, eh? 

No, it is an ignorance of the widest horizons, encompassing many disciplines, and it is so corrosively pervasive in ways so smooth and reflexive that its mechanisms are all but detectable. Like that fish unaware of the water it swims in, the luminaries alluded to refuse to question their own assumptions and presumptions inherent to a crass fundamentalist's scientific reductionism.  That Culture? Like any culture? Not your friend.

Is it an ignorance of design?  The short answer seems yes.  We appear to be socio-nationally programmed to have a predicted feeling given a "specific stimulus," and that programming is very busily engineered by a media firmly controlled by interests assuredly not our own, to grind axes, predictably one would guess, not necessarily in an individual's best interest. 

The aforementioned skeptibunky sees that ignorance as self-induced and holds the ignorant individual entirely accountable for their own ignorance.  That's convenient. They reason that it is a "bed" that the ignorant himself has insensibly made, despite the SSB's *solid* information to the (oh so convenient) contrary. Enter the fallacy of "CONVENTIONAL WISDOM", and the believable possibility that Americans, in particular, are very carefully conditioned to believe all the wrong things to buttress a betraying bottom line.

Tim O'Shea makes a pretty good case for a kind of artfully crafted *common* sense that rewards the few as it plunders the many—at least as it pertains to health, the health system, and the practice of medicine in the United States.  This writer asks: why stop at that institution? 

If an institution with the hoary mantle of presumed integrity like Medicine can be so thoroughly corrupted and embroiled in conspiracy, why can't ANY institution be corrupted just as thoroughly for similar reasons?  A paper I've completed attempts to demonstrate the potentiality for ready utilization of ANY opportunity empowering the *few* to take criminal advantage of the *many* if it is profitable and possible to do so. 

Isn't the study of UFOs just such an institution ripe for a similar abuse? One regards the imbroglio of relieved PA, MUFON Chair John Ventre. This would be regarding White Supremacist Politics' impact on a study of UFOs in Pennsylvania, Deleware, and West Virginia. One sees how muddy the water can get just out of hand. Demons and devils and Imps!  Oh, my!

Back to O'Shea. He quotes from "Trust Us We're Experts", written by Stauber and Rampton. This is a textbook on the history of molding public opinion, and it clearly demonstrates the seriously unethical (and many times criminal) lengths that corporate entities (among other organizations of easy conspiracy) have gone to in the unethically passionate bid to control their grasping bottom lines, and affect the quality of our lives.

"CONVENTIONAL WISDOM" is at issue.  Legitimate questions can be asked to challenge that "CONVENTIONAL WISDOM" is any kind of *wisdom* at all...  In other words, "Common Sense," assumed, presumed, and consumed since the cradle, might be something less than the "efficacious best move" that it is too reflexively thought to be. Are rank and file Americans, to start, patsies in a cruel shell game of subtle, and not so subtle, variegated Ponzi scheme manipulations or cultural chicanery?  Yes, again. Just consider the "war on drugs."  

These manipulations are exposed so frequently, even in a whorish mainstream (read corporate) press, that they require no citation.

UFOs, an understanding of which might truly raise human beings to a new quantum level of awareness, are a subject, then, likely to be a target of the devious manipulations O'Shea describes so luridly.  UFOs, frankly touch on all the levels illustrating the complete human condition, blind, crippled, or crazy.  Their affectations cover the sociological, implicate the psychological, and dictate the resistance of a "current power elite" to any reduction of ignorance regarding it! 

The truth is, of course, many times, an anathema to the corporate bottom line.  Consider the story of Erin Brockovich...  Truth has no respect for stockholders and has no regard for their future's prediction of mere profit and loss... where truth CAN be told... 

The truth is out there.  That's the problem, the ever-present threat to the suspect status quo... ...and a hanging sword of unending concern for the powers that be... 

There's a kingdom at hand, after all. Should that be assured for just a few or should it be vouchsafed on the many? Conscience and empathy dictate an answer even where it's going to be the hard one.

Where is the evidence that a Ufological institution might be subject to related manipulations referenced in Stauber and Rampton and by the current antics of John Ventre and others in MUFON? If there is such evidence, is it no less convincing than the programming Americans have endured in other venues (regarding the distortion of the truth for self-serving ends)? Pardon the digression, but if this writer were to perform socially in a similar manner (?), he would be rightfully accused of fraud and sent to jail.

