Odd Observation #15

Odd Observation #15
by Alfred Lehmberg


What do you want from me, you scurrilous and whiny CSIcopian or denialist denizen of errant Klasskurxia? Questioning Sanity so Reasonably Sane, it remains, that among reasonably rational others? I see stuff. Resolved: If consistently seeing's not believing, it's certainly penultimate to it. 

I intimate with respect, also, as regards "stuff" on more than one level. Every morning of decent visibility I'd go out... would generally provide me with an opportunity to make the substantive report you read here, I say true. 

There had been many sightings since the last accounting reflected in #14 which would have been seen by anyone with me... that is, anyone with the willingness to actually go out and look—anyone one with the most minimal courage to see... ...anyone desiring that reality LARGER than the one metered out to them from their stingy mainstream's homogenizing if sour smelling info-nipples.  

Too direct?

I'd seen weird stuff, again, one morning... then, more mornings after that... an unending stream of mornings and late nights.  There is such a compelling vastness there anyway, and to be at the "perceived" center of it all is humbling where it is not scary, and inspiring where it is not exhilarating... 

How does that work?  The reader might try the proceeding. 

Head and eyes locked as a unit, look left (the better choice in this writer's long experience), and regard where the eye lands.  Doing that and not looking, imagine what's behind you.  Then imagine your right.  Then left.  

Ja'do it?  No?  Well, imagine doing it. The point is that perception goes out from you in every conceivable direction... ...to infinity, even.  There is a lot of space/time and surface area to take in. It's an intellectual embrace that, so very quickly, becomes too big for mere imagination... becomes, in fact, wholly unenglishable. Even language extant is defied. In that single imaginative plane regarded? Anything that can... does!  All this in a single regarded plane:

Lost in time and dusty space 

could live the creatures of some race 

who'd solved the problems that we face 

or vanished there without a trace...
. 

Angels, monsters, neither... both... 

things beyond the wholly loathed... 

A paradise... an anxious hell, 

where we would stay or dread to dwell, 

but existing and extant 

beyond conjectured... callous cant.

Now, imagine this "plane of the regarded" on a ball-socket gimbal contrivance able to tilt the plane in any conceivable direction or orientation.  There is an infinity of those, too.  A few parsecs out a fraction of change at the reader's center means lightyears of dislocation on the... rim of the readers imagination. On and on. On and on. On and on.

The reader begins to notice that perception of all this centers on the reader quite apart from any desire to have it so. Indeed, that centeredness can be downright unpleasant living incorrectly, but we won't digress.  Remains that from the reader's point of view, the reader is, for good or ill, the center of the universe.  It can be no other way. Individual perception is the reality.

Much responsibility there... buying in, giving up... throwing down... it all comes down to you.

When a certain kind of person has an inordinate amount of time with which to "look," they will look, I think. I've been blessed (or cursed depending on outlook) with just that kind of "inordinate" time, and I aspire to be that "certain kind of person" I'll later (and most self-indulgently [g].) try to describe in this piece.  I'm precluded by conscience from anything else.

It all adds up to a genuine desire to find out just "what the hell is  going on." How can evil reciprocity and bold insentience hold such sway over this egregious disincorporation amongst ourselves when we are just the ones on which we must depend?

This is a desire that more of us have than not, I believe, and I am in a position, and have the time, to have a really good go at this puzzle, perforce; try to digest what I'm seeing, and then report findings back to you (the contrarily if gainfully involved, understandably distracted and otherwise employed, living hard won and travailed lives). Respect!

In a useful, periodic, and entertaining kind of way, I would take a reader completely out of themselves by suggesting an ironic orientation deeply rooted in themselves.  No fiction, or apologies, here. Self-appointed, sure, but "the good borrow and the great steals!" ...or makes the aspiration.  Reach exceeding grasp always and forever, but that's a good thing.

So, on reflection (?), just coming up on my second, more or less, dedicated 'decade' of looking for the 'ufological' and trying to develop some inclusive kind of knowledge base and general sensitivity for same, I find I'm still able to pay the continued price of its prosecution—be that kind of guy I will describe... ...continue a now protracted period of personal investigation and submit a good report on my, continuing, wide-field exploration of what presents itself as the "highly strange"!  The truth told to be understood, so perhaps believed.

This is forgetting, of course, that it doesn't have to mean a damned thing to you, respected reader. I'm gratified to hand towels and cigarettes where the reader does find meaning or some small pleasure... but it's not necessary. The heartfelt expression is going to be there, regardless. It's a record and a truthful one at that. It'll get read someday, "Lord willin' and the creek don't rise." 

...But let me make a quick digression with regard to the reader wading through my "affected" writing style... The closest I'll get to an apology is to inform the reader I write completely so as to be understood as I've outlined. I hear rhythms and songs and undulations of phrase.  Words are paint.

