A Pastiche of UFO Piffle

Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.

I read an account in Albert Rosales’ Humanoid Encounters: The Others Amongst Us 1930-1949 [Page 287] that gave me a smile:

A guy named “Harry [in Australia, 1946] reported a six-foot tall being in a silvery astronaut-like suit walked in the front door and came into his bedroom … [placing] his hand on Harry’s head and ruffled his hair.”

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The September 3, 2018 New Yorker has a piece (Page 64 ff.) by Louis Menard about author and historiographer Francis Fukuyama and his new book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment [Farrar, Straus & Giroux].

The article is fascinating, as most Menand pieces are, and offers material that explains, I believe, why we see commentary at blogs, other than this one, that showcase sycophantism, nuttiness, and irrelevant, often verbose digressions.

(My readers don’t fall into the category I’m going to outline here, as my visitors are sporadic and unconnected, not like those who attend Kevin Randle’s blog, or Eric Wargo’s or my pal Bryan Sentes’ blog where comments are participatory.)

The commentators at the blogs noted and others offer comments because of a need for recognition, as Fukuyama defines it, using the Greek word thymos, from Plato’s Republic.

That is, those leaving comments at Kevin’s blog, for instance, seek recognition in that venue as Kevin has ufological cachet – Kevin, a respected and credible researcher and author – and those getting comments read by or acknowledged by Kevin are raised to the level where they get some Aretha Franklin “respect.”

Kevin’s commenters, sad to say, are often just goofy and distracted by minutiae that has little to do with the subject matter that Kevin presents.

Those who offer comments at Eric Wargo’s blog or Bryan Sentes’ blog get respect because they are capable of intellectual discernment and understanding of the erudite subject matter(s) that both polymaths provide.

I’ll doubleback to the review later, as it offers insights that visitors here need to read.

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In that same New Yorker issue, Anthony Lane, in a review of the movie Andrei Rublev, notes (on Page 73) that the admirers of the director/film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky “verge on the worshipful, with good cause, and [are] deluged by his movies – this one in particular – [because they are] initiated into sacred mysteries for which no rational explanation will suffice.”

This goes to my argument that “normal” people don’t need LSD, sacred mushrooms, mescaline, or marijuana to enter into the realm of mystery and the real reality that Plato (and others) sought or referred to in their writings.

One can enter the mystical realm of existence (even the ultimate reality) by way of great art: music, painting, literature, architecture, nature’s renderings, and other cultural artifacts.

No outside ingesting of unnatural or bizarre natural elements are necessary to be transformed or exalted. The refinements of humankind will take one to the lofty realms that poets often provide and certainly the creators of artistic (cultured) enterprises have given us and continue to do.

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Finally, the idea that UFOs do not exist is a mistaken bromide that hideously tries to subvert the linguistic reality of the sobriquet UFO which, all by itself, creates the reality without need of the “phenomenon” itself.

RR 

Duplicity or madness: The Socorro Revival

Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.

Kevin Randle’s observation and posting, at his blog about a symbol he saw in a Treasure Quest TV show he watches has brought forward more controversy and nuttiness from those promoting or favoring their “choice” for the insignia or symbol allegedly seen by Police Officer Lonnie Zamora in 1964 on an egg-shaped craft in the desert just outside Socorro.

Go to Kevin’s blog [kevinrandle.blogspot.com] for the colloquy.

Here are the two symbols being pressed upon those still interested in the Socorro sighting:

UFO gadfly Ray Stanford, who dalliances with UFOs have been iffy, once offered that the inverted V with three lines through it (above) was the actual symbol sighted by Officer Zamora.

But Lonnie Zamora signed a drawing affirming that the symbol he saw was the arc over an arrow insignia (above):

Now, why would Officer Zamora, a member of the Socorro police force, sign a paper that was supposedly created as a ruse (a fraud) to throw off possible hoaxers, as Stanford and others have suggested.

Officer Zamora, a stable, professional officer of the law, would not be inclined to commit a fraud, no matter how pressed he was by Air Force officials, don’t you think?

You can read about the whole symbol saga in Kevin’s book Encounter in the Desert: The Case for Alien Contact at Socorro.

Kevin’s book offers the clearest outline of how the symbol controversy played out, and how Ray Stanford’s messy intrusion in the Socorro incident has made a straight-forward observation of something strange into a mish-mash of bias and bad reportage, as is usual with UFO sightings.

RR