Evidence abounds, actually.  To limit the scope and the length of this essay we will snapshot the contributions of one pioneering ufologist as seemingly far from "kookdom" as it is possible to get... and still maintain a balanced interest in UFOs.  This man was Dr. Josef Allen Hynek, an astronomer of considerable credibility with brother and sister scientists all over the world.

Dr. Hynek was, and remained throughout his life, a true scientist. Full stop. The reader might ask what a true scientist is. Let this writer allow that it is a question simply answered. 

A true scientist goes where the data leads despite personal concerns, personal desires, or the destruction of personal beliefs.  For a real scientist, it is the truth that is sought... "truth though heaven falls..."

Dr. Hynek is hired as a likely ringer by a government agency, ostensibly to get to the bottom of the Flying Saucer Situation (FSS) by matching UFO sighting reports with explainable atmospheric and celestial events. Neat trick, eh? 

The only problem was that the aforementioned agency received its marching orders from a jealous institution of the powers that were—personages who had begun to cop to the next-level implications of a real understanding regarding the aforementioned FSS... anyone must know that true, this is extreme. No justification for ignorance and I'm suspecting at that ignorance's abject peril. I digress.

It was not at all clear, you see, that the "powers that were" would continue to "officiate" in a world of *new* understanding... It was a condition identical to the one faced now by the "powers that are." Dr. Hynek might "help," as Dr. Menzel had (a skeptibunky of the first water), to shoot this whole unsettling UFO thing down...

Pursuant to a Top Secret clearance, Dr. Hynek endured an interview with the agency, and had to answer some odd questions. These were questions about UFOs. Now Hynek was a no-nonsense scholar with impeccable credentials who, when asked to express his opinion on the subject of UFO's, said that he thought "UFOs were nonsense..." He did think they were nonsense. Demonstrating a (perhaps preferred?) personal bias, he was hired. Hail Hydra.

Here are his own words:

"During this entire period of nearly twenty years I have attempted to remain as open-minded in this subject as circumstances permitted, this despite the fact that the whole subject seemed utterly ridiculous, and many of us firmly believed that, like some fad or craze, it would subside in a matter of months."

And:

"In 1948, I was asked by the U.S. Air Force to serve as a scientific consultant on the increasing number of reports of strange lights in the sky. I was then Director of the Astronomical Observatory of Ohio State University, and am now the Chairman of the Astronomy Department at Northwestern. I had scarcely heard of UFOs in 1948 and, like every other scientist I knew, assumed that they were nonsense."

Dr. Hynek was privately confident, even while he was professionally open-minded, that a detailed scientific examination of the Flying Saucer phenomena would shred these UFO's up like tissues in a tropical typhoon. ...But, unsettlingly, as the reports came in and he involved himself with their undeniable details, his initially easy confidence rapidly began to fade:

"Despite the seeming inanity of the subject, I felt that I would be derelict in my scientific responsibility to the Air Force if I did not point out that the whole UFO phenomenon might have aspects to it worthy of scientific attention."

As his private confidence faded Dr. Hynek reluctantly transitioned into that rarest of ufological beasts.  He, a named scientist with a reputation to uphold, began to become a convert...

"All of this increased my own concern and sense of persona; responsibility—and motivated me to urge the initiation of a meaningful scientific investigation of the UFO phenomenon by physical and social scientists. I had guardedly raised this suggestion in the past and at various official hearings, but with little success. UFO was a term that called forth buffoonery and caustic banter precisely because scientists paid no attention to the raw data—the reports themselves."

...and then found himself saddled with some of the aspects of a "rank believer":

"Still, on the average, if several pilots and/or policemen concur on the main points of the story, particularly if the duration of their experience was long enough (a matter of minutes rather than seconds) to have brought their judgment into play, it is difficult to brush aside their seemingly hardheaded testimony. And when one gets reports from scientists, engineers, and technicians whose credibility by all common standards is high and whose moral caliber seems to preclude a hoax, one can do no less than hear them out, in all seriousness."

Additionally:

"As a scientist, I must be mindful of the lessons of the past; all too often it has happened that matters of great value to science were overlooked because the new phenomenon simply did not fit the accepted scientific outlook of the time. I cannot dismiss the UFO phenomenon with a shrug. I have begun to feel that there is a tendency in 20th Century science to forget that there will be a 21st Century science, and indeed a 30th Century science, from which vantage points our knowledge of the universe may appear quite different than it does to us. We suffer, perhaps, from temporal provincialism, a form of arrogance that has always irritated posterity"

Dr. Hynek, among significant others, was an obvious portal of ufological respectability that the mainstream consciously, and with arbitrary malice of forethought, took pains to avoid.  The mainstream, then as now, preferred ridicule to seriousness, mockery to earnestness, and active scorn to productive investigation. Why?    

