The Status Quixotic ...

Republicanistas and the new McCarthyism 

The Status Quixotic ...
by Alfred Lehmberg


Fact is?  I have a quickly dwindling free expression. All of us are effected by this creeping loss... we get used to that being the way things are, or we rage at the dying of the light.  I'm moved to rage.

For my part I remain one of the genuinely disenfranchised (denied a more decent living) for expressing rational views and criticisms regarding interesting subjects piece, part, and parcel of our flawed human consciousness and experience. These are subjects in no way extreme, violent, or prurient. They're just critical even if uncomfortable. What's the problem, really, where I'm the one out nearly a half million in lost wages over the last 15 years and not allowed a job few want to do in the first place?  My "punishment" in no way fits my "crime."

Is it the interminable essence of my writing style?  Is it my PAQ ("prosery" of arguable quality)?  Is it the starkly conscientious contentiousness of my social commentary? Is it my very rational interest in UFOs and the abduction phenomenon—among the other ancillaries of same—a reason for a summary dismissal and obvious blacklisting?  Is it age bias preferring more malleable young women to an over 50 combat vet driven to truly teach?  Is it a small public notoriety vis a vis my unwavering defense of liberal values on a 21st Century communication system?  ...Is it my breath? 

Is my composed art disturbing and unsettling—a reminder to the reader of something seemingly convenient (but unethical) to forget? Do you think that I might confuse the kids (forgetting for a moment that it is better to confuse them than to bore them)?  What?!

No one has seen fit to challenge me directly on the foundations (or the appropriateness) of my rational convictions or teaching method. All evaluations were ironically top drawer. No one does me the courtesy of an eye to eye sit-down for a little logical and fair-minded mentoring. I'm not a know-it-all, I live to learn, and I will only admit to a fairly low toleration for "dogs" (of any stripe) that won't hunt.  Regarding those "dogs" (ideas, methods, and techniques et al)... why bother except that they degrade our human experience and make us prey for powerful psychopaths?

I write epic songs, the PAQs alluded to above; they are meant to be re-sung. I find them exhilarating, myself! Each of them has its own little jazz/folk tune attendant to help carry it along and, collectively, they are like little keyholes into the universe for me.  On the astonishing ride that these things have become for me, I am allowed to see a little deeper into the murk (actually a lot deeper) than I ordinarily can.  I go *somewhere* with them, on the natch.  Folks reading have told me they can go, too, sometimes.  They may chap your butt but that is, more likely, a reaction to being pinned down and exposed.

Every sentence of my composition aspires to stand alone. Every word is carefully chosen and, as I taught the whole of a professional career and remain hard-wired for it, even a mini education if the reader should have to look one or two of them up... There're not too many of those. They are the *right* words, reader, accurate to the high nines, and they are an honest attempt to switch out verbal lightning bugs for more compelling lightning bolts.  No apologies here.  It's my understanding that's what writers do.

I'd write them, have to write them, even if I was the only reader. I have some small indication that there are a few more reading than just me, so the worst possible thing has happened... abandon all hope... I've been encouraged.

...Now you've done it...

The positive response as regards my situation by far and away exceeds the negative response which is almost nil. None have suggested that I should NOT be a teacher in a substantial amount of personal mail, while my few cowardly attackers and arbitrary detractors continue to hide in the anonymity of faceless officialdom. So, again, what's the problem, really?

Why am I paying this unreasonable and wholly unearned social price for writing songs of conscientious expression (if that's the problem)? Why do I have to endure this back-shooting dismissal for exercising "guaranteed" civil rights? Why should I allow this totally unexplained and completely unjustified reflexive disrespect for my very reasonable and conscious if fiercely secular sensibility—a sensibility well within the assumed bounds of refined civility... I mean, really, where I'm not writing about this stuff, popular culture is otherwise shoving it up my... ...nose...

You might argue that a career soldier documented as singularly gifted as regards following orders creatively is cut from a cloth not presently suited for public (and certainly private) schools, and that I would cause a disruption in the status quo. You might be right... but one must struggle to REMEMBER that that is simply not the point! The POINT is that education largely fails in this country, is an uneven academic smear of regressive, grudging, and minimal efforts, and that it only teaches children how NOT to lead (or intelligently follow) in the 21st century.  Correct me where I'm wrong.

The POINT, moreover, is that American public education is a place where the exuberant are drugged to a convenient conformity, the creative are dulled and discouraged to the lowest common denominator, and the intelligent are summarily broken to suit short term social goals. The special are largely ignored at both ends of the spectrum. It's an environ where the academic penny is saved at school to incur the pound debt cashed in on later at the penitentiary... Could that be the system: a 21st Century slave class.  Not a question.

One had better hope and pray that someone questions the status quo! See, the "status quo" creates more misinformed criminals and rational psychopaths than it needs to. The status quo deserves every test and question leveled at it. The status quo is just another dog that won't hunt. Besides, the status quo by definition must remain unchanged, and to remain unchanged is to die suffocating in your own wastes, intellectual and otherwise.

Are these the expressions that I am to be pilloried for? My "apologies"? I have eyes; I see. I have ears; I hear. Besides! I have every right of free expression this side of shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre, don't I? My expressions, further, do NOT: require my expiation, justify my continued persecution, nor do they warrant the arbitrary dismissal I've continued to suffer since I left the Army in 1992!

As I have written before, "mash something down without GOOD reason "here", and just have it pop up over "there"—only meaner." I'll leave it to the reader to appreciate what that might mean...

For my money all would have been better served by figuring some way to employ me in the necessarily vast system, but it is too LATE for that now. I was made, much too casually, an item on a professional blacklist even down to non-teaching positions in the system. It remains to be seen what the end result of that arbitrary assignation will be. A victory by either side is likely to be Pyrrhic, but I cannot go quietly away for having been merely dismissed by just ANY convenient, contrived, or arbitrary faux-academic functionary prosecuting personal faiths and philosophies regarding what he wants in his school system.  It's not just his school system.

NO, I'll NOT be silent about this new social McCarthyism persecuting the secular. I'll do as I promised many moons (or so) ago and be VERY strident about reporting any affect I've experienced as a result of my ufological interests and the unfettered artistic expressions of those interests. I'll also keep making lawful expressions of conscience and social commentary. I owe it to the best ideals of this nation (and myself) to continue, and I've not forgotten that this is America even if most everyone else CAN and HAS.

"Meet me at camera three, America."

...I was in your bosom and I am representative. I patterned myself after the best of what you taught me! For conducting myself in your best traditions I was turned away and cast out? Given opportunity (?) I'd reconsider, were it me. That would be the "Christian" thing.

The implication is that if you can't accept me at MY low octane level of civil conscientiousness, then you won't be able to accept what you MUST accept later on to survive a future that roars down upon us all like a long-tailed comet from deep space. I'm no enemy.  I'm that needed friend of conscience who breaks the inconvenient—but needed!—news, of needs, for all of us. 

I'm also you... ...and a man named William Lester, a man reportedly better educated, more experienced in public education, better read, and more communicationally with it than I to be sure. I'm not worthy.  ...And he was summarily dismissed, is my understanding, from public teaching as a result of not being a chalk dust and impotent bore to his students, as was my aspiration.

Read on.

