Believing UFOs

I want to live in a society aspiring to the 21st Century,
not one reprosecuting a flawed 20th Century
reasonably retreated from for cause.

Believing UFOs
by Alfred Lehmberg


No. I don't believe in UFOs. I believe UFOs. The difference is NOT that subtle. 

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Sincerely, what is there not to believe? As a result of sincere aspirations to cogent cogitations, I believe in UFOs as I believe an apple can fall from a tree. The simile is also unsubtle... I believe falling apples.  
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My opposition will say there cannot be such a thing as UFOs, with no evidence but baseless faith for suspecting same. I would ask, "How can there not be," given seven clear evidentiary categories leading to same?  

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Seriously—UFOs crawl all over the historical record, and yet collectively the jealous reductionistas continue to inappropriately laugh up billowing snot-soaked sleeves... Who are they fooling but themselves?
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Why laugh up damp sleeves about that which is likely more real than government for example, which is, itself, a complete prevarication or fabrication? 

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Because they can't let it disturb their "future" plans? Rofl! 

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Future plans... Filthy rags to "He who is most high" and known only as "I am who I am"and hangs the stars like lamps in the night sky... filthy rags, anyway... right? 

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These aforementioned investors are to discover, I suspect, that the only "investment" one should have ever been concerned in making was the investiture required in loving the people around them as themselves... ...certainly not as a function of some coercive Church or manipulating dogma, punishing code or psychopathic Pope... but what comes out of most every individual when they have the minimal expectation of having their good works remotely appreciated.

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Individuality, then. That's the key to the kingdom at hand. Though, individuality with its ego on a leash, and a small "dog" at that... one completely under control at any rate. Ego's fine, one has to know which mouth the food goes in, after all, and can even be indulged on occasion (unused trumpets becoming funnels), but like its enabling "bumpy bits," shouldn't be waved around. I digress.

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What is it but our dogmatic belief in a phony-baloney, and very likely unjust, *future*—awarded to us if we stay our *profitable* but world sodomizing course?—an unjust future which allows the shimmering scales of a court jester klasskurtxianism to be glued to our hapless public eyes in the first freakin' place? 

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Yeah, that's right! Phony-baloney! 

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The conservative establishment smirks knowingly and continues to celebrate a conservatism that is born out of the *satisfactions* it has discovered in having *things* remain... ...just as they ARE, reader. Does everybody get that? 

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It doesn't matter that you can't buy your medicine or support a family. Dig? ...And I mean, it does not matter!

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Further—conservative establishment is an institution that periodically finds itself ironically needing to demonstrate some reinvention of itself as a "compassionate" entity... astonishing proof of its sociopathy! 

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Reader! If they are only interested in playing the game of compassion or wanting to appear compassionate... ...they are not compassionate! Follow? Is that so hard?

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Moreover, that future that we hope for (and that they promise) is a red herring (for a carrot) on the end of their long stick. ...And even IT evaporates (as a red herring is wont to do) the moment they feel they HAVE to have another platinum fixture on the downstairs bidet of their Autumn home... nick-named "Serenity." What price their "Serenity" to you? What does the reader pay so these can play?

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In a contrived and manipulated denouement that too few are availing themselves of... ...these few are very comfortable indeed. 

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We are embroiled in a gigantic and pyramidal Ponzi-scheme for a sociopathic minority, folks, for a dwindling piece of even the imaginary pie. Moreover, this corrosive minority believes that they will be able to insulate themselves from the very worst of what you are going to be expected to endure as a matter of course, FORGETTING they are in a position to elevate the whole of us... to truly cosmic levels, is my gut feeling. 

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...Way cheap power, for example, has such a *problem* NOT because there is nothing to it, reader. Oh no! Rather, a huge amount of old (and new) money feels it has a lot *invested* in the early, fossil, twentieth-century concepts presently employed, and which they have clear control... ...They are... ...reluctant... to switch over... and... ...oh... save the planet! 

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Reluctant? ...The bastards!  Energy problems in this country could be eliminated with an incentive to generate power and supply it to a grid, presently, enslaving us, but I digress, again...

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This group (of the, ah, uh ... ..."conservatively minded" [when nothing could be further from the truth!])... this group is the self-same bunch who fills the trough for our news media and mainstream science impetus... propagandistic "crapulation" contrived to steer us around our own best interests! It is also the major proponent of a campaign to keep ufology in the under-funded-court-jester status it presently enjoys. UFOs are the ultimate sedition, remember... their actuality provides for new energy sources, computational power, medical advancements, micro-miniatures, transportation mechanisms... wider horizons! Vaster potentials.  Greater Freedoms.  Mind, Matter, and Movement!

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UFO's suggest sea change! This is a change that may not be compatible with the present ease of luxury and control now enjoyed by a minimum number of selected persons... ...persons presently disrespecting your individuality and quality of life to facilitate their own, I offer! 

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How much control do you have, reader? Friend, in this day and age you, the individual, should be damned near self-sustaining. Yea and verily! 

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Sincerely, your roof should be supplying all your power needs and you should be getting 250 miles to the gallon of ... ...water. Your food and medicine shouldn't be trying to kill you and there should not be a plethora of institutions, agencies, and governments lining up to take squabbling turns sodomizing you.

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No, most of us hang by threads. 

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At the complete whim of a clearly criminal arbitrary, we are song and danced by a cloying and egregiously dissembling appeal to suffocating tradition and soulless ceremony by those practicing neither. Real irony there, folks!

