by Alfred Lehmberg
"Old UFOs have zero relevance..." some would, rather ridiculously, argue. Not quite. ...That misses the mark.
There's a smarter and more constructive way to look at that, too, it's offered, but let's see some more of the outline before comin' down hard. We have to come down that way in some pretty uncomfortable places. Courage is questioned. Ethics is debated. Self-honesty, always in short supply, will be examined.
Resolved: ...select others must argue that these old cases must be, precisely and exclusively, the cases we need to keep looking at! This is, of course, because these are the ones, the qualifying ones (it is worried!), but the ones with which we've grown the most comfortable, you know, as regards that actualizing qualification alluded to and aforementioned... ...does contempt have to follow familiarity? Onward!
Somehow wise to beat dead horses, we're advised... we are even served, reader, and verily, it is suggested, by looking at these classic UFO cases exhaustively, meticulously, and laboriously, even! We are rewarded in our attempts to voraciously discount, disqualify, and discredit them, only, is the assertion! Where is the science in that... A question expecting no answer as there is no answer.
See, even if a new "scan" or "scientific (scientistic!) sift" reveals the "fishing line" or the conjectured "smoky mirror," and the time-honored case blows up in our "less than perspicacious" faces, these would argue, we are attended to by this disqualification! Plussed-up, a "truth" is made even more obvious, and UFOs are shown to be... "well, that they just can't even ...be," eh?! Score one for the Pelicanist's home team!
One simply puts them from one's calmed, decerning, and superior mind... ...Naw!
One but slides back to fluffin' their glad arrogance and masturbatin' their unjustified pride... humpin' their sweaty hubris? Yes, it's that bad.
"...Because that's what science is about," is a cheerful if disingenuous refrain! "We are but chipping diligently away at 'belief' until all that remains is 'fact,' right?" ...These have smugly pontificated...
Then? Then, they'd employ their take-no-prisoners-kill-'em-all-and-let-God-sort-it-out "debunking" strategies, in the purest sense of that word... since it's foolish, as we all "know," to tolerate "bunk." This writer inserts an obligatory eye-roll.
Yeah, three cheers for "brave scientism" and the men who gleefully prosecute it, eh? Hearty hails as, drooling the aforementioned hubris, we hoist, foreshadowing a wholly inappropriate (and ironic) religiosity, its prideful banner high, higher, and highest... quite beyond all qualification or discussion... or protest.
Yea and verily, onward and upward scientistic (sic) soldiers,
marching as to war... and we'll fight-fight-fight on to our 2D triumph
and our facile, only imagined and assuredly passing glory... and its risible honor... wiping slime and slobber from those slack and scienceless jaws encountered as we painfully go... but fighting the never-ending battle for truth,
justice, and the scientistic way...
Uh, huh... then the "scientific" rent comes due, right? We find that our hubris is equal to our immaturity. How can it be anything else? Consider, anytime we "know" we have something in its tagged bag we discover that it's runnin' around in the yard sans its pants and flashin' the neighbors!
Sincerely, I don't mean to mock the sincere scientist with his diminished hubris and reasonable humility, but (!), notwithstanding the
unerring accuracy of their certainly sentient sentiment erstwhile aspired to? These are in no way allowing
for the dark side of same, reader! They are not on proper guard for it! They don't take it seriously enough! To a degree, they deny its very existence!
...And there is a dark side, Sir and madam. By way of example... what's much respected to be an honest "peer review" (just to start) may be a smothering cowl where the interests of the reptilian pecuniary lie, and compellingly, to wish it so... consider "good cops" not outing "bad cops" and begin to grok the drift... ...like a fraternity, institution, or a status quo ever legitimately trumped what was "right" and "true"! That finger hoisted!
...And let's ALL take a moment to shake our heads in contrition and remorse that such has not been so! There is shame enough for us all, true enough... but satisfaction beyond the shame, having copped to that shame. It is the way.
That "dark" alluded to remains predictably unacknowledged (when it would count!), where it is not first celebrated by the backstepping "self-involved," friends and neighbors, most caustically by persons typifying as one's reflex "skeptibunky"! Of that ilk and of that clan!
These are those persons, of course, of conflicted caliber, in other words...those defining UFOs as "dismissible" out of hand and sans all investigation, too... persons so risible on their face that the laughter begins before they open their mouths to speak!
Secondly, and sadly, we must include even that "sincere scientist" alluded to beforehand and so gratefully allowed for... (cops "good" and "bad," remember... and who's the good guy when the former lets the latter slide?) ...even as these are, perhaps, not so often in arrears.
