UFO Friends

I have and had some great friends in the Montaignian sense, even in the UFO community, believe it or not.

I’ve also lost a few along the way: Leon Davidson, Lucius Farish, Richard Hall (who helped me, greatly, during a stressful time with some UFO Updaters), and Bruce Duensing (may he rest in peace).

Today, I count as friends: Nick Redfern (a real pal), Kevin Randle (a true buddy), Jose Antonio Caravaca (Spain, a colleague), Gilles Fernandez (France, an erudite skeptic), the Anomalist founder Patrick Huyghe (luv that guy) and his listing staffer(s) William Murphy (who notes my postings and makes correctives when needed, which if often) and sometimes Chris Savia (who’s a little hesitant to note my ramblings here), Martin Kottmeyer (who often provides substantive materials that elucidate), Christopher Allan (CDA, when he’s operative), Zoam Chomsky (The Iron Skeptic, Aaron Sakulich, even though he’s a little nuts) and that’s about it.

Friends are a must, for living, as Montaigne’s eloquent essay On Friendship tells us.

And in the UFO world where “trolls” and haters (as the internet cites them) abound, one needs the support and encouragement of real friends to keep plugging away at a thankless enterprise.

Fortunately, I have some support, which keeps me going here.

I hope you have something similar.

RR

What is Real and What is Not? (There is no Non-Reality)

Copyright 2017, InterAmerica, Inc.

When a person experiences something, no matter what that “something” is, a reality is established.

As some of you regular readers know, I think that even the so-called hallucinations of schizophrenics represent a reality, maybe not the reality non-schizophrenics experience but possibly the real reality, or aspects of that real reality, which is hidden from us as Plato intuited.

That philosophical conundrum aside, anything which is perceived becomes a reality, in its own right. Illusion is real. Everything is real.

A person who witnesses something strange in the sky, let’s call it a UFO (despite a possible screed from Zoam Chomsky), is seeing something real, since he or she has perceived it.

The tangibility of the thing seen may be disputed, but the observation itself creates an observational reality, no matter how ephemeral that observation is.

Poetry spoken to a group, and not written down, may disappear into the night air, but the reality of the poetry was established, no matter how evanescent it was, much like the open-air dramas of the Athenian Greeks, Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, et al.

That some of those open-air dramas (and comedies) were written down, concretizing their reality, much as UFO reports (sorry Zoam) concretize flying saucer sightings, even if those sightings are hallucinatory or neurologically induced, makes them truly real.

Even the so-called appearances of the Virgin Mary, at Fatima, Lourdes, and other sites, or the voices of Jeanne D’Arc have an established “reality” because they exist, at least in the human zeitgeist, in fact, temporal, since we can discuss them.

The appearance of God in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) or the angels in the Qur’an become real by their notations in those holy books.

Now, one can discuss the nature of reality, as acknowledged above, but that’s the nature of reality, not reality itself.

One could go far afield with the topic of reality but, for me, ghosts, Big Foot, the Loch Ness monster all have a reality, maybe not a reality that enthuses me to deal with them at this blog, but a true reality, in the sine qua non of human existence.

I’m trying to cope with an explanation of UFOs here, not the reality of them, which is, for me, an established actuality.

Skeptics, deal with it….

(Image above from consciouslifenews.com)

RR

Why there are no ETs like us, anywhere....

My contention, which is hardly unique, is that extraterrestrial life -- advanced species on other worlds -- would never evolve as humans have: Darwinian evolution and all of Earth's technologies and creative endeavors derive from that evolution which is specific to Earth and only Earth.

Read these comments from physicist Paul Davies on the matter. Click HERE

This my take-away from the article:

"The essence of Darwinism is that nature is blind and evolution is directionless. There is no known principle that compels life to evolve toward intelligence once it gets started. But belief in alien civilisations tacitly assumes a thrust towards intelligence, a hidden directionality in evolution, which is sharply at odds with the whole spirit of Darwinism."

RR

A PDF Book you might like

You can download this 458 page book, UFO Phenomena and the Behavioral Scientist edited by Richard F. Haines [Scarecrow Press, NJ and London, 1979] from these links:

Click NICAP

Click NARCAP

Click NAVY

This comes from the book's Prologue:

" ... UFO reports themselves are generally [not] to be explained in terms of purely psychological causes such as afterimages, perceptual illusions, hallucinations, delusions, or attempts to gain notoriety -- though we must be vigilant for all of these possibilities. There just are too many cases in which correspondences between independent (and sometimes scientifically trained) visual observers and between these and simultaneous radar detections, both in the air and on the ground, point to an objective cause (e. g.  Hynek 1972; McDonald 1972; Thayer 1971)"

The various essays in the book, by notable (generally) ufologists, are interesting, even though the essay by R. Leo Sprinkle of the October 1974 Carl Higdon tale seems a little excessive to me. (The "incident" is interesting for a number of reasons and I've dealt with it at this blog in the past, but it is isn't a bedrock case that adds a lot of valuable information to UFO lore, but you decide.)

RR