Blissful Ignorance Is A Lie...

Blissful Ignorance Is A Lie...

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by Alfred Lehmberg

It won't be too much longer for Richard Dolan's landmark Volume III.  This is especially appreciated given surprising and unsettling, if revealing, current revelations regarding black-box agencies, official artful-dodgery and teasingly duplicitous astronauts!  

These in-the-tank entities, good reader, attempt to vulcanize (cauterize?) ufology once again, just lately.  Reality gets less distinct, the existential becomes a rumor of itself, and all corporeality is up for grabs!

UFOs or UAPs?  Bravely progressive or new conventional *wisdom*?  Imagination and artistry or the convenient and arbitrary?  The differences are as vast and profound as space/time itself.

Propitiously then, it would seem, Richard Dolan's third volume of well cited ufological history is soon to be released, eventually.  ...A volume perhaps bringing us all more up to date on these highly strange issues we know and love... nes't ce pas?  ...A new sterile lance for the festering ufological boil?  ...A kick in the cosmological get-along as we grok a looming concrescence individually and collectively?  Tested faith in one another or an untested faith in an imbecilic afterlife wholly responsible for corrupting the current one!
Released sooner, it is hoped.  Six decades of stasis and status quo become increasingly difficult to countenance as time itself (now measurably?) accelerates.

To that end, and in anticipation of same? I contend that a revisit to Dolan's first volumes are in order to more appropriately frame the arrival of the highly anticipated third one.  Consciousness.  Memory.  Conscience.

In other words, reader, I mean to re-couch the stunning impact of Dolan's first (and second) volume as a proper sealer or first and second stage rocket fuel for his third volume.  I am confident this is a meaningful and productive thing to do.  Where we shoot to the stars we cross the impossible river.

...And for the record?  I resent any implication or the remotest speculation that I'm just trying to sell a book here.  My glove is in the reader's face at the mere conjecture.  That said... I hope to ensure an autographed review copy as soon as III is released into the corporeal so I can compose an unvarnished review (...as Volumes One and Two are so composed, actually...) and be myself more informed.  I am confident that Dolan can produce just that kind of book.

...And rest easy, friends and neighbors, I'll be just as effusive panning a sub-standard Volume III, sincerely.  Indeed, Mr. Dolan sets the bar dauntingly high with Volumes I and II.  He is going to be his own hard acts to follow.  I wish him the best of luck and his God's own speed.  I dare Dolan's third stage to fizzle!

Speed's what's needed just now.  Let's put the pedal down.

To start, I suspect that in a more perfect future world a copy of Volume One will be a much respected core text in the history classrooms of highly respected and accredited universities everywhere.  I don't remotely oversell.

Indeed, the volume could (and should!) go into many different kinds of classrooms (from high school to graduate school) right now, as required reading!  It could certainly be a top-listed alternate for many other different kinds of classrooms as well. 

This is not hyperbole, reader.  Remember my glove.

Text book?  Indeed, as a more-than-cogent work of captivating literacy it does the job of a textbook. It catalogues, lists, and indexes like a textbook.  It informs like a text book.  It educates like a textbook. It improves like a text book, yes.

...But it additionally reads more like a top drawer Stephen King novel! It does so, I add, decidedly without reaching for it.  Truth is always a lot weirder than mere fiction, reader, anyway.  Right?  Compelling truth mimicking fiction stuns compellingly.

Oh, it's sans all the fictional whimsy and the interesting and inventive characterizations, even as it keeps some of the bizarre plot twists of a King novel!  Volume One must be without whimsy and characterization of course... you see, it has to be minus those things! The Volume has a special responsibility; however, the reader discovers.  True weirdness replaces whimsy.

See? As much as it can be rationally determined from Dolan's calmly rational explication throughout?  Every word in this book is, very likely, true...

Whoa!

...I know, I know... I can hear the internal dialogue... ...Pause to reflect on it a moment, anyway. Let it squeegee an intuitional third eye on the your courageous cognitive, regardless!  Just freakin' walk with me, OK?  Let those words sink in, even if only for the sake of argument.

"Every word is likely true..."  Woof!  Implication rears its unsettling head.

Be unsettled, its good for you, as Dolan moves right up there with what this writer has generally considered the "Brahms, Bachs, and Beethovens (et sig al)" of classical Ufology.  That's ufology with an unashamed capital "U". Heroes all.

This lengthening list includes my ever evolving ufological taproots, presently E.J. Ruppelt, J.E. McDonald, D. Keyhoe, and J. Vallee. Around these seminal four... are my other very highly respected ufological *musicians*: Friedman, Hall, Clark, Sturrock, Haines, Maccabee, Feschino, Connors, and McKenna, et significant al.  What an orchestra!  Is it too much to say Dolan could conduct a classic score of same?  Bet on it.

Special mention must be made of the person re-lighting the kindling of my interest over a decade ago:  Robert Hastings, an unsung hero (...forgetting all of the preceding are actually pretty *unsung*...)... and forgetting also the illuminating instruction I've subsequently received as a result of Mr. Dolan's work, an instruction indicating a demonstrated need for a much broader and more inclusive roster... One reflecting a more complete ufological *pantheon*, where even the reader takes a small part?  ...I digress.

Quality folks abound, patient reader!  Dolan; however, is an exceptionality.

All of the aforementioned intrepid researchers write, and write effectively, rationally, and relevantly... ...but none have reached out and rung my cognitive gong for a stunning academic connection to UFOs, or remotely grabbed me by the intuitional and inspirational stacking swivels of intellectual sensibilities... ...like Dolan's first volume, "UFOs And The National Security State..."!  

All of the preceding researchers mentioned have rocked my WORLD to one degree or another... Verily, they come to be joined, prominently, by Mr. Dolan.
Sincerely, all the way through his magnificent manuscript one is compelled to take continuous astonished stock of ones shaken sensibilities! Truth.

"...What?!?", readers will frequently exclaim to themselves while on this rich literary journey! All indications are, you see, that what you are reading is the way it "was..." ...THEN, and the way, reader, that it "is..." ...NOW!

Let that sink in too! The universe really is stranger than we know, you know?
Nothing is really as it appears! The *rabbit hole* of which I speak is much, much deeper (and more convoluted) than we ever would have imagined!  All is a self-generated illusion we make up collectively as we go along, the best minds are saying.   

But that's good news, reader, I expect.  Why?  It is because it puts the "Kingdom," right here, at hand!  Doesn't it?   

See, getting out of the cloistered *box* or out-grown play-pen always is a key to the Kingdom... even if you do cut yourself on a knife in the *kitchen*or burn yourself on the *stove*...  I digress again.

