The Friedman / Magaha Debate -- Part I of II

Inclusive Plato And An Exclusive Aristotle

The Friedman / Magaha Debate
by Alfred Lehmberg

A result of substantive ufological growth over the last couple of decades? I'd instituted a personal attitude shift for myself that was a little more subtle for me than it's going to be for another, perhaps. It was too slow in coming.  Truth should abide.  

Truly, I am tasked where I am not provoked by dishonor perceived, and, preferring efficacy and relevancy to this very real betrayal? My sensibilities are pushed hard to contrary port with regard to the regarded *other*. The way things are shaking down, this attitudinal shift seems the soul of rationality.  

Smug UFO denialists, I offer, prove only that enough is too much! Their science seems cheery picked.  Their demeanor too fearfully reductionist.  Their attitude unjustifiably hubristic.  Their imaginational horizons woefully narrow.  Number and measurement define their fundamentalist religion, they are the default arbiter of that which is not investigated, and an existentially holistic and inclusive Plato is entirely, if regressively, supplanted by a two color Aristotle with little art but the observation of "spin," "rate," and "electrical charge."     

The shift alluded to? I'm done apologizing.

That *other* (ET) to which I've referred is as sure as a handful of abundant back-fat on your garden variety boobis americanis, reflexive CSICOP adherent, or flaccid pelicanist. Intellectual back-fat you can wad, you know?  Such are the ultimately non-nutritious small-thinking fruits of klasskurtxia.

Be it for good or ill... three hots and a cot afforded by a small military pension has provided me a lot of time to think (...out of the box...) ...as I have endured a scurrilously imposed, decidedly unwanted, and ongoing unemployment! This is an unemployment, respected reader, informingly born of conventional high school clique pique, uninformed persecution, and an unjustified if condoned juvenilism... ...age discrimination prosecuted by reactionary attitudes to my perceived liberalism and creative eccentricity... religious bigotry even provoked by my very nonmilitant atheism, et al... and... none of it, reader, none of it, my manufacture. Not where it counts.  I'm live and let live... but if you can put Christian homilies on your public classroom walls and adorn your desk with a tabbed and indexed bible then I can ask you why you think it's supposed to be there!

Consider, in some of the places I taught? ...12-year-old girls were getting carelessly pregnant, but their teaching cadre was uncomfortable with me talking about the sex parts of FLOWERS for Christ's sake! I digress.

Science & Society fumble the ball, discredit themselves, and provide for their own invalidation. It's not me being obstinate, so much, I offer. It's society... ...being disrespectfully duplicitous and expecting the affected individual to just suck that up.

Wrong. Not at this station, reader.  No more.

I've come to some seriously interesting if tentative conclusions as a result of my aforementioned idle thinking (...God knows what the Devil makes of that, eh?)... 

Am I thinking more seriously about my vindicated cultural criticism to facilitate a more efficacious and productive reality around me? Yes.  I suspect that is what provides meaning sought for and the avoidance of an existential depression. 

Consequently, perhaps because efficacious thinking loves company, I unabashedly suggest my encouragement to as many individuals as I can... ...*Shift* with me, reader! 

I feel it's the future accelerating towards us, regardless. Really. I do. As I've written before, you don't catch a train by letting it run you down. 

Why not shift!?  New approaches to problems of division, fairness, and reach's grasp are begged for currently.  Each day that goes by seems to provide a little more external validation for this invigorating attitudinal *shift* we all will have to face inexorably, anyway,  so bear with me if you can (...and can decipher the "personal code" I've been accused of writing in...[eyeroll!]) because the result, I think, is the more timely acceptance of an unavoidable and quickly approaching ...future... that we are all largely ignorant of... kept so, and so... ...for which we are generally unprepared, myself included.  I'm not talking so much about cataclysm and catastrophe, mind... I'm talking about more "novelty" in a better sense.  See, I suspect there's some real optimistic meat on this conjectured bone, reader.  Communication, transportation, medical, environmental, power generation, Greenness and superior "quality of life" meat...

I think we would do well to prepare, more, for this future. Presently, as I've alluded, we are being denied, I suspect, by our conflicted culture (...its governments, agencies, and institutions...), the tools and materials for that alluded to "preparation"... less egregious superstition and more efficacious science even if celebrating more Plato for Aristotle.  Excelsior!

We have the staff of a McDonalds looking for near earth asteroids of threat and profit...

...That future alluded to could be wonderful, folks. We'd do well to be reasonably prepared for it to facilitate same.   The kingdom is at hand.  I digress, again.

