David Clarke's unsettling new UFO book: a review from TLS
The Times Literary Supplement for August 14, 2015 offered a
review of our British friend David Clarke’s latest book How UFOs Conquered
the World: The history of a modern myth.
[Aurum, 320 pp. $28.99].
The reviewer, Jonathan Barnes gives a nod – it’s in the In
Brief section of the supplement – to David’s loss of fascination with UFOs
as a product of alien/ET visitation.
David, of course, takes the stance that is reflected by
skeptics (CDA, Lance Moody, Gilles Fernandez, and Zoam Chomsky) who visit this
page now again: UFOs are optical illusions, misperceptions of aircraft or
obtuse weather phenomena and Venus, stray balloons, Chinese lanterns, et
cetera.
Reviewer Barnes end his short pastiche with David’s view of
the UFO story: “Human beings”, [David] writes, rather wistfully and with the
air of one who has learnt the truth the hard way, “cannot live without myths.”
David Clarke is an example of an erudite man. But he’s
wrong.
Even though UFOs may not be ET-oriented, they are exotic and
real, apart from the many “explanations” he proffers.
I’ve seen a few of these strange things and interviewed
sensible people who have experienced them also, some close up.
They may not be extraterrestrial craft but they are
something more than the belabored list that David offers (and that some of the
skeptics offer).
David, like our Brit buddy, Christopher Allan [CDA], is
cynical or disappointed that UFOs (and flying saucers) have turned out not to
seem ET-related.
But some of us who came to the sightings in our youth,
despite growing up not believing any longer that the ubiquitous things flying
around our skies for lots of years, even millennia, are alien spaceships, still think UFOs are
something that may have created a myth but yet have the core of a reality, from
which myth must derive.
RR
posted by RRRGroup at
Saturday, August 29, 2015
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