Who will be remembered in Ufology?

Copyright 2017, InterAmerica, Inc.

I have a blog based upon a premise in the Sci-Fi novel A Canticle for Leibowitz: what should be saved for posterity if civilization(s) end?

Media friends of mine have been asked to offer that which lies just below the rubric “famous” that should be noted and saved (extolled even), which got me to thinking who in the UFO community (ufology) will be remembered as time goes by.

(Not the sightings but the people who inhabit ufology or once inhabited it.)

Persons attached to iconic flying saucer or UFO events and sightings will be recalled and remembered when their UFO episode is brought forward by those, in the future, who look back at UFO lore, should anyone still find UFOs relevant a few years from now.

But from today’s perspective, who seems likely to be remembered as a major element in the UFO mythos?

Of course, early adopters of the phenomenon, such as Donald Keyhoe and John Keel, will show up in a perusal of the UFO oeuvre (and you know the names of others of their ilk who are tied to the phenomenon because of their efforts on behalf and about the phenomenon).

And I'm not addressing the obviously famous: Hynek, Ruppelt, Vallee, et al., just those who aren't in the well-known category, but strut there way around the UFO landscape as if they are.

So, in the UFO community today, who stands out and seems likely to be a part of the UFO history when it is written by an historian of the future?

Persons I know, who have enough cachet to show up in a UFO historical record, include Stanton Friedman (because of his entrenchment in the literature), Kevin Randle (because of his work on Roswell and his plethora of UFO books and articles), Nick Redfern also, (because of his vast journalistic paranormal output). These fellows won’t be famous but they will be remembered by astute UFO aficionados.

Will Ray Stanford be remembered? As a footnote, because of his silly-named book about the 1964 Socorro incident.

What about Gene Steinberg and his Paracast show? Not so much. Gene has been around for a long time but The Paracast show is not (and has never been) a fount for the UFO phenomenon, engaging peripheral UFO entities to highlight. (And Gene killed any legacy he was trying to muster with his need to panhandle survival monies for a few years now, drowning what little cachet he had or thought he had).

Errol Bruce-Knapp, once a UFO celebrity because of his UFO Update thing, has already been forgotten except by those who were integral to his circle.

What about Jerome Clark? He has a few books that will stand forth on UFO bookshelves but as a UFO notable, he won’t register, even now little known by UFO newbies.

What about persons that most of you don’t know, even now, or care about? Greg Bishop, Jeff Ritzmann, Jeremy Vaeni, Tyler Kokjohn – all at the outer limit of ufology.

Most of you have already forgotten Bruce Duensing.

Whitley Strieber is a future no-show, his output placed in the “remainder bin” of book-shops.

What about Isaac Koi or my pals at The Anomalist? Few will remember them as they are little known even now, much as the reporters at People magazine are subsumed by the celebrities they write about.

Then there are such good writers as Micah Hanks. Micah? Many will ask years from now.

Or Red Pill Junkie? Who?

What about my pal Paul Kimball? He won’t be remembered for his UFO work but will be known for his political aspirations and films.

Jose Caravaca will be alluded to by his Spanish amigos, and French skeptic Gilles Fernandez, likewise, by his French colleagues, but no one else.

The Brits, David Clarke, Andy Roberts, Joe McGonagle, already unknown outside the Empire.

The skeptics, Robert Shaeffer and Tim Printy, are skittles in the great skeptical lexicon, removed from note by such scalawags as Phil Klass.

There are other names, at the rim of ufology, but so despicable that I am loath even to note them as losers.

What about me? I’m not even a footnote to a footnote, sad as that is personally.

And what about you?

RR

From Nick Redfern

The Kindle edition of my new book on the Roswell crash is available on Amazon, as of today [5/2], and the paperback should be up at Amazon some time tomorrow.

This is the sequel to my 2005 book on Roswell, "Body Snatchers in the Desert."

The title of the new book, "The Roswell UFO Conspiracy: Exposing a Shocking and Sinister Secret."

Click HERE

Humanoid Encounters reported, but not to psychiatrists

Copyright 2017, InterAmerica, Inc.

I have mentioned here, several times, Albert Rosales’ book series, Human Encounters: The Others Among Us [Triangulum publishing].

His 2016 book, providing accounts of said encounters, for the period 1900-1929 is particularly interesting, the stories inside fantastic, to say the least.