Back to Volume One, Dolan informs us that our ufological deck was MARKED from the beginning!  This is without regard to an arbitrary culture's stealthy stacking, double and bottom dealing, or obvious missing cards.  These are cards manipulated from the shadows of that jealous and duplicitous society that culture imposes for the convenience of only a few!  

Revealed outrage!  ...Outrage you can cut with that aforementioned *knife*, friend, by the way!  And that's the problem...Why you're kept intellectually penned by your society at once covetous and jealous of your individual power, reader!  Culture restricts access to new tools!

Verily!  Know that a bill of damaged ufological goods has been sold to us and continues to be sold TODAY by the aforementioned culture, Dolan warns succinctly!  Know only that it is sold in a manner more insidiously and sociopathically evolved than it ever was before, he informs!  Truth again.

Mainstream historical materials were (and are!) of prevaricating issue, and a secondary slight-of-hand of shameless and self-serving duplicity festoons the cruel imperatives of impious and self-serving persons who have errantly published that decidedly bogus history!    Truth, still.

Moreover, these are persons whose only claim to *righteousness*, *power*, and *control* is (and was!)... that they'd had the money...

They'd always had the *money*... They have the money now, reader!  Do you know that as not true?

Unquestionably, Dolan reports in Volume I that a pig in a ufological poke was proffered and shoved down the throat of a fearful, war-weary, already sacrificing, but badly informed citizenry since the 40's... ...by a lapdog media, even then! 

"Fearful, war-weary, already sacrificing... badly informed..." and doesn't that sound familiar even today, reader?  An eerie foreshadowing.

Think that media has gotten any less capable of that unethical and self-serving manipulation?  Return to the *guess* queue for another, if you do.

Additionally, Dolan reports, at the same time, the beginnings of a coterie of insane and unaccountable black-box-agencies-without-oversight schemes and maneuvers (Hoover-drones!).  These busily, secretly, unethically... illegally... immorally... exercise their programs ...resulting in our aggregate personal ignorance and our contrived uninformed *consent*as a society today!  

...This is of course forgetting the incandescent hatred individual American citizens must endure from much of the rest of the world currently... largely as a result of the reported mal-management and agency chicanery iterated, chronicle-ized, if not proved in Dolan's pages!

...As the preceding world "burns," its skies remain pregnant with unidentified —all but ignored if startlingly INCREDIBLE—flying objects! These are objects capable of the most astounding, other worldly, and flatly impossible aerodynamics achievable!  These are objects, moreover, not found *within* but  outside our aggregate imagination!  They are the *other*!

My hyperbole circuit-breaker remains ice cold. 

From the very beginning, Dolan clearly demonstrates, and at the very start (of the "modern flap" in 1947?), CREDIBLE people were giving CREDIBLE reports to CREDIBLE officials running CREDIBLE investigations, and these reports were, in turn, considered CREDIBLE by the even more elevated and hyper CREDIBLE!

That's incredible!

What happened? Where did that "imperative of credibility" go, and go so abruptly and suspiciously? Dolan has more than a little rational insight into that!

Rest easy, reader, even as your short hairs curl!  Dolan provides this insight while being assiduously careful with the facts of ufological history ...and history in general! In a long and painstaking research effort Dolan has produced a work so incisive, well-ordered, and reasonable that the well cultivated fog usually surrounding the subject of ufology begins to lift like a micro-waved cloud!  

Yes! Wary of the usual "woo-woo" pitfalls, Dolan is hugely successful in providing facts that a reader can put on their own framework of ufological understanding.  The reader is free to derive their own ufological conclusions!

*Answers* are not supplied so much as they are refreshingly replaced by rational discussion of the facts as they occur in time... but one can still derive all the *answers* one can handle, honored reader, be unsettled! You can connect the dots well passed what might make you uncomfortable... and then know that many *dots* remain.  More good news!  The better dot is the known dot.  Blissful ignorance is a lie.

Dolan refuses to insult the reader's intelligence by dictating conclusions like some *researchers*. Dolan is a real historian, I add, unlike canted pretenders like PK, and I'm only telling you what I've observed!  

Truth, I suspect, though Heaven falls...  And if it so easily can fall, reader?  It probably should.

Grabbing indiscriminately from Dolan's book, some of the discussion includes Dolan's very reasonable thinking on how and why UFOs are treated as a cultural joke.  It covers how and why *grand* underrated conspiracies are patently real!  He also exposes the too conveniently and reflexively interpreted subversive nature of UFOs... perhaps the real problem with UFOs, you'll come to find finishing the volume, for the *mainstream* loathing onus to which I allude!  ...The "Catbird" is reluctant to give up his ill-got seat!

The mainstream cultural mechanisms in place for the de-legitimization of ufology are identified and iterated.  Indications are exposed regarding ufological secrets that are merely representative of... even more astonishing secrets! Let THAT sink in!  What a wondrous world we COULD be living in but for the soulless arbitrary manipulating us!
Additionally, the unsettling suggestion that the aggregate secrecy furiously maintained, facilitated, and protected by a non-accountable and non-elected *leadership* alluded to here is that these secrets are kept... likely NOT for the reader's benefit, and indeed to an eventual detriment at the ufological denouement! Verily! Yes!

From the book: Do stiff-walking and anal skeptics reveal their pompous ignorance, prejudice, and presumptive conservativeness with the questions they ask... and the questions they refuse to ask? Have many more "quality" persons had *encounter experiences* with genuine UFOs than we know about?  Was the infamous, tone-setting, and high-water "Condon Committee" infiltrated, torpedoed, and a patent fraud from the start?  Ditto the "Robertson Panel"? 

Does ufology really rate a respectable History? Why? How long has our government actually been spying on its rank and file citizenry?  When!? What must have occurred at Roswell?  How? What are the interests of ephemerally covert intelligence communities regarding UFOs, then... and so likely worse now?

Can Mr. Dolan provide citation for his incredible, far reaching, and illuminating report?  Hundreds, reader!  Read the book. The preceding teasers don't even get past the first chapter! Read the book!  Buckle up, prepare for warp, reader, but read the book!  Strap yourself down and hit the switch for hyper-speed, but read the book!

Read the book to hone a cutting edge for the inexorable future! Read the book to become more than a mere buff of the garden-variety ufological! Read the book to begin a process of scraping the cultural scales of the last century from insulted eyes ready to enjoy a new clarity of that more unfettered human vision!

...Read the book and exercise a new freedom! Read the book to catapult us all to the very real STARS! Read the book, friends and neighbors, to come refreshingly and positively... newly... alive!