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These traditions of Aristotle, or these ceremonies of elitist convenience and male dominance, do nothing but beg the inevitable question; however, a question largely unanswered but for a smirking retort from those jealously maintaining their status quo... ...leading to your increasingly exclusionary and suicidal dead-end, reader. 

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Somebody knows? Oh, yea and verily... Somebody knows. 

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UFO's are, by definition, massive change reader (the ultimate sedition, remember!), and this change points to worlds of much more breadth and scope ... horizon-less potential and effusive expansiveness! It gets no easier to maintain a façade of normalcy for the smirking denial of these few... ...so fearlessly—ask your own questions though the answers (or the suggestions of answers) offend you, shock you, or shame you. 

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There is joy beyond the shame, satisfaction beyond the shock, and fellowship beyond the offense. 

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...And it's real. 

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Read on...

ÆL

A More Perfect World

...And Now For Something Completely Different... 

A More Perfect World
by Alfred Lehmberg

In a more perfect world... we'd all be in that perfect world, wouldn't we? Though the world is far from perfect, we think we know. Pause for squirty, read incontinent, giggles... but then reflect a moment that our "perfect world" is at hand even as that perfection is ever only realized on the path to same... and never in its attainment. I say true.

It would follow that this writer believes that there is a thoughtful  majority of reasonable persons who appreciate an honest and humble aspiration to some idea of perfection, a transferable one with more value shared than secreted. ...Like joy, shared, increases, and it is realized at last that salvation has only ever come from the actions of one's fellow human beings. 

God's just the cut-out guy and cut from whole cloth or where does the cherry-picked hatred consumed God of the Old Program load up on His self-loathing and insentient drongo? I digress.

There are the sought after individual pursuits of joy in "peak experience," lightly alluded to, which are ever undefined and open-ended where respect for another's sensibilities are expected. These pursuits further exist to provide a glow sustaining one deliciously near as one can get to same without bursting into ethereal flame difficult to recover from, eh?  They are ego death by astonishment, reader, plus a transcendence in understanding that there is no "understanding"... no "closure"... no "tied ends" at the end. Remaining is "right here and now"!  

Rejoice! That's good news! It makes the aforementioned "now" of new valued note! Moreover, Tradition has always maintained that it was there... at hand!  The Kingdom... true Camelot before the spoilage and avoiding same.  The more perfect world! Right here and now!

To facilitate same, the rest of us, so disposed, think, wait, and "write" if we care to... demand a justice around us, command an integrity, expect forthcomingness and intelligence from those who would lead! We'd lead ourselves, similarly, without hubris and flawed superstition! We'd aspire to the good... speaking up to power, empowered, so that that truth-seeking and thoughtful majority alluded to is not swept away in the fervid rush of toxic fundamentalism and suffocating unilateralism.

I myself am entirely outraged that our truth-seeking majority is in any way thwarted from the pursuit of this truth regarded! This regard covers a span including alternative power sources and resource management, through non-commercial so suppressed medicine, food production, and technological efficacy, to UFOs and extraterrestrial life.  Humanity could be as vast as the universe including it.

I am completely aggravated that a "reflexive cultural secrecy apparatus" has been so abused and misused by these closed and otherwise cloistered institutions (corporate, governmental, religious, and *otherwise*) that it has made itself unworthy to keep any secret at all!  That's the only fear mongering this writer will dabble in...

Our societal leadership would seem to currently betray the trust only pretended to you and me, reader, and we are that majority alluded to in this note or jeremiad... our attention is enjoined to make stress sweat run betwixt the adipose cheeks of the betrayer accused and our righteous cooperation in cyberspace does nothing to preclude rivers of that sweat from its sordid run! 

A people should not fear their government even as that government is chartered to fears its people. We keep forgetting that. The more that governmental sweat runs the better quality of life we achieve, as those who would lead should pay a premium for the privilege; they earn a premium! 

We should, at least, be able to believe them, trust them, and respect them. We pay for that, and through the nose! This belief, trust, and respect for government is presently impossible for anyone possessing the barest minimum of rationality powered by eyes to see and ears with which to hear... an oligarchy or theocracy cannot be a government of the people.

Our efforts in these aspiring blogs of salient contention created might provide for a cooperation alluded to, materialize a social device for our edification with regard to matters impacting on the quality of our physical and intellectual life... even aspire to eventually make us over as a part of a living ring of construction composed of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, say! A living bracelet for our star... Those are SMALL dreams! These are dreams at hand!  Dreams are fractal too!

This is that living space made necessary for the billions now living who would never have to die and should expect to live lives on an upward path of convenience, improvement, and contemplation or what's a crisis of consciousness for? We might presume a little like we were that portion of the fractal universe which created itself to consider itself... catalog its own secrets... keep an "eye" out for synthesis... turn that into synergy? New novelty! New associations in connected contemplation... Us and... others...  ... more opportunity for constructive cooperation at least and at last!

That's what we could be doing in a more perfect world... but that we were being in that perfect world always at hand, remember... and what could be more perfect than that... if we lived in a perfect world?  The world at hand.

ÆL

Lockers Ruptured...

UFO History Imperiled 
by Alfred Lehmberg

Periodically, the "noisy negativists," and plying their proud scientistic (sic), faux-reductionist, and hubristicly homocentric hoo-rah, revisit old UFO cases. They employ the sad craft of a decidedly insentient cant, to invalidate and discredit same! 

They do this because these cases alluded to, exhaustively prosecuted, investigated, and evaluated examples showing decided support for the UFO's extraterrestrial hypothesis, are precisely the cases we need to keep looking at for current relevancy and historical context. That's why these cases are touchstones we've grown most dependent on as they validate the perceived larger reality for UFOs over time. They provide real substance for the whole concept of them.  