It is done, simply, the way it is done, out of respect for the language, and by extension, the reader. I'm not going to talk down to the reader, no, or poke teasingly at the reader's lowest common denominator! NO! Expect an intelligence, and many times get an intelligence. Expect Homer Simpson and get him every time.

I am going to use, arguably, the best word available, in my estimation, regardless, klasskurtxaeladdies and less numerous skepti-lassies! They aren't words that will be used only one time, good reader, they will be used again and again, in all my pieces fore and aft, for good reason. They fit, or what's a language for?!

Moreover, they are words that open up new dimensions in time and space for the individual that goes to the trouble of finding out what they mean that first time... a simple cut and paste into "Google" on the internet for instant gratification (and an expansion to the interior of a reader's perceptual bubble or "known universe) the result of a pleasurable little squirt of dopamine, itself a result of becoming a little smarter for the experience! Such is language. 

"Grasp" closer to "reach"! Take a step up on a new definition and see farther than the reader did before! Finally, I write the best, most considered, and most respectful kind of language I am  capable of producing.

I can do no less in as much as you are reading it, eh!  I must respect and appreciate that. I've respect to give.

Besides, different words put the reader's head in different places. The fact of a dwindling commodity (of diversity) evaporating rapidly in a contrived global homogenization of fascist mediocrity (as we speak), the reader needs all the difference they can get their sweaty little cognitive hands on, whether they know it or not!

The kind of language I'm talking about (and trying to employ here) has an appreciation imbued by the user to treat the language as if it were a box of verbal paint. In it are aspirations to make every word a dab of color, every sentence a portrait, and every collection of sentences a virtual holograph.

All things being equal I'd write in a language begging to be revisited, like a song, or like classic words of yore. That's what I aspire to here, with no shame, no embarrassment, and no guile. I'm too old to be pretentious. I would be of respected service, as would any sociophile.

Words are paints and magics and tools and weapons! They travel in time and are as eternal as they are made and preserved. They are teachers, leaders, and entertainers. They are efficiency. They are efficacy. They are immortality!

They are the very COIN and FABRIC of cultural memory! In as much as they paint better, more durable and longer lasting pictures, they are the ART of primary expression! Our culture will survive much, much longer than those of antiquity because (outside the threat of idea [and therefore book!] burning  CSICOPians, or the electricity stops working), the consolidation of all literary incantation is going to be very hard to forget. Believe it!

What kind of person am I? Why should the reader remotely care? I'm not suggesting that the reader should, really, but that I am in the process of telling them about some pretty 'twitchy' stuff, so I feel obligated to qualify my inquisitiveness, justify my conscientiousness, and predicate my truthfulness for them, if I can. Someone's going to write this stuff, I've a premonition, and as I have the means, the desire, and the attitude to write it myself, I will. Read or not. It's almost the same to me. [g].

I'm the "kind of person" who will blow his own horn once in a while... because if we don't?  It's not too long before a ~funnel~ is made of it, reader, and it loses its ability to be anything BUT a funnel. Pretty soon, there is NOTHING around but "funnels" (the GOP master plan?), too hesitant to contribute to the... efficaciously fertile sonic cacophony of genuine and creative human beings!

That's a terrible tragedy!  I say true.

That's part of the present problem, ladies and gentle-bunkies! Give me the "Rebel Alliance" over the "Empire" anytime, if the reader will forgive the George Lucas reference.  To many nazis in the "Empire."

Who would I aspire to be eventually? Consider the rapidly depressurizing airliner. All the yellow oxygen masks drop down in the emergency, and your personal experience, education, and training is reflexive, you put your ailing neighbor's mask on him before you put your own on yourself. Yes, you've been admonished by the flight crew to put your own mask on first so you will be around to help a struggling fellow passenger.  It's a secondary admonition.  Your own self-admonition takes precedence and you blow off the flight crew as forgotten.  The flight crew is absolutely correct, but that's not going to matter. Not that, it's like that.  I aspire to be of meaningful service.

I've got my mask on in the time allowed me, and I might be able to offer suggestions facilitating a better seal on yours... I would aspire to be around to serve, indeed, I've volunteered for service all my life, doing all sorts of jobs no one else wanted to do.  There was satisfaction in them.

That's over!  I have a new cognitive sheriff in town. This one shutters Walmart for Mom and Pop with extreme prejudice!

I aspire to make original music. It transports me, its only requirement. Others have been similarly effected and I take that for convivial service rendered.  

I'm an aspirant artist. I'm not the only one who thinks so. I say that straight out and without pretension. An 'outsider' discovered by Dr. Faye Earnest of Enterprise State College (who produced a one man show of my, actually award winning, work), I represent an art community with no formal training in it. I push the physical materials or light media around in ways to satisfy me, without regard to convention or tradition and so I am unhindered by the "conventional wisdom" of what "does" and "does not" work. 