It's a textbook. It's a riveting account! It's stranger than fiction, more informative than a quality self-help manual, and it is a genuine ufological secular bible masquerading as a hot page-turner!  The aforementioned hyperbole breaker remains icy.

I could go and on, be more effusive yet (believe that!), but I pause with reluctance (if to the relief of some... I'm sure.) so the abused reader can visit the site below for an affordable (cheap at three times the price, friends and neighbors!) copy of their own. This book is off the tall end of the star scale, seriously! I unabashedly give it my highest possible recommendation, still!

http://www.richarddolanpress.com/#!chronology-of-a-cover-up-1941-1973/c13n2
Finally!  A book regarding the ufological FUTURE, written about the ufological PAST, and providing some REAL insight on the... real, remember (!)... ufological PRESENT!
"Real History" folks, earning every parsec of Apollo "14" astronaut Edgar Mitchell's towering endorsement on the thick book's (decidedly clever if simple!) cover. "Thorough and Monumental," that justifiably elite moon-walker said...

With all respect to Doctor Mitchell... His comment is actually reduced to stupefying understatement! Were even a sizable minority of (real) Americans (forgetting for a moment persons anywhere!) to read this book, the aggregate holistic sensibility of the entire world could take a quantum leap forward!

This book is that important; this book has that imperative; this book is that current and relevant... ( the book should have been written back in 1949 and we would now inhabit that living ring of breathtaking construction in our own asteroid belt I'd written about earlier... ...be reaching out to the promise of the ever beckoning stars)!

In closing? This writer's hyperbole circuit-breaker never popped, nor even got warm! 

Believe it. 

Volume II next, reader. Read on.

Culture's Failure

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What's gone around has come around our circle many times.  Still, some get smeared for cheating but the cheater's undefined. Too, where "newborns" gnaw at ankles of the aged, dulling teeth, they mewl their dreary posits like the "first time" they've released.*

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Newbies think they have their "answers" so they're bellicose and smirking but the ground must quake beneath them... lack of manners isn't working!

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These new-guys?  They're like pipe-bombs of impatience, I detect. They have that youthful vigor of the outraged if perplexed. They've just resolved hypocrisies, outlined in decades past, but think them new, re-prosecute... so run right out of gas.

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Intransigent and churlish, they refuse to pay respect, so then like a child's expected? Trade their favor for neglect.

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...But they've "purpose," unremitting, that pretends to see them through, if righteous in their outrage (which conflicts their point of view). They are betrayed and short-changed, so... their aim is wrenched awry. It's the engines of their culture they should discount and decry.

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The 'old' guys, then, new scapegoats for the 'young' guy's dearth of depth... these fight, anew, old battles... when those "battles" have been met!

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In wars been fought so many times credulity is strained; progression lacks progressiveness so advancement is restrained.  Where we revisit "failure" as regards what's clearly "failed" we stupefy our furtherance and betray what truly sails.
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No, there is much to qualify a study of this type.  UFOs?  Reality... and sans all guile or hype.
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Example? Dave Rudiak** is much maligned for construction and detail. He is, in fact, most criticized... for covering subjects well!  His "Ramey stuff" is smoking gun! Printy's powder's wet; "smart lawyers" wade assumptive-ness... they cross a line? You bet.

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The quandary of Dave's hecklers is that failure to provide... a "counter golf-swing" good enough and so improve their lie.

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Hall**: too ancient hard-nose? It remains he wrote "the book." He's chronicled, and early, son, a long, hard... hoary look. He can be forgiven, then, impatience some deride... as they prosecute their ignorance from the shoulders he'd provide.

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He's earned in spades the accolades that he still does without... He is "the old man down the road" whom "Creedence" sang about.

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Clark's**** a "snob elitist" and an "ET plutocrat"? There's precious little substance in assessing such like that. Like those preceding indicate (in decades, real time), of that there is small evidence, bad reason, and no rhyme.

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An honored man won't suffer fools who beg to be corrected, then fix upon 'inconsequence' to keep their "ass" protected...

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These are men perceiving such, which shall not be denied... the common sense pervading same who "look so they can find."  The data is the data and to which we'd follow that?  We're not deceived, we're energised to finally "bell" that cat!
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Space/time's near infinity precludes "we are alone."  Suggested "surface areas" posit "others," Holmes! 

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...See, stand with me in desert's dark sans city-light or shine.  The air is cold and dry and stark... a moment froze in time. The star field is... immense... out there, a billion points of light... bedazzling us with brilliance born from "reds" and "blues" turned bright.

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...And that is but a fraction, friend, enough to halt your breath... it is the bald antithesis of darkness... even death...

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A million, million points of white all glitter in peruse. They symbolize an endless time... producing me and you! They are the pressure cooker of the matter that we mind, an endless chain of living things considers it in kind.

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On Earth produced are 'people'... some are humans that we know. Too, crows and whales and wolves and bees... much loved by us? Well, no...

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...Now pick one star, and any star. Pick one from all the millions! The 'space' that star must mask from view... is a trifling, tiny smidgen. Though, expand that tiny aperture; blow it up all huge: a photograph to stop your heart—a change for all your views!

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See, it's not mere stars you're seeing as the picture fills your eyes. It's billions of new galaxies as stars to fill that sky!

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A trillion, trillion points of light, all glittering out there, and each a star with planets: "surface area" mon frere,  ...And, on some extant surface, such as us came into being... We are alone or aren't, old son... and both thoughts have one freaking.
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...And that's just from the visible that the speed of light allows, beyond which is a precipice where ones terror is aroused. 
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Now tell me we're alone in "this," or the "state of God's proud art." That we "bejewel creation's crown," or light a sick Earth's fart? It's plain we're prepubescent—if passed from wombs at all! ...Prolonging immaturity insures our crippling fall.

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It's clear in layered evidence we're pompous—insincere... while UFOs remain extant and are our new frontier!

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They are the best 'sedition' if you think on it at all. That's why the 'man' deplores them... plying hurdle, screen, and stall. It's why we have an "info void" well larded by the smirks of skeptibunky charlatans and other funded jerks.

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See, Culture's in a sad denial... it's why we are distressing... we suffer culture's failing... Our culture is regressing.

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alienview@roadrunner.com
http://www.alienview.net/

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Is it not undeniable that Culture is no friend to the individual even where the individual has ever been the glad redeemer of same?

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*The ufological truth is not sought and even demonstrated falsity must be discredited over and over again, by design this writer suspects.  This is true on both sides of the aisle. The line between becomes a smeared morass. 

