UFOs and beauty (or non-beauty, as the case may be)

Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.

Beauty is often said to be a subjective matter, changing with the times, and driven by the aesthetics of such personages as Aristotle and other philosophers or painters of an era whose depictions set the standards for their societies, such as Rubens.

Rubens’ models were plump, buxom women, as seen above, and his paintings created a feminine meme that was vibrant from the Baroque period [the early 17th century] to the 1920s when svelte women became the vogue.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zt6jq6f

Rubens provided an example of feminine beauty, while Michelangelo’s statue of David [1501-1504] established the archetypical example of male beauty which remains intact to this day.

Aristotle [384-322 B.C.], who was surely aware of the Greek statues (of men mostly), wrote:

“The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness ” and claimed that science proved this wherever you looked. He found great beauty in 'the golden ratio' which is a mathematical formula found all over nature, such as the growing of shells and the human body.” [Italics mine]

And if you go to YouTube and search “flash mobs,” you’ll see examples of millennial beauty today.

Marshall McLuhan’s famous mantra is described on the internet, thusly:

"The medium is the message" is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in any message it would transmit or convey, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan

This, plus my minor dissertation on beauty, is the point I’m driving at with this posting.

In ufology and the UFO community is housed and  gone public an awful horde of persons – “McLuhan’s media” (not the written material but the people transmitting material); persons who lack beauty, physical, oral, psychological, and in every other way, elements of presentation that evoke Aristotelian beauty.

That is, persons speaking for ufology or on behalf of UFOs are not, across the board, beautiful; most are quite homely, ugly even.

In the cultural arts and news media, good looks and charming presentation are a must for success.

A movie, TV show or news report, even a showing at an art gallery would be remiss and without cultural validity if the persons showcasing the presentation were as deficient in attractiveness as the clot of UFO persons speaking for the phenomenon have been and are.

This has been one of the problems with ufology since its initial appearance. Persons witnessing and those touting the mysterious phenomenon have been offputting, because of their flawed, unattractive facades or personalities and non-cultural, unscientific demeanors.

Not only do people in the lower economic levels of society witness UFOs and talk about them but the persons investigating and promoting that witnessing or the phenomenon are a medium (media) that the public is not attracted to.

(And Tom DeLonge is little help.)

I won’t further name some of the ugly people who frequent my sojourns into the UFO news of the day. You know who they are, and think you are not one of them. However…

RR