Great One Sided Debates

Friedman

Shostak

Great One Sided Debates
by Alfred Lehmberg

Speaking recently (Thursday, July 23, 2015)  of debates where Stan Friedman regularly dusts up on Seth Shostak: though long delayed due to an alleged and unsubstantiated illness reportedly short-stopping Seth Shostak, his much anticipated debate with Stanton Friedman took place on the "Coast To Coast" radio show, George Noory providing limited sequencing and orchestration, on Wednesday, July 21st of 2004...

Let it be said that Friedman rode Shostak like a rented mule and found him just as stubborn, sullen, and recalcitrant in a debate scored nationally at 57% for Friedman, 33% for Shostak and 10% undecided.

Still... I was all set to give Dr. Shostak the benefit of the debated doubt until he used Kal Korff as a citation, and then all of his air went out for me.  Kal K. Korff compared against Stanton T. Friedman is like warped and wormy lumber compared against hardened steel beams. Dr. Shostak is in oxygen debit if he thinks "triple-K" is remotely relevant, is in any way conversant with ufological reality, or has demonstrated, in any way, an unbiased and un-canted balance regarding what happened at 'Roswell'. Great suffering ZOT, Dr. Shostak!

Beyond that, Dr. Shostak was a willing poster child for mainstream ufological denial, pretended ignorance of ufological fact, and mainstream unwillingness to think out of the box of the suspect status quo. His defeat, I suppose, was inevitable.

"Where is the evidence," Dr. Shostak plaintively wailed. "Why don't we see the evidence in a museum"? Well, why don't we see evidence of corporate chicanery in high school history textbooks? Why don't we see evidence of alternative archeology in these open-minded and tolerant museums alluded to by Dr. Shostak? Why don't we see the acceptance, by the mainstream, of the ufological evidence, extant? Reactionary and unlearned denial of the ufological is the Doctor's only hole to hide in. He has a lot of conciliatory, albeit conflicted company in that dank and shallow hole...

Dr. Shostak demonstrated only that he was oblivious to the huge volume of extant ufological evidence of an excellence that cannot be forever ignored... Verily, the quality anecdotal evidence, compounded with the vetted photographic evidence, and then added to the documented historical evidence, gives every indication that a ufological contention regarding that phenomena must be taken seriously...

Moreover, when the preceding is framed by the serious artistic evidence, qualified by the ~available~ physical evidence, and then compellingly buttressed by the conclusively personal evidence, I can only be annoyingly astonished by the continued reluctance of people like Dr. Shostak to face the highly strange music that just cannot be forever marginalized... Does the information available justify respect from the mainstream that is not forthcoming?

Yes! The 'evidence' he cries for is a fact to which Dr. Shostak remains, stubbornly, oblivious. Evidence does not cease to be evidence merely because it is denied.

Additionally, and well fleshed out in Dolan's "UFO's and the National Security State," (which Dr. Shostak was blissfully unaware of) are the ongoing and well-referenced programs of ufological denial, dismissiveness, and derision that the aforementioned National Security State has prosecuted for the last 57 years with regard to UFOs! Fifty-seven years of cover-up, patent misdirection, and obvious conspiracy has denigrated, destroyed, or degraded science's ability to embrace this new challenge or to reasonably credit the available evidence in any way.

It's not lack of evidence. It is lack of willingness to pursue the evidence that is there!

This readily explains the reluctance of the mainstream to come on board! That 'evidence' for which the doctor wailed so plaintively cannot come to light if it inconveniences those who dictate to the mainstream, those who officiate the conduits of funding and grants, and those who oversee the maintenance of an 'official' giggle/discouragement factor... also denied by the good Doctor!

Astonishing!

Dr. Shostak was very plain that the "giggle factor" did not really exist, and that a ufological reality would be embraced by the scientific community if it had but a "single percentage point" of verity to it. Shostak says it would be the biggest thing in a scientist's life. Ironically He's right about that!

Museums would LOVE to display the Ray-gun or star-drive he demands as 'evidence' (?), as he blissfully disregards the abundant evidence that is there. What bald cultural naiveté is this? This is in direct opposition to Dr. Michio Kaku who gave an opposite assessment to Art Bell just a few weeks ago on the same program, and who said that the scientific community was very fearful regarding serious interest in the ufological, even today.

Dr. Shostak's final point was that Mr. Friedman argues his ufological case from ignorance with regard to 'facts' and so his assertions cannot be taken seriously for that reason. Flap-doodle, forgetting he's the errant pot calling the stalwart kettle black!

Mr. Friedman might be arguing his case from ignorance, true enough, but Dr. Shostak certainly argues his case from reactionary denial, scientistic (sic) inertia, and knee-jerk self-interested obstinacy. Some things in this multidimensional continuum of undetected reality won't hop into Dr. Shostak's test-tube for him. Most of reality won't, I suspect.

Dr. Shostak lost this debate by a healthy margin, anyway... as it turned out, but when one takes into account the faulty assumptions the Doctor made, the facts the Doctor demonstrated that he was unaware of, or the outdated 'conventional wisdoms' that he employed to arrive at his conclusions... he didn't make point ONE, reader! He was Mr. Friedman's "crushed opponent driven before him", after all... and if you listen carefully you can still hear the lamentations of the Doctor's fanboys.

Read on!

PS -- Kal K. Korff?!?

"I'm Like A Monster Who Walks Among Men"

"One person's criticism of my methods should absolutely
not call into question the legitimacy of hypnosis
being used in abduction research."

"I'm Like A Monster 

Who Walks Among Men" 

 David Jacobs, noted abduction researcher, filed the following report Sunday the 19th of December in 2010 on George Knapp's Coast To Coast radio program regarding his "harassment" at the hands of the "shrill harridan and obsessive psychopath," Emma Woods, a pseudonym.


http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2010/12/19


Let it be said, once again: all things are not as they appear to be. The reader will find below a few of the most egregious slanders of Ms. Woods et al, with the demonstrated perpetrator whining that he is in fact the victim—where all the evidence seems decidedly in opposition to that. I advise the reader that virtually every statement uttered by Doctor Jacobs on the Knapp program can be unwound in a manner similar to the un-windings below.


We begin:


David Jacobs raves: "She's a persuasive blamer; she's blamed me for any number of misdeeds and horrendous problems that I've caused her... listening to her, I'm like a monster who walks among men."


That was the curious description he used for himself, used over and over... Does the shoe remotely fit Dr. Jacobs?


Perhaps she "...blames" in as much as Jacobs... can be blamed! Moreover, I'm not listening to her for evidence that he is a "monster walking among men," no... I only need to listen to him for evidence of that.


The tapes he reports as "doctored" and "out of context" are not challenged by tapes of his own, have passed muster by experts with no dog in the hunt, and are quite clear as a measure of what I'm compelled to identify as blithe malfeasance on the part of Doctor Jacobs. Moreover, I submit that it is he and not Ms "Woods" who is the raging obsessive.  His upcoming retreat from hypnosis as an investigative tool while providing no description with regard to how his schtick has in any way changed is indication of a potential scurrilousness imo.
 


More...


David Jacobs raves: "Every time she listens to a tape of a session she'll find some other charge against me... or something."


