Looking for a [UFO] reality

When Plato suggested a real reality, outside the one humans perceive, with his cave allegory, it opened the door to philosophical musings, about what constitutes reality, to this day.

But there are other realities that humans have tried to determine or clarify.

Theologians seek a reality after this one. Historians try to determine the socio-political realities of the past and present day.

Anthropologists look for the cultural realities of former societies. Archeologists look for the social environments and venues of past existences, human and otherwise.

Artists, of the painter-kind, have tried to capture the realities of their places and times until the modern era when Dada, Surrealism, abstract expressionists, et al. strove to capture the reality that Plato hinted at.

Scientists, especially physicists, look for the cosmological and infinitesimal realities that surround mankind.

Then there are the psychedelic buffs, of which I have a few as Facebook friends, who think that LSD and hallucinogenic drugs take us to the Platonic reality when, in fact, all that psychedelics do is distort the “sensory reality” of the person ingesting such drugs, as Oliver Sacks discovered.

For the purpose of this blog, I’m looking for the reality that ufologists (UFO buffs) are looking for by their interest in the UFO phenomenon (or phenomena, if you want).

What do UFO buffs hope to obtain by discovering what UFOs (or their antecedents, flying saucers) are?

I assume that most UFO aficionados hope that UFOs are extraterrestrial flying craft; some looking at UFOs as a strange phenomenon rather than vehicles for alien visitors to the Earth, and a few feeling that UFOs are a mental or mythical aberration.

But what explanatory reality satisfies?

My typing these things in this blog may be only true to me; that is, my “consciousness” may be a chimera altogether, a concoction that I alone experience, or seem to.

But, for the sake of my contrived argument, let’s assume that you reading this are real and perceiving the same reality that I am.

If UFOs are ET vehicles, maintained by alien intruders, what reality do we have?

We have “proof” that humans are not alone in the Universe, but where do we take that?

From time immemorial and currently, we have nothing more than an imaginative intuition that UFOs contain living entities from elsewhere.

We have nothing more: no evidence for an ET existence, no real proof that UFOs are anything more than a figment of human desire and very likely an hallucinogenic imagery despite a sometimes (apparent) physical presence.

That UFO buffs have exerted inordinate energy, time, and resources to confirm their desired reality, whether the extraterrestrial reality or the strange phenomenal reality or the mythical reality, that’s still a ‘philosophical-like” pursuit that has ended up nowhere thus far.

(I’m taking a shot at the ongoing Roswell regurgitation at Kevin Randles’ blog where a useless and psychopathological foray into the detritus of the Roswell incident has come to consume a few UFO buffs who have descended into a reality not unlike that which the psychedelic crowd indulges in. It’s nonsensical and foolish in the extreme, but can’t be assuaged by the suggestion that the debate is as near to insanity than anything in the psychiatric literature. That is that search for reality is so bizarre and outside the normalcy of intelligent conversation that it can be dismissed by we who presume to be mentally whole.)

Mankind, we humans, has/have always been consumed by a desire or need to know what reality really is.

And we’ve pursued that desire or need in various ways, some of those ways satiating an emotional need on our part, and often producing some of mankind’s finest efforts that transcend the brutishness intrinsic to our existence and being.

But the search for a UFO reality has become (and always been?) a pursuit marred by an idiocy that is incomprehensible to other persons outside the UFO fold who are barely compos mentis themselves.

Should the search fro a UFO reality continue? Yes, as a pastime for a few intellectual individuals, operating outside the pathological milieu that now suffuses the UFO topic.

But those sane, commonsense pursuers have got to make sure that the mentally deficient members of the present UFO community don’t sneak into their effort, much as Homeland Security attempts to keep terrorists from disrupting the body politic.

It shall be daunting but if one is serious about explaining UFOs or discerning the UFO reality, it has to be done….now.

RR