À la recherche du temps perdu (and UFOs)

With apologies to Marcel Proust, let me indulge in an observation or two….

At my Facebook Media page, where I cope with local news media staffers and radio personalities, I found a raft of camera photos taken by many of them at a KISS concert Friday [8/12].

TV newsies and radio deejays, plus a few newspaper journalists gathered for the concert, many dragging their children along.

Why do they do this, aside from enjoying the heavy metal music?

They are trying to re-live a time when they were younger – most are now 40 to 50 years old.

They hope to recapture a time that is lost to them but was, apparently a happier time or a memorable time.

This is also the modus for most UFO buffs; they try to re-capture the allure and excitement of that time when flying saucers or UFOs invigorated their imagination and curiosity.

For old-timers [me, CDA, Kevin Randle, Stanton Friedman, et al.], the thrill that the phenomenon brought (as possible evidence of extraterrestrials) continues to enrapture us.

While most of us have abandoned the idea that UFOs are ET vehicles, we still yearn for that heady period when the possibility was rife.

We stick with the topic, often resorting to obsessive recall of those early sightings or events that sparked something transforming or transcendent in us: Ken Arnold’s vision, Roswell, Adamski’s Venusian, the Washington D.C. “invasion,” the Trent photos, the Hills episode, Socorro, et cetera.

We can’t get the thrill of those tales out of our heads, just as the local newsies here can’t get the long-lost thrill of KISS performances out of their heads and memory banks.

But it’s really time to move on, to forget the ET patina of UFOs, and hunker down to see what created the phenomenon and why it continues to fascinate, even showing up still, mysteriously and unaccountably, with no resolution in sight.

We can’t recapture our youth, with music or a re-iteration of classic flying saucer stories.

We may hope to do so, but as Proust’s masterpiece tells us, that time is lost, those remembrances are interred..

They only reside in the backwash of our lives.

RR