Surely not _every_ time, eh? Though, certainly something that is there.  It remains that what she has uncovered seems abundantly damning to an unusual, even surreal, degree. ...But then one listens to the hours of tape in question, the well vetted tapes, the abundantly damning tapes, the wholly undeniable tapes, the completely revealing tapes—hours and hours of tape! I'm reminded of Nixon reminding us that he is not a crook...


Step down, Dr. Jacobs. Step off, Dr. Jacobs. Step away, Dr. Jacobs.


More...


David Jacobs raves as regards Woods' "supporters": "There are people [out there] who will believe almost anything... especially if there appears to be [some], quote, evidence, unquote..."


That's right Doctor. Why, I myself will believe almost "anything" if there is evidence for it! Anything!!! Even that which sends a torpedo well below the waterline of a fellow community member for whom I once had the greatest admiration and respect!  That would be you, sir!


Step down, Dr. Jacobs. Step off, Dr. Jacobs. Step away, Dr. Jacobs. If you really want to support the research, recuse yourself now!


Oh, and Doctor Jacobs? Full marks for the depth to which you insult your base on this Knapp show of C2C!

More submitted as needed or called for... wrong is wrong.

Closing, there is more than one person criticising, Sir... there is a plethora, an abundance, and even a surplus of diverse criticism available.  

'The UFO Debate...' Debate

'The UFO Debate...' Debate
Commentary On
Seth Shostak's flawed thinking

By Alfred Lehmberg


Shostak article "The Great UFO Debate" from http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_shostak_ufo_050714.html

DS - Doctor Shostak

Lehm - Alfred Lehmberg

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~

DS: The good news is that polls continue to show that between one and two-thirds of the public thinks that extraterrestrial life exists. The weird news is that a similar fraction thinks that some of it is visiting Earth.

Lehm: Ah, mirth! Risible, but not in a good way! There is a long smear 'twixt  "good news," "news," and then "bad news."  How does the reader interpret the category our Dr. Shostak uses to categorize the "weird" kind? If that's not plain now, it will be as the story weaves its very predictable path as defined by the confines of D. Shostak's mawkish quest for continued funding. Moreover, Dr. Shostak will provide ample proof of his political mastery of this path only as he ponderously grinds the specious axe of his denialist's agenda, in my opinion.  Revealed: his canted whetstone. 

DS: Several recent television shows have soberly addressed the possibility that alien craft are violating our air space, occasionally touching down long enough to allow their crews to conduct bizarre (and, in most states, illegal) experiments on hapless citizens. While these shows tantalize viewers by suggesting that they are finally going to get to the bottom of the so-called "UFO debate", they never do. That bottom seems perennially out of reach.

Lehm: Why would that be... one wonders! The single most important event to impose itself on humankind since the Arrival of Buddha, the Oath of Krishna, the Resurrection of Christ, and the Ascension of Mohammed... ...combined... ...demands a diligent search for the "bottom..." ...even if it is "perennially out of reach"! Think! That's a concise description of all humanity has ever done! That is to say, keep inexplicably reaching for the perennially out of reach! It's what we do!

Lehm: ...Yet that search is not forthcoming... and this is despite the intense interest of an astounding two thirds of the population to which Shostak, himself, condescendingly admits!

Lehm: How does one account for a stunning imbalance sufficient to change whole constitutions of super-power nations, while that same population is routinely denied information having such a profound effect on the quality of their very lives? Shostack baffles himself with convenient peripheral issues content with his role as "learned mainstream front-man," "pelicanist shill, and "lauded denialist"... imo, and is only an intimation of the rationality he is so practiced at portraying in all media... ALL media.

DS: So what are the contentious issues here?

Lehm: What indeed are these issues, and can Dr. Shostak be counted upon to consider them intelligently, bravely, selflessly, and creatively in turn, employing a manner that is as non-partisan as it is tolerant or as expansive as it is diligent?  We shall see.  Breathing should not be suspended.

DS: First off, despite heated discussion by all concerned, let's admit that interstellar travel doesn't violate physics. It's possible. After all, the Pioneer and Voyager probes are nearly three decades into an inadvertent interstellar journey right now.

Lehm: ...Though, at specific locations we can't account for, presently, eh Dr Shostak?

DS: The kicker, of course, is that these craft will take 70,000 years to cover the distance to even the nearest stars (and they're not aimed that way). With the physics we know, it's extremely difficult to substantially, and safely, shorten that travel time.

Lehm: Not so, I believe. Stanton Friedman, who regularly dusts (to be kind) Dr. Shostak in public debate (with DS the first, and last, to get snippy and defensive in same, imo), is quite clear that the mere imposition of our will to stop our egregious tribal warfare is all that is necessary in a successful reach to the stars... and all of this in a bubble of space only 70 or 80 light-years in radius. Having actually worked on the very successful hardware in question trumps a career of ludicrously looking for smoke signals from intelligences "too far away to get here", and that readily accepted only because we can't yet "suss out" how to travel there.  Good lord... the insipid arrogance.  No... with high tech "wagon trains" in space... we could get there from here. Truly, "there" is a lot closer than we are lead to believe by Dr. Shostak's self-involved, self-limiting, and so self-defeating personal philosophy.

DS: Sure, it might be theoretically possible to create wormholes or some other exotic facility for high-speed cosmic cruising; but that approach is entirely speculative.

Lehm: Uh, huh... and there was also absolutely no need to leap all the way out to "worm holes" and "warp technology" as Shostak, very arbitrarily and leaping to the absurd, puts us! ...And it should be pointed out that Dr. Shostak, himself, was the one to take the leap... though, to what end?  To make the reader take that presumptive breath for the suggested smirky giggle?  To appeal to the Doctor's conjectured absurd for the purposes of same? To inject 'unlikelihood' deeply into the probable 'likelihood' so as to distract from that likelihood? Be that as it may? Shostak was the one to make the leap, and hangs momentarily (if a little foolishly) in open air as a result.

DS: And it's not really the point. The problem I have with the claim that strange craft are prowling our planet is not with the transportation mode, but with the evidence.

Lehm: An extra-ordinary claim (especially one made with the observation of quality instruments both mechanical and multiply witnessed) deserves an investigation that is equally extraordinary, one would think, as alternative thinkers have pointed out. This is forgetting that the body of evidence is seven levels deep, cuts all the way across a wide social strata, and is thousands of years long. A less than wholly constructive reflex reductionist denial of all this as a "lack of evidence" is just ludicrous and intellectually obscene.

DS: I'll worry about how they got here once I'm convinced that they've really made the scene.

Lehm: There's the rub, folks!  Did you catch it? What would it indeed take for Dr. Shostak to be convinced that "...they've really made the scene"? We all know that Dr. Shostak busily touts the specious Saganic rubric that "...extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence...," but that shopworn rubric is too often used as a "think cloak" to "preclude progressive [and more constructive] thinking," actually, and provides for a "receding evidentiary horizon" in the same way one might put the requirements for evidence finally accepted at the end of a skepti-bunkers two-color rainbow (Van Gemert). That is to say that no evidence would ever be good enough for the Doctor. That's a dodge of a coward, frankly. Again—what would it take to convince the Doctor, given the already abundant preponderance of same?

DS: Well, have they?

Lehm:  Quite! Drake's equation says they are. Fermi's paradox says they will. Evidentiary Ufology say they have. ...If this were baseball Doctor Shostak would already be out.

DS: How good is the evidence?