I aspire to write.  Words are just another box of paint to me—another art to reflect what is perceived as truth. I do what an artist does. I don't know any better.

I'm a whistle-blower. This is a quality that I didn't realize I had until very recent reflection, years after the fact, demonstrated it to be true. In the military, I would flirt with disloyalty to my superiors when they would operate in arbitrary manners that, knowingly and thoughtlessly, abused the troops or were dangerous and illegal. I "blew the whistle" on them. I was instrumental in getting more than a few of my superiors relieved for cause.  It was not pleasurable even in service to people.

This cost me, in fact, generally, a career above the military company level despite being awarded four times the recognition for Meritorious Service as the usual officer in my grade. I turned down my last promotion, awarded on the second consideration when it was discovered by the promotion board that my failure to get picked up 'first look' was a result of one of those 'superior' officers I should have helped torpedo (very justifiably... he lied, cheated , and stole... nearly killed a guy thoughtlessly in a field training exercise...) but didn't, to leave the Army at last after 23  years.  I regret not nailing that guy, too.

I'm paying a whistle blower's freight, still, with monitored pride and good satisfaction! I've been denied friends (such as they were), opportunities, and about seven hundred thousand dollars in lost income to prosecute what, I have strong convictions, is personal correctness and living correctly, to a high degree necessitated by conscience!  A satisfaction is there, too. It's been a tough slog.  The wife has been patient.

Continuing on the thread of "whistle blowing," One can only imagine what my experience was like in my subsequent career as a Public School teacher... oil and water does not begin to provide an adequate metaphor, but upon coming from a military operation that had to work by definition, my sagacity was by no means appreciated in an operation engineered for failure that does NOT have to work, also by definition. I was treated generally (and from the beginning) as a pariah carpet bagger despite the fact that I was at my very best, appropriately subordinate, behavior. 

Though, I could not ignore hypocrisy and malpractice without at least asking probative questions about it. Anything else makes my stomach hurt, and why should ~my~ stomach hurt when it's not my problem and a result of the clearly defined unethical actions of others? Why should yours? The reader will just have to take my word for that, but it applies in the ufological arena as well.

I am a "Boy Scout", philosophically. I believe all the stuff I learned in school and from parents about honor, truthfulness, and fidelity, and I was nonplussed, to say the bleeding least, upon discovering that it was all, decidedly, nothing but an artful cultural dodge, mostly, used by otherwise unrestricted psychopaths to secure unethical advantage because, honored reader, they were not compelled by a society (they controlled) to follow the same rules that you and I are compelled to follow. Mendacity abounds!

Honor, truthfulness, and fidelity have earned sneers were there should have been citation, loss where there should have been efficacious gain, and rejection where there should have been ready acceptance. I would ram those easy sneers back up some of those sociopathic noses (or alternate avenues to where the sun doesn't shine) and will, given the attention of a single interested reader (myself?).

Who are "they", the aforementioned psychopaths? Already asked and answered. Check the archives.

I'm a trained military observer (I used to teach observation techniques as a flight standardization officer in the Army) as I hope this series has demonstrated. I'm not given to taking apples for oranges, satellites outside their forecast, pelicans for costumed super-heroes, or UFOs for thrown pie plates. I'm not a believer, but at the same time, I am not a reflexive disbeliever. 

I cannot accept; however, especially given even a clouded history of our own species, that we are the center of the universe, the crown of creation, or even the shining buckle on God's three corner HAT! I don't believe in gods made in the image of those who would have me do their ill-faith bidding. Like George Santayana, I am an ATHEIST in that regard.

My faith is in my left leaning compatriots from whom my salvation was ever secured. It's disingenuous to levy that those human hands alluded to were divinely inspired. No. Individual HUMANS were their own inspiration.   

I'm a writer. I write nonfiction that takes what I would think is an enthusiastic and creative delight in the craft. I want to inspire a reader, enliven a reader, stimulate a reader. I would encourage a reader, revitalize a reader as I have been revitalized by reading, and, finally, I would challenge the reader as I have been challenged.  It's all good.

I am eyes with the TIME to look. Look with me! I am ears with the MOTIVATION to hear. It is there to listen to. I am voice with the OPPORTUNITY to speak. I'm speaking now. Like eating and breathing, I am compelled to produce these ufological reports and expressions because I sense in them (or more, in what provokes them) a 'truth' that will likely not be forthcoming from any other quarter. Call me self-absorbed; I've earned my self-absorption.

The aforementioned truth is detected between lines of cross-purposed communication everywhere else, between the very stars I observe at night, and I suspect that it is a truth that is at the base of many other, subordinate, truths. Know this one truth to know many more. 

UFOs are real, by way of example, and I think everyone intrinsically knows that, even the most gravid CSIcopian skeptibunky at some dank level or in some dark recess or cavity of a withered and wholly atrophied personality.

