The 1967 Michalak/Falcon Lake UFO incident (from Google Alerts)

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/falcon-lake-incident-book-anniversary-1.4121639

(Zoam Chomsky dismisses this sighting but, as the newspaper article indicates, it's a good one.)

RR

Ufology = Escapism

Copyright 2017, InterAmerica, Inc.

Because of my psychological background and training, I can’t help being attuned to quirks in the UFO community, not just UFO witnesses but ufologists (UFO buffs, investigators, and wannabes).

And I’m nonplussed by the blatant, over-ripe examples of escapism on the part of ufological practitioners.

“Escapism. In psychoanalytic therapy, this term denotes the tendency to escape from reality functioning to the relative security of childhood, a tendency often manifested by an accentuation of neurotic symptoms. It is a form of resistance.” [Psychiatric Dictionary, Fourth Edition, Hinsie/Campbell, Oxford University Press]

(The neurotic state also applies to physicists, especially those involved with cosmology as I’ve noted in passages here, previously, about the childhood demeanor of such scientists when they’re discussing their work and findings or celebrating a successful result such as a Mars Rover landing.)

In the UFO world, escapism is highlighted by the dominant desire to see UFOs as a contingent of extraterrestrial visitors, coming to save the human race from itself or to aid our species with “extraterrestrial knowledge” and “aid.”

I won’t name names, but in the tangential fringe lore online, one can see a grasping desire by those who suffer economic plight or physical deformity or just plain homeliness. (Ray Palmer was an example of the deformity group, while a few “pals” of mine suffer personal homeliness or economic debilitations of life’s exigencies.

There are few UFO enthusiasts who are endowed with beauty or riches, so one might conclude, and I do, that these aficionados seek the solace and comfort of the UFO ET meme.

They escape into a delusional, fantasy world, based in their childhood dreams, of otherworldly existences, exacerbated by their failure in adulthood to achieve dominance in looks or economic wherewithal.

UFOs offer a cover for their perceived shortcomings, and they milk the idea of “ETism” to assuage their “failures” in life.

(Look at the demeanor of UFO people – their physiognomy, their financial status, their success, or lack of it, their slovenly dress, and their cultural interests or lack of such.)

Ufology is a lousy, deprecated fixture of the social milieu, and the people involved in it are a species representing the welter of persons whom psychiatry use to treat but now, generally, ignore, as does the rest of human society.

Image above from:

https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/escapism-the-double-edged-sword-at-everyones-throat-6c25e7055a6b

RR