Dr. Hynek was an EARLY indicator of the validity of the UFO phenomenon, its veracity as a fulcrum of scientific advancement, and finally, its portentous reality.  Dr. Hynek made it abundantly clear that UFOs were real, operated in a manner that was not consistent with anything man-made, and, moreover, he demonstrated that quality people from all walks of life and station, from General Officers to general contractors... thought so, too.

Quality people have ALWAYS thought there was something to unidentified flying objects.  It is only a jealous and intransigent mainstream that paints a ufological interest as the domain of green toothed trailer dwellers—the inappropriately maligned feebs, dweebs and NCCs... unfortunate individuals that, bad off as they might be, are still better than their skeptibunky detractors because they're at least trying to go where some data leads! Fish rot in Denmark and an individual senses something beyond the pale. One might even feel betrayal.

The reader is cautioned that it is not an unfortunate "infestation" of the ufological temple that is the issue. RATHER: it is the suspected abundance of quality data that cannot be accessed by researchers of ANY type. It is the sullen recalcitrance and lack of general forthcomingness from closed institutions encouraging the actions of NCCs who must surely (and conveniently for the establishment) take deconstructive advantage of their inexplicable informational void... And it is, finally, the lack of collegiality of the current crop of investigators, their professional snobbery, selfishness, and ego (plus their inexplicably doting appreciation of a fundamentalist *science* that does not appreciate them) which goes a long way towards keeping the subject of UFOs in the Sargasso sea of tepid indifference presently endured... it would seem to this writer. 

UFO's are real, they have always been real, and they will continue to be real. It is the establishment's concern for a convenient status quo that makes the arbitrary decision to dismiss an aggregate ufological as just one province of gullible fools, weak-minded new-agers, and credulous counterculture revisionists. 

See. It is not the current crop of NCC's that keeps UFOs in an informational limbo; they're a logical reaction to that suspicious and ongoing informational void alluded to above... It is, rather, the mechanism of a duplicitous mainstream that keeps UFOs in ubiquitous shadows for perfectly predictable reasons all its own. ... ones decidedly not in the best interests of your garden variety human and mote of consciousness.  Read on.

Restore John Ford!

Risking Mammon's Wrath

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Mine's a strident little station who would dare to speak to you; to step out on the world stage with ethos, heart, and clue. To break from "comfy cover," for to play the real blues. To risk the wrath of Mammon for a heartfelt Alien View.
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I know the message "should" be pleasant... so "the horror" fades from sight. You'd have your "warm and fuzzies" in a "lifestyle" clean and bright. ...Though where's an even break for those who fight a "straight-up" fight? They'd have "warmth" plus "satisfaction," too, terror absent in their night.
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My "program" plays the "classics", and the music's "implication." Know your fear, it's always here ... but feel a strange elation. The blues are played to curve the will for "valid protestation," and "valid protest" wins its grace; you can feel it at this station.
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As you listen walk a path with me which covers different ground. We live in senseless violence which happens all around! You cannot hear the crickets who will only make their sound when this madness isn't spraying sullen poisons on our ground!
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Check out this DJ's costume as it flashes truthful color. Our spirit is effusive. It makes our message even fuller. My straightened back gives breath back so a "faith" leaps even taller; amazing all these thoughts are had for throwing off one's collar!
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My signal comes from mountains waving grass grown green in rain. The amplitude is mellow even pushing up the gain. My frequency's a freshness to ameliorate the pain with a pleasure you'd been missing, though you're *taught* that's quite "insane."
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My message is hard-edged enough—don't dare to call it "quaint." It doesn't take the word of what the privileged call a "saint." It won't tremble for the *mighty*, then go all weak and faint. It's alone its own creation, but sans hubristic paint.
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My center's hailing yours completely guileless... a little worried... The message has to get out quick; together, we must hurry. Only in the shadows can real monsters dart and scurry. Our light could have them slinking back to darkness in a flurry.
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Ours? A strident program the 'electrics' pump worldwide. It's that self-made leap of faith I've contemplated, I confide. It's heartfelt appreciation that we help our Earth abide... It's a reach across our differences that must yawn so deep and wide.
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So I'm pumping up the volume. Indifference? ...Just be damned! I'm smashing out of *boxes* where our spirits have been crammed. Emboldened by your silence, and revolted by "the man"? I'd prefer a kind acceptance, but I'm armored for your slam.