Lehm: Better than can be expected in a climate of systemic denialism, institutional intransigence, and scientific cowardice... that's for sure.

DS: In the course of a recent TV broadcast in which I participated...

Lehm: Where Doctor Shostak performed glibly but dissemblingly while his uninformed wingman Dr. Susan Clancy performed... well... not at all.

DS: ...guest experts who have long studied UFOs argued the case for their alien nature by showing photographs of putative saucers hovering at low altitudes. Some of these objects appeared as out-of-focus lights, while others resembled hubcap-shaped Frisbees caught in mid-trajectory.

Lehm: Dr. Shostak proposes this like he was some kind of expert in photographic analysis. He is not. He proclaims the preceding like he was an optical physicist. He is not. The doctor announces the foregoing like he had a reputation for looking at both sides of the issue without cant, bias, or forgone conclusion. He has no such reputation. I also add, as I wrote before, that the ufological proponents came out way ahead in the presentation alluded to by Dr. Shostak... explained by the lack of substance in Dr. Shostak's lugubrious but negativist's pleading and the abject ignorance of Dr. Susan Clancy... truly a deer caught in headlights.

DS: Since the former are perforce ambiguous, the latter commanded more of my attention. How can we know they're NOT hubcaps, tossed into the air by a hoaxer with a camera? The reply from one expert: "these photographs pass muster." When quizzed on exactly which muster was mastered, the response was that "atmospheric effects give us a limit on the distance, and careful examination has ruled out photographic trickery." Well, the former is pretty chancy, and relies on some assumption about atmospheric conditions (was it a smoggy day in Los Angeles?), and the latter proves nothing. A real shot of an airborne hubcap would, after all, be free of photographic trickery.

Lehm: Dr. Shostak is ever a master of the exhorted slight of hand, and this verbal juggle of assumptive gymnastics is a near 'delight' to behold... you just can't but it in the existential bank.  Dr. Shostak only continued to pretend an expertise he does not have in a subject that is anathema to him. There was no time for completely honorable men like Mr. Swiatec and Dr. Maccabee, actual experts mind you, to make clear the requirements for "passing muster" in a few minutes of TV time with six persons on the panel. Shostak might just as well have asked for a detailed description of "Cell Respiration" or "Photosynthesis" each requiring a full hour of presentation time with slides and overheads... just to begin to get an idea of what constitutes "muster passing."  It remains that the respected experts say they are not thrown objects, and the conflicted or uninformed pretenders say they are... where does the smart money go, reader?

DS: Additional evidence that is endlessly cited is "expert testimony." Pilots, astronauts, and others with experienced eyes and impressive credentials have all claimed to see odd craft in the skies. It's safe to say that these witnesses have seen something. But just because you don't recognize an aerial phenomenon doesn't mean that it's an extraterrestrial visitor. That requires additional evidence that, so far, seems to be as unconvincing as the trickery-free saucer snaps.

Lehm: Wasn't that lovely? "...trickery-free saucer snaps..." Rolls right off the tongue in a delightful little dance, doesn't it? It remains that Dr. Shostak is the canted amateur in the exchange, and that poetic explication and a practiced public persona is no guarantee of correctness or constructiveness... ...unless I'm the one doing it, reader. Har!

Lehm: It also remains that experienced, talented, intelligent, educated, and honorable persons perceive something in their skies transcending the highly strange and that these things appear as if they are under intelligent control. The reader is best advised to fix on that which Shostak admits as an intellectual loss-leader, quality testimony, and well away from his "trickery-free saucer snaps," which could never be quality testimony, anyway, imo.

DS: What about those folks who have experienced alien beings first-hand?

Lehm: ...Yes, Sir... the many, many thousands of them, ignored by society, marginalized by their mal-instructed peers, and punished for same by a plethora of closed institutions more interested in their own status quo than the individual human beings they were created to serve? What about them indeed?

DS: Abduction stories are an entirely separate field of study and one which I won't address here, although I must confess that it's intriguing to see photos of scoop marks on the flesh of human subjects, coupled with the claim that these minor disfigurements are due to alien malfeasance.

Lehm: ..."intriguing..."? These persons are not lab-rats, Sir. You would be their betrayer, it seems, as the gleeful pitchman for the hijacked and denying mainstream you gladly represent, denying the disaffected for a dissembling place at the academic trough.

DS: But even aside from the puzzling question of why beings from distant suns would come to Earth to melon-ball the locals, this evidence is, once again, ambiguous. The scoops might be due to aliens, and then again, they could be the consequence of spousal abuse or many other causes.

Lehm: ...Anything but that which raises the hair on the back of your neck, good Doctor... ..."melon-ball," indeed. Seems what the good Doctor lacks in ufological competence is not made up in compassion for people enduring something truly terrifying... a terror made worse by a culture that punishes them for enduring it... ..."spousal abuse," indeed. How about "sleep paralysis"?

DS: When push came to shove, and when pressed as to whether there's real proof of extraterrestrial visitation, the experts on this show backed off by saying that "well, we don't know where they come from. But something is definitely going on." The latter statement is hardly controversial. The former is merely goofy. If the saucers and scoopers are not from outer space, where, exactly, are they from? Belgium?

Lehm: The doctor must be merely joking, no one could be walking around in this much oxygen debit and still survive. Does Doctor Shostak want to know what goofy really is? Goofy is reflexively insipid denial of seven categories of evidence that is very wide, exceptionally long, and astoundingly deep. Goofy is depending on clever turns of phase and artful exposition appealing to an audience's lowest common denominator. Goofy is spending too much money listening for alien smoke signals from around distant stars. Goofy is relying on discredited homocentricism to short-circuit natural curiosity and appropriate humility. Goofy is pretending to be an expert when you are not. Goofy is expecting the aforementioned audience to forget that Dr. Shostak has a big hungry dog in this fight over the UFO question... so his sincerity is suspect.

Lehm: There is indeed "something" going on. It is clear that we are not getting forthcoming information on it from suspect agencies, un-elected governments, or closed institutions. Moreover, the curiosity that Dr. Shostak pretends to champion is not remotely served by his back-stepping obstinacy and scientistic (sic) intransigence. Not remotely.

DS: The bottom line is that the evidence for extraterrestrial visitors has not convinced many scientists.

Lehm: ...Scientists intimidated by the jealous system, threatened by an imposed and belligerent giggle factor, and bullied by presupposing, conflicted, purposely uninformed, if lettered, peers... ...peers not unlike Dr. Shostak?

DS: Very few academics are writing papers for refereed journals about alien craft or their occupants.

Lehm: See my response immediately above...

DS: Confronted with this, the UFO experts usually take refuge in two possible explanations:

Lehm: ...Ummmmno. The unctuous fallacy of "Either / Or" ...even leavened with a "usually" does nothing to provide the barriers to progressive thinking on this issue that the Doctor would hope to achieve. It remains: his Silly Exercise to Investigate is not safe because it is a ludicrous exercise... This is forgetting UFOs will not likely be explained in just two pathetic and facile explanations.

DS: The material that would be convincing proof has been collected and secreted away by the U.S. government.

Lehm: Riiiiight... Governments have shown a remarkable ability to be transparent and appropriately forthcoming regarding paradigm changing occurrences. Not!