Before my just specified "attitude adjustment," and while maintaining a general profile as a confident proponent for an *other*... (...some obliquely oriented form of the extraterrestrial hypothesis ... no apologies here! ..Jesus, grok Drake and pay attention to a night sky!!), I still endured an undercurrent of personal embarrassment, actually, regarding any discussion I might try to initiate with someone in the mainstream world I'm drowning in... ... regarding my ufological activities, projects, or concerns... ... ...excluding, for the moment, the off-line world of friends and acquaintances also sharing that *mainstream* world with me... real "meat-space" is the issue here.

...Prudence, locally practiced... seemed indicated? Lack of same, apparently, got me disqualified from a second career, after all... I was a tad gun-shy... but now I pull fewer and fewer punches, even with them, as the days go by... Life's short, you know?

On momentary side-bar ... If "the man" is going to deny a person a living wage for thinking out of the box or refusing to skip to a disrespectful tune... what will "he" do if a person persists in their rationality? Well, I intend to find out... and report it to you... reader.

...Anyway, I used to be oversensitive and demonstratively *understanding* (no seriously, and ironic, ~that~!) about the discomfort of persons around me regarding the subject of UFOs. I was*indulgent* of their lack of ufological interest, and *understanding* (more than is remotely appropriate) of their own lack of understanding ... or their pitying or scornful expressions and abrupt subject changes (...if I tried to bring the subject up cold?)...

What follows is a brief composite conversation with the "mainstream," over the years, for illustration...

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"I saw a strange light in the sky this morning doing some really impossible things..." I might start...

A sidelong "Oh yeah...?" ...is the abruptly guarded response...

"Yeah... it looked like the shuttle or the space station going over, was brighter than Venus, and..."

"...It likely was the shuttle or the space station going over..." they might impatiently interrupt.

"I've got an animated schedule from the NASA site that ruled them out...," I'd counter.

"Well—it was some other satellite, then... there's hundreds, thousands of them up there..."

"Well... yeah," I'd concede, "but few as bright as Venus... I get forecasts on those too. Additionally, these lights..."

"...Still" He interrupts again, "...it had to be a satellite, or a plane or a balloon, or something..." He shakes an impatient head...

"Well—it changed speed and direction, stopped, and was traveling more or less due west..."

"So"?

"Well—it was comparatively erratic in flight and absolutely silent... with no navigation lights, ruling out a plane; balloons and satellites don't abruptly change direction, rate of speed, and... stop. Moreover, satellites generally don't go west."

"...Um-hmm... [...starts whistling the "Twilight Zone" theme...] ...so it must be aliens, then, huh?"

His pitying smirk begins its slow bloom. "Well, no, not necessarily... it just seems to be a logical thing to wonder given that as the *impossible* begins to be eliminated about UFOs... ...whatever remains, however improbable, might be the truth about UFOs..."

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...Blank look from the addressed followed most usually by a subject change or retreat, or in one memorable case, even open hostility...

...Look. I know these people have lives—families, jobs, and mortgages. Further, I know that it's me making the waves, rocking their boat, or kicking at the last-century wooden spokes of the wheels on their aggregate cultural applecart!

I know that I can be discomfiting with regard to my ready willingness to question "general reality" or providing for a too ready invalidation of everyone's, too comfortable, status quo. I understand the need to believe in something rock solid so the night shadows are held at bay, and I can appreciate that it's difficult to contemplate the *other*...

Still, "...*Everything* one *knows* is *wrong*..."? A hard swallow... but true, still, for my money. It's where the data seems to be going. Screw your cloistered and conflicted peer review, Herr scientist. I'll do my own science. You seem to betray the trust of any respect I would extend to you. ...You are judged by the fruit produced, Sir.  

...And don't point at gadgets and toys!  To paraphrase MeKenna, that's like the snake oil salesman implying the elixir is good because his snappy patter and juggling about it was. 

... But that's what kept me at bay, generally, with regard to a more strident and challenging approach on my part to the persons refusing to even consider the ufological... ...in some chance discussion with the... ...call them, respectfully, the ufologically unwashed.  Catch the train.  Don't miss it because you couldn't haul your fat ass from the station lunch counter or tourist center!

This is what embarrassed me, reader, provided for my over-sensitivity to an another's arguably specious or contrived or unexamined sensibilities... ...compelled an understanding, an acceptance even (Jesus!), of their lack of intellectual bravery! I figured they were innocent and victims in the social duplicity... just like I was. I was worried about their feelings.

Hit the reset!  It's not that entirely that way anymore.  The one wounded for my trouble is me!

