Conventional Wisdom for Feebs, Dweebs, and NCC's

Conventional Wisdom for 
Feebs, Dweebs, and NCC's

by Alfred Lehmberg

There's always a lot of myopic griping from the ufological luminary about Ufology not deserving its identification as a "breeding ground for nitwits, crackpots, and cuckoos" (NCC's).  ...And there's lately been considerable moaning about its infestation by same.  

To this end, extant and name-called NCC's are rather arbitrarily identified by some largely self-appointed, self-validating, and self-grinding ufological gatekeepers in a baldly-approached and androcratic attempt to clean their "ufological temple" of that "undisciplined dross" and "intemperate corruption"... yea and verily...  Yea and verily, my brothers and sisters, holding short of overturning the counting tables of the money changers, of course! 

...A man's gotta eat. Only, how well and as a result of what.

Though, wait! What about the provenance of that so-called "undisciplined dross of NCCs?  Where does it come from?  What compels the corruption and the foolishness of that highlighted "dross"? 

To be sure, this writer offers that the conjectured foolishness can only be the result of the baldest ignorance on our part.  On that point, this writer would agree with the most Strident SkeptiBunky.  Where that SSB and this writer diverge is that the SSB won't cop to the boundless pervasiveness of that ignorance.  He won't admit the contrived and engineered enormity of it... the daunting scope of it... his part in it. He thinks he's aware and outside of it. That any of us could be, eh? 

No, it is an ignorance of the widest horizons, encompassing many disciplines, and it is so corrosively pervasive in ways so smooth and reflexive that its mechanisms are all but detectable. Like that fish unaware of the water it swims in, the luminaries alluded to refuse to question their own assumptions and presumptions inherent to a crass fundamentalist's scientific reductionism.  That Culture? Like any culture? Not your friend.

Is it an ignorance of design?  The short answer seems yes.  We appear to be socio-nationally programmed to have a predicted feeling given a "specific stimulus," and that programming is very busily engineered by a media firmly controlled by interests assuredly not our own, to grind axes, predictably one would guess, not necessarily in an individual's best interest. 

The aforementioned skeptibunky sees that ignorance as self-induced and holds the ignorant individual entirely accountable for their own ignorance.  That's convenient. They reason that it is a "bed" that the ignorant himself has insensibly made, despite the SSB's *solid* information to the (oh so convenient) contrary. Enter the fallacy of "CONVENTIONAL WISDOM", and the believable possibility that Americans, in particular, are very carefully conditioned to believe all the wrong things to buttress a betraying bottom line.

Tim O'Shea makes a pretty good case for a kind of artfully crafted *common* sense that rewards the few as it plunders the many—at least as it pertains to health, the health system, and the practice of medicine in the United States.  This writer asks: why stop at that institution? 

If an institution with the hoary mantle of presumed integrity like Medicine can be so thoroughly corrupted and embroiled in conspiracy, why can't ANY institution be corrupted just as thoroughly for similar reasons?  A paper I've completed attempts to demonstrate the potentiality for ready utilization of ANY opportunity empowering the *few* to take criminal advantage of the *many* if it is profitable and possible to do so. 

Isn't the study of UFOs just such an institution ripe for a similar abuse? One regards the imbroglio of relieved PA, MUFON Chair John Ventre. This would be regarding White Supremacist Politics' impact on a study of UFOs in Pennsylvania, Deleware, and West Virginia. One sees how muddy the water can get just out of hand. Demons and devils and Imps!  Oh, my!

Back to O'Shea. He quotes from "Trust Us We're Experts", written by Stauber and Rampton. This is a textbook on the history of molding public opinion, and it clearly demonstrates the seriously unethical (and many times criminal) lengths that corporate entities (among other organizations of easy conspiracy) have gone to in the unethically passionate bid to control their grasping bottom lines, and affect the quality of our lives.

"CONVENTIONAL WISDOM" is at issue.  Legitimate questions can be asked to challenge that "CONVENTIONAL WISDOM" is any kind of *wisdom* at all...  In other words, "Common Sense," assumed, presumed, and consumed since the cradle, might be something less than the "efficacious best move" that it is too reflexively thought to be. Are rank and file Americans, to start, patsies in a cruel shell game of subtle, and not so subtle, variegated Ponzi scheme manipulations or cultural chicanery?  Yes, again. Just consider the "war on drugs."  

