Ufological Drilling Down! (No one does that or has done that.)

It’s clear to me that UFO enthusiasts and those claiming to be researchers or investigators are facile when it comes to examining current and past (classic) UFO events.

Blue Book was lame, and so was the ersatz Condon UFO Committee.

(The exception seems to be the French cynics, as evidenced by many of the skeptical research papers, including the one I added here, from Gilles Fernandez, the other day; a really forensic attempt to clarify a UFO tale.)

UFO reports, scrutinized by so-called ufologists, including some a prolific as David Rudiak and Tim Printy (one an ET promoter, the other a rabid dissenter/skeptic), don’t dig past the top layer of sightings, although they pretend to.

In the 1996 Ann Arbor/Dexter/Hillsdale “swamp gas” sighting that Hynek attested to at a Detroit press conference was alluded to and investigated superficially.

No one, not the media surely, or Hynek or any UFO investigator, went to the Dexter site where at alleged craft was spotted by Frank Mannor and his son.

 No water was taken from the swamp where the sighting allegedly occurred. No photos were taken of the surroundings or the in situ spot where the supposed craft was seen.

The whole episode, along with the concomitant sighting at Hillsdale, fifty miles, give or take, away was never really investigated or studied in any significant way, UFO aficionados and media trumped by Hynek’s superficial explanation.

The same thing happened at Socorro, Ray Stanford’s shallow take notwithstanding and with the Betty/Barney Hill scenario: no one really checked her marred dress or the markings on the Hills car….I mean really checked.

 The Gorman interaction with a foolish acting UFO was never really studied just as the iconic Arnold “flying saucer” sighting wasn’t. (No one checked what he had eaten or drank before his flight over the Cascades, or what medicines, if any, he may have taken.

And was his plane checked for emissions in the cockpit? No.)

I could go on but you get the gist.

Even the touted skeptical reviews of such sightings, with photos, as the Trent/McMinnville has never gotten a real look, despite the jumble of material by Bruce Maccabee or Bob Sheaffer. (Neither contacted farmer Trent’s son or daughters to see what they could impart.)

While a lot of copy is often engorged about noted sightings (the Phoenix lights or O’Hare, for instance), nothing is done from an on-site check or with equipment to check veracity of witnesses or the surrounding environments at the time of the alleged events.

Most UFO investigators use the internet to gather what they use as material for their voluble but only knee-deep musings.

On-site investigation is often grab-and-run, as the Stanford Socorro take on the Zamora sighting, or the “swamp gas” imbroglio.

(The Roswell slides fiasco is a case study of how not to do UFO investigations, but that affair is not atypical. It is tantamount to how all UFO investigations have been done over the years and even now, when one can do so much more with the technologies available.)

Drilling down is not what ufologists do.

Creating massive amounts of hoary detritus is what the whole UFO literature is made of.

No wonder skeptics have cachet.

RR