See, even fallaciously, blow the "old UFOs" up and any "new UFOs" lose all substance and traction, unjustly losing validation right out of their gates! I say true.

...Hardly seems sporting or fair... ...forget brave.

See, some "new investigatory scan," for example... say, of some long-accepted photo evidence, by that ever up-popping garden-variety skeptibunky ringer? Why, it "reveals at last" the ethereal hint of bogus coherence of that "at last detected fishing line" of a "suspected" hoaxed UFO! The once-respected historical case is encouraged to blow up in the observer's faces. 

...Because that's what science is about? ...Chipping away at "belief"  until all that remains is "fact." Skepticism in the purest sense of the word, "debunkery," if you will, since it's foolish to tolerate bunk.  

...And it is, foolish that is. ...But, was it?

Three cheers for brave science and the person who practices it! That default arbiter of all that's laid before it to include even the "ironic uninvestigated." Hoist its prideful banner high... Onward scientistic (sic) soldiers, marching as to war... and we'll fight-fight-fight on to triumph and the glory, and the honor, wiping the slobber from slack jaws encountered as we go and fighting the never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the scientistic (sic) way...

I don't mean to mock you, Mr. Scientist, but notwithstanding the unerring accuracy of your rather pompous sentiment on the purest and so unachievable idealistic of the preceding? You are in no way allowing for the dark side of same. ...And there is a dark side, Sir or Madam. Who but a fool or coward would proclaim and pronounce on the wholly uninvestigated?

The "dark" alluded to remains predictably unacknowledged. First by persons of the debunker's conflicted caliber but then, because I believe others of even a constructively "skeptical" bent are honorable persons willing to continue to play by the honorable rules as constructively codified... ...others, too? Even by men of such erudition, intellect, and honor as the late Richard Hall and still very much with us Jerry Clark. The sought-after lure of a perceived positive legacy reflecting responsible reasonability is strong.  

I remember, on the other hand, that all but a precious few of us are consigned to forgettable legacies, so why not risk reaching for the transcendent... perchance to grasp, now!  One can be one's own Magellan. I digress.  

It remains that persons embracing varying strengths or degrees of debunkery contrive to discredit credited cases already receiving abundant accreditation. Less than intellectually honest mechanisms are employed to achieve that end. One is reminded of Republican tactics employed against Democrats.

I resurrect my analogy of the "locker rupture" and the mal-intellectual thugs who continue it:

In my country, while attending high school, one had to be very careful to ensure that one's gymnasium locker door closed and locked completely and didn't let so much as a thread of gym shorts show through the small crack 'twixt door and casement! If you didn't?  That thread would be ferreted out by a diligent juvenile delinquent and the shorts torn and ruined as they were worried and jerked out of the locker crack, shred by tattered shred... We called them "locker ruptures."  I did one or two.  I'm not proud.

Our ufological delinquent's intransigent "locker rupture" performance would be almost admirable if he balanced his obsessive energies in the service of ferreting out, once in a while, threads of evidential, procedural, and logical error abundant in the arguments and anti-research of "pelicanists" and "skepti-bunkies" (while pretending to not notice that their own ufological gym lockers hang open like a half-wit's mouth at a fireworks display)... but that's not likely... It counters the by-laws of garden variety pelicanists provided by Stanton Friedman: (1)Don't inform what's not known, (2) attack the person when you can't assail the argument, (3) prosecute your research by proclamation, and (4) make rock-hard conclusions unassailed and so unassailable by new discoveries.

The debunking revisionist adroitly employs all four as he ferrets for fabric's tatters he has largely manufactured himself, out of the ironic whole cloth. The Trindade case (like Socorro, Roswell, and others) has an obvious solidity that our glad debunker attempts to ruin like the ufological gym shorts just described.

Vis a vis Trindade, he has grasped his "find one more witness" fabric tatter (of Trindade for example) like one of those juvenile delinquents I alluded to earlier, and biting down hard on it in his little bulldog's impassioned if powdering teeth, he is content to hang on for dear life, prosecuting his dull obstinacy like his obdurate stubbornness was a virtue. It is not, just as it's not about our Skeptibunky's plea for "one more witness." 

It wouldn't matter to "Pelican Boy" if Philip Klass, himself, stumbled forward from the grave to say that he had been on the boat at Trindade, in the yard at McMinnville, or in the cab with Heflin and in truth, saw, himself, the true UFOs in contention... Those goalposts prove moveable.

No, Klass would be asked if he had been "drinking."  That's how it goes with a receding evidentiary horizon. No evidence can be acceptable where conclusions, howsoever contrary, have been made, eh?  That's how things roll in the skeptibunky aviary.

The regard for the ufological is about looking beyond the usual, thinking out of the box, and removing oneself from the center of a trumped-up "God's" universe and its poorly understood "Laws." It's about reading to the para-perfunctory period, accepting the larger reality, and combating reactionary denial discomfited in its novelty of a looming future. It is about truth, justice, and the sentient's way. In my opinion, anything else is reactionary stodginess, and obsessive pig-headedness...

Delinquent CSIcopians should let that current errant tatter go while their humiliation can be remotely repaired. They waste their energy and our own, and so they perform no service, still. Verily, they're unaware that the locker and gym shorts they're trying to rupture through the locked door... are actually their own!