I would be remiss if I didn't voice my concern, express my opinion, or make my contribution to the thought pool available as it is. It's the least I can do, reader, when I have the manipulating and programming thoughts of scurrilous others imposed upon me in an even more forcefully disrespectful manner... ...and in an authoritarian two-faced way considerably less efficacious than I would ever dispense... or... have dispensed... to me.

I'm expected to be honest, forthright and dependable with regard to my society while my society is, plainly,clearly, transparently... ...not honest, not forthright or not dependable to me in return! TILT!

I have... difficulty... respecting a society that has no respect for me, and shan't, reader.  I have solid ethics, myself, but my society, seemingly, has no philosophical morals. This creates problems for me that are not of my manufacture...

You see, it's not my problem that I've paid attention and the scales have begun to fall from my own eyes. It's not my problem that I still possess a bravery honed, refined, and made baldly mandatory in the social conditionings of two decades of combat, combat aviation training, and troop leadership in the Armed Forces.

It's not my problem that another will choose to turn a blind eye to a substantially abundant ufological evidentiary base... and masquerade their equally blind ignorance with obligatory debunker-isms, spoon-fed CSICOPian platitudes, faux-intellectual talking points, and head-in-the-sand congested and bigoted worldviews!

I reject the obvious preceding!

It's not my problem that people prefer to trust the realities manufactured for them by a thoroughly corrupted lap-dog and bogus imposter *mainstream*, or that they put their faith and cognitive stock into the canted thinking contrived for them by those who would disrespectfully try to manipulate them... ...to dark ends we, the  folks "manipulated," would not appreciate if we knew what those ends were... No apologies here either!

And remember: It's not my song, folks! You'd be remiss shooting the piano player. Do enough of that and pretty soon you won't hear any music at all... with the exception of what's state approved! "Music" dry and uninspired as vapid chalk dust.

It's not my problem, friends and neighbors! Rather, it's a problem inflicted upon me by an imposed, encouraged, or even nurtured cultural naiveté (...I once gleefully supported...) that society was ultimately predisposed to provide the greatest good for the greatest number!

...Pause for squirty guffaws!

Upon discovering that the truth was more... uh... ...*oblique* than that (...that society was actually only interested in providing the credible [and grudging] illusion of "providing-the-greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number"...)? I'm compelled to hold the mainstream authorities, their representatives, and their faith-based apologists to the same fire that has been held to me, and protest, stridently (...if needs be!)... ...where they can be found to be breaking the *rules*, advantaging themselves in the codification of these *rules*, or selectively interpreting the *rules* to suit these aforementioned few!

...Piss on THEM, reader. Yea and verily and with prejudice!

Besides, that's a discredited CSIcopian charter! I'll have no part of that!

The arguments and the credibilities of the *mainstream* (and CSICOPia!) are dead, flatly (...become more decomposed and odiferous with each accelerating second...) and can no longer be counted upon to be the common-sense-retreat-to-traditional-solid-ground that a reflexive conservative apologist might shrilly advise that they *once* were. No. Steve Allen rolls in his grave...

They're decidedly not the "step back to better times," they suggest! When the coffee's perked? At the denouement? When you paid your money and took your chance? They're a step back to medieval times of neo-feudal social atrocity and the unrestricted lusts of cold-fish and elitist psychopaths legislating that sociopathy! Search your heart, damn it!

Devoid of any responsibility for fairness, and with zero regard for the sensibilities of individual persons ground up in the institutional machines of these new "neo-lords of the imposed and official ignorance"? They destroy the middle class, supplant the "freer republic" and replace it with an anti-individualist's "new theocracy" every bit as bad (for the rising and the advancing of the individual human spirit?) as fundamentalism of ANY stripe. ...Even worse in many ways, I fear...

Next:  THE DEBATE!

...In Torment...

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There are persons in torment, and it’s genuine, bunky! These belie all your snickers and sneers! They’re smashed on the rocks of some highly strange weirdness, yet shoved to the fringe's inconsolate rear!
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These write haunted letters seeming eerily truthful. These try to make do with their ruinousness lives! One has to lie to a spouse to keep *blending*... Another's alone and abused but *survives*.
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“Just say it ain’t so,” people's relatives plead. “What's said's "science fiction," son, anyway!” “You’ve surely lost everything–now let *it* alone.” “...Get down on your knees, stop sinning... and pray!”