DS: While endlessly appealing, this is an argument from ignorance (tantamount to saying "we can't show you good evidence because we haven't got it"), and perforce implies that every government in the world has efficiently squirreled away all alien artifacts.

Lehm: Right! Egregious truths about the criminality of government and its failure to adequately represent don't come to light every freaking day if more every day! Besides, Dr. Shostak's airy dismissal of likely behavior from the aforementioned black governments does not make that benevolent government, so... and this is forgetting the good doctor has a "dog in the fight," remember.

DS: Unless, of course, the extraterrestrials only visit the U.S., where retrieval of material that falls to Earth is supposedly a perfected art form.

Lehm: Which is nothing more than a written smirk wrapped in a sneer and so discountable on its face. It remains that procedures have been established in professional manuals, public and private, for UFO avoidance and retrieval, and that it is no stretch to suppose that there must be more detailed but classified publications for same, elsewhere, justifying these regulations and procedures.

DS: Scientists have simply refused to look carefully at this phenomenon.

Lehm: ...Meme proposed and answered twice above...

DS: In other words, the scientists should blame themselves for the fact that the visitation hypothesis has failed to sway them.

Lehm: No... Let us first lay the blame at Dr. Shostak's feet. As a celebrant of the mainstream prosaic unless a billion light years away... and only to prop up his own incipient enterprise... the blame can be laid there with some confidence, I should think.

DS: Not only is this unfair, it's misguided.

Lehm: Now there's a coal colored iron pot calling a polished stainless steel kettle black!

DS: Sure, rather few researchers have themselves gone into the field to sift through the stories, the videos, and the odd photos that comprise the evidence for alien presence.

Lehm: And many of them come back convinced Shostak fails to point out! Consider Hynek, Vallee, Haines, and McDonald. These were real scientists wading in as confirmed skeptics and walking away not so sure, at a minimum!

DS: But they don't have to.

Lehm: Yes! Yes, they do! ...If they expect to continue to be called scientists. Perhaps Doctor Shostak has forgotten what being a real scientist must be like!

DS: This complaint is akin to telling movie critics that films would be better if only they would pitch in and get behind the camera.

Lehm: One word: Nonsense! Dr. Shostak's analogy is akin to the tedious canard of comparing apples to oranges! Movie critics would write better critiques if they ACTUALLY SAW THE FILM!

DS: But critics can compose excellent and accurate evaluations of a movie without being participants in the business of making films.

Lehm: ...But they compose a steaming pile of bupkis if they haven't seen (or don't want to see) the FILM!

DS: The burden of proof is on those making the claims, not those who find the data dubious.

Lehm: There is more going on in the issue than this tiresome canard, that's for sure. A preponderance of evidence growing larger as we speak shall not be forever discounted even as the "flying saucer gap" between competing countries widens. Perhaps Dr, Shostak is unaware of this widening gap. Moreover, there are a multitude of reasons that go completely unexplored with regard to exactly why the aforementioned scientists would find the data "dubious" to begin with.

DS: If there are investigators who are convinced that craft from other worlds are buzzing ours, then they should present the absolute best evidence they have, and not resort to explanations that appeal to conspiratorial cover-ups or the failure of others to be open to the idea.

Lehm: A good scientist must follow the data, Dr. Shostak seems to have forgotten, and if the data leads to conspiracy... well what waddles and quacks might be a duck!

DS: The UFO advocates are not asking us to believe something either trivial or peripheral, for after all, there could hardly be any discovery more dramatic or important than visitors from other worlds. If we could prove that the aliens are here, I would be as awestruck as anyone, however, I await a compelling Exhibit A.

Lehm: I suspect that there is no amount of compelling exhibit "A" sufficient enough, imo, to convince Dr. Shostak... because he has too much time and effort tied into a paradigm that pays his bills and keeps him more than merely comfortable. Outside of that, he's a practiced mal-assembling tether on the leg of humankind's rising and advancing spirit. Nothing more.

Lehm:  Closing, this writer found Doctor Shostak's written position as fatuous as his televised one, and twice as intellectually misleading... be that as it may, it remains that an ~admitted~ two thirds of the population alluded to regard Dr. Shostak with "arms akimbo and eyes askance," and that is a signal that good news may portend... as it would appear that five decades of duplicity and fraud by our default societal institutions has just not had the desired effect. A majority of people, intelligent and honorable people... suspect the UFO phenomenon is real and that we should know more about it. That can ~only~ be good news and the only thing that can be reliably drawn from Doctor Shostak's conflicted and dismissive cant.

 Restore John Ford!

Read on...

Comment On American Education

A Comment On American Education 

By Alfred Lehmberg 

A pragmatic person and a retired soldier, I can, of course, see the need for *some* direction and oversight in culture and society as regards a system of education. Education is the product of some point to reality, rationality, and realism that a humanity (select portions of it, anyway) stands on the landing of a 21st Century medical and technical wonderland as much as it does! But "Direction" and "Point", as practiced currently by elitist, sociopathic, and corrupted leaderships, institutions and agencies are just additional concepts to be abused and misused—like "national security", "social security", or "homeland security"!  Then there are those—craven psychopaths in the round ever grasping and mendacious and almost guaranteeing a permanent serf class—who would do away with public education all together.

I'm a FAILED second-career public school teacher whose REAL education began, also, towards the end of a formal one, forgetting that it was the formal one which allowed me the opportunity for access to that larger, more satisfying, and more accurate informal one. ...But there's the rub.  Try to live on it.

See, an American public education system is plainly more interested in producing good, docile, and God fearing *employees* than it is in producing creatively intelligent, rational, critically thinking human beings, students and teachers. I was THERE, good reader! I know this to be true! Indeed it is among the unjust reasons I was summarily relieved from a public school teaching position.

When John Dewey, the FATHER of American education, condemned the rank and file American man and woman to creative slavery in the service of this authoritarian elite of the corporate arbitrary, he was acting upon the strident and unabashed sociopathy of his times.  This is not an excuse.  We had evolved from that... and slip back! 

Dewey's was a time when the mighty white was more than right and the mongrel brown of needs leave town! This was a time of an appallingly applied eugenics and enforced sterilization (even annihilation!) on persons of color. This was a time of an abject lack of meaningful protection from corporate criminals selling substandard consumables and enriching themselves on planet destroying planned obsolescence continuing uncontrolled today!

We begin to see the error of these blighted and shortsighted ways?

Another dean of American education, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, observed that the poor must be TRAINED to their poverty. The poor (anyone outside a privileged elite) are very broadly defined. Additionally, the reader can readily reason that if the poor can be so trained to accept their lot in cruel life the RICH can be trained in a similar, but opposing, manner. The general reader can bet that THOSE are the kids being trained to be the leaders in this twenty-first century even as your children are not. No—their kids are being trained in a manner clearly described by John Taylor Gatto (a minor god in my personal pantheon) to be the artless SHEEPLE so written about: expendable motes as dry as the chalk dust in their pitiable and threatened classrooms.

I was not REMOTELY interested in producing sheeple-aping employees, but in each individual achieving the creative and self-actualizing personal goals of which they were able. Somehow, I had convinced myself that this was the overriding goal of the America I believed in, an America that was the envy of the world, I thought—an America that I had served so well on its flawed battlefields. I would move that battlefield to America's classrooms. Ha.  It is no wonder I would be torpedoed...

