Non-pertinent information that impacts ufology, indirectly

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I get regular notices of new books, offered for review or purchase and the latest from Harvard had two that contained blurbs that I found enticing, not for review, just generally….

The Great Rift by Michael E. Hobart was primed by this, “Hobart offers a new twist on a huge old metanarrative: the death of God. Something or other happened in Renaissance Europe [that] distanced science from religion.”

It’s the “Something or other happened…” that I find interesting.

Applying those words to the UFO problem, what “something or other” has ever happened in UFO’s longish run at the headlines or media that has raised the hackles of science, journalism, or the public?

That is, what UFO event or events went on, after the initial blush of excitement, to create a tsunami of scientific or public scrutiny or interest?

Not the Ken Arnold sightings, Roswell neither, nor the Washington D.C. incursions, or the Betty and Barney Hill “abduction, and not Socorro or the Phoenix lights, nor the O’Hare airport thing…..no, none rose to the “something or other happened” that changed things.

Only UFO “nuts” remain fixated on those events/sightings or UFOs generally and the word “nuts” leads me to the second book blurb that I found interesting. It was about Charles Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity:

“A vigorous and entirely successful criticism of two intertwined bad ideas: that you are wonderful just because you are you, and that ‘respect for difference’ requires you to respect every human being, and every human culture -- no matter how vicious or stupid.”

Mr. Taylor’s view(s) support my tendency to rankle the likes of UFO buffs/writers whom we all put up with and who irritate because they are self-aggrandizing or just plain stupid.

(I’m self-aggrandizing surely and this irks a lot of UFO people but I just claim they are stupid so that’s that.)

One tries to be authentic, but to be so will bring down Hades on your head, unless you are part of the subversive clique that wants to control the UFO agenda, and I’ve named them here often.

Anyway, the books cited will not be reviewed here (but elsewhere). I just wanted to vent.

RR