See? The mechanism of re-hashing the musty hash on the already well-parsed hash of "old cases" is two-fold, and it's all aimed at the otherwise distracted observer who still sits on the fence regarding the basic legitimacy of UFOs. If the "pelicanistic-skeptibunky-klasskurtxian" can demonstrate, even fraudulently, that a conjectured jury is still out on the best cases... it is these cases they can first discredit, and then, by extension, to all ufological cases.  

A ufological macrocosm is then invalided by a purposely errant invalidation of the microcosms making that macrocosm up! That seems the province of liars, cheats, and thieves!

If the old "bulletproof" cases can be made to appear dodgy, then all ufological cases can be made to be perceived, to the fence-sitting masses, as the same kind of dodgy... and by fallacious extension, the impetus to investigate any and all ufological cases, past, present, and future... is thwarted and ham-strung.  See how all that might work?

In an ideal world, this would clearly be perceived to be the case as prosecuted by these craven and duplicitous revisionists. The world is; however, less than ideal and the perception fraudulently remaining is that UFOs have a cloying potential for being bunk!

Are we going to forget for a moment the debunkers complicity in keeping us from the benefits of that ideal world actually there? Are we to disregard their scurrilous effect and duplicitous campaign with regard to same? Are we to overlook their program, their design, their prosecution, and their mechanism to facilitate what they would pretend to decry? Not on this person's watch. These are not "truth-seekers," friends and neighbors! They are a truth-"bleeders"!

...But in the real world, it might be argued... as is all too obvious from postings in the community, this does not happen.  The scurrilous cur is lauded as a person of science while the potentially far-reaching and intrepid are discounted and marginalized.

Yes, only because of the insentient and duplicitous "worrying rat" activity of the uneasy debunking squad, that list of UFO denialists, and their portentous willingness to destroy a perfectly good set of gym shorts torn from a perfectly serviceable locker on which they've unethically broken the casement or warped the door! The Hope diamond can be turned to dust with an errant sledge of the skeptibunky, reader... proving nothing but the inadvisability of leaving any "diamonds," around them, at all.

True, no matter how often the metaphorical "fishing line" alluded to has been revealed as bogus and contrived, even the serious ufologist can become uncomfortable with cases, that they regard well parsed and buttoned-down, constantly under suspicion. The attempt to re-examine what has already been exhaustively credentialed with an abundant criticality is not a heresy as much as it is the deliberate muddying of water that had an abundant clarity with which to begin!

Oh, what a pompous load of klasskurtxian crap the skeptibunky revisions and reexaminations prove to be. No matter how often the 'fishing line' can be demonstrated not to have been there, bumptious "avians" have become so adept and comfortable crapping on these validations that they regard any attempt to protest their duplicitous 'reexamination' as a form of reverse heresy! There's some irony! What you would have said in that better world about which you moan through your crocodile tears, you insentient drongoes of the "skeptical" community?

Cases such as McMinnville, Trindade, Socorro etc, are part of the canon of a legitimized ufology and must be defended from the errant pecking of the pompous pelicanists for cause and in the spirit of scientific fidelity.  In a fractal universe, we are our own proof that we are not alone. We might start there!

Ceaselessly criticizing cases such as McMinnville, Trindade, Socorro , etc, are part of the klasskurtxian bag of scurvy skeptibunky tricks and shall be criticized justifiably, and with all logic, from the protests of braver and more honorable truth-seeking men and women opposing them.

You lords of bumptious Scientism! You and yours... shredding metaphorical running shorts from the broken casements of ruptured gym lockers, is the only way you can mount your disingenuous challenges or prosecute your inconsequent mal-critical assault on UFOs. The pelicanist is known by its squawk and the fetid droppings it leaves in its wake, only, and by anything they would utter in an otherwise reasonable and reasoned discourse. Be not proud, or fooled, that your tedious and exclusionary reductionism is a default discipline... you anxiously and intellectually asphyxiating avians*!

Read on.

ÆL

*You know who you are.  Say it five times fast.

Errol

Errol Bruce-Knapp, of UFO UpDates, Strange Days—Indeed, the Virtually Strange Network... ...and the coiner of the expression "Fast Forward," has passed. 

22:00 hours, the eleventh of August, 2016.  He was 73.

I never met him in meat-space.  That's come to matter not at all.  Does it have to, one wonders.

I used to hate talking to Errol on the phone even as I had great times, even peak experiences with him, on the radio... weird.  It wasn't him, not at all.  It was me... I didn't feel worthy enough to take up his time, even as it had been him calling me for something!  

Myself, a world traveled professional soldier, summa grad, and aviation combat veteran, I was frankly intimidated by Errol's life experience, intelligence, and his depth of character.  He was who I had wanted to be when I grew up, eh?  I felt unworthy.

Truly, it was rather like getting rung up by a genuine "Gandalf the Grey" who had "roadied" for the Beatles and was a confidant of Dr. Strange's "Ancient One"... for chit-chat on the unsettled and unsettling issues of the day.  I was loath to be caught short conversationally or not measure up in some imagined manner... ...Revealed as a "fraud" and asked to leave Errol's stage. 

Maybe he knew; he probably did.  He never made me pay for it.  He was ever gracious, unconsumed with self, and all that given the stories he could tell about casual participation in the very events about which they are now making feature films, today!  Errol was the whetted cutting edge of the bona fide "age which is upon us."  He was all that, I say true.