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...But these know just what they felt and saw and heard!
They know they weren’t just dreaming! That’s absurd!
What smells like that while dreaming? How's reality not perturbed?
...And this process of the "highly strange" goes its way, still, undeterred!
~

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I won’t pretend to understand their stark prodigious terror... These events which must exceed all sane control! Insanity inflicted has pretended their *discredit*! These are ...people... ground in gears... of steel and gold.
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If they’re wrong, the bunky reasons, they're "pathetic" parasites. They’re a drain on *worshiped* science; that's the worst! ...But correct... they readjust our shallow worldviews, and our *white-bread* compilations split and burst!
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If they’re right? They have an insight on these "changes," we suspect. This may mean that all you work for is untrue... ...All the wealth you have amassed... may be purloined from your grasp; you may end up "leeks" and "carrots" ...in a stew!
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If they’re right your personal world could get "uncomfortable," n'est ce pas... All your children could be thrown up in your face. All your works? An abomination of some true psychotic God; all your thoughts? ...Mere filthy rags in time and space.
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Is it best, then, not to know that you’re invalid without point, that's to say compelling evidence "shows" to" place"? For my part, I'd rather gladly "start at zero," begin again, than to live a life contrived, so losing face.
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...And still these "walking wounded" write me letters by the by. Their misery's complicated, sans surcease.  Abandoned, and alone, these are in tatters and impugned, and bullied by the likes of "mind police."

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...Too, they know just what they felt and saw and heard!
They know they weren't just dreaming! That’s absurd!
What populates their dreams like shrieking birds?
...Showing horror's unabated as what's "strange" goes undeterred.
~

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Think “Ellen” was a brave soul for her swim to Lesbos isle? Think her courage so conclusive or refined? It’s, respectfully, just a piddle, when compared to all the trouble the abducted take on board when they're defined!
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They are driven from their families far more often than mere gays? They are driven from their jobs... where they've worked and saved and paid?  They're divorced from all humanity and then driven to the fringe; and when it's you, you'd understand where "what's" to happen then.
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That’s the lot in life, perhaps, for those who put their trust... in our cultures admonition that it’s there for you, or bust! But show a little "difference" in "performance," I say true, and they shove you to the brittle ice and push you coldly through.
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So suffer your affliction's tattered lives, my honored friends—respected neighbors! Take heart it’s really happening, not contrived! Take heart that you're the vanguard and so, likely, closer still to what, soon, I must surmise, we’ll all imbibe!
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~

...See, these know just what they felt and saw and heard!

They know they weren't just dreaming! That’s absurd!

Who dismisses abject terror, on whose word?...

Who'd invent their hapless lives so marred and burred? 

~

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lehmberg2002@gmail.com
www.AlienView.net
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Steven Stills soulfully warns via any "oldies" channel from 45 years ago, "Something’s happening here–What it is ain’t exactly clear..." ...and he was spot on. As I hear it, we're all in relative indeterminacy on an out of control globe and awash in inky infinite space. Concurrently, we hurtle to some dark unknown as it is, at best, communicated from a lying rear view mirror. That's good news, really. Anything else would be boring.
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As regards the "highly strange"... So damn much is made unclear, though, and unnecessarily so.
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"Made" unclear... eh? That suggests mechanism, and what is that mechanism? What is happening and how! We'll leave "why" to those who mistakenly believe they'd comprehend it or even have the stomach for it. "Understanding" is not required, eh? Who "understands" the requirements for electronically publishing this page but a few in their own cowls and mantels?  Not me.  I just try to stay in the "curl" that "is."
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Wipeout looms, sure, but sometimes it's just a hop down to the pillowy sand after a finishing rooster-tail in the knee-deep soft-water.  This was, of course, subsequent to a transporting chronological wave, wholly tubular, so much so that the only sound remembered is the Om of the spinning water Mandela.  Then, board be-armed, you huff it up the beach into the fresh embrace of the new destiny illustrated with real meaning, appropriate satisfaction, and humbling enlightenment.  Perchance to brave the ride, again, tomorrow... eh?  Is it that easy?  Perhaps.  The kingdom is at hand!

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So be strong, you woefully affected. 

Ignore the ignorant jibes of the indolently aspected, 

wuff your wings as Joyce wrote, and well be!  

You'll have company soon enough, 

and if you care to that's enough 

to be better than detractors, and what they need.  

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You can have the last laugh, broadcast a few well deserved I told you so's ... and then give these scared newcomers the help they didn't give you.  Do unto others... am I right?
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That said, and for what it's worth if I may, you "experienced persons" have my regard, as genuine whatever the provenance of your sincere experience.
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Try to remember, though, it may not be the aliens, so much, facilitating your torment. It's your culture, likely aware of the very same thing vexing you, themselves, who are to blame. With its support, you see, one could stand tall to the enigma and not be cowed by it, or less cowed, surely.  Society is your villain, I maintain.
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Read on.   ...And restore John Ford, for Christ's sake!  Do unto others!