I see stuff in the night sky, at any rate, that is not remotely addressed in the wan pontifications of those with a CSIcopian cant, and I shall not hesitate to point that out to same. Individuals of the aforementioned bent (individuals and collections of these individuals who continue to pound straw into their nineteenth century sensibilities, fifteenth century mores, and first century philosophies) can just bloody well get used to my earnest if huckstering dissection of them as long as I am able to stab a key with an index finger. I enthusiastically encourage others to do the same!

It's only what I have been allowed the time to do. The lap-dog mainstream should have allowed a more consuming employment for me. I was just fine (and performed splendidly) as cannon fodder!

...Sorry that an employment of that same capability (in the interests of the rout and general destruction of CSIcopia?) scorches CSIcopian prairie oysters, but that's the way the saucer crashes and the way we roll in the ufological hood!

I just can't feel very sorry for him. He's the mainstream himself and so has his reflexive support built right in. Ironically lonely, he is never alone, our intrepid CSIcopian... cowardice, intellectual or otherwise, loves company.

Isn't that right, Mr. Magaha? Isn't that correct, Dr. Nickell?

Buckle up... enjoy the dying thrashings of elitist reductionist Empire, something better is ~sure~ to rise from the dust and ashes. [g].

That's enough. I remain watching the skies.

Read on!

What Your Guts Say...

Good God, but that one could presume we were able to find a way to stay off each other’s ass!

.

But... (Yeah, I know; you smelled one coming...) ...if I was hearing this forthcoming *message* from anywhere else, I’d give consideration regards turning in my "foil hat" and stepping off to let a sleeping dog lie, awhile.

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The message?

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"There is no *cosmic* conspiracy, in the first place, and errant persons who suspect same are infected with the dreaded "M" cubed disease. This is to say, simply, that they are deliberately Misleading, credulously Mislead, or Mentally ill..."

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Lying, stupid, or sick, to be "John Rimmer" plain.

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Predictably, given the ilk in practice spreading this puddle-deep meme, there are no alternative choices. Zero, zip, nada and uh-uh. That's key.

Nothing's outside the box, the box is all there is "...move along... a non-elected leadership is appropriately forthcoming, show's over folks..." and our institutions don't betray our trust, nothing happening here... nothing interesting!

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Right.

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The previous sentence is patent nonsense to any with-it person who has but seen a UFO, read any Richard Dolan, Robert Hastings, Frank Feschino, or Stanton Friedman et sig al... ...You could have asked Richard Hall about the betrayal endured from trusted institutions betraying all trust but we let him pass beyond the revered pale under-appreciated. He'd been salvoed on multiple levels by same for decades. Still, like a true philosopher-warrior, he persevered to the graceless end, an unsung hero of courage, imagination, and rationality... I digress.

.

Forget the legion of mighty ufological soldiers and the shoulders on which you may confidently stand for a moment, reader... shoulders supporting a contingent of cited justification for very real conspiracies of all types... just to start.

.

...What is your gut feeling, reader? Are you getting anything resembling an informed square deal from mainstream media, the military industrial complex, and your *elected* leadership? Too, are these unsettling entities, and remotely, incapable of ponderous obfuscation, predatory self-interest, and even criminal chicanery? What do your guts tell you, sir and madam, and go with that.  Accept that premice.

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Gargantuan Pharm? Toxic Chemicals? Mendacious Petroleum? Co-opted Media? Corporate Government? Duplicitous Medicine?

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Are these behemoths remotely concerned with the best interests of those travailing individuals who heat the abusing behemoth's very water, haul its garbage, fix its toys, clean its messes, and suffer its, at best, ready disrespect or insincere patronizing? Fight its wars? Uh-uh, after a while, folks, they're just pissing on your leg and don't even CARE that you know it's not rain.

.

Jeez—was that another digression? Great! I love those things! J.D. Salinger points out that that's where the honest reality is actually happening. Everything else is just a bluster... a meaningless and embarrassing facade awaiting the next stock-taking and so useful digression.

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Ooops! Did it again!

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Back at the ranch... ...Please remember: an entity, be it governmental, institutional, or departmental, who can dump PCBs into your drinking water and then cover it up, cripple an official investigation into it, and then not report on the egregious aftermath... is capable of lying and distorting about much worse, and more highly strange, than that... Isn't that what your guts would tell you?

.

...And don't be surprised at the pompous vituperation you can incur as a result of going with your gut on the matter as I have. Just having the suspicion alone is enough to invite the dismissive smears, canted logics, and derisive hoots of conflicted elitists... even those likely pretending a mantle of respectability, scholarship, and common sense... eh, "FASTWALKER," Br'er Ecker?

.

Who else resents being employed in the manner of a casually misused implement brandished about like a pitchfork in the hands of a psychotic maladroit. I've recently read where an individual's facility of a sick society does not speak well of the overall health of that particular individual, at the start...

