Dealing with UFO madness, even the foolish kind……

Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.

Michel Foucault, in Madness and Civilization [antea citatis], after a consideration of unreason and “insanity” in the Middle Ages, concludes that the representation of madness, as pictured by painter Hieronymus Bosch, was replaced by theatrical illusion as exemplified by Georges de Scudéry in his theater of theater: Comédie des Comédiens. [Page 34 ff.]

“The classical experience of madness [was] born. The great threat that dawned on the horizon of the fifteenth century subsides, the disturbing powers that inhabit Bosch’s paintings have lost their violence.” [Page 35]

“Madness had now ceased to be … an eschatological figure” [ibid]

That is, madness, as such, was turned into a kind of insanity that was of two kinds, hospitalization-required and benign.

This is where we are and have been in ufology.

Madness has operated sub rosa since 1947 (or so). Illusion and delusion have been submersed by the theatrical aspect of flying saucers and their adherents, noted particularly in the contactee movement with its followers. [See Nick Redfern’s book on the matter: Contactees.]

The contactee period was more silly (foolish) than seriously insane.

As flying saucers evolved into a phenomenon, commonly identified as UFOs, the foolishness of previous years turned into a sublimated movement pretending to be scientific, with that halo of foolishness still intact but repressed by configurations of seriousness. [See Friedman, Randle, and especially Vallee.]

Today there is a reactionary stance by skeptics, of which Sheaffer, Printy, Moody, and Sakulich (Zoam Chomsky) are the architects. (Philip Klass and others preceded them.)

The ufological skeptics are a little rabid, some of them. They are like the instigators against “madness” (real insanity) in the pre-hospital period noted by Foucault.

These skeptics have had enough. And I tend to empathize with them.

In the UFO commentary here (and elsewhere), one will find the fanatics and those who, in a more subdued frame, present crazy belief in the ETH, the idea that UFOs are vehicles manned by extraterrestrials from advanced civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy or universe, visiting Earth in gobs now and have been for some time.

The belief system that they embrace is as insane as the insanity that the metaphorical images found in Bosch’s painting, Ship of Fools depict.

ETH supporters, even those who pretend to an open mind and agnosticism about the ETH, are mad in the Foucaultian sense.

It is tiresome to keep being cudgeled by persons who think that UFOs show intelligent behavior and express, by the alleged movement, evidence of intelligence.

(One sees movement in dead, unliving objects, from which one could infer “intelligence” but that inference would be a moment of unreason, a state of madness, per Foucault and others qualified to note it as such, even our UFO community’s skeptics.)

And taking the word of “higher ups” in the military or government, from the heyday of flying saucers, that the things had to be extraterrestrial, is a sop to authority, one of the worse cases of illogic known to mankind, and having caused havoc throughout man’s history,

I understand that emotional, reactionary response(s) of my skeptical pals, and while it is often a bit livid, I’m not belabored to present those responses here.

It’s my way of dealing with UFO madness, also.

RR