These manipulations are exposed so frequently, even in a whorish mainstream (read corporate) press, that they require no citation.

UFOs, an understanding of which might truly raise human beings to a new quantum level of awareness, are a subject, then, likely to be a target of the devious manipulations O'Shea describes so luridly.  UFOs, frankly touch on all the levels illustrating the complete human condition, blind, crippled, or crazy.  Their affectations cover the sociological, implicate the psychological, and dictate the resistance of a "current power elite" to any reduction of ignorance regarding it! 

The truth is, of course, many times, an anathema to the corporate bottom line.  Consider the story of Erin Brockovich...  Truth has no respect for stockholders and has no regard for their future's prediction of mere profit and loss... where truth CAN be told... 

The truth is out there.  That's the problem, the ever-present threat to the suspect status quo... ...and a hanging sword of unending concern for the powers that be... 

There's a kingdom at hand, after all. Should that be assured for just a few or should it be vouchsafed on the many? Conscience and empathy dictate an answer even where it's going to be the hard one.

Where is the evidence that a Ufological institution might be subject to related manipulations referenced in Stauber and Rampton and by the current antics of John Ventre and others in MUFON? If there is such evidence, is it no less convincing than the programming Americans have endured in other venues (regarding the distortion of the truth for self-serving ends)? Pardon the digression, but if this writer were to perform socially in a similar manner (?), he would be rightfully accused of fraud and sent to jail.

Evidence abounds, actually.  To limit the scope and the length of this essay we will snapshot the contributions of one pioneering ufologist as seemingly far from "kookdom" as it is possible to get... and still maintain a balanced interest in UFOs.  This man was Dr. Josef Allen Hynek, an astronomer of considerable credibility with brother and sister scientists all over the world.

Dr. Hynek was, and remained throughout his life, a true scientist. Full stop. The reader might ask what a true scientist is. Let this writer allow that it is a question simply answered. 

A true scientist goes where the data leads despite personal concerns, personal desires, or the destruction of personal beliefs.  For a real scientist, it is the truth that is sought... "truth though heaven falls..."

Dr. Hynek is hired as a likely ringer by a government agency, ostensibly to get to the bottom of the Flying Saucer Situation (FSS) by matching UFO sighting reports with explainable atmospheric and celestial events. Neat trick, eh? 

The only problem was that the aforementioned agency received its marching orders from a jealous institution of the powers that were—personages who had begun to cop to the next-level implications of a real understanding regarding the aforementioned FSS... anyone must know that true, this is extreme. No justification for ignorance and I'm suspecting at that ignorance's abject peril. I digress.

It was not at all clear, you see, that the "powers that were" would continue to "officiate" in a world of *new* understanding... It was a condition identical to the one faced now by the "powers that are." Dr. Hynek might "help," as Dr. Menzel had (a skeptibunky of the first water), to shoot this whole unsettling UFO thing down...

Pursuant to a Top Secret clearance, Dr. Hynek endured an interview with the agency, and had to answer some odd questions. These were questions about UFOs. Now Hynek was a no-nonsense scholar with impeccable credentials who, when asked to express his opinion on the subject of UFO's, said that he thought "UFOs were nonsense..." He did think they were nonsense. Demonstrating a (perhaps preferred?) personal bias, he was hired. Hail Hydra.

Here are his own words:

"During this entire period of nearly twenty years I have attempted to remain as open-minded in this subject as circumstances permitted, this despite the fact that the whole subject seemed utterly ridiculous, and many of us firmly believed that, like some fad or craze, it would subside in a matter of months."

And:

"In 1948, I was asked by the U.S. Air Force to serve as a scientific consultant on the increasing number of reports of strange lights in the sky. I was then Director of the Astronomical Observatory of Ohio State University, and am now the Chairman of the Astronomy Department at Northwestern. I had scarcely heard of UFOs in 1948 and, like every other scientist I knew, assumed that they were nonsense."