• lehmberg2002@gmail.com
• www.AlienView.net

...And where do _I_ get off, eh? The answer to that is: "...where I will"!
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...And this just in at the AV News Desk!!!
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Someone try to tell Mr. Lehmberg that he is misleading, misled or mentally ill. Someone, please intimate that he's witness to mere birds, boosters, bolides, or balloons. Someone inform him he was seeing fairies... suffering vapors... or having an "episode."
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...Go on! Tell him!
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Tell him to, yourself, feel steel. Read on.

Conundrums In Cognitive Dissonance "Part II"

Conundrums In 
Cognitive Dissonance ... 
Part II of II

by Alfred Lehmberg

            Last issue we explored why candidate astronauts can't see UFOs, that hypnotism can work in reverse, and how 25 or 30 professional people, some genuine scientists and their intelligent wives, used cognitive dissonance to massage an uncomfortable personal reality back into uneasy control.  We pick up at the Ash Creek flying model field in Northern California located at co-ords 40 degrees 25 minutes 26.03 seconds North by 122 degrees 10 minutes 7.85 seconds West... Find it on Google Earth.

I observed the odd thing in the sky above the flying field and didn't shout or jump, but nudged my nephew Mason... "Hey there, Mace . . . what's that about"?  I quietly pointed out the anomalous object flying languidly South around 45 degrees elevation to our east.

Mason looked, his mouth fell open, and he called out to his Mother, who got right up and even took a decisive step in its direction as if to see it closer, still.

The attention to the first appearance of the object spread like an airborne virus and soon everyone was looking at this apparition of the highly strange.  All other activity stopped. I believe I recall one guy losing his feather-weight rubber model to the distraction.

The UFO is flying slow, too slow my guess, to be a jet or plane. It floated along like a balloon but against the prevailing wind, at first enchantingly confounding those watching. It looked like a BB held at arms length, but squash it a tad flatter—and make it bright white.  Flying south in a peculiar nose up attitude, it coasted by looking like a TIC-TAC rather fat in the middle but tapered on the ends.  Then it drifted out of sight, though seeming to make a very slow, very wide, turn to its left and East. 

Picture the object flying in a huge circle, and some distance outside that big circle to the West the east-looking observer only gets to view a tiny arc.  The turn was barely perceptible.  Big circle.

There was general amazement.  There was, "...What the hell is that"?  No one mentioned UFOs.  Sorrowfully, at that point I was an "apologist ufologist" and still a little embarrassed by my newfound ufological interest. I kept my own silence.  

Someone mentioned—"Aircraft"! Others offered: "Blimp." I whispered to Mason that I thought it was, decidedly, not what was conjectured by the crowd.

Well, the *thing* flew by again, for the second time of FIVE times that it would make its apparent circuit, and fewer people watched it sail ephemerally by. The third time fewer still looked up to wonder what it was; the fourth was even less than that — the fifth, just me, because... how can one not look, I'd suppose...

Interview these persons and ask them why they stopped looking. Most would not even remember, I suspect.  Cognitive dissonance (1), remember, provides for the memory adjustment of those things disrupting one's piece of mind or status quo.  

But there's a problem with Cognitive Dissonance, reader.  While it may be true that a little might contrive to keep one from going crazy, a continued use, or just a little bit more of same can drive a person no-pants and wall-crawling insane!  Our society is psychotic to a degree already, I suspect, because of its decided over-application of the Cognitive Dissonance mechanism with regard to UFOs... and other things.

See, a UFO is an unwelcome distraction  to these people from their "personal fable." This is a fable reinforced with the models they bring out to fly. These are are representations of things we Human beings, only, fly up there in the crystal air... ...This includes everything from lost rubber powered featherweights to aging space shuttles...  The preceding assumption regarding who-flies-what is a likely falsehood.

The ETIs conjectured discount all that, see?  They invalidate a lot of twitchy presumptions, assumptions, and resource consumptions cognitively lugged by infant humankind, too, I'm betting.  Moreover, these intellectual fallacies regarding our corporeal and intellectual "singularity" in the cosmos may prove to be irrelevant and invalidated items of psychological baggage imposed upon our own futures... imposed entirely of ourselves!  Out of that intellectual disjunction must come the imperative to preclude even the memory of seeing a UFO? 