**Richard Hall

***David Rudiak

****Jerry Clark

A Hero & A Heroine

A Hero & A Heroine

by Alfred Lehmberg

Dr. James E. McDonald, seminal ufologist and a man of undeniably objective science, was a man who might be observed at two seemingly disparate levels. On one level he possessed exactly what our duplicitous society stridently proclaims it prefers from its citizenship: intelligence, courage, self-improvement, civic involvement, and sterling productivity. He was ever a total asset to humankind's elevation and advancement on every front! A quality first-rate citizen! 

On the other hand, he was a hapless and betrayed fool—howsoever magnificent, brought low as a result of the most ham-handed and vexed betrayal a society could mete out to one of its own! He was a fool because he put faith into the faithless! I think both observations are correct as strongly as I believe that McDonald can be, oddly enough, congratulated and otherwise lauded on both of these levels.  

See, it wasn't his failure! It was ours!

At once, Dr. McDonald’s story is a hard lesson even if it is a much-needed and certainly gainful inspiration to us all. This is what is drawn from Ann Druffel's powerful, informative, and very well-woven—excitingly readable—biography of James McDonald, entitled Firestorm: Dr. James E. McDonald’s Fight for UFO Science (Wildflower Press, 2003).

Dr. McDonald, by way of introduction, was a good man, a kind man, a renaissance man, and a family man; he was a man instrumental, key actually, in elevating the status of aggregate ufology to the level of seriousness that it remotely enjoys—against all odds—today. 

Yet, today, he is almost totally unknown even by those with more than a passing interest in the field. There can be little in this area of UFOs that is more unjust.

No, this is an egregious tragedy beyond debate. Ms. Druffel, in a peerless effort, would put that error aright. 

Druffel portrays the lettered physicist James E. McDonald, accurately it would seem, as a highly respected world-class research scientist and much-beloved teacher, academic coach, and gifted educator. An intellectual paragon on multiple levels, a true polymath extraordinaire, he was a renowned atmospheric physicist, a nascent prototypical ecologist, an incisive social scientist, and a master of diverse multiple subjects... full stop: a brilliant man in every regard. He changed the minds of hostile governments, steered academic boards, chaired lofty research sections, and headed significant social causes.

Then he got interested in UFOs … cue the precipitous music.

I’ve written before about an insidious social aspect of our hijacked society I tentatively call the Mothman Futility Mechanism (MFM). The sufferer of this mechanism, briefly, is an otherwise rational person innocently encountering an aspect of the genuine and highly strange. 

In a subsequent and justifiably passionate investigation of that very real strangeness, this person is destroyed in one way or another as a result of paying an awful and inevitable penalty for the pursuit of that "enigma’s teasing challenge," ...as it is imposed, anyway, by that non-elected leadership extant and mentioned before in other papers. 

Such was the fate, then, of one Jim McDonald. Druffel writes a compelling cameo, indeed, about the aforementioned "mechanism" in action. It is portrayed exceptionally well in the heartbreaking and heartbroken subject of her startling biography.  Back to McDonald...

This fine man, reader, by step, by increment, and seemingly by evil design was progressively failed by society, its science, and, as a result of toxic engineering, by those closest to him. He would pay more than most MFM sufferers—There have been others—for his provoked transgression. He would be—perhaps deliberately—aggravated so that he suffered un-mitigating depressions he found, at last, no longer tolerable...

Indeed, Druffel succinctly conveys how he would be inexorably driven over the cliffs of the blackest despair by the activities and initiatives of duplicitous others. He would be goaded, lead actually; drawn out on a precarious limb after years of government duplicity, institutional subterfuge, and agency chicanery. All that was extant!

...And then the limb was sawed off. With great deliberation and at the nadir of abject hopelessness, he took his own life. 

Consider, his would be the kind of intelligent effort and efficacious artifice that the aforementioned agencies, institutions, and governments would want to "finesse" for a "managed failure" or conveniently "thwarted success." One might be drawn to that conclusion when reading between Druffel’s heartfelt lines. Indeed, I recall that many of the major players on the ufological scene have been documented as being drawn down the same kinds of primrose path ending so tragically for McDonald. His story, again, is a pointed lesson for the observer of it:

Jacques Vallee wrote about Linda Moulton Howe and Stanton Friedman being played in a similar fashion. J. Allen Hynek and Edward J. Ruppelt wrote about the many hundreds of credible witnesses who initiate a report and then, abruptly, don’t follow up on their testimony. Richard Dolan and Robert Hastings make rationally credible cases for an unelected government’s ufological interference and manipulation … and worse things.

Worse things, reader!

Given today’s realities, one could surmise many reasons why someone of McDonald’s caliber and propitious drive would have to be "stopped"—one way or another! Truth can be inconvenient for the guys in the enclosed and catered cat-bird seats.

The mechanisms used against the trusting Doctor are obvious and not so obvious, Druffel further illuminates. Not the least of these—jealous mechanisms and mouthpieces of a hostile mainstream—were the scurvy tactics of otherwise inexplicable persons such as Philip Klass and Edward Condon. These were shallow men without imagination and courage, at best. At worst, they were drunk on their own baseless hubris and perhaps even cooperating drones for that conjectured unelected leadership alluded to. 

Both were two-faced authoritarian murmurers with a predilection for whisper-campaigning, name-calling, hate-mongering, and the yellowest of yellow presses. They were the hackish agents of stupefying misrepresentation and the instruments of crass deception and misinformation. They were the blindsiding back-shooters and the artless shadow-snipers. 

They are the reason the rest of us are reluctant to be bold!

These, and others like them—known and unknown, recognized and not so recognized—were the cowardly hurdles that Dr. McDonald was compelled to clear. They were the cheaters. They were the liars. They, themselves, were what they were pretending to warn us against! See, they threw dismissive hurdles in front of McDonald which was bad enough, but one expects that honorable hurdles be visible. These were not; they were corner shot, a knife in Jim's back, as often as not.

McDonald, on the other hand, Druffel writes, was only a genuine scientist of the first water made aware, as a result of his researches, that a significant number of UFO reports could not have prosaic explanations. He was justifiably intrigued.

He was also demonstrably and justifiably aghast that his much-revered science, in the person of the military and the scientists employing it, was not taking a remotely competent look at UFOs and their ancillaries. That UFOs should be exhaustively investigated was abundantly obvious to McDonald, along with few significant others. 

He understood all too clearly that they were not being properly investigated by any means. So he readily took up, as a man who is not a coward will, the campaign to bring mainstream science online for that competent investigation. We are well served thereby, ultimately, that he did.