Build It!

I mean, you'd help me build it—right? ...That place where you could go... Where answers ask the questions, and the questions don't blow smoke. Where everybody's interested and has no ax to grind... just folks concerned with clarity, if  tired flying blind? Where art is done for art's sake, just commercials for the soul -- where classics don't sell lunch meat, but will serve the truth up cold.

Exposing some unusual lies, admitting what we should despise, copping to the starry skies—a satisfaction in reprise!

I mean, you'd help us build it—right? ...the stone work architecture, the streams and ponds—the shady spots... a site for our conjecture. A place to sit with back support. A spot to put your feet. Hot water from a tap that's free with air that's cool and sweet. And grass in leaves of different greens, an interwoven tapestry—splashed with reds that never fade... a painting of a rhapsody. 

A place to go—see different things, study stuff that "leaps and sings", watching close what "spreads its wings"—Imagination's wanton fling!

I mean, you'd help us build it—right? . . . the stars would paint the skies, and their focus be *explicit* as they glimmer in disguise. Words take on new meaning—definitions are profound, what's heard is CD quality—somber bursts of ultra sound. And the humor is full bodied, and the laughter's not at you... Everyone's respectful—even Christians, Moslems, Jews. 

No sacred cows, or inhibitions—no phony, harmful prohibitions, examining our inquisitions—changing ~all~ the cold conditions!

I mean, you'd help us build it—right? . . . the screens to show full motion, all the hardware that contains them, and the software smooth as lotion. Cameras have strange angles, and unusual fields of view to capture crystal empathy that could leave you unconfused. And a library for enjoyment with Teddy Sturgeon there on hand. Andrew Vachss will clean your clock, and then he'll help you understand. 

...Know truest love, without collusion, respect up front (it's no intrusion), examine every institution; improve, at length, your constitution!

I mean, you'd help us build it—right? ... the places by the falls in the mists of acquisition where we hear a lectern call. Where sunlight's dappled softly into shadows well perceived. Where we can talk, and eulogize the ignorance we cleave. Where space spins out unending, and the speculations call. We shan't be cheated from it; we shall laugh, and have it all! 

We'll sally forth for our detection , our senses sharpened for connections; we'll make (at once) those course corrections, choosing paths of BEST direction!

Odd Observation #12

Odd Observation #12
by Alfred Lehmberg

Outside visibility had been as terrible and opaque as a dirty milk-glass. Too, the suffocating humidity was oppressive and discouraging to an otherwise ready spirit. Indeed, I was reminded of Nipple-napper John Ashcroft's Justice Department during the catastrophic Bush administration. 

Moreover, all the effects of global warming were centered, seemingly, directly and most precisely on my exact geographic coordinates.  The bugs were held in magical abeyance by the Bounce rag; however, or I would have assuredly been driven indoors.  I'm thankful for the potential of an "indoors."

Still, they flew.

Oh admittedly, they didn't fly grandly, conclusively, or even brilliantly...  Still, they flew.

...And it's a taste ironic for me as, at the time and now. There was a lot of impassioned discussion about the end of UFOs.  

They were all going "away", going "out", or going "extinct." "Abductions were decreasing," some pontificated.  "Sightings were way down," others pronounced.  Really.

Forgetting for a moment that this got the CSICOPian Shermer/Sheaffer  skeptibunkies capering around gladly like frolicking nay-saying Net trolls, it really only aped some kind of sweaty bandwagon many seemed to be jumping on... in some "king-of-the-hill" attempt to be "first" and proclaiming some "new reality" regarding the death of UFOs?  Specious stuff and turgid nonsense then and now.  The "new reality" is not found; it is faced.

I saw it as chasing a "false plausible" in a ham-handed if  furtive attempt to appear cutting edge while avoiding the issue.  I saw it as playing into the hands of the transparently deceptive to assuage personal concerns regarding work thought done.  I saw it as pandering to the misleading, and embracing, too greedily, the decidedly flatulent ostensible.  I saw it as courting the readily sophistical, incorporating the duplicitous and so onerous captious, or being, at best, shallowly pretentious but at worst an 'evil' retrograde returning to a comforting past which never existed.  I saw it as denialist cowardice. 

Such as these favorably considers their falsehoods as right and true, and then conflate themselves with the absolute weakest of what's too easily or most conveniently presumable... the too taken for granted "conventional wisdom." They are the rigid misapplication of Occam's razor where the hypothesis must be, of needs, complicated. The are a poor man's Aristotle (reductionism) where a leavening of Plato (holism) was required.

