UFOs: What are we looking for?

Copyright 2017, InterAmerica, Inc.

While scouring another older UFO magazine in my collection, I came across an article by Jerome Clark and my (now deceased) friend Lucius Farish about the wave of airship sightings in 1909.

The accounts were reminiscent of the 1896 Airship reports (that Clark and Farish also distilled in magazine articles).

This got me to thinking about what we UFO buffs are doing now and have done, or not done, in the past and recently with or about the UFO phenomenon.

The 1947 Roswell incident is, for all practical purposes, tapped out when it comes to information that isn’t a rehash of the cluttered material accumulated from 1978 to today.

The Socorro/Lonnie Zamora event of 1964 has been thrashed to the point of ennui.

The Betty/Barney Hill “abduction” is also flattened by the contradictory elements that have crept into the Hill’s tale since the story became overt in the mid-1960s.

You can name a number of other UFO accounts, from Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting to the array of unidentified lights that persons are reporting everyday lately, accounts that don’t matter.

In the golden age of flying saucers, the mysterious phenomenon engendered excitement because it was fraught with odd or quirky subsets that intrigued curious minds.

But today all we have is the flying saucer mythos, besotted with egregious accumulations of fancy more than fact, and a few weird lights flying overhead.

There is no there there, or here.

We UFO buffs have nothing to chew on, the old UFO bones gnawed to ossified remnants, offering nothing to sustain our once avid hunger.

Lights in the sky are of little interest to the real ufologist.

“Objects” with seeming tangibility or encounters with potential other-worldly beings or creatures are grist for enthusiasm but neither appear any longer.

So what are we to do, rehammer and hammer again the gristled remains of old UFO sightings, as a few followers of Kevin Randle’s blog are doing with the Chiles-Whitted “flying cigar” or misperceived bolide sighting of 1948?

Do we hope that an overhead light drops down for a closer look allowing its photographic capture with the technology of today?

Or do we produce a bona fide theory of what flying saucers were once and how they turned into the boring things called UFOs today?

I have no answer, obviously, and find that no one else does either.

We are all fritzing around with the topic, treading water, in an ocean of silliness and moronic colloquies with like-persons.

Something has to be done, something disruptive and transcendental, or final, thanatopic.

Image above from http://www.themysteryworld.com/

RR

Those old UFO magazines!

Copyright 2017, InterAmerica, Inc.

While some who visit here loathe those UFO magazines of a few decades ago, I often find nuggets of information I didn’t know.

For instance in True’s Flying Saucer and UFOs Quarterly Spring and Winter 1978 issues I found a few articles by NASA skeptic James Oberg, one a paean to encounters of the third kind (the movie and UFO encounters too) and another about robot space explorers.

Then there was a Wendelle Stevens piece, in the Winter 1978 issue, about the plethora of UFO sightings, one, in 1975, that mimicked the 1965 Kecksburg object:

The Oberg piece in the Spring 1978 issue told me that UFO skeptic Robert Sheaffer was a “colleague” of Phil Klass. (Now it all makes sense.)

Oberg also related the “problems” that Charles Hickson (of the Pascagoula abduction) had: fired from his job for extorting loans from subordinates and bankruptcy. Hickson also hedged, Oberg reported, on taking subsequent polygraph tests and was furious about other people making money off his [Hickson’s] UFO sighting.

Oberg provided some Betty/Barney Hill material that hasn’t been noted particularly by UFO buffs: that psychiatrist Benjamin Simon, who was instrumental in the Hill’s remembrance, by hypnosis, of their “ordeal, thought the “whole case [was] based on fear-induced fantasies in Betty Hill’s mind.”

Then there was a piece by N. Oserowsky, in the Winter 1978 issue about the alleged Lake Champlain “monster” that told of a 1953 encounter near Paris that involved green stocking capped dwarves, part of the 1950s wave of little beings seen all over Europe:

So, while those “lousy UFO magazines” are excoriated by haughty UFO aficionados, they often contain detritus that clarifies UFO stories and reports that have become iconic in the UFO canon.

RR