Happily, one can more easily believe in these, largely because they are the more guileless and sincere professionals measured in hard-won letters and education, persons of ethics and consistency... J. Allen Hynek's "good instruments," truly honorable persons, perhaps, persons of all humility and without most of that degenerative hubris alluded to (one hopes!)... even if ignoring happily the toxic hubris practiced by their abject adjacents... so, persons willing to continue to play by
the honorable rules as codified... even as they don't call out skeptibunkies for not reading to the period as regards their traditional lack of open-minded investigation? The rent will come due, as was pointed out.
These might escape the graceless ignominy of dishonor, dishonor hastened by their adjacent's arrogance and homocentric vanity... mostly... even as those aforementioned, those faux-skeptic and denying others, do not escape that eventual dishonor. Cowardice, intellectual or otherwise, can never be rewarded.
This includes, moreover, even that caliber of a person displaying erudition, intellect, and personal honor otherwise... like the late Richard Hall
and Jerry Clark, for an example of type (Not Hall and Clark, I'd hasten to point out, but persons of that caliber). These people, and requiring no citation, don't want their world views destroyed, out of hand! Who does! Though that becomes necessary, sometimes. Why deny an obvious? Examples are legion even if difficult to admit.
Folks are more comfortable believing that they'd had their things pretty well nailed down, the "big parts" allowed for, you see... but it's the once-revered anything that can blow up in one's face! One speaks from experience.
Asserted here is that some will go to extraordinary lengths to keep their well-deserved and justified cognitive implosion from happening... employ all the self-interested tools facilitated by cognitive dissonance and other mental gymnastics to keep things "already defined" in their well-ordered universe as "already defined" if in, ironically, contorted "line"... where they are not! You, me... anybody. A self-inflicted wound, self-service has the shortest shelf life. Do not consume. See, if heaven can fall, it probably should.
I resurrect my analogy of the locker rupture for the mal-intellectual thugs who prosecute it:
In my country, while attending high school, one had to be very
careful to ensure that their gym locker doors were closed and locked
completely! Additionally, one didn't let so much as a thread of gym shorts or jersey show as fishable through the small crack betwixt the door and its casement. Stay with me, now.
If you
did? That thread would be ferreted out by a diligent juvenile
delinquent with anger issues and your gym clothes torn and ruined as they were worried
and jerked out of the locker crack, shred by tattered shred! The bottom of the door could even be exploded outward like it had suffered the expulsion of one of Ellen Ripley's Alien chest-bursters! We
called them "locker ruptures."
Our aforementioned anti-ufological delinquent, tricked out with his obdurate
performances of reflexive denial, on the other hand, might remain minimally admirable if he'd balanced his
obsessive energies in the service of ferreting out, once in an f'n while, threads of procedural and logical error in the mechanizations and mal-approbations of his ilk's "lockers," eh? ...Validated a case, once in a while, where it could be validated, instead of invalidation as his purposed and partisan "go-to" move!
These are significant errors, moreover, abundant in the
arguments and researches of his fellow pelicanists and skeptibunkies who are opposed to even the concept of UFOs (while pretending to honestly challenge the "conventional wisdom" of
quality (old) cases already abundantly assessed!)... but that's not likely, eh? The late Stanton Friedman was able to point this out in every debate he was ever in...
See, behavior such as that would counter the by-laws of your garden variety pelicanist guild members and those folks over in their sister clans of concerned scatological klasskurtxians and anxious skeotibunkies! But for these re-re-redigested tatters, tatters they have largely manufactured themselves out of whole cloth, as with the Roswell case, for instance (et sig al), they but serve us but a corrosive disservice, some facile misdirection, and that ever-popular but mendacious scientistic argle-bargle only aping the scientific! These cases, re-re-re-dissected, remain to have an obvious solidity that your sage denier attempts, everlastingly, to ruin... like the gym shorts just described!
These have, say, grasped the skeptibunky's "find one more witness" tatter (of Trindade for example, a case beat to death so badly one cannot be sure of pronouncement upon it one way or the other... the plan and end-game of the denialist one might imagine!) ...like one of those juvenile delinquents I alluded to earlier, and, biting down hard on it with his little ferret-faced rat-fangs, he
is content to hang on for dear life, prosecuting his dull and tedious obstinacy... like stubbornness was a virtue! It is not. Not when that stubbornness is backboned by any of the four iterated items above, it's not!
It is not, just as
it's not about a mendacious servitor's, "one more witness" disingenuousness. It wouldn't
matter to this kind of guy were even the late arch-skeptibunky Philip Klass to stumble forward, from the
grave, to say that he was on the boat at Trindade, in the yard
at McMinnville, or in the cab with Heflin so in truth, saw,
himself, the UFOs in unending contention... Matters not... especially from the grave, eh?
