The Mothman "Futility" Syndrome

Real? Imagined? ...or something "outside" an "in-between"?

The "Mothman Futility Syndrome"

by Alfred Lehmberg

People suffer needlessly for the gloating convenience of craven psychopaths. I say true. Avoiding that suffering is a bullet dodged. Here's another kind of bullet, its recognition, and avoidance. 

A syndrome is defined as a Pathology where a group of symptoms—together—are characteristic of a specific disorder or disease, or something else resembling such, though something in the existential. Additionally, it follows, then, that it can be a group of related or coincident things, events, actions, or affairs. All this hallmarks a pathology biologically or psychologically indeterminable from a state that should be describing a "well" person, except for lettered and educated guessory, frankly. 

It's obvious that a "bigger picture" is lost on mere monkeys making mouth noises. A talking monkey, myself, I only suspect that. Don't look to me for a dead-lock nut on the universe... Still, I have eyes to see and ears to hear. I make my report.

Back to syndromes. Sometimes, a syndrome is the pattern of synchronous symptoms characterizing or indicating even a particular social condition... if humanity can be looked at as a whole entity. Finally, a syndrome is that predictable and characteristic pattern of behavior, action, etc., which tends to occur under certain circumstances. These circumstances are of the "default and existential highly strange," especially those occurring to persons previously thought of as sane and rational. Finally, like all syndromes, this is one which slowly and painfully (if needlessly) kills.

Legions of persons down through history have self-destructed on cruel paranormal shoals thrust upon them without their foreknowledge or informed consent by an official reaction to highly strange events. Then they are made to pay for their innocent exposure. I say true.  

Affairs and activities regarding these individuals... (where these same individuals are prosecuted [none dare say persecuted] by corrupt governments, mendacious institutions, and dark agencies... corporate golems indifferent to the revolting excesses of their masters... beyond even a duplicitous oversight... and then prosecuting their easy betrayals of the public trust attendant to these "mal-trusted entities")... do not get illuminating scrutinies.  

Questions get begged, eh?  Google Paul Bennewitz for an example.

Damaged in these encounters, these persons are then denied succor and redress for grievances perpetrated on them—suffer by their own self-loathing if nothing else—facilitating gainful persons who "know better," eh?   ...Ethically superior, then, to the aforementioned organs of a duplicitous society and expecting greater or at least equal ethical behavior from it, these persons are ironically sacrificed on the self-serving alters of same... for the pecuniary convenience of same!  

Dr. Jim McDonald is another example.

The pathology of the strange syndrome is revealed.  We observe that it is indeed strange... strange that it is not the alleged affected harboring the real disease but the affecting! 

Verily, I'm reminded of an observation by Timothy Leary that LSD is shown to provoke cognitive pathologies and mental illnesses in persons who have not taken it. The aforementioned McDonald, by way of example, was a portrait of rational health adored by thousands for his attitude, intelligence, and leadership.  His persecutors, not so much. Chief among them was company stooge and media hit-man (the late) Philip Klass. Klass was visibly chief with regard to harrying McDonald to depression, despair, and suicide... Why? McDonald could opine intelligently, scientifically, and convincingly on the subject of UFOs.

A distinctive or characteristic mechanism of a patterned and manipulated behavior, the "Mothman Futility Syndrome," then, is at base defined as the authoritatively prescribed—and so largely inevitable—defeat, ruin, and despair visited upon an individual who fails to get to the bottom of—or provide adequate personal explanation for—a paranormal experience manifesting itself to him or her and which that person cannot, in good conscience, ignore. 

A sane person wants a reason explaining the "actually extant in the existential" ...flying pink elephants if they were perceived, by damn! An explanation of the unexplained is demanded by that reasonable person. One wonders for their sanity questioned, after all. Concern for one's sanity is eminently understandable. Society is not helpful.

Clearly, this imposed malady is NOT self-caused.  This societal insult is an imposition not from within, but from without.  Civil rights implode!  No, one should not be betrayed, targeted, or penalized for seeing what is actually there to be seen or there's no such thing as fair play.

Everyone has heard tales regarding someone who went "over the edge" or "off the deep end" chasing UFO's, or some such... Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster-type affairs.  Some of these persons lose jobs, loved ones, self-respect, and even their lives regarding "mainstream derided" incidents—incidents regarded as paranormal snipe-hunting excursions—reportedly, of their own accord.  Examples are Dr. Jim McDonald, Paul Bennewitz, and John Ford.  These are men lost as a result of not getting support, or targeted outright, for chasing a tantalizing, if wholly and ironically demonstrable, ephemeral.

The aforementioned were lost to death and /or despair.  At the far less dire end of that syndrome is myself, as example.  I've lost over a decade's real wages as a certified teacher discouraged employment as same.  There's a freight to be paid investigating discouraged investigations.

True, it would appear that these persons drive themselves "crazy" trying to "know the unknowable," or, in other words, chasing "obvious" folly. I was on the way. In the words of one man: making the wrong choice between "not finding out" about "something" and... "...living a normal life..." I've finally opted for the latter.

Still, that's not the issue.  Self-aware persons can know what they saw, eh?  The default villain in the piece is seen in relief to the self-aware person alluded to, but I move ahead of myself. The victim shall not be blamed!