I suspect so.  See?  Even affected perception of our hoped for UFO-less-ness is the default "reality," reader, where perception, howsoever flawed, is the reality.

I'll make my own presumptions, thank you very much.  The craft that flew that fateful day was not contrived by humanity. Human beings didn't sand the fuselage, or build it with thin sheets of fresh smelling balsa or toxic smelling and exotic composites. They did not spin the wooden or plastic prop they bought at the local hobby shop.  Instead, they were threatened by what they did not control; they were unable to countenance what was not their own construction. 

Where do we learn this cowardice?  How do we justify our betrayal of our own humanity... fail to avail ourselves of a future looming with the greatest promise of potential, EVER!  No, our progressive inventiveness in an underused brave science and technology puts us on the edge of forever, reader!  We must embrace that.  We must embrace that... or perish squalidly. 

The conundrum that we face is like a pustule, gentle reader,

And the cause of its neglect we should decry.

Those who push away the truth to save invalidated egos,

We should vilify—respectfully despise.

That pustule skin is very near to breaking, Sir and Madam.

The skin of it is hot and tight and dry.  

Any little touch could have it blow up in our faces,

But I'd like to clean it out—and I suspect that we must try.

What happened?  Self-hypnotism?

            ...Tell yourself enough times that "something's" not there?  Pilgrim!  It's not there!

             I  would suggest that my two fellow aviators, all those aforementioned California modelers, and I... dutifully followed obligatory hypnotic programming of "polite" society, and collectively ignored a sighting that should have been VERY interesting to two military instructor pilots, a host of educated professional people, and a candidate astronaut!

            But no... ...in the aggregate, we were less than properly interested; we ignored genuine UFOs as non-events, reader!  The preceding is behavior that now seems inexplicable to me on this end of my considered ufological investigation!  Remember, even I forgot it for a period of years!

           What strange Hypnosis is this?  Let's look at that a moment.

           Hypnosis, indeed, has a strange history shrouded in chicanery, hum-buggery, and a little something extra one can't put a finger on. That little something extra is what keeps it around, makes it useful, and justifies that harder look by science...

            Many times, it works.

            Distractingly, one hears the word "hypnosis" and is overcome by images of stage personalities facetiously suggesting to people that they can be transformed into barnyard animals, dance the "grand ballroom fandango," or be compelled to quit smoking—lose weight or some other mundane prosaic... like the abuse of research subjects, but the program of hypnotism can be more insidious than that...

            See, apart from coercion and manipulation imposed by anyone else?  You impose your own.  You can't even trust yourself.

            If two-thirds of the population can be affected by phenomena that science can quantify (if not qualify), this seems to be a ready mechanism for control... that's right ...by manipulative suggestions delivered via a daily bombardment from a very tightly controlled corporate media—news print, radio, and television— devices contrived to direct the innocent mammalian individuals to ape a corrupted reptilian mass. I say true.

            Individuals buying into the unceasing manipulations of this contrived, distorted, and corrupted mainstream might even take the next step in their own "control" by hypnotizing... ...themselves! Let that sink in.

            In effect, reader, they render themselves incapable of perceiving what is there, plainly, to be perceived... ...NOT, conversely, seeing what is not there to be seen... See the difference?

            Individuals of the mass, we've hypnotized ourselves—followed our social programming—perhaps, but we rejected the unsettling enigmatic for the comforting mundane! We ignored what our eyes were reporting to us and replaced it with an "accepted" routine!  We turned our backs to the unexplained, likely occurring around us all the time (unseen... or seen and subsequently ignored), and made it fit into what we are trained to find culturally tolerable... "socially acceptable"!

            Where do we learn such cowardice; I ask again? What is that provenance of same?  In concert, why does Culture persecute the individual (Mothman Futility Syndrome) for perceiving reality?  

             Culture is not your friend, reader.  Believe that. 

             I suspect, moreover, that the best, brightest, and most progressive of those contrary true-seeing individuals are routinely "suicided" out of hand or otherwise murdered as a result of contrived mechanisms mendaciously applied by same...  Hicks, Lennon, McKenna... a host of others.  You know it's true, don't you.  Not a question.