Reported encounters include many with strange women (dressed in black or white) seen floating or appearing near witnesses, a number of “wild man” encounters, and many air-ship observations, one, with Martian visitors, stumbled upon by a man (T.T. Timayenis) near Athens, Greece in 1905, derived from a 1910 Indianapolis Star story. [op. cit. Pages 48-49]

It seems that Mr. Timayenis saw two young men looking through a glass, purportedly displaying the cities and inhabitants of the planet Mars, with whom the two men were communicating via their hands and voices. T.T.T., watching, stated that the women and girls seen were “of surpassing beauty, tall and stately, with forms ‘which still haunt his dreams’"

“He also saw birds of beautiful plumage, flitting about and alighting the shoulders of maidens.”

The two men stopped gazing through their “glass” at Mars and the planet then shown in its spot in the night sky.

T.T.T. approached the two men who asked him in “excellent Greek if he could spare a light.”

T.T.T. gave them matches and cigars, and they gave him a cigar they said came from Cuba.

Then the men said they came from Mars and told him of the planet’s continuing “strife between groups” one of their enemies being “Pelasgians” who “were eventually defeated” with their survivors fleeing in airships, ending up on Earth “in the land known today as Albania” from which they became “the first settlers of Greece.”

“They then added that that the civilization on Earth was (in 1905) 100,000 years behind the Martian civilization” and “that there had not been a war on Mars for over 200,000 years” and that inhabitants “had … discovered the secret of immortality.” [ibid, Page 49]

According to the two Martians, electricity was “the secret of perpetual life.”

They told T.T.T. that the Greek “philosophers Socrates and Demosthenes were not dead but were currently alive and well in [sic] Mars.” [ibid]

The two men, named Telemachus and Phidias, then “jumped into the water, which was no less that 60 ft. deep” and wearing “long protruding skates of bright yellow metal, strapped with stout wire” they glided upon the water bringing T.T.T with them to “a  magnificent floating airship [where] they dined.” [ibid]

T.T.T. was informed that [the two Martians] were on a mission to meet Edison “in relation to a recent invention, which could prove fatal to humanity.”

T.T.T. “was brought back to shore and bade farewell to the Martians.” [Page 49]

You can guess what I believe about this imaginative and strange story.

It’s one of many, many more in the Rosales series.

What I find odd, is that such tales abound in newspapers, other accounts, and UFO lore but there is not one like story in the psychiatric literature, in the period noted here, the 1900s or earlier, and certainly only appearing in psychological papers when the UFO abduction scenarios became popular (common) in the modern era.

What causes such tales to spring forth, insanity (psychosis) or temporary, creative dementia praecox?

Or did something happen, in the case of T.T. Timayenis that provoked a scene that for him was real but in real reality was nowhere actual as reported by him.

Since there are countless stories in Mr. Rosales' books similar in telling, with different “humanoids” and circumstances, mostly differing in fantastic detail, one has to come up with a cause.

British UFO buff, Dr. David Clarke, who is an expert in folklore, would attribute such accounts to the fairy tale milieu I think.

And noted psychologist Bruno Bettelheim in his The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales “argues convincingly that fairy tales provide a unique way for children to come to terms with the dilemmas of their inner lives.” [From The Atlantic as stated at Amazon where his book may be bought].

But T.T.T. was an adult and many of the reports in the Rosales’ series are from adults, although there is a raft of children encounters that I find credible, believing children to be basically truthful when recounting bizarre experiences, accepting the caveat(s) of Dr. Bettelheim of course.

So, do such stories, as related by adults, indicate a regression to (a troubled) childhood?

Perhaps, but there may also be an external cause for such “encounters” – a cause yet to be confirmed although there are the hypotheses of Jacques Vallee with his control agency and Jose Caravaca with his “external agent.”

For me, there is an evolution to such tales, starting in the Middle Ages, when elves, sprites, and other weird entities flooded the minds of the populum pauperem coming to a head (literally) in the UFO era (and before as the 1905 “encounter” above indicates).

It’s a kind of madness, one that isn’t debilitating as schizophrenia but in that mental ball park, either a temporary neurological glitch or a psychological fluke that appears then seemingly disappears … something transitory and inherently harmless.

Whatever the stories are, they have pretty much evaporated. (No or few UFO encounters are currently running in the mainstream of ufology.)

Yet, as fictional artifacts, the tales prove entertaining; there is that.

RR