It is about looking beyond the usual confinement, thinking out of the box so redefining (evolving!) the box,
and removing oneself from the center of a trumped-up "God's"
universe, at all. It's about reading to the period, accepting the larger
reality, and combating reactionary denial as cross-purposed and inordinately deconstructive to advancement and elevation... a fist in the throat of our aspiration to transcendence even!
It is about truth. It is about justice. It is about a sentient way. It is the way! How could self-honesty, justified humility, and lack of corrosive hubris be any less?
In this writer's opinion, anything else is
reactionary stodginess, obsessive pig-headedness, blithering
anti-science, actually, and the death of our progressive rationality...
...as some, more sentient than this writer, rather assiduously point out. Check current events. Richard Dolan ain't just whistlin' Dixie!
Sceptibunkies should let their shards of current tatters go while their humiliation can still be less regrettable and more manageable. They waste our energy and theirs, and
they perform no service, still, but the fluffing of our collective complacency and the corporeal du jour cowardice we endure. Verily, they are unaware that the
locker and gym shorts they're trying to rupture through the locked
door and ruining frame and casement are actually their own articles. It's their locker, too.
See? The mechanism of re-hashing the same-old hoary hash on the already
well-parsed hash of old UFO cases is two-fold, and it's all aimed at
the otherwise distracted observer who still sits on the fence
regarding the legitimacy of UFOs, at the start. Then, if the "pelicanistic-skeptibunky-klasskurtxian" can demonstrate, even fraudulently,
that a jury is still out on the best cases... it is to these
cases discredit, first... and then, secondly, by non-admitted extension, to all
ufological cases. Concept: obliterated. ...See how that might work?
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 as an exercise in futility, when it is not. How could it be? The open end of that suspected multiverse seems unavoidable... I've written before regarding happenstance roaring down on us like freight trains... what happens when we don't investigate what's been humming on reality's tracks...
In an ideal world, it will be postulated, this would clearly not be the case. We, however; have learned to accept the "less than ideal" as real. We embrace the evolved reality revealed for all its angels and devils!
Are we going to forget for a moment the denialist's complicity in keeping
us from the benefits of that "ideal world"? Are we to
disregard their scurrilous effect and duplicitous campaign with
regard to the invalidation of same? Are we to overlook their program's imagination-lessness, their disingenuous design, their sad prosecution of same, and their mechanism to ill-facilitate that which they would but pretend not to decry? Not on my watch. These are not truth-seekers, Sir or Madam! These are a truth-"bleeders"!
We bleed collectively, howsoever needlessly, only because of the insentient and duplicitous (even psychotic and mendacious!) dog-worrying activity of them and theirs... or one's 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 and warped the door! The Hope diamond can be
turned to dust with an errant sledge, reader... proving
nothing but the inadvisability of having pricey diamonds (UFOs?) around some persons,
at all?
No matter how often the metaphorical CGI "smoke-mirror" or "UFO suspending fishing line" has not been substantivally revealed, "trufologists" can, and perhaps should, become comfortable with those cases, even take them for granted to a degree, as good pieces of evidence. Proof of contention. This would be the evidence justifying the continuation of an expenditure of energy in the UFO's regard, at all. ...Not just its dismissal.
...So maybe, just maybe, a reasonable attitude to any attempt to re-examine these cases non-critically, hair-splittingly, disingenuously, and dismissively... well, that attempt be treated as a form of intellectual heresy and an ironic betrayal of real science... which is, remember, that aspiration to truth, truth though heaven falls to shattered shreds or tattered shards!
I suspect we're more aptly served able to rebuild upon a more substantial foundation, after that falling, than trying to build on those same holy scriptures telling us when and where to acquire slaves, murder "disappointing" daughters, or commit senseless genocides... failing us in the corporeal... and whose sigil has an emaciated man torturously suspended by nails on a wooden cross... but I digress.
Remains, we'd have all this behind us if we'd copped to a ufological reality back in 1952 when the concept first raised its alien head and Harry Truman ordered they be shot down... and they were!
But oh, what a pompous web-load of klasskurtxian crap the denialist will prosecute in tedious denial of all that, eh? ...Like Bill Nye pronouncing authoritatively upon that which he has not seriously investigated, at all. See, and again, no matter how
often the conjectured "fishing line" can be demonstrated not to have been
there, bumptious "avians" (pelicanists!) have become so adept and comfortable
crapping out their ready dismissals that they regard any attempt to protest their
duplicitous "reexaminations" as the real heresy! Gaslighting at its fervid best! Not what one would
have wished, perhaps, for that "better world," aforementioned, about which some must moan through crocodile tears, Sir and Madam!