            Summing up, I've watched this process of ufological denial (through self-hypnosis?) at work twice now, then. At a rubber-model airplane meet in Northern California dozens of us watched a UFO fly by five times with fewer and fewer people looking up to watch it fly by with each succeeding pass it very queerly made!  Previously, one decade earlier, three high-time aviators at an outside party saw and subsequently ignored same.

            ...Tell yourself enough times that something's not there, reader, and it's not there, even if it is... especially if it is!  Perception, including lack of same, is the reality.  That it's a false reality is beside the point... not germane.

            Every indication is that science accepts that the human brain is capable of convincing itself to perceive what is not there to be perceived. I would suggest that it can also very handily do the inverse of that.

            It can also mask what is there to be seen as plain as gleaming day.  

           We won't pay enough attention to that (another suspicious point), given that we have to overcome so much programming from our myopically conflicted culture to do so. But we must, reader, ultimately, if we ever expect to see anything 'really' there, at all. 

Read on.

(1) Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon referring to the stress incurred as a result of 'discrepancy' between what you already know or believe... and some new information or compelling new interpretation of that old information.  Seeing startling new evidence that 'black' is really 'white' on any level you care to name.  Good is found to be evil?  Evil, good?  How is that processed?

...Down To You...

The Center Of The Universe

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Did you know that you were actually at the center of a multi-verse? That all creation moved its mass 'round you? This is not a charming metaphor just to illustrate a point! This is truth as culture knows it. There is no doubt that it's true.
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"The center of the universe"! Bunkies frown, and smirk, and sneer. "What you proffer is the selfish you've decried "! ...And taken to their limit, then, they'd be exactly right. ...But that's to choose that selfish pathway I'd despised.
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Everything in culture's writ to come down hard on YOU ... as it knows that you alone can "heat its water"! It binds together billions of these universal *centers* ...but to succor an elite, in turn ... who treats you like a squatter!
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It all comes down to YOU, you see, and the payment of YOUR taxes. It's down to YOU, and what YOU leave behind. What's YOUR contribution—is it "positive" or its "inverse"? ...And "minus/plus" for who and what or why!
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Every ad you've ever heard or seen is focused on your brain. And they're crafted with your "singleness" in mind. You're extorted, individually, but then ground in culture's mill ... Reminded on "good teamwork" until used up, tired, and dry…
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You forget that you're the center where you're never seen and heard, as you're shifted from your center to controllers. "It's God's will you be accursed within an evil world toil!" ...Best get behind their *Jesus,* these Conservative *extollers.*
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You turn your trusting back to those who'd stab betwixt your shoulders: the man with dodgy ethics who "decides"? The men who have their "history" all pre-writ on blood-stained pages? Where's history? Who suffered, how, and why? ...And there are these, these men not shy to use your faith against you. These men professing gladly they're of God. Firmly anti-science and professing superstition, they're a clear and present danger. They're a flaw.
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Think about a "lynch mob", and the mob rule there displayed ... where the single man or woman would not play. But together they dilute that "wrong" an ethics makes so plain, and they spill the blood you know's been spilled—today!
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You're the center of a universe... with many different centers! What you do counts BIG—here's reason why: What you have been doing? If you stopped? There'd be "undoing." Without "YOUR" contribution, then... their culture wilts and dies!
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You are the center of your universe 'cause it's you who pays the freight! You're the one—on site—with all the guts! Through the nose you're always paying though it benefits the few ... and if asking for the truth? Then, "you're just nuts."
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But you're not nuts, I must point out!  You're the engine and the fuel to make what happens! You're the stone in freedom's wall, building structures deep and tall; you're all the art and music and its passion!

• alienview@adelphia.net
• http://www.alienview.net/

A team is only as strong as the individuals who make it up, Nes't ce pas?
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That neatly makes the individual key, am I right?
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The most successful countries have the most respect for individual rights. Discounting the individual makes teams and countries fail. Consider North Korea, Mao's China, and the late Soviet Union... or much of the Islamic world. Notice the weakness displayed lately by our United States as respect for individuals is diminished.
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Look around you—you ARE at the center of the universe. What's between your meager senses and the center of your head but YOU! Every direction from you departs... from you!
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My center hails your center. We exist this very day! AHOY!
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Are you an individual? Remember, it seems to be the individual with which the "other," howsoever that "other" is configured, is interested in communicating, after all... at all.
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...Down to you.
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Rejoice in your individuality! Exercise it! Just remember that there's a responsibility entailed. Treat others as you would be treated, eh?

