Keeping UFO discussions on track

One of the problems with the UFO community – and there are many – that is irritating in the extreme, is the wayward direction(s) that debate takes.

I only regularly visit a few web-sites and blogs (Kevin Randle’s. The Anomalist, Eric Wargo's TheNightshirt, and sometimes Mysterious Universe) and the one that gives me the most heartburn is my pal Kevin’s.

Kevin allows some of his visitors carte blanche to be discursive and/or ignorant. And he gives David Rudiak free rein to hog-tie readers to protracted sidebars that often have little to do with the topic at hand.

At this blog, I keep a tight rein on comments, as you know. Few avatar-identified commenters show up in the comment sections.

(I know that most UFO buffs are homely and have to hide photos of their real façade, but couldn’t they pick an avatar that has some class instead of the goofy-ass images they often adopt?)

In Kevin’s recent postings about the 1964 Socorro event, he has suffered side-tracks, mostly from Mr. Rudiak. That bear no, or little, relationship to the point(s) that Kevin is trying to make.

This is typical of many UFO aficionados. They have particular interest in a UFO case and some minute detail in it. (For me, it’s the symbol in the Socorro sighting, as you well know.)

When a UFO case, old or new, is proffered for discussion, those who have an obsession with some aspect of the case impale readers with their obsession, no matter how irrelevant it may be.

In the Socorro incident, Mr. Rudiak, for example, is locked in to the whereabouts of Officer Chavez, a fellow-cop with Lonnie Zamora.

Readers often tell me that the symbol is insignificant, in context of the whole Socorro episode, but I’ve never seen a distaste for Mr. Rudiak’s Chavez obsession, except from Mr. Randle.

Mr. Rudiak’s modus operandi has always been, especially in the Roswell incident, to lead readers away from the truly significant elements, taking them to minute aspects that can’t be pinned down or explored because they were so under-reported at the time, and even now have no value in pursuit of the Roswell truth(s).

Yet, Mr. Randle consoles Mr. Rudiak’s misplaced adventures, because Mr. Randle is a polite gentleman.

At other blogs and websites, the owners of them want to stuff their venue with anything so as to appear popular or to accrue web clicks and gather a few pennies from advertisers. Frank Warren’s site, The UFO Chronicles is like that, an observation I made a while back, losing his friendship for pointing that out.

There are dozen’s of distractions that take UFO buffs off course in their belabored pursuit of the UFO reality.

Again, here, at this blog, my “friend” Aaron Sakulich [aka Zoam Chomsky] likes to badgers commenters and me with his idea that UFOs do not exist, and never have, because there is no concrete evidence for their reality, only reports of them: nothing tangible has ever surfaced to show that UFOs exist. He uses the “Null Hypothesis” to bolster his erratic view.

When I was in college and absorbed by classes in Abnormal Psychology, we (the class) often were taken on field trips to Eloise Hospital (Wayne County General Hospital) to interact with and observe patients there who were “diagnosed” with schizophrenia or other debilitating mental aberrations.

The doctors at the hospital and our professor(s) never, as I recall, said such patients had a disease, a matter which Dr. Thomas Szasz has been livid about in many of his writings, and which I’ll be dealing with, in the UFO context upcoming.

The doctors treated schizophrenic patients as if the voices they heard and the visions they allegedly were persecuted by were a reality – for the patient. And I have always thought that such schizophrenic visions and voices had a “reality” that we “normal” folks were not privy to.

This is how UFOs should be seen: as a reality for those who have seen them, or those who think they are real, because “normal’ people have reported seeing them.

To debunk that reality, via the (goofy) Null Hypothesis, takes away the prospect of investigation of an odd perception of something that is rampant in the social milieu under the rubric UFO.

Getting side-tracked or off course when it comes to the UFO topic is understandable, as the followers of the phenomenon are often skewed toward ignorance and non-think, suffused in belief rather than a scientific, intellectual (intelligent) scrutiny of the things.

But those who exploit that ignorance with attempts at derogatory onslaughts or side-trips to meaningless detail merely exacerbate the confusing environment that has evolved about flying saucers/UFOs under the sobriquet of Ufology.

If Kevin Randle would clamp down on his wayward readers and hog-tie David Rudiak’s nonsense and Zoam Chomsky would understand that his Null Hypothesis is just silly, that would go a long way to cleansing the UFO topic of its current effluvia in our neck of the UFO community.

RR