It was Errol, in the beginning, who cultivated this insignificant person's contribution and facilitated his "odd odes," a name Errol had coined himself, as early as 1996. It was he who was key regarding this writer's early fellowship with Stanton Friedman and on whose coattails Frank Feschino would serendipitously  ride!  It was an association with Errol that would lead to contact and friendship with Robert Hastings and Richard Dolan. These four would synergize and otherwise qualify a limitless interest in the most demanding questions of our time to become a philosophical quadriga powering this writer's ufological chariot!  Errol was the master of those accommodating ufological stables!

These would be followed by hosts of others, for which he was the communicational mortar, and from which I'd never have gotten the remotest traction, myself, but that Errol Bruce-Knapp let me in the room to stand with him and even throw down a little sand, eh?  I was a hard sell!  

Eventually, I am allowed opportunity to travel the country, to a degree, in the interests of UFOs, meet the people involved, be introduced to perpetual wonder, and then write about it in an International Magazine.  A facilitated opportunity all owed, initially, to Errol Bruce-Knapp.

Errol was, moreover, an ethical paragon of our paranormal milieu in which senseless, if purposed, ridicule and a forced information-void provides for few ethical or moral paragons.  He was short on "woo" and long on "reasonability."  He was not detoured when that same reasonability would include a huge potential for the existentiality of UFOs widely reflected in seven categories of compelling evidence he had helped this writer to evolve and recognize. He'd go where the data went. 

A light in a darkness provoked by that jealous status quo, Errol was tireless amidst those fatigued by official indifference, reflexive skepticism, and du jour scientism.  Rare bird, he.

Asked once in interview about his research as regards UFOs and the ETH, he admonished, "I'm not a researcher, I'm a facilitator."  This was true in the best possible sense.  There was original research, but Errol Bruce-Knapp was more a genuine carrier wave for information that would not have, otherwise, gotten so easy a transmission by alternative means.  Certainly not one of Errol's open-minded if hard-nosed caliber.  By reputation, he was a 30 mm high explosive cannon round among 22 caliber short rounds. He didn't make anybody pay for that either.

Many of us got our starts and first venue on his Strange Days, Indeed AM radio program and his world class UFO UpDates list and message board, from whom the likes of Chris Carter, of X-Files fame, would draw their lore and lexicon for lucrative theatrical projects.  Don Ledger, Paul Kimball, Grant Cameron, and significant others saw greater penetration as a result of the inclusive band-width which was Errol Bruce-Knapp.

Needlessly cautious and intimidated I was enlivened, still, to bask in the glow of the man. Here was a person of whom it could be said that talent and expansive rationality had combined with efficacious imagination to shine productive lamps... where light is unbravely loath to go!  That glow is snuffed out as all glows must, I suppose, but I wonder when and in what situations we're going to miss the illumination that Errol would provide, and mourn his memory fresh and anew.  That's where he'll be missed.

I fancy the idea that ilk the likes of Errol Bruce-Knapp is out there.  That one of those alluded to no longer is, is to be reminded how brief our stay on life's stage. We're admonished that we shouldn't waste a second of what is later to be a regretted missed opportunity to avail ourselves of something we'll mean to make time for... with all the best intentions... but put off until it's too late.  Would that I could talk to him on the phone one more time... 

Goodbye, Errol!  We'll see you on the other side, friend and Brother!  ...And one more, last, time?  I say thank you, Sir.  

Thank you for "getting" me, encouraging me, supporting me, and for being a valued friend, to the end.  You'll be having better things to do, I know, but read on, Mr. Flynn.

Alfred's Odd Observation #19

Bless you, Errol Bruce-Knapp...
laid low by cruel malady
and STILL facilitating friends and comrades!
You are in my thoughts.

Alfred's Odd Observation #19 

Sunshine's Surreal Shine-on

by Alfred Lehmberg

Only the most prosaic of the nonprosaic had been sighted—which was not to say that *they* had returned in any force or even at all.  To wit: All the observations since a preceding report (two actually) had been dim, of short duration, and unremarkable.  The only thing I can presently observe is that *something* is up there.  They are quiet, oddly moving, and strange—but they were few, even if the drought had ended...

Here on Earth, Spielberg's Taken had been running for five days and taped on old VHS. I'd watch it the next morning sans the evil Celebrex and cheese advertisements... or other cognitive insults and creepy assaults of commercial TV. I report as an observation that it was certainly watchable, classic Spielberg, and actually pretty astonishing.  It was also pretty unsettling.

From the opening scene, I'd been gratified by how closely it stayed within a factual "ufological" lexicon, despite the plot distortions it employed to be an exciting television program.  Something unusual seems to be trying to be communicated (NOT par for a conflicted mainstream) certainly considering the number of times it had been replayed in just the first five days. This is forgetting the virtual carpet bombing of it that Saturday and Sunday, though remember that it is exposure from the mainstream, so suspect even if it IS intriguing!  

*Everyone* is being given an opportunity to see this "thing" in a manner that just hasn't been done before.  

What's up with that?

Spielberg was also using a lot of (seriously employed) children to tell this story, too.  And he's doing that, I think, to reassure the audience regarding some kind of *truth* to this tale—a *truth* (or set of *truths*) that he is so ardently trying to communicate? Hard to spend that much money on a gamble and not say... something meaningful, eh? 

I mean, that's why an artist filmmaker uses kids, isn't it? They are notoriously difficult to work with precisely because kids don't have any guile.  Kids aren't easily duplicitous.  Kids aren't usually *talented* liars... an actor's stock in trade.  

Kids can still be innocent simply because they haven't had the time and experience to become jaded yet...  ...What that old saw about the "child being father to the man" might mean... eh? Kids are innocence and truth... or can be. If they can sell their performance they are truth where truth is told... or seen to be.