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Conundrums In Cognitive Dissonance (Part I)

The wages of CD...

Conundrums In Cognitive Dissonance ... 
Part I of II

by Alfred Lehmberg

Apart from new cyberspace?  My old circle of close friends—6 or 8 guys and their lovely, if formidable, wives (one of these wives was a Chief Warrant Officer 5 aviation officer who fought competitively in a couple of female division cage-fights... think of a Kill Bill Lucy Liu, to get close)—were military rated day/night all-weather aviators of considerable experience and expertise.  They were persons on and off active military duty.  They were all Republicans in a red state Alabama. Now, stolidly on their Trump Train, it seems I never knew them at all. Heavy sigh.

Not so much as an Independent!  How did I endure, but that sometimes (Pre-Trump) a shared experience transcended mere political considerations, eh?  I forgave them their psychopath's hypocritical politics. No more. They forgive me my unrepentant liberality. No more. I've become an enemy... and they?Apparent insentient monsters ok with racist fascism and a whites-only America.  

     Such was friendship among those who had trammeled the angry, if hallowed, halls of air, I suspect. It was once. Even through a GWB, it was. Once.

Back at the ufological ranch... Near every man-jack and swinging Richard of this collection of highly skilled persons had reported to me sincerely that they had witnessed weird lights in otherwise sundry momentous skies.  They don't object when I offered that what they were seeing may have been "Flying Saucers"... they didn't encourage me, mind... 

It remains.  They didn't object.  All those guys knew I have a considered interest in same and so had volunteered their sightings to me.  I felt honored, actually. That was then. This is now.

Still though, not so curiously, and contrarily, we rarely discussed those well admitted "sightings" in the full group.  If I brought it up, or if it came up?  There was always a concerted "group" effort to get the subject back to a more prosaic and comfortingly familiar.  All seemed to vie to be "the most scientifically reasonable" person in the room. "Graveyard whistling," for the benefit of group sensibility would be my guess.

No—the subject was more seriously broached and reports shared only when I'm caught alone... coming back from the latrine or caught alone at the bar... on the way out to the car at evening's end... the odd encounter.  Stealth and surreptitiousness seem to be required, n'est ce pas?  

Verily, in turn, these men inform me of others reporting the very highly strange to them.  Conservatively, even among these highly experienced aviators, First Kind Encounters seems more a common thing than not.

To put it lightly, reminding the reader, these are reluctant witnesses.  You'd think these career military people were trying to share with me that they were gay or crossdressers.  Consider: they were compelled to make their careful report, still, to someone frankly not laughing at them!

The stories recounted are invariably told in an embarrassed way with eyes decidedly to the ground or, alternatively, hollowly and unblinkingly regarding me. There was a furtive hope in their unblinking stare that I would take them at their inexplicable word... that here, in me, they might find a fellow who'd take receipt of their strange story and not bust their chops or question their sanity.  

...That they could tell someone at last—unload or unburden themselves to someone who might provide them with some small grasp regarding highly extraordinary occurrences they'd had obvious difficulty processing by themselves. Dissonance looms. 

These men are not cowards.  Did I mention they were decorated soldier aviators? They were pragmatic pilots.  Their wives, more hard-wired by genetics I suspect, were pragmatic, too, only more so.  Wives, and women in general I observe, provide ample encouragement for the aggregate pragmatism, I'm sure.  I know mine does.  I catch regular hell, eh? It's not entirely undeserved.

See?  All know the hard wages of having one's supervisor or superior officer gain knowledge of their subordinate's going "off the reservation" intellectually or exploring too far "down the twitchy rabbit hole."  Careers are destroyed.  Promotions dry up.  Advanced training evaporates.  Confidence is compromised... Advancement is curtailed... Friends laugh...  Friends laugh, reader!   
Hey!  I'm about a half million dollars down in lost wages, myself. Speaking with some experience, I report that reasonable persons are significantly wounded in this struggle for a more validated existentiality. I say true.

Fitting in at any cost?  It has that greater imperative, even if an unethical, irrelevant, and unsatisfying one... a soul destroying one.  Pity.

To forestall these back-stepping and unjust sociological hazards to having your world turned upside down, many persons experience our foreshadowed cognitive dissonance (1).  They intellectually react to the stress of not being able to accept what their—usually trustworthy—senses are reporting to them, and make the imperatives of those contrary reports either go away...(not see what's there) or change them over into something that is acceptable to them.  Imagine an oyster reacting to a grain of sand in its mantel by creating a pearl around the disturbance. 

