Paul Dean offers a NICAP report of a 1963 UFO event

RR/PD

A 1962 UFO Encounter from Flying Saucer Review (via Paul Dean)

RR/PD

Shirking (real) Reality for the UFO Reality?

Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.

Setting aside my pal, Zoam Chomsky’s dictum that UFOs do not exist; i.e., UFOs are an ephemeral state of human folly, let me conjure with the problem of dealing with the UFO phenomenon, sensibly and academically…

We who are suffused with the topic UFOs keep coming at the matter from the top down; that is, we do not underpin UFOs with a few basic considerations that have to be ironed out in order to attack UFOs intellectually.

For instance, we UFO buffs (ufologists, if you will) have to establish the premises upon which we stand in order to discuss UFOs rationally.

This means that we have to take philosophically oriented stances by asking such questions as “What is reality?” and “What is consciousness?”

We keep coming at UFOs as if they are real – something that irks Zoam and others like skeptics Lance Moody or Robert Sheaffer.

But we have to determine what reality is first and before that if we are conscious and aware of any reality.

Those are consuming considerations, and in order to track the UFO reality, I think we have to assume we are conscious and experiencing a reality, even if that reality is unique to the person experiencing it.

Can we ever know what the real reality is, the reality that transfixed those in Plato’s cave thinking that the shadows there were reality when, in fact, reality lay outside the cave.

Philosophical conjectures intrigue me but, like the mathematical equations of science (especially those in physics), they take us far afield from the everyday drudge of life.

Most of us don’t have time for things outside our drudge, so we have to pick or choose that which engages our seeming conscious thought.

UFOs are one of many topics that some of us devote time to. And keeping UFOs confined to its simpler aspects – without intrusional questions as to their reality or if we are truly conscious of them – should allow us to determine what UFOs are or may be, even if what they are or may be has nothing to do with real reality or anyone else’s reality.

My academic buddy Bryan Sentes may try to inflate this UFO aside of mine to make a case for philosophical importance and truth but, by so doing, he’d merely take me, and a few of you, to a mental conflagration that torments like one of the lower hells of Dante’s Inferno.

UFOs are a messy enough enigma to keep me posing with it.

Consciousness and reality have to wait for another time, maybe a time when, for all practical purposes, consciousness is stilled in this life and the other reality takes possession of us.

RR