What exactly IS being communicated, presuming (as many of us would) that this was not just an amusing yarn to distract the masses?  Too much (even if arguable) "fact" is being employed, from foo fighters through alien abduction to implants, to just do that.  If they only wanted a soap-selling yarn they could have any number of "Buffy the Vampire Slayers", and remember... *they* set this whole thing up with slick film documentaries painting the Roswell and Abduction ufological reportages as potentially factual in serendipitous presage!    Of... what?

Firstly, Something, eh? Many of the people watching are plainly encouraged to take the whole saga as a dramatization of some kind of existentiality...  What are the *facts* communicated?

To start, and clearly, local and federal Governments are tending to evil, out of control, and corrupted entities so impossibly beyond rational oversight that they have become enemies of the people they would be sworn to protect, Spielberg says.  Certainly in the play, perhaps in reality?

Black-box "agencies," "ranches" and "shops" run disconcertingly amuck, keeping useful secrets from the lay rank and file for inexplicable and arbitrary but certainly pecuniary reasons, and who make no pretense about having any respect for the individual human being, for which they'd pretend right stewardship, we see. Certainly in the play, perhaps in reality?

Ironically, these egregious human agencies perform abductions of their own and are nowhere near as concerned about bringing the abductees back as the aliens apparently are.  WE are what we fear!  Aliens are ancillary, is the takeaway!  We have nothing to fear but the fearful themselves?  Such seems so. Certainly in the play, perhaps in reality?

Secondly, Human beings are more stridently psychopathic than the aliens or their clones and hybrids, by far.  It's the obsessively passive-aggressive faithlessness and disloyalty of -human- beings that is at the root of the problem between humans and aliens... or humans and other humans.  "You don't see THEM f-king each other over for a goddamn percentage," Ellen Ripley once grimly observed to a corporate captain in ALIENS.

Truly, consider our behavior as they see it, and wonder that it MUST be that we scare the hell out of 'em with our shortsighted and irrational, not to mention immature and psychotic, behaviors.  Indeed, it could be argued that they'd traditionally shown remarkable restraint and patience with us.  Certainly in the play, perhaps in reality?

Aliens are old.  They are Older and more hoary than are the pyramids, by a long shot. We, on the other hand, are new. Remember that we are likely the newcomers in a fractal universe!

Third, "Doctors" readily abandon ethics and oaths "to do no harm" to do REAL harm facilitating the agendas of projects so horrific they'd make the evil Nazi Doctor Mengele gag... (well, maybe not...).  

I'm sure some of the antagonists are lawyers, fulsome Politicos are in evidence, and some priests can be introduced to the core of the psychopathic elite of fervid harm-doers.  Human institutions are more corrupt than the individuals they prey upon, and closed institutions are the worst offenders.  Trust is not possible or advised.  

What kind of world is that?  It does not appear to be a recommended one.  And why tolerate that when it's a simple choice to embrace the efficacious kingdom always at hand!  A kingdom, a Camelot, is at hand!

Four, pervasive "secrecy" and convenient "classification," in addition to facilitating a necessary discretion, also facilitates a culture of rampant sociopathy allowing the most craven of grasping psychopaths a full range of authoritarian autocracies to pursue arbitrary, illegal, and conspiratorial ends, ends that too plainly benefit the few at the expense of the many.  Such seems so even as it has always been so.

Secrecy becomes its own justification. A culture evolves  around it and into the hands of those who transfer power along hereditary lines, just as it had been tyrannically done before the renaissance.  There is no review, revision, evolution, or reform possible within it.  Autocracy reigns supreme as a complacent despot, at best!  Cue ominous music.

What was being communicated to the reader by "Taken," not enumerated here?  Does a reader have anything to add?

I further point out, endless characters in Spielberg's saga are great examples of a "Mothman futility mechanism,"  or the deliberate steps taken by a cowardly society to implode or destroy the individual human being who would have the effrontery to report their paranormal experiences to the rest of us, expose our cowardice in that experiences regard, and shame us.  

Endless examples of persons who would prey upon us exist in the play also.  Those would be the society's officiators alluded to above.

Remains, the person watching is left with the impression that there is going to be some kind of payoff as a result of disclosure of this event.  Like the event, itself, is a preface for disclosure, a little heat applied to the water so as to warm us up for some subsequent disclosure... we live in interesting times.  

Taken is aired as science fiction to provide an escape hatch for the usual plausible deniability in the event of the suggested panic or provoked unease (Bollix that!  Let implode that which implodes! We'll all be better for it in the long run!), but the intimations of *fact* are strongly, even if teasingly, suggested.

Bad news won't get better with age, friends and fellow motes, and even if good news can wait, should it?

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

Bless you Errol Bruce-Knapp... laid low by cruel malady and STILL facilitating friends and comrades! You are in my thoughts.

Is Stanton Friedman For Real?

Is Stanton Friedman For Real?

By Alfred Lehmberg

In 2005, the late Peter Jennings touted his headlined UFO show, ostensibly, as "coming clean" on UFOs... Be not fooled... Cleanliness was not the result where the thrust of the program was a complete if subtle hack job on an entirely honorable Stanton Friedman, et al, by Jennings. He employed all the old prejudices, to wit: making out like ufologists, in general, operate on conflicted faith and that they are either mentally ill, misinformed, or misinforming... "M" cubed for the in-crowd...

Even where this is true, it's not the point... 90% of everything is crap.

Skeptibunkies, on the other hand (Jenning's body language, word choice, and intonation just drooling preference) are "hard-nosed realists with the conviction of real science behind them." Jennings chumped Stanton Friedman and dismissed him, along with Kevin Randle, as addled opportunists! 