That, resolved: cases such as McMinnville, Soccorro, Trindade, and etc, might be part of a canon of ufology to be defended, at cost, as accepted and acceptable. Canon beyond the tortured logics, disingenuous self-interests, bland mendacities... or dead-horse beating (locker rupturing!) weaponizations used by persons too leery of necessary new world-views roaring down on all of us like the aforementioned train.
...Let world-views and personal philosophies become more cosmically gylanic, if we let them, but promoting canon certainly protected from the ceaseless and inordinate pecking of the impertinent pelicanists, biased ringers perhaps even employed to prosecute the reflexive denials aforementioned, at the start!
This is given, of course, precisely because that it is likely that we are not alone in an unknown cosmos! ...And would be much better served, at cost to cat-birds (one suspects), behaving as if we were not.
...And that that is such a game-changer, "innit," though again it's a bullet we could have bitten in 1952. My 40-year-old son would never have known a universe without extraterrestrials in it. I suspect that that universe might have a much broader horizon and greater aspect to it for that brave disclosure than is offered currently...
This is a cosmos where there is and has been time and consolidating surface... area enough, friends and neighbors, not only to substantiate in the existential everything in the single most creative person's imagination... but everything beyond the most basic capacity in an unceasing plethora of such imaginations! Conceive of the inconceivable. That's for good and bad. It's all out there. Choose. That's on you.
The counterproductive and ceaseless criticizing of past cases such as McMinnville, Trindade, Soccoro, etc, are part of the klasskurtxian bag of scurvy skeptibunky
tricks, one can observe. These shall be defended against, at cost, and within a trusted unbiased logic,
by the protests of more honorable and truth-seeking men and women, regarding same. ...Persons like Jeremy Vaeni, Tyler Kochjohn, Tim Binnall, or Jack Brewer... just to draw notable apts from a hat of notables... Good cops finally calling out the bad? Sense must triumph over self-serving insentience, sometimes.
Try to remember that the United States Navy is looking hard at them, right now! What's up with that? Loss leader? Bait and switch? What?! We'll see.
Summing up, perhaps the best way to challenge any mal-critical assault on one of these "old" cases is simply to assess (not label) the person making the criticism as a facile skeptibunky, a too-proud pelicanist, or a scared denialist, and then be allowed to move on to territory unexplored precisely because we've been nagged and niggled re-prosecuting the already well prosecuted instead of that unexplored. Funny that, eh?
As deconstructive as it is and proves itself to be, no further discussion pertaining to that destruction is needed or necessary. It has abdicated all rights to favorable consideration being beneath that consideration, its concern, or all contempt. Then maybe we can move on to the current and more substantive stuff, exactly what your garden variety pelicanist would seem to oppose. ...And funny, that!
Those of you in this outlined clan of reflex denialists! You and yours only shred metaphorical shorts from the
broken casements of ruptured lockers, your own, I remind!
It remains to be the way, the only way you can
mount your weepy challenges to ufology, or prosecute your inconsequent mal-critical assault on UFOs. The pelicanist remains to be known... known by its somehow impassioned yet desultory and nonsensical squawk
and the fetid mal-intellectual droppings it leaves in its intellectually impoverishing wake, only, Sir, and Madam, or by
anything else they'd distractingly utter in what only seems to be an otherwise reasonable and
reasoned discourse.
"Truth..." Those are sneer quotes. The uninformed presumption of these outlined reflexive deniers, rife with toxic hubris and wallowing unjustified arrogance, ages as badly as it initially smells, eh? I am moved to just let one's massive hubris "tag and bag" its own misunderstanding... let it un-bravely prosecute those little articles of "reality tunnel" presumption employed... but that it disserves us so egregiously! ...All the while, remember, already vast and expanding multiverses loom before us like a gaping tooth-filled maw, more unknowable than they are unknown and with greater shadows revealed for every brightening of our meager little lamp!
Moreover, who can depend on a clock never correct because it moves its own hands around to sense time as it would have it measured? These, be not proud.
Whistle passed that graveyard, little darlin's. When your religion is unblinking hypocrisy, your science an inflation of unjustified hubris, and your patriotism is but patent treason, all you have is that which dissolves inexorably before you... enjoy, eh? It's entirely on you. There's some truth... sneer quotes are unnecessary and one's locker remains intact.