I am a very highly decorated retired military officer and combat veteran with impeccable credentials and bulletproof references who could not make it public education.  Can the reader entertain, along with me, the idea that the problem was not all mine?  I made the dollar commitment, graduated Summa... some place could have been found for me in a system necessarily vast.  No... in the place of the remotest consideration, a 16th Century shunning.

We are better than this.  We are better than our manipulators. We see the demonstrated value in our individuality. We resent our trained poverty, our dearth of respect from society and culture, and the lack of aggregate humanity from our corporate overlords... we will drag these hijackers of the mainstream screaming from their ivory towers eventually, perhaps sooner rather than later. Even a "sheeple" can only be expected to take so much. The individual IS key, and the REAL power behind anything else, after all.

The denial of that may be our shared social abomination only getting more abominable as time marches on.

They Fail

ZERO!

They Fail

by Alfred Lehmberg

Lately, Roswell is revisited for cast aspersion, yet again. Et tu Brute?  Of course!  Pecuniary graspers the likes of Jaime Maussan draw half-cocked pistols to shoot the ufological in the foot, are found demonstrably wrong and then double down on their error for more professional embarrassment. What was everybody thinking?

I think what I find most personally offensive about the Roswell 'tree' being shaken further vis a vis the child mummy fiasco are the fallaciously stretched and smirking satisfactions of the ardent skeptibunky/pelicanist/post-pelicanist ilk. Their gloating satisfaction, such as it was forecast and readily demonstrates itself to be, is as inappropriate as it is wholly undeserved.

See, it's revolting that these same Klasskurtzian ideologues might draw a deeper more self-satisfied breath for any reason, but that as a result of reflex "E?H" disqualifications for Roswell, or that Roswell might (at last!) be shown to have a prosaic (even if horrific) explanation, is a bridge too far!  That is simply as intolerable as it is overweening.

To spin you up, reader, the respected writer/researcher Nick Redfern recently suggested the aforementioned "prosaic horrific" in one of his books.  That book may have missed the mark.

Back at the ranch, I resent, further, that the aforementioned disparaged persons would even falsely perceive a little more hydrogen in their otherwise disintegrating balloon of reflex denial, a sad sack of abject ufological denialism of the first wash. Plainly, I take exception, finally, that they feel even remotely validated in the continuing prosecution of their senseless negativity regarding what is otherwise the patently obvious regarding UFOs and Roswell. 

...And it is obvious, reader.

Verily, the Pelicanist elite must contrive to avoid the freaking point ...once again! To what end but intellectual complacency, one is compelled to wonder.

Though, verily, reductionist science shows that its two color "reductionista" only props up its cloyingly dismissive ufological faux-insouciance while it blithely continues its reversing back-step to sooth its cotton candy retro-paradigms, one must presume... paradigms of the already survived past where they were the masters of all that we survey... that they are the dominators of same... that they are a jewel in some Cartesian deity's inviolate crown... No, no, and no.  That fondly remembered past is a self-deception. They were no master in it.  They were a soaked cork, then as now, bobbing on a tormented if wholly alien surf in a moment of respite, ill perceived reef rocks at the ready known and unknown and only chance's wind to blow one around them.

These intellectual affectations of presumed superiority are attitudes easily washed away in the first tidal wave, buried in the wave's caused earthquake, or obliterated with the first surprise asteroid strike. They fail.

Why does a Roswell redux upset me... and maybe you? Because it's a waste of everybody's time, I believe. It will be used to qualify a retreat from the inevitable. It uses conveniently applied logic to eradicate logic, intimates fallacy for more plausible, treasured and wished for faux-reality... uses a metaphorical ufological democracy to hinder that self-same democracy.  Justice AND science are not served.

Listening closely, one can begin to hear the faux-victory chanters wheeze their tiny little sighs of sophistic satisfaction as they return, renewed, to the role of "foul beast" lurching off to CSIcopia to be born in the form of a mummified child. On popular UFO lists noted 'skeptics' are of the first emboldened to that pompous lurching. Others follow the very next day in their usual, knowingly lugubrious, manner. Others quick to natter in?  They "knew all along," you see.

Can you hear them smirk as they distorted; do you sense them sneer as they cherry-pick; Can you perceive in your mind's eye their snickers as they fraudulently lecture and attempt transfer for their unbrave retro-isms? Oh yes, these intellectual cowards smell a new validation for their tedious progression hating paradigms. They rejoice! These are only a beginning. They will fail.

This is said with all admiration for and appropriate respect to Mr. Redfern and persons of his seeming sincerity, who has gone some distance, ufologically, without disgrace on that paranormal path, a path fraught with all manner of opportunity for said disgrace. His arrows have flown with a minimal divergence from true, it would seem, and those arrows stick in the target with an efficacious tenacity which seems wholly justified. Whatever he has to say on the subject is worth having a look at... however he shakes it down. That's more than fair, and I believe Mr. Redfern aspires to same.  So, Redfern is not the problem, eh?

The truth about Roswell is, of course, paramount; however... only if it is the truth and not the current denialist's anti-ufological sex-toy for the "S&P Cubed" individuals alluded to above in the second paragraph, remember. The truth has no agenda. That's the province of a lie, even if just one of omission.

The "Cubers" first instinct, remember, is to use the resultant Mummy flap to discredit this ufological microcosm of Roswell... but then as a fallacious mechanism to destroy even unrelated ufological macro-cosms elsewhere! That's the quick and dirty on their device. Their agenda is the fraudulent invalidation of UFOs.

They're not remotely interested in the truth! Their only interest is to keep the backstepping status-quo rewarding them... as turgidly vital as they can... for as long as they can... and accomplish same in any manner that they have to. It's what they do, have done and will continue to do.

Inevitably, they fail. Over an over again, they fail. UFOs refuse to go away.

As has been pointed out often by named researchers (including Friedman, and he wrote the 'book' remember), Roswell... despite all the high strangeness surrounding it (...and perhaps even because of same!)... ...is just not that important in the grand ufological design, good reader! It follows, then, that one can safely refrain from discounting the whole of that grand ufological design as a result of any one aspect of that design... especially Roswell, most especially Roswell, given what may be the ultimate truth about Roswell... as repugnantly repellant and off topic as that subject's likely to be... ...won't matter... sincerely!

...Real truths have a way of leading to other real truths. I'm ecstatic finding them myself howsomever they might make themselves available to me, because of exactly that. I'll take them as I find them and find them acceptable, or not... however uncomfortable they are. Reality is preferable in the long-run even as the phony-baloney one provided in its stead is missed for a time...

That was the theme of those three Matrix movies wasn't it? Those films struck an enduring chord for some freaking reason...

Returning to track, has it ever occurred to the reader that Roswell has been cultivated for years by its opposition as a device to keep the "credulity line" regarding UFOs as indistinct as possible? See, if 'indisputable' evidence is uncovered that Roswell was nothing more than monkeys flying footballs, or disabled Japanese children in dangerous high altitude balloon tests... (good ...God!)... it shall not diminish a pool of data and evidence regarding UFOs that remains seven levels deep, is thousands of years long, and has collected such an evidentiary weight and girth of reality changing propensity that its debated actuality becomes wholly and obscenely ludicrous... ...and, I suspect, a psychotic exercise of less than sane illegitimate power-holders in the confines of a lunatic asylum they have taken over, furiously pointing out and away from themselves the examples of the madness that they themselves are most afflicted by, frankly.  I digress, but in the aforementioned seven layer pool there only has to be one locus of correctness, just one truth, and all the arguments of the reductionists fall away because the reductionists have to be correct in every instance.  Negatives are impossible to prove, but that won't stop the ardent skeptibunky.