As a result, the ufological fencesitter was in no way encouraged to ask difficult questions of Government, Institution, or Agency. ET is a "long-shot," credible evidence "does not exist," and they can't get here anyway, "largely because we can't get there...," pride and hubris be damned, oh, and all is right with the world... our arrogant, unwarranted and unjustified self-image is intact. 

I was completely disgusted. No points for Jennings, at all... 

More on that here...

To the contrary, reader. Anyone with uncluttered sense knows who or what Stanton Friedman is.  He's probably as close as anyone has gotten to being a household name with regard to UFOs.  Even not knowing his name, but seeing his picture, is to automatically go, "Oh yeah... right... ...the 'UFO' guy."

Still, Friedman was, as pointed out, unfairly pilloried, fatuously and egregiously, along with some undeserving others, on the infamous Jennings/ABC flopumentary "exploring" UFOs, where he was faintly accused of behavior so far removed from his actual behavior that it borders on slander.  For my money, it crosses the line.  To wit:

Stanton Friedman is an evidential cherry picker, a self-involved fantasist, and an inventive conspiracy monger/hoaxer.  Stanton Friedman is a frustrated old man with delusions of grandeur and a messianic complex.  "Stanton Friedman is not real."

So would say those who still speak in their "persuasive" proclamation, "mainstream" declaration, "media "decree, and "official" edict.  But hold on.  

The thing about proclamations, declarations, decrees, and edicts is that they don't need to be true; they only have to be compelling. They only have to sow a seed of doubt... ironically nourished by the "information void" they've helped to maintain! It's enough to preclude further action.  The goal, to be blunt. The locker rupture phenomenon can then take over...

Though, wait! Let's try some other "proclamations" on for size... proclamation, contrarily, for which actual evidence abounds in extremis.  To wit:

Stanton Friedman is real.  Stanton Friedman is a tireless historical scholar and rational humanist.  Stanton Friedman is a portrait of selfless courage, an assiduous researcher, and an unflinching observer/reporter of that which is decidedly and discomfortingly out of the box... but portending our future and the quality of same...

Forgetting, entirely, their polar opposing character, is there any other difference between these preceding proclamation sets?  Paul Kimball, once a serious filmmaker with his own production company, has produced some engaging and instructive documentary films providing the requisite basis for just this kind of supposition... later refuted or not!

The well-crafted documentaries referenced here include Kimball's "Stanton Friedman Is Real" (a sober examination of Stanton Friedman the 'man') and "Do You Believe In Majic" (A Doc regarding alleged quality documentation indicating, among other astonishing things, very high levels of official interest in the ExtraTerrestrial Hypothesis... as it pertains to UFOs) in the fifties. Such was so.

These films show, with some clarity and fairness, where more of the truth in this... very twitchy and ephemeral area... must be! This is forgetting the balanced cameo Kimball provides Stanton Friedman, despite, I do not hesitate to point out, any conflicts of interest possible.  I suspect any conjectured conflicts are abundantly accounted for. 

Kimball's relationship by marriage to Friedman's family has Kimball erring on the side of Friedman's opposition, if anything.  It remains that this writer's gut sense advises that Kimball is legitimately trying to shoot straight down the middle on the issues. Too bad for Friedman's opposition. A 'fair' look makes them look pretty bad.  Humiliatingly so.

The pros and cons regarding a ufological contribution by Stanton Friedman do not balance in actuality, even as Kimball's films very assiduously give equal time to the positions of both sides... obvious sincerity shown by Kimball, a man trying to arrive at some kind of non-anticipatory conclusion on the matter, or at least a step forward and not back.  Which side of the argument does succeed in outweighing the other? 

The viewer can make up his or her own mind... but this writer perceives that the 'cons' see far before them what 'pros' leave far behind... The cons have little weight it seems.  No draft.  Zero substance. Inconsequence!

Along similar lines, I've heard no protestations from this opposition—no cries of "foul" or angry wounded remonstrations regarding a misrepresentation of their assumptive, biased, canted, and inordinately homocentric views; their too convenient attitudes—their contradicted opinions. The point here is whittled, admittedly, pretty fine. 

Truly, I've neither read nor heard of same, and both of these films were released some time ago.  Perhaps there will be a late protest...

The presumption is that, to date, the opposition feels that it was fairly characterized by Kimball's films and that oppositional views, such as they are and have always been (...continue to be!), were squarely portrayed and accurately recounted, one would presume. One would presume!

The irony is that it was squarely portrayed and accurately recounted.  They got their best shot!

In comparison with Stanton Friedman, though, they fall way short; their meager shell won't even clear the gun tube.  This is despite the huge amounts of powder provided by the hijacked mainstream to get that round downrange.  A kid's stomp rocket has more loft!

This is further illustrated by the ease with which Friedman will dispatch the occasional brave (if haplessly clueless) soul who gathers up the sack required to join the long list of "noisy negativists" crushed, decisively, in debate with him!  

There are numerous examples of same on Kimball's films.  Dispute Stanton Friedman on the issues, bunky, and scamper from a righteous fray with your tail tucked between your legs making whipped-puppy-Ned-Beatty noises... I digress.

Flatly, the arguments of Friedman's opposition make assumptions based on contrived ignorance, intellectual infidelity, obstinate illogic, wishful thinking, denied fear, and rank complacency.  They are arguments larded with confident-sounding if baseless assertions based on varying tinctures of the upcoming eight performance indicators more embraced by Friedman, and they only serve to provide for what, in the final analysis, can only be sack-less cowardice—intellectual and otherwise.  Such is, and has been, the ongoing prosecution of the arguments from Friedman's opposition.