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Yeah... an aspiring truth-seeker must of needs stay well informed to preclude the shenanigans of the sold-out kool-aid drinker... however "well intentioned"... and folks, think about it. You looking out to me and saying I'm a crazy conspiracy nut may be decidedly worse than me looking back and calling you a juice-sucking and hubristic coward, even if the shoe "fits." I digress again.  Focus, Alfie!

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I’m in the possession of a textbook giving all indication that things are worse than you even suspected, good reader. I read it again recently for about the 150th time... ...Just another liberal pule and the product of a liberal education system? I think not!

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Key words are “cognitive dissonance”, and “Lies my teacher told me...” I've remarked on this book before on the "AlienView Explained" page, and it is the kind of book that begins to sandbag your ufological levee even as it has nothing to do with UFOs. See, it remains to point out that there's a lot of money involved vis a vis officiating the status quo... and UFOs, whatever they might be, are about an alternative entity not beholden or controlled by our default *officiators*.

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The status quo abhors a seditious alternative. UFOs and their conjectured "occupants" may be outstanding in that capacity—nes't-ce pas?

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Lies My Teacher Told Me is a book about re-writing or misreporting the history to support the conveniently approved cant preferred and endorsed later on in a duplicitous society, but using it on the children et al to indoctrinate and manipulate them... ...a docile "employee production" at the expense of producing, instead, critical thinkers. 

I was there, folks, and understand how it has been going on since the beginning. Yeah—maybe totalitarian regimes do this as a matter of course, but what's not reported is that we are guilty of this ourselves in America. Think not? Read something that's not a propaganda, pilgrim.

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We were just starting to come out of it, too... [heavy sigh...]

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Is it any wonder that history (school) is almost universally hated by our children. They know it's bull-squeeze even if they can't articulate why.

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...I say all this, patient reader, knowing that I can get so far up a person's nose that they can feel my boot heels on their chin...
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...but I gotta write my conscience, friend...

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...Unlike my piqued, canted, and neo-conic opposition: scheming scolds recently pandering around loudly and seemingly "oh so sensibly" to a community they would love to firm up into a "base"? Right, Squidward?

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...Only, I've got that conscience to which I have alluded, above... no apologies for that... not straight, not crooked, mind. Curved, and aspiring to asymptotic.  I'd meet that looming concresense, What's left?  More left.
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We're near banging on the starboard wall as it is, preparing to be dashed on the rocks of psychopaths and authoritarian busybodies denying us our birthright of individual freedom to do anything with our bodies requiring mutual and informed consent we care to, eh?
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...wow, was that a final digression?

Read on...

Odd Observation #14

Odd Observation #14
by Alfred Lehmberg

One Monday morning in a turbid summer of 2002 I saw multiple oddities in reasonably clear skies.  The following Tuesday morning recorded oddities numbering in double digits.  

On the strength of the previous two days, that Wednesday morning was an early expedition with a friend (and fellow former master aviator) to a prime observation spot out of town.  There, silent sky crawlers, solitary hovering flashers, and thought quick star-streakers punctuated discussions on Type II Novas, evaporating black holes, the nature of conspiracy, and the unimaginable hugeness of everything else when compared to ~our~ tiny and near insignificant artifice.  What a morning that was.

By Thursday, the experience began to become almost mundane as many objects were seen once again!  Friday evening, with brilliant planets in the sky behind peek-a-boo clouds, I was pointing them out to astonished dinner guests who admitted to me that they were indeed puzzling… "…but how about that Obama"!  Dinner would sit uneasily. 

Finally, there were two now wholly unremarkable sightings of the bizarre and highly strange that following Saturday morning...  

...Heavy sigh... to be compelled to tilt at such ephemeral windmills of seeming if evaporative substance just at reach but unable to grasp... ...when the kingdom was at hand, it seemed.  It's necessary understatement to remark that it was quite a week of sightings, in fact, singular. 

Additionally, we consider—as the "highly strange," audited in seven compelling categories, struts and preens in aforementioned skies—ufologically "under-endowed" purists and reflex skeptics were continuing to whine naggingly, insultingly, and incessantly their pompous reductionist's projections, too proud prosecutions, and puling pontifications, inexorably, regarding "lack of substance as regards UFOs..." testing my endurance to confront them (and their shallow 19th Century philosophies, tired memes, irrelevant and outdated world views) via this, now fourteen part, series.  

Only "testing" I'd said. The snow on a roof might mask a healthy fire in the furnace.

No. Like a rabid sperm whale testing the bulkheads of one's personal ship of consciousness. This mad cetacean has to go down.  Prosecute your Aristotle as needed but remember the Plato remaining to be seen... 

Would that I could point these ETH & UFO denouncers to just one place, you know?  One research point, one concerted effort of ufological balance and intelligence that meets these nastily noisome negativists on their own ground, counters their arguments with arguments based on superior citation, reasoning, logic, and validity, but hoists the hijacked mainstream by its own scientistic (sic) petard...