A prosaic Roswell does not make UFOs go away, by any measurable means, reader-sitting-on-the-fense-wrongly-believing-that-there-remains-a-plausible-deniability-with-regard-to-...True UFOs... there is no plausible deniability. UFOs are, indeed, real. Of this there is no rational doubt. There are abundant hosts of quality citation for that statement, reader.

Moreover, this is forgetting that a well respected and honorable Mr. Redfern may yet be found in arrears! Yea and verily, if Stanton Friedman can be proclaimed to have Roswell wrong (and that jury might very likely hang after it was out for years) then no less can be meted out to Mr. Redfern as the days and months spin on out. Nes't ce pas? Paramount in all our minds is the truth, isn't it? 

Well, no, frankly. Noted ufologist Jerry Clark recently points out in cyberspace that the behaviors and methods of a contingent of the ufological community diverges ...considerably... from Redfern's conjecture!

Is anyone with a degree of open-mindedness remotely surprised?

Indeed, the first salvo of response from this "S-P Cubed" contingent are only the predicted snickers, smirks, and sneers of obligatory partisanship. "Wait and See" is largely abandoned in a rush to agree with each other and score the first points in the game of pressure seal refurbishment that they would play and prosecute. They fail.

Their seals continue to pop around them like condoms apparently sent to third world countries. They know this to be true even as they don't accept it or remotely acknowledge it.

Their cabin pressures dwindle regardless. They begin to gasp for breath. Their status quo betrays them at last. Their retreating paradigms are a momentary aberration of their own meager hubris, and the gods they manufacture to do their bidding (and which only serve them in the short run)... fail. Even as these would deign to drag the rest of us into self-centered complacency, intellectual cowardice, moral injustice, and blighted sensibility, they fail.

Contrarily, we'd do well to agitate for truth, reader, despite its inconvenience; however uncomfortable it might be; embrace it in relieved acceptance. UFOs remain real, more real than we'd want them to be, perhaps, but preferable to any antithesis so far provided because the antithesis themselves are so occluded, so contrived, and so intellectually lacking. They fail.

Soon those opposed to UFOs will make 'the' straw-breaking failure, and the slide to 'truth' will become inexorable. This latest Roswell redux, as off topic as it appears to be, could be just the thing to get that slide started. Truth is grease. Any truth. I remain optimistic.

The summer of 2015 remains the wild ufological ride predicted. I remain to have eyes to see, ears with which to hear, and an internet to whisper it in your ear, if you let me.  UFOs remain very real.

Read on.

Restore John Ford

Mushrooms In The Dark

Mushrooms In The Dark
By Alfred Lehmberg

Is the Alien a rule-breaking villain—a black agent in the nameless dark? Is it an intellectual rapist, a serial abuser on a massive scale, or is it a singularly bizarre kidnapper criminally exacting an unknown ransom? Is the alien a being with no respect for humanity, raw disgust for humanity's sensibilities, and projects naught but disconnected indifference for humanity's creative attributes or individual quality of life?

Does the Alien use humanity as its lowly subordinate and reviled minimum wager; does it squander our savings, inflict disease and pestilence upon us, or does it put us out, homeless, into the streets? Does it shortchange and abuse our women, manufacture noneffective and dangerous drugs, equipment, and consumables; does it pollute the groundwater and needlessly despoil the environment with toxic waste and planned obsolescence?

Does the Alien spin our history—cook the very books of it—or corrupt accurate institutional memory for unjust advantage, only, facilitating the "textbook producing" class? Does it pasteurize, homogenize, and sterilize the accounting of history into boring, unrealistic, and untrue accounts of unjustified herofication to intimidate, manipulate, and depreciate the inventive minds of school children? Does it punish the critical thinker and reward the malleable wage-slave employee?

Does the Alien set up closed institutions operating contrary to the public good, stiff sick soldiers when they are maimed or contract strange and nebulous but debilitating diseases in foreign lands? Does the Alien install puppet governments to unethically expand a non-accountable and sociopathic corporate state? Does it allow more and more filth and fecal matter into our foods, titrate dangerous chemicals into our drinking water, and spray non-admitted substances into the air over our heads?

Does the Alien crush our dissent, suspend our rights, or assassinate our heroes? Does the Alien subject us to stark tyranny, badger us with its religion, or persecute us, individually, for the rational nonsupport of its corrosive, illogical, and defeatist party line? Does it make the rich richer and the poor poorer; does it compel more privilege for the already privileged... at the direct and unjustified (indeed unjustifiable!) expense of the too abundant "under-privileged." and far too many "non-" privileged?

Does the Alien compel us to overpopulate ourselves beyond the carrying capacity of the finite land supporting us? Does it teasingly push our sex in our faces on the one hand and then punish our indulgence in it on the other? Does it say one thing publicly and then do another privately! Does it piously and destructively accuse what it is itself guilty of? Does it frequently act beyond the bounds of reasonability and rational decency? Is it known as other but the fruit that it produces?

I think I've been abundantly clear.

It's not the Aliens, folks. It's us. We are the engineers of our own ignorance and denial. We are the builders and maintainers of the confined space to which we have consigned ourselves. We are our own tormentors and abusers. We are our own wardens and jailers. We are our own well of wretched and seemingly unending anguish!

Indeed, but good news! Yes!  Rejoice! We are all of these things only because we tolerate it so!  

Aliens, the future, the larger reality—that which makes its approach, regardless—tries to interact with us, still, though they are likely unendingly baffled (if not stridently repelled!) by our seeming willful insanity, obstinate denial, and obviously preferred ignorance regarding the larger sphere of that new reality... [resolving in acceleration as these words were written and are now being read]!

Convinced by those manipulating few: those who have the least concern for the value of the individual, that same individual is presently browbeaten into the erroneous conviction that what they think (and say and do) doesn't matter! Moreover, to continue their "crimes of thought" and "out of the box" interests is to court punishment in some extreme "John Ford-like" manner, or in a way not befitting their "crime" of critical thinking (or wanting to go where the data propitiously leads)! 

What a miserable, unvaried, and dry as chalk dust sub-reality we inflict upon one another... What a crippling lack of depth we instill! What a numbing loss of color we endure! What a stunning DEARTH of ideas we impose! What a soulless future of despairing futility we consign ourselves to! Verily.

Aliens abound! UFOs are real! Conspiracy to cover up these things (and more) is a likely reality! There is information we should have, fellow fezzy mook-oids and well-hammered fum-gudgelers! 

We are the mushrooms alluded to in much of my poetic commentary. We're fed a very thin (and toxic!) manure and kept as far from the light as possible... which would be fine if we actually were an insentient fungus, but we're not! 

It's getting harder for them all the time, though, and will continue to get even harder until they wise up and shut down the internet... 

They'll try... they'll have to play their true hand to do it, but they'll try.  I've a suspicion that they will be, and summarily vanquished... I digress.