For his trouble, Druffel notes, he was bait-and-switched, drawn-out over empty air with high-level and well-connected promises of the financial support necessary for a quality investigation which, carrot-like, never materialized. All this was occurring while he, along with his family, was phone-tapped and threateningly followed in obvious and threatening ways! Was his wife even cat-fished by a distracting honey male honeypot in the midst of a marital turmoil brought about by the unasked-for circumstances?

Concurrently, even as McDonald is hobbled and persecuted in his righteous study of the problem, Edward Condon throws away a half million dollars in government grants for a negatively biased foregone conclusion regarding UFOs that he would later foist on the scientific community and a hapless public, very nearly ruining the whole ufological enterprise with his patent obfuscation of it, out of hand!

The bastard! Verily.

Condon and Klass were too little, too late for a complete destruction of nascent ufology, it seems, as Druffel points out with ready alacrity. Condon was clearly and suspiciously identified by McDonald, even before the formal report was released, as a duplicitous ax-grinder who apparently had not even read the report which he chaired and for which he was writing the conclusion. McDonald also made decisively short work of Philip Klass’s ludicrous expository, too... made him look like a fool. Klass was, summarily, inarguably, and effortlessly dismissed. Klass would later caper, one wonders, exacting his revenge on McDonald.

See, but for McDonald’s sterling science, faultless logic, expansive intelligence, and stalwart bravery, the bucket of cold water poured on UFOs by these two uber-denialists might have snuffed out the interest in them, altogether. McDonald was truly key in keeping them alive for subsequent generations. Druffel makes this clear, also. 

Oh, but what McDonald might have done with the half-million in coinage that Condon just pissed away on his fake study! I don’t think it entirely unlikely that humanity might already be living expressive lives in the asteroid belt as a result. 

...A living ring of humanity around our star; a glittering halo of progressive humankind worn like a bracelet effortlessly adorning our sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter… but I digress.

Why was Dr. McDonald a fool, then? Everything expressed thus far would seem to indicate that he was a fool’s very antithesis. And he was, good reader; he was. 

...But he was also a Boy Scout and a true believer. Not a "believer" in the paranormal or a "believer" in UFOs, but a believer in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people as a working reality of the truly existential. The rule of sensible law and leveled playing fields... See what I mean?  He was doomed.

He had a Boy Scout’s confidence in the institution of a science that went where the data went and not where it could, itself, be driven. He believed in demonstrable right and the courage of tested convictions, not easy convenience, untested faith, and profitable complacency. He believed in the rule of law, the rationality of due process, and the efficacious profits of professional behavior; he believed in the inevitable elevations and advancements discovered in frank open-mindedness, and he believed in the certain ultimate rewards found in a passionate investigation for the truth. ...Truth though heavens fall. McDonald believed in America.

McDonald’s belief was that his society was an accurate reflection of the preceding. Even as it is not now. It was not then. McDonald, astonishingly, even as he can’t really be blamed, one discovers, believed he fought his scientific battles on a field that was remotely level. See, McDonald thought there was a National Honor.  He was disabused of that and it cost him his life.

The monumentally magnificent fool, forgetting for a moment that he is exactly the kind of fool that this writer and Ms. Druffel, I suspect, aspire to be and must admire; in fact, the only foolishness we’d insist upon. Fairness, rationality, forthcomingness, progressiveness, consistency, intelligence, and individual respect one should be able to take for granted given no demonstration by a concerned party that it is undeserved.

Any other path is back-stepping, inane insanity. It is also apparent foolishness given the state of the union today and half a century’s ufological denial, extra-normal dismissal, and thoughtlessly executed and canted denunciation by profit-taking pelicanists, scurvy skeptibunkies, and conflicted klasskurtxians.

These were the presumptions Dr. McDonald held, writing off the inconsistencies of science he witnessed as a monumental cock-up of crass incompetence and not what it more than likely was—a monumental cover-up of crafted duplicity.

...And one not in our best interests I’d suspect; nor, I predict, would Ms. Druffel. Those who "have" would keep on "having" without regard to the sensibilities of those who have "not."

Would that McDonald had been better able to take stock of his culture’s duplicity, he might have proceeded along more successful lines. Druffel points out a few occasions where information held out on him by knowledgeable authority provoked assumptions he was making regarding the veracity of professional persons he was otherwise forced to deal with. Thus, more encouragement outwards on that swaying and precipitous limb. 

These were the officious anti-intellectuals and ethically bankrupt authoritarian toads such as Klass, Condon, Menzel, a host of intelligence operatives, wind-sensing (and passing) politicians, and timid academic functionaries. Betrayers of truth, all!

Verily, Ann Druffel is clear that Dr. McDonald was a fine, upstanding, and intelligent man of ethical consistency and rare courage who was betrayed by persons closest to him; betrayed when those persons knew he was on the right track, doing the right thing, and doing it in exactly the right way.

Where was the doctor’s wife when he had the future by the shirttails and enigma by the scruff? Where were his learned colleagues who knew he was right when he was blindsided by the convenient bias of pompous detractors who’d have to scale a ladder to buff his shoe tops? Where were his friends? What have they done in the aftermath to keep McDonald alive then, and for the future?

Dr. McDonald’s story is a hard lesson because we are reminded of the prices that are sometimes demanded for the pursuit of human advancement. He is a wonderful inspiration when we recall that his name will be remembered long after the names of Klass and Condon and Menzel are less than ignoble dust.

In closing, this is a book of such power, intelligence, and accuracy that it has compelled this writer to reassess all of Ms. Druffel’s past work in a new, more interested, and attentive... light! It is that kind of book. Not to diminish the volume in any way, but it could be a dazzling film featuring Matthew McConaughey or Russell Crowe as the good Doctor.

They might do Mac justice.

Firestorm! The very title of Ann Druffel’s book is an astonishing hint to just how close McDonald may have been to putting us in the asteroid belt to which I’d alluded earlier. When all this busts loose and any dust settles... ...Firestorm!, eh? Be that as it may, I am improved, fortified, and emboldened with the reading of it. 

I’d suggest you would be, too.

Lighting The Flatwoods Fuse -- Part II of II

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Lighting The Flatwoods Fuse

by Alfred Lehmberg

PART TWO

When I awoke early on the seventh everyone had already been up for awhile moving like a platoon of Army Ants.  On the previous day, after I'd retired, it had been discovered that the venue where the event had been planned was short required sound and lighting equipment! Replacement equipment provided by the furious activity of Larry Bailey's two younger sons drew too much power for the recently restored 50's type movie theatre and was blowing fuses.  The sound and light boards needed to be virtually rewired, heavy klieg lights had to be procured and mounted, colored gels and masks were cut and affixed to carousels while rehearsals and run-throughs had to be completed—yesterday!