I'd found it, actually!  You knew that was coming.  See, I'd revealed a new minor god for my personal humanistic pantheon, as well. [g].

As a result of frequently reading what were current events at the now archived UFO UpDates on the very understated VSI site (www.virtuallystrange.net)—real UFO history—plus swinging by the SDI (Strange Days Indeed) page to get a spin up of "what was going to be on Errol's show tonight," I was reintroduced to one of the more serious ufologists, a Mr.

Jerry Cohen.

I'd heard the name, even visited his (older) site.  Ashamed, I just didn't get it, then.  I do now.

I'd always thought that Jerry Clark was the skeptibunky's most auspicious and able nightmare.  I'd discovered that I'd had to move Mr. Clark, respectfully, to an inferior chair!  

My review of Mr. Cohen's site suggested that he has a degree of investigative meticulousness so precise and complete it must have your garden-variety fundamentalist debunker's precision voodoo beads flying through terrified fingers like a slick mechanical snake (spewing an obligatory dark and steady stream of myopic oaths and self-absorbed prayers...) to put an impotent and artless whammy on him!  It's ~quite~ a site of very navigatable hypertext weaving an important story!  I say true!

Mr.  Cohen confronts "conventional wisdom's" CSIcopian directly and on the skeptibunkies home turf, exposing the fallacies of its klasskurtxian reasoning, the emptiness of its turbid proclamations, and the liberty it takes with the facts.  Additionally, Cohen gives the ranking CSIcopian adequate room on his site to rebuke his well-supported contentions, thorough rebukes, debates or defenses are not provided in turn by the skeptibunky and are not forthcoming.  No surprises there, eh?

Mr. Cohen has been around for a ~long~ time so one would think (especially given the effectiveness and competence of Mr. Cohen's assertions regarding CSIcopian interests) that there would be at least some reference to Mr. Cohen on the CSIcopian website in turn; however, a search for "Jerry Cohen" on CSICOP's website turns up exactly bupkis—no mention of him what-so-ever—rather predictably.  Indeed, Mr. Cohen appears especially OBVIOUS in his perfectly explicable absence….

Mr. Cohen's site is a hypertext history of the ufological and is an excellent single source repository for detailed and balanced work so complete and layered that one could spend absorbed days in it.  It is tabbed, indexed, collated, explained, and referenced so well that it will be difficult for the interested and open-minded individual NOT to be well informed by one of the most fascinating and full featured approaches to ufological history this writer has EVER seen. 

Errol Bruce-Knapp is to be commended once again for providing a solid platform for the competently expressed ufological, and a button might go up to Mr. Cohen's site from the reader as soon as possible and with all deliberate speed.  It's good stuff.  We are not alone.

There's a lot of good stuff.  Why doesn't it matter more?  Because it provides answers for which people don't ask questions?  There's a spin for your wheels.

At this point, one must ask, why.  Why bother?  Why "tilt at this windmill" at all?  Well, forgetting the beguiling alternative to the corrupt status quo UFOs provide, and the suggestion of 21st Century tech knowledge actually bestowed in the 21st Century, it's because it may be all going away, is the short answer.  

Come the authoritarians stealthily infiltrating from school board to White House over the decades to legislate religious litmus tests and a mandate to execute homosexuals, life sentences for marijuana possession, and a woman forced to carry her rapist's baby to term. 

Oh, not tomorrow or even next year, but soon, mayhap. Now, consider that a global 21st Century communication system is anathema to the prerequisite authoritarian legislators of moral presumers prosecuting their vapid and regressive interests contriving to return society to the up-tight and ignorant tried-and-rejected-as-unworkable mores of the 1950s, only with no Social Security or Medicare. 

That's enough.  I remain watching the skies.  Read ~on~!

Friedman / Magaha Debate Part II

One shone, the other imploded...

Friedman / MaGaha Debate Part II

by Alfred Lehmberg

PART II

Last time in Part I, we suggested that everything we know is wrong, duplicity has surmounted the objectivity of truth told, and reflex apologies regarding the hurting of one's feelings, as regards the issue of UFOs, were no longer going to be made!  Rolling in, HOT!

...None of this is lost on you, sympathetic reader, none of it. The pretense of same only enrages indignation in me further!  No dog in the hunt, the appreciative reader knows that it is the answer sought which is entirely supplanted by the answer faced.

...Which brings me at last, albeit the long way around, to the Friedman/McGaha debate at TSUM on January 24, 2004, or what should come to be known as, "The Day CSICOP Died..."...

The lighting punk is lit, folks. The box of fireworks is opened. The fun starts.

There is precious little hyperbole in the preceding and the aforementioned debate is an apt citation in strong support of the ufological attitude change announced at the beginning of this essay!