As I have already said, "we are power we don't use." If we want change and expect change, we have to demand and support change. It's really as simple as that. "AlienViewGroup" aspires to have just that kind of effect and efficacious leverage. As our leaderless numbers grow, a force, imbued with the positive, will be generated in a wonderful synergy powered by our next-level civilization communication system: that same internet.  

Its base will be broad, its veracity will be solid, and its conviction formidable. We are not alone.  You are not alone!

You, specifically "you," reader, "make it so," or not! Just like Yoda said in response to Luke when the young Jedi whined that he would "try"...  

"Do! ...Or do -not-... there is no 'try'," Yoda said... 

If the reader wants her "X-wing fighter" of freedom and inventiveness out of "the bog" of ignorance and manipulation, if the reader wants to engage hyper-drive and accelerate to the more expansive destiny... if the reader wants to soar and cleave? The reader must only set their mind and heart, and then use their hands to make it so!  Mind over the consequences of matter. Setting that example, individually, works, or we wouldn't be where we are now!

Read on!

Jeff Challender's Astounding Discoveries

The Astounding Discoveries 

Of the late Jeff Challender

Will Evans, a staff writer for the Sacramento Bee in California's Capitol, reflected, in part, the following on January 14th, 2003 at:

http://www.sacbee.com/content/lifestyle/story/5884951p-6848710c.html. That link is dead. The article is reproduced here.

It is an article pertaining to UFOs plainly shown on NASA file footage recorded by the late Jeff Challender and waffled on by portentous pundits, the skeptibunky elite, and conflicted NASA officials.

The less than intrepid Mr Evans reports:

"The longtime aviation junkie [Jeff Challender of Sacramento] started taping missions in 1997, just for fun, to edit each one into a documentary. But in 1999, he saw something that grabbed his attention: an illuminated dot, pulsating as it whizzed across the screen. Then, later, he saw many white dots moving around, changing direction and speed."

"What were they? Challender has been tracking similar 'anomalies' ever since."

LEHMBERG COMMENTS: Sneer quotes?!  What fatuous, mal-informed and misinforming hubris is this!? ...Pretty cheeky in the face of seven clear categories of evidence signifying the UFO, illustrating the UFO, and providing substantiation for the UFO. 

-- 'I want answers,' says the former railroad laborer. 'I believe something's going on and the facts are being kept from us.'

NASA isn't so sure.

LEHMBERG COMMENTS: A pox on suspect NASA (Never A Straight Answer), mere lap dogs of their corporate handlers! Just another arm of a corrupt system manipulating the prevaricating smoke and distracting mirrors of an unelected leadership! They only assume a patent cloak of patronizing condescension to hide their arbitrary guile! Along with Mr. Challender, -this- writer would have some ANSWERS!  Lastly, describing Mr Challender dismissively as a former "railroad laborer" was a cheap shot beneath the dignity of the SACBEE and akin to describing Edward Snowden only as a low tier intelligence analyst! 

-- " 'I'm not aware of any visuals of (extraterrestrial) activity,' says Fred Brown, executive producer of NASA Television."

LEHMBERG COMMENTS: Mr. Brown is also unaware, apparently, of a controlling corporate hand shoved so far up his back-side that the quickly moving fingers have replaced his tongue and stirred the components of his brain!

-- "Challender points to incidents where the camera seems to zoom in on one of the dots and then cuts off the live footage—signs, he says, of a cover-up."

LEHMBERG COMMENTS: And if one has seen -any- of the -quality- stuff that Mr. Challender has recorded, the remotely conscious reader would smell "cover-up," too! Much of this material will be archived or referenced at http://www.richarddolanpress.com/.

-- "Nonsense, Brown says. 'If those things were out there and we were trying to hide them, we wouldn't put them on NASA Television.' "

LEHMBERG COMMENTS: Of -course- they would... or show -nothing- at all!  Slight of hand and bait and switch.  Moreover, they -do- try to hide them, or why does the current visual signal come, now, only after significant time delays subsequent to some of the -first- anomalous and highly suspicious sightings? Additionally, they -would- plainly show some of the *sightings*, but only for the purpose of "hiding" them in plain SIGHT! Be not fooled!

-- "Challender is probably seeing bits of liquid or ice, close to the camera, blown around by jets of gas from the shuttle, says Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute, a nonprofit organization running what used to be NASA's 'Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.' "

LEHMBERG COMMENTS: Probably Shmobably... Ah yes—Dr. Shostak of Stanton of Friedman's well identified "Silly Exercise To Investigate." Just another guy who wants to keep his place at the funding trough, and a man reluctant to re-think his thoughts or re-do work once thought done? -This- writer is un-swayed!

-- " 'You have to be careful,' [Shostak] says. 'They're very impressive if you're naive.' "

LEHMBERG COMMENTS: Ha! Pompously pointing a finger to proclaim the naivete of others, Dr. Shostak points a pecuniary THREE back at himself! Significant others make compelling and cited arguments that it is HE who is more abundantly naive! Case in point:

-- "...But [Dr.] Jack Kasher, a retired University of Nebraska, Omaha, physicist, says he's viewed Challender's findings, concluding that they aren't ice particles and challenging anyone who says so to prove it."

LEHMBERG COMMENTS: I've seen Doctor Kasher's work. It is detailed, scientific, and significant, and it -destroys- the feeble explanations of his axe grinding detractors, artless men who predictably attack the man when they cannot refute his airtight arguments!

-- Still, Shostak says, why would SETI spend millions searching for alien radio signals if there were Martians buzzing around every NASA mission?

LEHMBERG COMMENTS: Ha ha! Exactly! Why indeed? A straight answer to THAT question would re-write history and make bogus heavens FALL! And if heaven CAN fall, it probably should!  Remains that Mr Shostak's silly effort to investigate is akin to searching the heavens for smoke signals (Friedman)!

-- "Shostak believes that there is alien life. If 10 percent of stars had planets and 1 percent of those supported life, there could be millions of worlds with life just in our galaxy, he calculates."

LEHMBERG COMMENTS: ...Merely a loss-leader, throw-away, and meaningless comment so as to -appear- open minded. He still won't *cop* that if he believes they could be -anywhere- then they could just as easily be -here-! He won't *cop* that the abundant evidence of them -being- here has a history of thousands of years writ in ink, pressed into clay, and scratched into eternal stone... he blithely forgets the testimony of thousands, the quality photographs, and the physical trace evidence involved with their (obvious!) presence... how?

-- "But NASA would have no incentive to hide any evidence. 'That would be the greatest thing for NASA. Their budget would go up instead of going down,' he says."

LEHMBERG COMMENTS: Yes! That's the kicker argument. That seems, at first glance, to be the definitive and unassailable dispute to Jeff Challender's astounding assertions! But glance again! That unctuous, facile, and patronizing comment ASSUMES the veracity of a "forward looking" and "clear-eyed" NASA motivated only by truth and driven to it by -real- science. ...But is it really? Can that assumption be made with -any- onfidence? -This- writer think not! On reflection and being fair? The reader can't either! We are NOT alone, and a brave Jeff Challender has captured it on film!

For AlienViews, read on!

Lehmberg@roadrunner. com

EXPLORE "AlienViews" at: http://alienviewgroup.blogspot.com/

"I cleave the heavens and soar to the infinite. What others see from afar, I leave -far- behind me." - Giordano Bruno, scourged by the scabrously specious scurrilous.