It won't matter, reader, if this errant acceptability is a falsehood.  Would that the aforementioned resultant pearl had any lasting value, am I right?  It does not.  It powders easily 'twixt thumb and forefinger and exudes toxic fumes provoking madness!  Still, perception, errant or no, is the reality.

Example:

While on active duty many years ago, well before I'd developed any substantive interest in the ufological, I'd had a raucous barbecue at my Fort Rucker, Alabama home one weekend evening. There were five or six joyous couples in carrier-landing-rowdy "CAV-songs" attendance, plus a few guests some of these had brought along with them. All were highly experienced attack and utility branch military aviators plus their wives or girlfriends.  This was a singularly *high-toned* bunch.

I was standing away from the group with two other men, one Tom Boucher, an AH-64 (Apache) instructor pilot, and a, name forgotten, fixed-wing "driver" I didn't know... but a rare Army candidate for the Astronaut Program. The sun had just gone down and dusk was washing out to the encroaching blackness of inevitable night.

There was a lull in the blustery conversation. One of the men looked up and said, "That's weird..."

He was pointing at the sky with his beer hand.  We all looked up to see a decidedly out of the ordinary... black, one unit by five (or so) *strip*, or rectangle, about as wide as a little fingernail held at arm's length, and flying through the air diagonally with its airfoil about 40 degrees from its direction of travel!  It was flying about as fast as a small propeller-driven plane!

We were incredulous, our jaws decidedly slackened! As the strange object flew, one of the men remarked that it had very peculiar "position lights." These lights (seven or eight of them) were white flashing strobes running weirdly from wing-tip, down the strange diagonal, to the opposite wing-tip, and then back again like a Pong ball...

There is no aircraft that does that, reader. ...Looks like that. ...Flies like that. ...Has an array of lights operating like that.  ...Flouts aviation conventions like that... There was no evidence of the required red and green "port" and "starboards," and no flashing anti-collision light... No sound... We'd have heard it.

 "Well — it's got to be something..." someone said... it may have even been me, and, with that... ...the object was abruptly forgotten! All three of us returned to the party and the consumption of massive quantities.

"...Ships and shoes... and sealing wax..."

            ...Ex-squeeze me?

Yes. Confronted with the exceptionally bizarre... more distracting beer was called for, and the party continued into the usual drunken mini-brawl for which Army rotary-wing aviators USED to be famous last century... Let me just say here that alcohol precludes the perception of UFOs reader... not the ludicrous inverse.

I didn't remember this occurrence again for almost a decade. ...Was reminded of it only by seeing a similar object in California after I had developed an interest in UFOs upon leaving the Army.

That aforementioned incident occurred at a rubber-powered model airplane flying meet in Northern California up around Anderson. I attended with my late father after I'd retired from the service in 92.  Dozens of us watched a UFO fly by... five times, over a period of a few hours, with fewer and fewer people looking up to watch it traverse with each succeeding pass that it very queerly made!  What's up with that?

There were twenty-five of us, or so, on that Sunday late afternoon to evening... flying model airplanes. It was a scene right out of the fifties.  A smatter of the aforementioned models flown were gas powered, but few of these were flying.  It was rubber powered models folks were flying, generally.  Very quiet.

The evening was très pastoral—no alcohol or drugs.  Club charter; it kept the insurance down. A very gentle breeze was blowing, and far away from city or town, it was as quiet as country can be.  We were indeed the only people for miles around.  The ladies had fixed finger food and old men flew their childhood dreams.  The sky was blue and crystal clear... so sharp it seemed to shine and gleam...

I saw it because I'd developed a subsequent interest in UFOs alluded to previously, and so was, idly, watching the sky.  Verily, if you look, reader, you see.

Next issue:  more Cognitive Dissonance in action, presumptions, assumptions, and resource consumptions, unwelcome distractions, and a hypnotism of insidious inverse: "seeing what's not there" contrasted with "not seeing what is there to be seen"

(1) Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon referring to the stress incurred as a result of 'discrepancy' between what you already know or believe to be true... and some new information or compelling new interpretation of that old information throwing all your certainty into question.  Perceiving startling new evidence that 'black' is really 'white' on any level you care to name.  Good is evil?  Bad, good? Remains the question begs to be asked.