Friedman's pompously ignorant and conflicted detractors ascribes humanistic psychological motives to aliens, facilitating a fallacious relegation of them to dismissible myth.  It waxes knowledgeably on the physical impossibilities of alien propulsion systems, then references their superiority later to preclude us from a possibility of even accidentally bringing one of them down... then it blithely leaps back to foregone conclusions on the unlikelihood of alien technologies with which to start.  Astonishing!  They seem unaware of this strange dichotomy, themselves...

It soberly expounds that the already unlikely alien cannot get here because we cannot get there, only inventing a comforting rubric they can use to keep their intellectual distance from them. It is quick to label the ufologically affected individual as a misrepresenter of the facts (a LIAR), a misunderstander of the facts (a DOPE), or as one too mentally incapacitated to appreciate the facts (a NUT).  To the opposition, there is, or can be (...of needs!), no 4th possibility.

To this klasskurtxian and pelicanistic opposition, people who see UFOs are, unquestioningly and absolutely, "M" cubed (Misleading, Mistaken or Mentally ill), as we are alone in our little corner of the multi-verse, these unblinkingly proclaim. ...Perhaps (...pray hard to your fundamentalist god of choice!), even alone in the whole damn thing... a centerpiece jewel in God's crown of creation, ideally!  Intelligent alien beings might possibly exist in some other galaxy, or even at the other end of this one... but not here... Oh please, God... not "here."

No!

No!  There is a 4th choice. Verily, there is a plethora... a panoply of "choices"!  These are choices that must come as a result of following the data where it leads and not where it can be driven!  

These are choices that one discovers as one pursues the devil in the details (as Friedman has for four decades!) and still be able to hold that evidentiary demon by reluctantly slippery shirttails!  These are choices that remain after one is able to appreciate the vast amount of evidence extant (as Friedman has) that is physical, historical, photographic, anecdotal, and even personal.   These are choices one can accept when one sees past the end of a conflicted little nose (as Friedman has), removes oneself from ones convenient and unfounded prejudices (as Friedman has), or objects to and rejects ones self-imbued and pettily contrived ignorance (as Friedman has).  Freidman has a long, long history of perspicaciously,  perceptively, and intelligently trying to get it down... right.

We are not alone.  Not now.  Not ever.  Admitting the preceding is to step into the future.  Denying it is an impossible and so disastrous retreat to a lost, and even invented or imagined, past.

Paul Kimball is clear in his films that Friedman is very specific and precise about why he says what he says.  Not content to sit in a comfy spot and airily spew puerile pronouncements of outdated and discredited "conventional wisdom" like his critics, Friedman chases details that squirm and shift in his grasp, details handily discrediting the 'official' version of puzzling events and/or corrupting, otherwise, what should be a cogent record of same.  Rare bird he. We're lucky to have him.

Stanton Friedman is thorough.  His critics are only thorough enough with regard to their assertions to sow a fallacious seed of doubt or allow for a plausible deniability to obscure the ufological issue du jour.  This is not honorable, on any level, and apes the activities of the propagandist, despot, axe-grinder, canted lobbyist, or spin-doctor.

Friedman is organized, objective, constructive, and comprehensive.  His critics are none of these things and are shot down in flames when they meet him in the air for formal argument on the points of it. Shot down in flames.

Friedman is flexible, acceptable, specific, and thoughtful regarding the ufological.  His critics prosecute the opposites of these things and use every fallacious trick they can to discount him, invalidate him, and discredit him.  Even his reputation and character have been smarmily attacked, reader!

...Et tu, Peter Jennings, and a black mark on your legacy, Sir.  Point one finger and risk three back at yourself, boyo!

Contrarily, Kimball's other compelling film "Do You Believe In Majic," dismissing the recent Jennings/ABC whitewash as patently false and a mockery of what a documentary (...not a "mockumentary"!) should be, is a good case in point.

Every point skeptically raised against the verity of the key MJ-12 Documents (...as clear evidence of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis with regard to UFOs, and an admitted high-level ufological interest in the reality of same...) is dissolved, handily, by citation—chapter and verse by Friedman.  Truly, these defensively reflexive protests do not hold up upon examination, Kimball is able to show.  

They are bluster, illogic, ignorance, complacency, bias, and cant.  Friedman, on the other hand, can provide clear and compelling evidence that the documents are, indeed, real.  His critics have nothing remaining in their moldy corner but strident, officiously vicious, and patently unsupported negativity.

So, in answer to the question asked at the beginning of this essay about differences between the two sets of opposing proclamations, the answer is this:

One set is of "proclamations" based on solid reputation, diligent research, painstaking fact-finding, unblemished integrity, tuned intelligence, and verified results.  The other set is based on 'mainstream' flatus or klasskurtxian hot air.  The reader can judge for themselves which is which.  Be that as it may, Stanton Friedman, in a final analysis, ~is~ real, in this writer's view, and one wastes no time, at all, believing in MAJIC.  Step forward to the future, reader, not backward to futility.

Such can be drawn from Paul Kimball's intriguing, concise, and calmly iterated documentaries.  See Friedman's film, here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-z67rAE18Q

In comparison with detractors even twitching with baseless philosophical mendaciousness, quick uninformed pronouncements, and displaying gross even medieval intellectual cowardice, Stanton Friedman... well, don't smirk... debates!  Read on!

ÆL