This conjectured syndrome is best illustrated by the Gordon Smallwood character in the semi-recent hit film, "The Mothman Prophesies." Smallwood was the tortured and tragic character alluded to, played by Will Patten. This poor soul was so taken by the "Mothman" and the strange portents that it 'communicated' to him... that he lost his job, family, and even forgot to eat or dress for a dangerously inclement weather.  

He finally died of exposure waiting for the ephemeral and enchanting "Mothman".  ...A true story?  On some level, I'm betting, and to many.

"Smallwood" died, "close" to something he felt, so very close to *something*... but he died in despairing futility, regardless.  Everyone would agree. Then, where is the implied provenance and necessary genesis for that futility, and who actually bears the brunt of responsibility for it?

"Gordon Smallwood"?  I don't think so.

You see?  Gordon Smallwood was just trying to make sense of what he KNEW was occurring around and to him.  He knew something was happening because a well credentialed, reasonably decent, and big city television 'News' man was very supportive that something WAS actually happening to the both of them, over an extended period of time, and to a LOT of other witnesses too, including Smallwood's predictably deserting wife.  What's a remotely curious human being to do in such a circumstance?  What would the reader do (and they're more choices than merely two)?

Just another anecdotal tick-tac for the impacted klasskurtxian or reflex reductionist to pole vault over?  Probably, but still very symptomatic of other chronicled sightings of the paranormal by sober, competent, and reliable witnesses during mass sightings similar to Belgium in 89 and 90, Exeter in 65, and Illinois in 2000... the list is long.

How many "Gordon Smallwood's" of one degree or another have dashed themselves damagingly on the rocks of this 'facilitated' futility during the aforementioned sightings?  How many lost wives and husbands, jobs, or positions over it?  Some were affected, surely.  More illustration?

There are major motion pictures made about the concept as archetype, most notably the Roy Neary character in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"...walking away from humanity betrayed by society, wife, and children but, why SHOULD that sociological loss occur? He was driven to it, not driving.  

The witnesses are righteous, something inexplicable actually occurred, and innocently ordinary people were confronted with the extraordinary... why is their destruction necessary in a pursuit of it? Why indeed, but that it makes corporate catbirds skittery...

In walks an obfuscating, corrupt, and completely hijacked mainstream represented by its erudite and lettered mouthpiece, shill, and unabashed apologist, CSI.  The aforementioned Philip Klass was a starring member of this sham scientific society back when it was CSICOP.

CSI (all the publicity it gets), a corrupt Committee of Serial Insentients, is primarily invested employing its murder of uber-reductionist crows: eloquently canted little pundits in eager attendance and capering around their idea-burning fires like evil imps and busy nixies. Here are the facilitators of the syndrome sufferer's toxic futility, and the real reason the "Gordon Smallwood's," of NEEDS, must dash themselves senseless on the rocks of those self-same and surreal existential shores.

Lost in an informational VOID that a corrupted mainstream nourishes, encourages, and otherwise advances, the inevitable "Gordon Smallwoods," while knowing that something really unusual—is—occurring, are forced to try to make some sense of it on entirely their own!  Here, reader, is our outrage!

See, they are DENIED open-minded but rational, competent, and learned counsel.  Though, how can they get quality counseling when their concerns, reports, and fears are met only with shrill admonitions that they are one, MISINFORMED, two, LYING, or three, CRAZY! The problem is with the observer!?! Classic gaslighting at its finest! This is all the Mainstream CSIcopian can allow.  ANYTHING else is "outside the box," and so a slippery slide back down the slopes of their accommodating and ongoing duplicities. "Alternative facts" are their current admonition. Maybe Jesus really did ride a dinosaur? That's insult on too many levels to name.

Misinformed. Misinforming. Mentally ill. "M" cubed!  HERE is the trinity of their "truth" and from which the mainstream controls the worldviews of millions!  HERE is the suspicious mechanism keeping a ufological disclosure at bay!  

HERE is the mainstream agency that complicates at best and destroys at worst, knowingly, the lives of innocent Joe Sixpack or Jane Wine-cooler, when they see a UFO or suspect they've been abducted—what sets them up for ridicule, failure, and despair! For control... ignoble, unethical, and pecuniary.

THIS is the genesis of the "Mothman Futility Syndrome," then, and not, inexorably, the infirmity of the innocent individual attracted like a doomed moth—as would be any one of us—to a true burning flame of the purist imperative. UFOs! Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Hard to ignore when it walks up to punch you in the face! It is the learned SOCIETY that won't produce the tools with which to deal with the braver investigation of that flame extant!  Liability revealed!

HERE is your villain!  There is much, good reader, that is outside the tiny box of mere craziness, simple error, or outright misdirection. Yet, the mainstream professes this is not the case and proclaims it science.  Nonsense.

Enforcing those kinds of philosophical limitations and intellectual confinements does NOT go where the data leads.  If one does not go where the data leads one is NOT doing science, one is not being rational, and one is, finally, opting for base cowardice, intellectual and otherwise! 

Finally, and most importantly, respect is not being shown.  This is the crime for which heads will roll eventually.  Our leadership, elected and non-elected, had the information all along to lessen our confusion, fear, and despair and didn't respect us enough to do anything but shine us on.  Heads will roll, eventually.  The correct ones at the last.

...Think they WON'T?  Be disabused of that baseless notion, eh? History is clear.  Read on.