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 testing my endurance to confront them (and their shallow 19th Century philosophies, tired memes, irrelevant and outdated world views) via this, now fourteen part, series.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~!