Where were the expected harsh shouts, finger-pointing, hurtful allegations, angry accusations, and exasperated capitulations?  Nowhere to be found, reader!  In its stead was a calmness, ready volunteerism, and sacrifice to common cause.   I had other things I probably should have been doing, but I even found myself setting up Stanton Friedman's 35mm slide presentations or helping Doug Gokey, one of the event security guys, set up the boards and displays of Feschino's Flatwoods mini-museum.

Forgetting the preceding for just a moment, I report that I was treated to encounters with my fellow Homo sapiens rather adding to the unusual fellowship—fellowship so thick you could breath it like it was oxygen enriched air:

Shoot Them Down!  It is an important story, reader, perhaps even the story given the remarkable genuineness of it.  It deserved the best possible foot forward and everyone gravitated to that end—this story would be told, brave persons would be celebrated, and the sacrifice of departed service members would be remembered and even vindicated!  That brave deceased, involved and perhaps even perishing in undeclared and secret air war with extraterrestrials—just pause a moment to breathe on that—is difficult to blow off.  Everyone was spring-loaded to giving their best.

First up is John Barker.  From 1950 thru 1958, Barker, an acknowledged expert in military aviation history, was a close 1952 associate of early WV radio personality Hugh McPherson.  McPherson was a huge WV Personality.

Barker, now in his eighties and still tack sharp, was out to the Bailey Fisher farm, scene of the celebrated Flatwoods Monster incident, soon after the highly strange affair went down! He took reports on the acrid alien smells, saw the terror in interviewed participants, and wandered the—still fresh—landing sites. He observed the cordons restricting entry into the inexplicable "what-are-they-doing-here" military presence... forever impressed, himself, that we are not alone.  Barker—still a trusted, if largely retired professional person with a long established wealth in community idiosyncratic credit regarding his honor and dependability—was there.

We spent about 90 minutes chatting about his deep and abiding interest in UFOs. and a warmer and more eloquent elder gentleman I have yet to meet.  Listening to the articulate Mr. Barker, I was reminded of the depth, scope, and timelessness of the ufological milieu I suspect I could get in no other way...

Next up was Scott Ramsey.  Mr. Ramsey, FYI, has focused the past 20 years tracking and documenting the facts, piece by unsettling piece, to some pretty startling conclusions regarding the so-called "Aztec Incident," a related affair.  This incident remains, at least, relevant given the activity on both sides of the military/ ET equation which Frank Feschino trots out in two bulletproof current additions he can stand by. That should get juices flowing! ...But you, reader, discount what Feschino's discovered in his two decade and change sifting the data at the reader's peril.  The first edition of his work, remember, was butchered by an errant publisher. 

Decidedly, Feschino has separated fact from fiction regarding the alleged Aztec, New Mexico Crash/Landing of 1948.  His painstaking investigative journey has taken him to 29 states and drawn interviews from some 60-plus 1st and 2nd hand witnesses. In addition, Mr. Ramsey has archived over 2200 supporting Atomic Energy Commission and US Air Force Documents, including uncovering three old and abandoned radar bases still suspiciously secret more than half a century later!  What's up with that, eh?

Ramsey's been a busy man, and no less busy is his lovely wife, companion, and partner in the concise, detailed, and extensive research, Suzanne.  Scott himself was very personable, had an affability provoking a comfortable friendliness. Scott was there to support Feschino.

We've never been "in Kansas," reader.  The Ramsey's understand same.

Realize, reader, in a short digression, that the jury is still way out on the Aztec occurrence.  MJ-12... Roswell, Flatwoods—all the cases that more recent errant persons, fulsome skeptibunkies and crass klasskurtxians—struggling for the unjust fame of current punditry—love to try to discount.  Denial seems the new masturbation.

Though, further trying to throw a bucket of cold water on the Flatwoods affair is not the carpet-bagging stranger coming to the great state of West Virginia who doesn't really make a dime even trying to cover expenses... it is West Virginia's own, ironically enough.  Based on fatuous bupkis?  Some local press came not to praise "Caesar," but to cremate him!

Locked into the dreary pedantic and unable to appreciate at least one impassioned metaphor, Mr. Bill Lynch,  astonishingly if predictably clueless and uninformed—but with a ready if inexplicable sneer regardless—misses the point, the chance, and the journalistic boat, eh?  Missed the boat, when he knew better: follows, a link to a dead page at a Charleston, WV Newspaper...

http://thegazz.com/gblogs/strangeplaces/2007/08/29/space-aliens-want-our-women-and-maybe-a-corndog/  The link is dead but the reader can detect the predictable cant.  A "good laugh" is had all around, eh?

Relegating perhaps hundreds of brave servicemen and the sacrifices they made to an insulting joke regarding "aliens wanting our women" and perhaps as some second choice, "corndogs"... is in the poorest of taste, at best.  At worst it is a stake in the heart of an honorable pecuniary opportunity for West Virginia that could not be achieved in any other way!  Famous flying saucers don't land in just everyone's back forty. How ironic to spit in ones own face, but Mr. Lynch seemed to have achieved same.

But the program itself.  What about the program itself, minus the 12 foot Flatwoods Monster replicas, the huge saucers painted in 3D, the fog curling off the front of the stage, the red lasers, colored lights and finishing mock shuttle (of the imagination?) launches powered by twin nitrogen gas cannons?   What about the program itself, minus the street closed off outside and festooned with automobiles popular in 1952—even one authentic and perfectly reconditioned Olive Drab Army Jeep looking ready enough to strike out to the crash site circa 1952—all highlighted with easel mounted placards iterating facts and figures of the affair at Flatwoods?

The program, patient reader, is a compelling multimedia presentation including a very thorough telling of an astonishing story as real as spots on apples and more relevant than football on TV!  Persuasive and compelling original songs by Anthony Sica, performed live and on video, question our Government's role in the aggregate ignorance of every one of us.  One of his compelling songs even channels the spirit of one of the pilots lost as a result of "Shoot Down" orders issued by the highest authority, plaintively beseeching that he be remembered for his sacrifice! 

Frank Fechino gives a short talk before showing his Flatwoods documentary film and solemnly iterates the names of pilots known to be lost in the incompetently reported, poorly conducted, and childishly chronicled, if suspicious, "official records" of the time.  He would honestly choke up, a little, as he recited this harrowing litany on the first night of the program.  He recovered, and wouldn't blubber like I would later—forgetting he sure primed my pump—but Feschino thoughtfully mourned the memories of young men forgotten and betrayed even as they bravely sailed into the teeth of their ultimate sacrifice!