Sightings were "down" friends and scabrous bunkies, not because UFOs were "going away," but because there were fewer people LOOKING for them those days!  People who might otherwise have been pondering the skies were, instead, only looking over worried shoulders for 'enemies', real AND imagined. They had no TIME for a puzzling enigma in the skies over their heads while staring down the barrel of a terrorist's gun!  All part of the master plan then (uneasily?) dismissed by Jerry Clark? 

Conscious or unconscious (and given less and less protection from already tolerated sociopaths by an at the time authoritarian Bush/Ashcroft administration) it was not a completely unreasonable proposal.  After all, it's only a relative few who inordinately gain as a result of our aggregate ignorance, after all.  Sociopaths ARE.  Psychopathy IS.  Conspiracy abounds. Discount these and the threats they busily precipitate at your peril!

Let me assure the interested reader that sightings were not down, then or now. "Abductions" were not decreasing in frequency, and the artless bunch over at archaic CSICOP had no hint of vindication what-so-ever.  Shermer and Robert Sheaffer  might have ceased their tiresome capering and returned to their reductionist think-cloaks, nineteenth century runes, and outdated CSICOPian Newtonics.  That's their beat.

The universe continues to resonate with a "quality" of life, undreamed by the whistling klasskurtxist*, as strange moving lights unsteadily traverse a steady starfield to MOCK the cast aspersions of those who would "wish" them away.  Rock the head back to a crisp night sky with a modicum of revealing patience and be rewarded with proof of the larger reality that will be there, eventually!  I say true.  I saw same.  Moreover, progressive humility and the avoidance of unwarranted hubris demands it.

These occurrences, that the mainstream will only trifle with, come in 'WAVES' that even a conflicted mainstream cannot ignore without blowing its cover, its facade or thin veneer of pretended rationality or open-mindedness.  

These waves are well referenced by Ruppelt, Hynek, and Vallee in decades of literature. They've been going on since time in memorial and are captured on non-faked film, recorded in credible historical ink, and chiseled into ancient and unyielding stone, "if you ken it."   These "waves" could be older than current DIRT!

The history of UFOs truly parallels our human history. Though it is decried, minimized, and derided by our suspicious social convention, the facts of their existence creep out around the edges of the coffin lid employed by garden variety CSIcopians (klasskurtxian*) employs to contain them. This should give us all more than mere pause to entertain a suspicion that some larger reality is being denied every one of us.  Something certainly is. Search a heart roundly despised and discounted by scurvy scientistics. 

UFOs are valid, it is our baseless and cowardly mainstream denial of them that is not.  Evidence of them abounds; verily, it gushes from founts.  It is photographic, historical, credibly anecdotal,  and very personal for many of us.  It's mathematical.  It flies in the face of the denial of it.  

Only the irrational fear of a knee-jerk reactionary, culturally conflicted, and philosophically myopic leadership would deny the patently obvious.  UFO's are real.  They exist and have existed since before the first human being banged one rock against the other.  We are not alone.  Everything else is a fantasy, ironically—a concoction, invention, or convenient illusion.

That's enough.  I remain watching our skies.  Read on.

*It's a word I coined. It's a mash-up of the names Philip Klass and Paul Kurtz: two CSI(COP) "heavyweights."  I'm attempting to put a name to aspects of their too hubristically anthropomorphic, unjustifiyably arrogant, and altogether cowardly philosophy.  Was that point too fine?

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"Klasskurtxian" is, I submit, a graceful co-mingling of Onomatopoeia and crystal self-definition, clattering concussively—if effortlessly—off the tongue and palate like a big porcelain urn of live poisonous snakes dropped in the CSI(COP) Commissary. It has a meaning easily determinable in context for just that reason, eh? 

A Star In Kansas (Part II of II)

PART II

Last time we put justified tears to rest, tried and failed to herd cats, established justifications, and were substantively lectured by people of unquestioned sincerity...

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We move on.

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Foundations laid the previous day, the next day's activity is a panoply of UFO subjecture wholly complementing the previous day's presentations, expanding the history further back then is generally known, and touching substantially on the theme of the OZUFO conference:  UFOs and Nukes.

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Butch Witkowski

First up—and right after breakfast too—embattled researcher Butch Witkowski, takes us for a walk on the dark side of the abduction phenomenon with a forensic presentation of, not "cattle" mutilation, mind you... but "human" mutilation.  Could the "other," apart from merely abducting we humans, be torturing, mutilating, and murdering us too?  The evidence seems inconclusive to this observer, but something produced the horrendous and stomach churning subjects of Witkowski's unsettling photographs, and the case he makes is not entirely dismissible.