A "standing room only" crowd witnessed the complete and total demolition of all that is CSIcopia—reflex reductionism and imagination dearth—in the person of one (decidedly less than intrepid) Mr. McGaha, apparently the only person in all of CSICOPia willing to stand toe to toe with Mr. Friedman in a controlled debate. The reader can witness the rout, the carnage... on tape, herself, for a small (tres reasonable!) fee. Goliath gets stomped, again, by David.  Goliath should pack it in.

The plainly one-sided debate began with Mr. Friedman, his usual faultless ufological rationality in full sail! He stuck to the facts, outlined his justifications splendidly, and did one more significant thing. Abundantly provoked? He refrained, himself, from any gratuitous insult.

Mr. McGaha, quite simply, failed to perform in a, remotely, similar fashion. His facts were blustery proclamations, his justifications were silly, specious, and unconvincing, and... he was sneering thinly veiled insult from one end of his unpracticed and facile presentation to the other, then not so lightly intimating that Mr. Friedman was a blithering fool to be discounted out of hand.  The porcine dog!  Well, that contrary hog was to be slow-cooked in a pit he'd dug himself for his effrontery, temerity, and trouble!

The reader will understand when I say it was perfectly obvious who the fool, really, was, reader! Be outraged by this affront to enlightened debate!

Mr. McGaha paid heavily (and will continue to pay, I suspect, considering this essay), I'm sure, for his easy insolence and reflex disrespect. He was rude, presumptuous, condescending, unclear, pedantic, arrogant, patronizing, and not a little duplicitous... ...where Friedman was the textbook opposite of these things, verily. Additionally, McGaha was a case study of Friedman's Four Laws of Fraudulent Debunkery... To wit:

1). "What the public doesn't know, we certainly won't tell them." 

...Or lie about it, Mr. Friedman?  See, a look of flawless innocence on his moon-like face, McGaha resold the "Robertson Panel" and the "Condon Report" as straight-up peer-reviewed examinations born of balanced science... instead of the admitted torpedoes to serious ufology they were first designed to be and then discovered, later, as they actually were! This is a result of well-documented criticism of the preceding reports and panels, reader! These duplicitous initiatives were designed to discredit UFOs... from the start!

There were more than a few of these anecdotes proffered by Mr. McGaha... some of them real head-scratchers... He claimed, for example, that the sheer volume of reports regarding different UFO appearances was proof they didn't exist! What?! All the descriptions of UFOs should be the same to demonstrate the remotest verity... McGaha expected us to believe... ?!?

Astonishing... smoke in tarnished mirrors... sounding authoritative but disintegrating in search for its audit trail like dog-dirt in even the lightest rain.

2). "My mind is made up, don't bother me with the facts." 

His literal nose thrown high in almost laughing and unjustified scorn, Magaha pontificated during one of his pompous verbal faux pas that there was "...zero physical evidence of UFOs... PERIOD," and this was after Mr. Friedman had just talked about what constituted physical evidence, indicated some 5000 trace cases, and then showed some slides of same. What a feather-brained and oblivious thing for Mr. McGaha to do and say. An example of the "big lie" and cognitive dissonance in solicitous action...

3). "If one can't attack the data, attack the people. It is easier." 

A large portion of Mr. McGaha's presentation was taken up with insult to those of us decidedly not in Mr. McGaha's camp, deriding the abduction community, or dismissing the rest of anyone else with an open mind (...forgetting those thoroughly convinced, like myself...) ...as malingering "little" people trying to connect to something "big" ... patent misleaders, the credulous mislead, or the weak-willed mentally ill!  Liars, dummies, and crazies, only.

Finally, dismissing the noted professor Dr. Peter Sturrock (...a trained scientist with more courage in a nail paring than can be found in a gaggle of soppy pelicanists or pompous klasskurxians...) as a credulously thoughtless "believer"! This was simply infuriating. Sturrock is one of a hand-full of men and women willing to be eye to eye with the deepest levels of our reality, whatever the reality really is.

It is only rank cowardice dismissing someone of Sturrock's reputation and caliber, out of hand.

4). "Do one's research by proclamation rather than investigation." 

I don't think Mr. McGaha answered one question asked of him that evening, at all, that sparks didn't just fly like angry bees off the CSICOPian ax he ground in his non-answering of them!  Additionally, he was clear as churned mud with half of what he said all evening, anyway, all of it airy proclamation of his scientistic (sic) faith, bland misinformation, invalidated conventional wisdom, and pointless ideological saber rattling.

Moreover, his overuse of the expression, "Period," was amateur, ill-informed, and unconvincing. He used it like it was a citation all its own when all it really was... was a demonstration that he had no citation.

"There are no UFOs... (wait for it!) ...Period"!

"There are no physical traces... (wait for it!) ...Period"!

Oh, OK... ...Mr. McGaha said, "Period"! ...Everyone turn in your tin-foil hat and laser pointer post haste! We can, at last, disband and go our separate ways"! Such is the verity and validity of McGaha's citation: "Period"! 