 

The reader is asked to imagine himself—or herself—as the pilot of an all-weather state of the art Air Force jet September, 12 1952, during a documented 21 and a half hours of sustaind UFO activity.  The jet, loaded with dozens of transonic ballistic rockets sits—engines roaring—on the dark and stormy tarmac in standby with orders compelling one to launch themselves into the teeth of the complete unknown: ordered to interdict, engage, and shoot down UFOs.  Such orders were issued, reader.

Last not least, Stanton Friedman, in great voice and in his usual inimitable and extremely well reasoned manner, lays out for the listener not only how possible it is for Aliens to be here, but how possible it is, based on our own well understood technology, for us... to get there!  This may begin to explain an Alien's interest in our humble Earth.  Enough. 

Reader?  I must report that the two day program, conceived in an efficacious sincerity and a tireless diligence, was a success without qualification even as it cost all the participants at the start.  See?  It's to become, I suspect, a dry fuse leading to an explosion of the future... for the future! 

Consider, this investment of time, passion, and real dollars was supported in an unstinting and selfless camaraderie entirely bereft of ego!  It was executed with imagination, intelligence, sacrifice, and bravery; the Event was a bona fide success.  Smoke that, hostile punditry!

In a sidebar, this writer hopes that as a result of this success the people of West Virginia realize three things:

One, that they are top dead center on the short list of one of the most astonishing and precipitous events of modern times, two, that they owe Larry Bailey and his three fine sons, especially Gilbert Bailey... three of West Virginia's own, a hearty vote of thanks for bringing the preceding to them... and three... just how poorly they are served by what passes for some journalism in the beautiful state of West Virginia.

The Flatwoods Fuse is lit folks.  Buckle in.

Eh?  Oh, right.  The aforementioned tears.

Larry Bailey decided at the very beginning of his initiative that he wanted to tie kids in somehow with the interesting historical aspect of the Flatwoods affair and its presentation.  Consequently, when the opportunity provided by Charleston's Heritage Towers Museum presented itself, that he sponsor a Flatwoods Monster Art contest for age-grouped kids, Bailey jumped aboard without the slightest hesitation.

Well, the two-day program is finally at an end and we're shutting down the theater on the last night.  Everyone is exhausted and ready for some down-time.  Bailey is insistent, though, that we return to the Heritage Museum, unannounced, and congratulate the kids who'd won in their age groups.  Well, at this point, we'd have done anything for old Ben Cartright, eh?  We put on our spurs, and in a kind of Flatwoods Monster Posse, moseyed down the street on foot a few hundred meters to the Museum.  Included was Larry and his son Gilbert, Stanton Friedman, Frank Feschino, and myself among others.

We walked in the front door of the, really, very interesting cultural museum—let me quickly digress and tell the reader about a genuine ceremonial grain door from the Ufologically famous Dogon Tribe in Africa on display! Look that up!  Anyway...

The museum is all tricked out "Flatwoods monster and UFOs," the kids have been watching UFO and Science programs all afternoon and evening, and they're keyed up in a pleasant and productive sort of way, anyway.  Celebrating their own very real local history, the kids wave glowing green chem-stix as the adults validate same wearing fluorescent green and bobbing antenna.  Absent from these educated persons was the knowing look, the klasskurtxian sneer, or the remotest smug pellicule of same (sic).  I was genuinely touched.

Well, into this themed and very pleasant exuberance of kids and adults, and a big feature of the program all day authoritatively on television anyway—walks Stanton T. Friedman!  Friedman is followed by the "star of the extravaganza down the street at the theatre," followed by a merry band exploding flashes and otherwise chronicling the event, plus the event promoter.

Well, the kids were all "...oh WoW!" and "We don't believe it!"!  Eyes were wide and breathing was quick and fast!  I could tell that the kids appreciated this capstone to a great day for them... firing their imaginations with a future looming somehow beyond economic depressions outside, right here in their own Capital City!  I should have recognized the signs, the thickening in the throat and itchy eyes.  I tried, successfully, for some small control.

The  winners of the age-grouped art contest quickly presented themselves and they all just beamed, but one little fellow fairly eclipsed the rest.  He glowed with an inner light bespeaking, it seemed, that this was the absolute and uncontested high point of his short life so far; heroes and book-writers like Stanton Friedman had walked down to see him, congratulate him, and shake his hand... He looked up grinning into Feschino's face and said, "Mr. Feschino, I want to write and draw and paint, just like you someday..."

Need I go on, reader?  Eyes filled right there, but with a masterful control—I'm a manly man dammit—they didn't spill until we were out of the museum into the hot night walking back to the theatre.  Still, I was fine, recovering nicely... then Larry had to say, "Did you see the expression on that little kid talking to Frank?" 

My tears gushed like rococo fountains.  Me and anyone else with a lick of sense, a shred of intelligence, or some small brace of consciousness, eh?  No apologies here.  Remembering what was said earlier about necks and field stations, dare to mock me, eh?

Read on.

Lighting The Flatwoods Fuse -- Part I of II

"Son, when a man knows deep down in his heart, when he really knows, he doesn't have to argue about it, he doesn't have to prove anything. Just knowing is enough." -- Ben Cartright

   

   
      

      

   

Lighting The Flatwoods Fuse -- Part I of II

Lighting The Flatwoods Fuse

 by Alfred Lehmberg

PART ONE

Here it is, then: more proof positive that while I've "...eaten dead burnt bodies and still have veins in my teeth," I'm just another old softy when you boil me down to my component parts.  Indeed, I wouldn't even bring this up but that I had too many witnesses.  Caught blubbering like an old pensioner as a result of certain occurrences, howsoever poignant, I make my report.

Still, so as to put the first efficacious spin on it, thereby, I'll tell you myself! See?  I was moved.

Seriously, what brought this blubbery verklempt-ness about... forgetting for a moment the "bodies and veins" of the preceding paragraph and the fact that, properly provoked?  I am quite capable of pulling off an offending head and using the resultant neck for a field toilet.  A former Senior TAC at the US Army's only Warrant Officer Candidate School, I've made former Navy SEALS, training for an Army Warrant, tense.  

Pray, then.  What precipitated my teary "verklemptitude (tm)"?

The first "Flatwoods Monster Extravaganza" was held early in the month of September on the 7th and the 8th, 2007.  This was a two evening program celebrating the 55th anniversary of one very puzzling night of many puzzling nights, actually—then and since—in a quiet little town of what remains to be decent and hardworking Americans to this day. The town is Flatwoods, West Virginia.  The time celebrated was one 12th day of September during the Indian summer of 1952.