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After a welcome break from Witkowski's punch-in-the-paranormal-gut that was his presentation—not for the squeamish—Rosemary Ellen Guiley served up more engaging and embraceable fare.  First a word about Ms. Guiley.

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Rosemary Ellen Guiley has written some 43 books, numerous papers, and is on the mastheads of several named initiatives aspiring to meld spirit and science in the name of equal time for both Plato and Aristotle, I submit.  A lovely woman such as she is, with her world class reputation and sought after schedule, could be expected to be aloof, standoffish... even arrogant and elitist.  Not so Ms. Guiley!  She was ever gracious and approachable, more a listener than a talker, and damned funny too.  Likable on all levels. Approachable at all times.  Appreciable in every regard. 

Guiley and Feschino share a table... 

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Regarding her current book, written along with her less than fortunate co-pilot on the venture: the increasingly infamous and now wholly discredited Philip Imbrogno, she explored how far back into our history the other, alien, or ET may go.  Islamic tradition parallels Christian tradition with regard to "fallen Angels," it seems.  UFOs, abductions, and close encounters abound in Textual Islam just as they do in the Bible.  Only, Islam seems to take a more balanced, informational, complete, and evocative position with regard to the reportage on their gods and angels.  This is as it pertains to angels "fallen," or otherwise.  To say that her presentation was compelling is to prosecute an understatement.  ...First-wash talk from a top drawer lady.

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Bryce Zabel

Following Guiley, Bryce Zabel returned to presage his writing partner and co-author, Richard Dolan, coming later, on the consequences of official disclosure of the outré  "other" as it pertains to the effects and affects of this "other" on human Government, Religion, Institution, and Agency (GRIA).  What will change and why?  How will GRIA change and where will these changes manifest most?  When will these changes be, not found, but faced? 

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Peter Robbins

After lunch, we regard Nuclear weapons and the UFOs—with the presumption of self-aware occupants—interested in them.  First in the breach is the always with-it and persuasive Peter Robbins to revisit the Rendalsham Forest Events: The Woodbridge and Bentwaters Base Incidents in England.  The update on current events and principals was more than interesting and of note, but special mention must be made of something else.

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Robbins extended what this writer took to be an Olive Branch to Colonel Charles Halt regarding some low-intensity conflict the Rendalsham principals had been enduring for some time and did so with humility and style.  When Col. Halt took the podium later on for his presentation he, again by this writer's estimation, accepted said Olive Branch with grace and aplomb and made a startling disclosure of his own. 

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Charles Halt

Halt reported that the enlisted men associated with the Rendalsham incident were put through a "stand-down" so bloody arduous in extremis that it involved unending debriefings of brain-washing intensity and psychotropic drugs!  That's the long and tall on this writer's take. He remarked further that it was a wonder that these brave men had any "there" there, left at all.  The question is begged: is this the way we treat brave volunteers who witness something inconvenient to a corrupt authority through no fault of their own?  I can work up little surprise if so.  Still, a startling disclosure!

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Robert Salas

Moving forward, Robert Salas took us all deep into the secret and hugely well-vetted world of the atomic Missileer, nuclear missiles, and astonishingly, effecting UFOs!  With illustration and lucid talk this Air Force veteran, retired master's engineer, and high school math/science teacher, does his society one more good turn!  
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See, he faced the ufological reality foursquare and, with no small courage, passed his experience on to the rest of us.  At the end of his presentation, I hurried backstage and told him that I was hugely impressed with his history of service and was officially bestowing upon him the "As Ufologically Sober As Stanton Friedman," award.  He had a hearty laugh and so did I... it was good, though.  He was that compelling and that convincing. This writer's read is that Salas tells the truth and nothing but.

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Colonel Charles Halt then took the mound! Number two man at Bentwaters Base in England during the infamous—and getting more so—UFO incident of 1980, he pitched a perfect game pertaining to his being on site, ground zero, for "first person testimony of the event" rights.  His story is important in the nukes & UFOs context because "everyone knows," nuclear weapons were being stored illegally at that facility in 1980!  Colonel Halt?  He fixes you with a stony expression and informs you that he is not at liberty to either confirm or deny. 

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The ranking witness to the event, he's on clear audio tape with his subordinates, a crack team of top notch Security Police—"guarding nuclear weapons," remember so, "crack" by necessity and design—as they chased close-counter, even physically touched, UFOs in the otherwise deserted forest.  This UFO was witnessed by civilian persons off the base too, reader.  This did not...as it is maintained ..."not happen"!

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The closing day of the Summit was "final history and likely implications," day.