Dr. Hynek was privately confident, even while he was professionally open-minded, that a detailed scientific examination of the Flying Saucer phenomena would shred these UFO's up like tissues in a tropical typhoon. ...But, unsettlingly, as the reports came in and he involved himself with their undeniable details, his initially easy confidence rapidly began to fade:

"Despite the seeming inanity of the subject, I felt that I would be derelict in my scientific responsibility to the Air Force if I did not point out that the whole UFO phenomenon might have aspects to it worthy of scientific attention."

As his private confidence faded Dr. Hynek reluctantly transitioned into that rarest of ufological beasts.  He, a named scientist with a reputation to uphold, began to become a convert...

"All of this increased my own concern and sense of persona; responsibility—and motivated me to urge the initiation of a meaningful scientific investigation of the UFO phenomenon by physical and social scientists. I had guardedly raised this suggestion in the past and at various official hearings, but with little success. UFO was a term that called forth buffoonery and caustic banter precisely because scientists paid no attention to the raw data—the reports themselves."

...and then found himself saddled with some of the aspects of a "rank believer":

"Still, on the average, if several pilots and/or policemen concur on the main points of the story, particularly if the duration of their experience was long enough (a matter of minutes rather than seconds) to have brought their judgment into play, it is difficult to brush aside their seemingly hardheaded testimony. And when one gets reports from scientists, engineers, and technicians whose credibility by all common standards is high and whose moral caliber seems to preclude a hoax, one can do no less than hear them out, in all seriousness."

Additionally:

"As a scientist, I must be mindful of the lessons of the past; all too often it has happened that matters of great value to science were overlooked because the new phenomenon simply did not fit the accepted scientific outlook of the time. I cannot dismiss the UFO phenomenon with a shrug. I have begun to feel that there is a tendency in 20th Century science to forget that there will be a 21st Century science, and indeed a 30th Century science, from which vantage points our knowledge of the universe may appear quite different than it does to us. We suffer, perhaps, from temporal provincialism, a form of arrogance that has always irritated posterity"

Dr. Hynek, among significant others, was an obvious portal of ufological respectability that the mainstream consciously, and with arbitrary malice of forethought, took pains to avoid.  The mainstream, then as now, preferred ridicule to seriousness, mockery to earnestness, and active scorn to productive investigation. Why?    

Dr. Hynek was an EARLY indicator of the validity of the UFO phenomenon, its veracity as a fulcrum of scientific advancement, and finally, its portentous reality.  Dr. Hynek made it abundantly clear that UFOs were real, operated in a manner that was not consistent with anything man-made, and, moreover, he demonstrated that quality people from all walks of life and station, from General Officers to general contractors... thought so, too.

Quality people have ALWAYS thought there was something to unidentified flying objects.  It is only a jealous and intransigent mainstream that paints a ufological interest as the domain of green toothed trailer dwellers—the inappropriately maligned feebs, dweebs and NCCs... unfortunate individuals that, bad off as they might be, are still better than their skeptibunky detractors because they're at least trying to go where some data leads! Fish rot in Denmark and an individual senses something beyond the pale. One might even feel betrayal.

The reader is cautioned that it is not an unfortunate "infestation" of the ufological temple that is the issue. RATHER: it is the suspected abundance of quality data that cannot be accessed by researchers of ANY type. It is the sullen recalcitrance and lack of general forthcomingness from closed institutions encouraging the actions of NCCs who must surely (and conveniently for the establishment) take deconstructive advantage of their inexplicable informational void... And it is, finally, the lack of collegiality of the current crop of investigators, their professional snobbery, selfishness, and ego (plus their inexplicably doting appreciation of a fundamentalist *science* that does not appreciate them) which goes a long way towards keeping the subject of UFOs in the Sargasso sea of tepid indifference presently endured... it would seem to this writer. 

UFO's are real, they have always been real, and they will continue to be real. It is the establishment's concern for a convenient status quo that makes the arbitrary decision to dismiss an aggregate ufological as just one province of gullible fools, weak-minded new-agers, and credulous counterculture revisionists. 

See. It is not the current crop of NCC's that keeps UFOs in an informational limbo; they're a logical reaction to that suspicious and ongoing informational void alluded to above... It is, rather, the mechanism of a duplicitous mainstream that keeps UFOs in ubiquitous shadows for perfectly predictable reasons all its own. ... ones decidedly not in the best interests of your garden variety human and mote of consciousness.  Read on.

Restore John Ford!