Mmm-no... Reader! We're not idiots to be shined on, children to be wrongly inculcated, marks easily impressed with some sonorous proclamation... ... mere workers to be mal-employed!  Stuff that in a sunless place!

Doing more harm to his denialist CSICOPian position than would have been forecast, reader, Mr. McGaha's strutting patronization pointed up only the paucity of his facts, his startling ignorance regarding the topic he attempted to debate, his reliance on fallacy and misdirection to make his dissembling points, and, finally, his illumination of the certainty that the hallmark of CSIcopia is *reflexive thinking* in support of the *suspect status quo*... and not *reflective thinking* in support of the *advancement of human efficacy*.

He and his knee-jerk reactionary institution of shallow denialists spewing dismissive philosophies are the fuel on the fire of my rejection of same!

He allows me (...nay, compels me... provokes me... tasks me!) to pull off my gloves and be solicitous, no longer, of the specious sensibilities of persons with a ready sneer, a complacent ignorance, or a self-closed mind!

Why... McGaha's put me into a situation where I have to "start scaring the straights," (to quote Bill Murray), too, and that's regrettable... but, it's not me kicking the spokes out of their cultural wheels, but that their *spokes* were bad (or missing altogether) to begin with! The emperor is nude, brothers and sisters!  The universe watches us in trepidation, is this writer's intuition.

Couple the preceding with the stark refusal of these same persons to perceive that their *emperor* (or Mr. McGaha for that matter) is, and decidedly, without a stitch of cognitive clothing... and a mandated shift in ufological attitude becomes more than justified!

Shift where? Again... if it hasn't been clear...? That is, reader, to shift from the apologetic and unsettled *fringe* as a reviled and dismissed "believer" (as purposefully degraded by Mr. McGaha), ...to the brave and un-conflicted individual... comfortable and confident that he/she holds the higher rational ground, would do the purer, more courageous science (given tools and fund-age), be more in line with where the mainstream should be, and so should be the mainstream, in fact!

These *new* mainstreamers alluded to can be secure in their more supportable convictions regarding the *reality of things* as it pertains to the ufological and its peripheral ancillary issues... based on a stunning mass of "seven kinds" of evidence for same (anecdotal, photographic, historical/artistic, physical, scientific, mathematical, and personal)!

Finally, it's seen that they discredit, themselves, the disrespect they prosecute for YOU, reading truth-seeker! They disabuse, themselves, the validity of the contempt they say they don't have for you! It's them the enemies of reason, reader, not yourself. The irony is rife! 

Moreover, the reader knows this is true the first time these officiators are observed pronouncing upon that which they have not remotely evaluated, themselves.  That sounds like prejudice and bigotry to me.

Look up with a hard new eye! It's down to you, reader. It always has been.

Unfounded and unsupported criticisms of canted and denying bias from this *former* mainstream remove it to the "real" fringe, friends and neighbors, and the higher pressure "open-minded" moves in to supplant the resulting void! That's when we take off in this new millennium, fellow motes, and not before! My feelings...

It is a new age. Prepare to live in it. There's no other choice. The non-nuanced sub-realities of the likes of Ronald Drumph or his mean supporters aren't remotely enough if you think man lives by bread alone, sour gruel from a grudging soup kitchen... or worse... ...I'd have a more satisfying board, thanks, and it's at hand.  Free lunch, and verily!

...And? The kingdom is at hand, too, remember.  It's our choices dictating our reality!  If we wanted heaven on Earth we would make it so!  The question is why we don't.

What lies at the approaching denouement, be it heaven or hell, reader, is a repudiation of a soullessness and misogynous domination by a God who has never known a woman, ironically. It is the discredit of a science that sets itself as the final arbiter with regard to questions on the reality of things... ...when it does not even do itself the courtesy of following its own rules or adhering to its own ethics... forget perform the remotest investigation upon that on which it would pronounce!

Step off! Don't debate definitions of science with ME, boyo! I'll rip you a new one! Science is going to be... ...what is accomplished in its name, the attitudes and motivations of the men and women practicing it... and for what reason... and how the past is bowdlerized to facilitate the fallacies of the mal-contrived future and Occam's abused razor to facilitate same! You know a tree by its fruit after all, reader, right?

Oh, and pleasantly surprise both of us, won't you?  Try to do something more than railing at me for reminding you of the just preceding, with my thanks. Regardless, I'll give as good as I get. Unblinking sincerity, examined faith, and supported conviction are my protectors and impervious to darts, sticks, and stones of a sneering skeptibunky hoi-polloi.

Lead... follow... but get out of my way.  If you're getting this? Buckle up.

To close: Buy the Friedman/McGaha debate disk by contacting Stanton Friedman at fsphys@rogers.com... I'd wager Mr. McGaha won't be providing them.

Read on.