Very briefly, reader... and brace.  It is not my intent to shock you... but perhaps as a result of an undeclared war with bona fide extraterrestrials involving the United States—let that sink in—there came to be crash-landed an alien craft with at least one seeming occupant, who, before being evacuated near Frametown, WV in a subsequent rescue by fellow ETs (!), provided for an occasion of extreme terror for the brave people of Flatwoods.  This was a courage betrayed and followed by decades of specious, unearned, and suspicious ridicule in regard of that terror!  Let's keep it real.

See, in that late summer night circa 1952 incomprehensible sightings were made, physical evidence was collected by authorities, a sizable contingent of American Military was deployed to the immediate area... ...as numerous persons got strangely ill, and one dog died.

I make no apologies.  I said "war with Aliens."  An air-war, actually, fought between the forces of the United States and Beings, astonishingly enough perhaps, from another star! 

Now, don't worry overmuch about any of the preceding, good reader.  Stranger things, I'm sure, abound in an endless multi-verse none of us, really, has a freaking clue about, eh?  It remains that this article is about a collection of sincere Human beings who, in the past, the present time, and I suspect years into the future... are reacting to the unsettling potentialities of same.  ET war.  It does boggle the mind.

Half a century later the Flatwoods Monster is, still, almost a genetic memory with the good people of West Virginia.  This is a result I think of savvy persons living there who know starships from meteors and aliens from owls... plus a book by an especially diligent and consistently patriotic investigator, Frank Feschino Jr., who has been investigating the unsettling affair for clocking up over double decades regarding his landmark book Shoot Them Down—The Flying Saucer Air War Of 1952!

Enter Gilbert Bailey.  Gilbert is the son of one Larry Bailey, the engaging West Virginian event promoter who fronted the entire two day affair out of his own pocket, and who demonstrated such expansive trust, kindness to strangers, and compassion for struggling community—that he provided a fecund potentiality for my aforementioned tears at the start.

Back to Gilbert.  Gil had encountered Frank Feschino at a book signing a few years ago while pursuing his own very cultivated, rational, and considered interest in the legitimate ufological.  Despite being a successful businessman in his own right every bit as engaging as his father, and an obviously astute person of incisive intelligence... he still found himself captivated and compelled by Feschino's detailed research.  See, on a subsequent and very synchronous visit home he'd noticed a copy of Feschino's book on his father's coffee table.  He then had a surprised, substantive, and very synergistic talk with his Dad. 

One thing leads to another: calls inquire, networking occurs, and decisions are made.  Larry Bailey decides to make something happen and commits to it—putting his money, rare bird he, where his mouth is! 

Thing is, he's never done anything like a UFO conference before, is not remotely ufological himself, and has only the barest clue given his experience very successfully promoting vintage automobiles, farm equipment, and industrial machinery in high visibility Trade Shows. 

He trusts a very capable Gilbert though, who's convinced there's a "there" there with regard to Feschino and the Flatwoods story.  Buffered by two other able sons, Scott and Ken, who fall in with wives and girlfriends to "help out Dad," they begin to provide for something not there before for the economically abused people of WV. 

What's that?

A legitimate and honorable attraction and economic hope.  To a degree?  The Flatwoods Monster could help save West Virginia.  This writer is not the first to say so.  Damned, reader, if I'm not reminded of Ben, Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe.

Verily reader, synchronicities occur, serendipities present themselves, and Larry Bailey concludes that it would be a good thing if a looming anniversary of the "Flatwoods Monster Affair" might provoke a positive, far-reaching, and efficacious attention for West Virginia, a West Virginia economically dying, unfairly and unjustly on the current Federal vine... ...but how?

Now bear in mind, reader.  All is risk.  Nobody's getting a paycheck before, during, and after the event.  Larry Bailey fails to break even, Stanton T. Friedman waives his speaking fees, and Feschino's in the hole approaching a half a mill since the start of his investigation, years ago!  Licensed, trained, and experienced sound and production guys, ably lead by presentation guru Robbie Breeze, are busting collective humps for gratis and bupkis!  Named guests expect no honorariums.  Why?

Back to Frank Feschino's stirring book, Shoot Them Down!  Remembering that I've already pointed out in a previous articles that Feschino satisfies, in proverbial spades, all the requirements for a Pulitzer prize he'll likely never receive... it seems I'm not the only one who thinks so!

Indeed, anyone who reads the book or talks to Feschino is justifiably impressed with the single-mindedness of his scholarship, the depth of his unceasing research, and the intensity of his compassionate concern for the, perhaps, hundreds of missing pilots associated with a covert, secret, and otherwise forgotten military action swept under the historical rug!  Moreover, consider, reader!  Can a substantive research activity ever have too long an attention span?

I arrived in West Virginia after a twelve hour drive from Southeast Alabama on the 6th into a parking lot of the assigned Charleston motel.  Surprisingly, I stepped out of my car, a stranger, immediately into a group of strangers, right there in the parking lot... including Stanton Friedman! 

Everyone had collected at the motel for the evening meal. The only persons I half-way knew were Frank, a few years of correspondence and one meeting over dinner the previous year vouchsafed that, and Don Hobar... who is a kind of Ray Manzerek to Frank Feschino's Jim Morrison... Feschino's friend, acting as infrastructure/organization guy.

Frank and Don broke ranks and walked out to meet me, and when we all walked back to the group, and I was introduced around... well, immediately, there were no strangers anymore!  Stanton Friedman engaged me in an immediate conversation like it had been interrupted just moments before, Larry Bailey welcomed me loudly as his "partner in crime,"—we had teamed up earlier online to cuff and pummel an especially clueless, uninformed, and obnoxious local newspaper reporter disserving West Virginia's readership, imo, but I digress.  All the rest of the guys involved gallantly extended uncomplicated and genuinely welcoming good vibes.  We were crew!

My experience with gatherings of ufological persons is that they are anxious clashes of massive egos and way short on expansive fellowship and effortless camaraderie.  Not so here.  I was among friends right from the start.  Friedman and Feschino were the stars of the show, and I guess they could be allowed a little leeway in standoffishness.  But no, they're just one of the boys. 

This feeling maintained itself for the next four days, reader, something new was in the air, for sure... but whacked out from the long drive I went to bed after dinner, retiring with a cozy, warm, and fuzzy feeling pegged to the high nines!

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In Part Two, victory is snatched from the jaws of defeat, history is revalidated, and tears are justified as far as this old soldier is concerned.