Huffington's Lee Speigel blunders through some UFO crap

In the Huffington Post piece (linked below) Lee Speigel touts The History Channel's Hangar 1 and its recent airing of UFOs reportedly seen in war zones.

UFO cognoscenti know that Hangar 1 is a flawed theatrical program, fraught with erroneous fact and much fiction about UFOs from MUFON.

(Mr. Speigel's rendering of the supposed 16th century woodcut showing a host of UFOs warring over the city has been addressed by me, showing the woodcut as an "editorial cartoon" about the religious turmoil of the time.)

Mr. Speigel's cavalier journalistic endeavors will remove any idea of credibility for Huffington, just wait and see.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/19/ufos-during-wartime_n_7046472.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592

RR

UFOs and the conflict with personal realities

The research and expected explanation of UFOs (flying saucers) has always been marred or obstacled by researcher bias and entrenchment in subjective realties.

Recent dialogues I’ve had, online, with some of those who continue to delve into the UFO mystery, show me that we’ll never arrive at a reasonable consensus as to what UFOs represent or are.

That is, I keep finding that those who are enamored of the UFO enigma always, and I mean always, really want to impose their subjective realities and belief systems on the phenomenon, to the detriment of objective thinking (or research).

We all are subject to what we’ve been reared to believe or have come to believe during our life-times.

But that often disqualifies us from being objective or scientific when it comes to examining a phenomenon or topic in the current zeitgeist.

Pressing UFO people to be sensible and open-minded doesn’t work, as I’ve experienced it.

I keep getting suggestions as to what UFOs are, supported by egregious reference to belief systems and preferences for various theories or hypotheses that are interesting but still just theories, belief systems, and/or hypotheses.

I’ve often mentioned Edward De Bono’s books and ideologies about how to think, but this has fallen on deaf ears.

Persons locked into modal thinking, refracted by personal exigencies and preferences, are tough to deal with; they are cemented into thought processes by mental glitches or neurotic, even psychotic-like subjectivity.

What causes this erratic subjectivity?

Psychological malfeasances they’ve accumulated over the years or actual neurological malfunctions.

In my UFO journey I’ve come across all kinds of nuts and crank and, currently, suffused with suggestions, in comments here that border on insanity.

Let me exclude such ravishing real thinkers as Eric Wargo or academic Bryan Sentes and creative, investigative reporter Nick Redfern.

These men offer real thought and objectivity.

But Tim Herbert and I see the mental configurations that intrude on the search for a UFO explanation, and these mental configurations are rife in the UFO community, online and off.

Kevin Randle allows, at his blog, an open ended commentary where some of the nuttiness intrudes, although Kevin is becoming more circumspect about who or what can appear in his blog’s comment section. (I applaud his stance.)

Here, I will allow obtuse, erratic commentary if it is creative or humorous, inadvertently so even.

But overall, I have to eschew the nonsense that comes my way and often engulfs the UFO topic everywhere else.

But I am fully aware that much of what I’m getting in the way of commentary or private e-mails is material steeped in wayward thinking or mental disturbance of a minor and sometimes serious kind.

And if many of you think Zoam Chomsky is on my list of nuts, you’d be wrong. His anti-UFO spiels make more sense than anything one might get from David Rudiak, who is a brilliant researcher, besmirched by a belief that ETs are the sole explanation for Roswell and UFOs generally, bereft of any evidence to the contrary.

So, I am not gulled into presenting ideas that come from disturbed minds – except my own – or from persons who don’t really think in a way that bespeaks intellectual acumen.

That may sour some, who believe they are intelligently presenting UFO-speak when, in fact they are offering crumbs of insanity, disguised by posturings of high-readibility and intellectual refinement.

The UFO enigma deserves better, does it not? Zoam?

RR 

Roswell Slides Dating from and by Jose Antonio Caravaca

One of the principal arguments has been put forward to defend the authenticity of the famous Roswell slides is their age, and specifically its correspondence with the last years of the Forties, between 1947 and 1949. Both Anthony Bragalia ufologist, and more recently Mexican journalist Jaime Maussan have argued that different analysis of the slides confirm they are old and have not suffered any recent manipulation. But how was it determined that the Roswell slides were taken between 1947 and 1949?

Their arguments are based on some very unproven premises and assumptions. The cardboard sleeves used to protect its Kodachrome slides were manufactured between 1939 and 1959, until they were replaced by those made of plastic. However the specific sleeves containing these Roswell slides belong to the first generation of this type of housing that was only manufactured between 1941 and 1949. Therefore, Bragalia and his colleagues came to the conclusion, focusing on his obsession with Roswell Incident, that the most date for the slides to be taken was between 1947 and 1949, ruling out other possible dates. But it should be noted that this dating completely lacks any scientific support in the form of analysis. And although the Kodak company ceased production of the aforementioned type of cardboard sleeves in 1949, it does not mean that in any camera store in the United States stopped using them. They would have continued until their inventory of them was exhausted, the switched to the new Kodak sleeves. Therefore, the evidence surrounding the dating of the slides is circumstantial and supported only by refutable arguments, because following the premises of the researchers involved, we could not rule out, so lightly, the years before 1947. But obviously an earlier date ... even January or May 1947, would mean that it could not be a Roswell alien... and that would ruin the expectations of Maussan and his colleagues ...

JAC