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Feschino & Friedman

First up was my good friend, "Shoot Them Down" researcher and author Frank Feschino Jr.  His presentation regarding extant military "Shoot UFOs Down" orders, the biggest Flying Saucer Flap in US UFO history, and the whole 1952 "Summer Of Saucers"  affair... only culminated in the Flatwoods Monster situation, a presentation in itself... It is, again, the ETH so far up your nose you feel knees on your mustache as I alluded before. 

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There's a lot of military history in Feschino's 90-minute presentation, air, and ground, and just how is it that a whole battalion of infantry can be deployed to a remote area because a woman and six kids see an "owl" in the mountains?  Enthralling, to be sure, but this was not the "hit" of his presentation.

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The "hit" concerned the eight-foot square time-line-map documenting UFO activity in and around the State of West Virginia (http://tinyurl.com/3mkl4m6).  See, if the reader was informed that the furiously busy construction laboriously laid out reflected UFO activity, in and around the State, over the preceding decade, they would be impressed enough!  Though reader... ...the construction alluded to reflects only 21 HOURS worth of activity September 12, 1952... and the bulk of that in just 2 hours!  Be now properly impressed!

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Richard Dolan approaches, reader, cue the ominous music.  There's

Richard Dolan

no secret why Richard Dolan gets invited to conferences all over the planet.  Besides being a leg of my own personal Ufologically convincing "quadrature" or "Quad Riga," he has for many years (along with Feschino, Friedman, and the not attending Robert Hastings) been my ufological goto.  Dolan is the very portrait of the person one would think is needed to break the unsettling if inevitable news to the rest of us.  Still warmly approachable like the college professor/hero in a quality 1950s Science Fiction film, he's tall, fit, and hugely eloquent.

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Dolan envisions a breakaway civilization inside the civilization we know, if unknown to you and I.  This civilization within a civilization may avail themselves of wondrous technologies purloined from crashed saucers and strange deals with their builders, and, catbirds in catbird seats, it could be this secret civilization keeping official admission of such at bay.  Cogently opining on the inevitability of that "official admission" or disclosure, Dolan explores the affects and effects of the supposed secret civilization on its parent civilization.  Good stuff raising the hair on the back of one's neck to be sure—one has to face fear to mitigate fear, reader—but, still, not to be compared with Dolan "one on one."

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Dolan had me out for a beer, once, during a break in the evening program where he wolfed down a Veggie pizza... and he told me 'stuff' that made me dizzy... made me feel like he'd turned gravity down somehow, real light in the seat and "Twilight Zonie." One on one with Dolan is a memorable experience.  It wasn't the beer, folks.

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What 'stuff'? What you'd expect, on reflection. Big names undisclosed in dark, still smoke-filled rooms, discussing the unknowable, to us, but pedestrian to them like they live in another reality or dimension entirely... a select group of human beings availed of Technology so advanced it's real magic in a synthesis of mind and material... provoking "breakaway civilization" and facilitating a different "kind" of human, altogether. Shocking!

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Head swimming 'stuff'. Iterated justifications for why we are, at all, interested in this 'stuff', eh?  Dolan instructs that our interest is justified, brothers and sisters! Yea and verily!

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Steve Bassett

Closing... the reader can say what he wants about final speaker Steve Bassett.  That he is a belligerent bombast in the vein of a ufological Alex Jones.  That he's a UFO guy never seeming to get around to talking about UFOs.  That he hijacks conferences with talk about secret underground cities, FEMA concentration camps, suitcase and shipping container nukes used on the heartland of the US and seaports coast-borne... 

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Though, consider: it might be that he genuinely feels that an across the board disclosure, given the ufological reality outlined by most of the previous speakers, may be just the thing to preclude the use of those aforementioned nukes, those proposed concentration camps created in the wake of atomic blackmail, tens of thousands of children starving to death, presently, on this planet every day, oceans dying in turgid toxic filth... all this where we have an un-admitted wherewithal with regard to secret technology that could mitigate all these tragedies?  Yet, a result of reptilian sociopathy, our unelected leadership would deny the race of us these mitigating boons.  Well, this writer is provoked to a little belligerence of his own.  You go, and God's speed Mr. Bassett!

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John Leatham

Finishing up, let me congratulate, again, OZUFO Summit producer, Mr. Dan Lauing, a good man of sincere passion with the courage of honest conviction to say what he thinks needs to be said, able to provide a platform for others to express similar unsettling sentiments, and then making that so, compellingly, so.   Also, acknowledged here is John Leatham's wholly selfless quality value added.  OZUFO is not done without yourself, Sir.

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I look forward to the next substantive conference.  There is a new star in Kansas.