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UFOs: À la recherche du temps perdu

Copyright 2017, InterAmerica, Inc.

À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier rendered as Remembrance of Things Past) by Marcel Proust pertains to UFOs and ufology. And here’s how…

My son Josh, the neuroscientist, had a soiree in Ann Arbor Saturday night, for his U of M compatriots, to which I was invited.

I didn’t make an attempt to sneak in a few words about UFOs, during the discussion(s) about mental quirks and some quantum theory, the company composed of psychologists, astrophysicists, neurologists, and a few sports people.

My comments were tied to a remembrance of past notables in music, the arts, the movies, popular culture, and politics.

I made my starting point 1940.

Everyone knew about Adolf Hitler, to some extent anyway. But no one knew much about Franklin Roosevelt, or Eisenhower (except as a WWII general), and very little about Richard Nixon and nothing at all about Nixon’s cronies.

I worked my way into the 1960s, asking first about some early music icons: The Ink Spots, Bill Halley and the Comets, Elvis (that many knew about), and the Beatles (also sort of known).

Now these friends of my son are all millennials, so there’s that.

As for movie stars or radio biggies, very little known, except for a few comments about Swedish director Ingmar Berman and his film The Seventh Seal.

Jack Benny, The Shadow, and Orson Welles not known particularly, although Citizen Kane was acknowledged, but not “Rosebud” or anything substantive about Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast.

I threw out names and significant events from the WWII period that almost everyone knew a snippet or two about, but not to any great extent, and these are Ph.D. people mostly.

A few pitiful comments by me about quantum mechanics were treated politely (as I am Josh’s father, after all) but comments by others went a little too deep for my understanding, mostly dealing with new approaches in quantum theory and applicable methods, for computing and space travel.

Even the noted forerunners of quantum mechanics – Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Schrödinger, et al. – were absent in the discussions, just the new wave(s) in quantum physics.

My point?

We, who are UFO buffs – not the younger set but the geezer set and mid-lifers – know everything about UFO events beginning in 1947, everything.

We know the ins and outs and all the machinations, twists and turns, of every UFO sighting and story extant.

Millennials don’t give a fig about UFOs. It’s a determinate termination in conversational settings and social get-togethers.

I didn’t broach the topic Saturday night as the group was a mix of sophisticated types, with only a few Einstein Fellowship people in attendance, all hoping, I’m sure, that I wouldn’t bring up UFOs. I didn’t.

But UFO enthusiasts have a remembrance of things past, even if that past is as elusive to younger people, who care nothing or little about the topic, or anything else that is “past,”

So, like Proust, we ufological types, dote on the past, and try to make it relevant to the present, as Proust’s monumental work attempted to do (and does, in many ways).

That’s something, yes?

RR