The Meaninglessness of UFOs today

Copyright 2019, InterAmerica, Inc.

Do UFOs matter? Did they ever?

In the early days of flying saucers [1947-1950s] people were inundated with reports of sightings almost every day.

The general consensus of those thinking about them was either the things were a new kind of meteorological phenomenon, an aircraft prototype of the United States or Soviet Russia, or visitors from outer space, people from another planet flying here, non-stop to see what's going on.

“Zoam Chomsky” insists, seriously, that UFOs have never been and never were, even during the height of their apparent reality. And UFO skeptics have tried to make the phenomenon a scientific slattern from the beginning

Harvard’s Donald Menzel wrote that flying saucers were meteorology of some kind and Philip Klass gerrymandered for the Zoam Chomsky position: flying saucers did not exist.

Pilots were chasing chimera and people were seeing things.

Today, we have no vibrant promoter of UFOs, as was the situation early on in the phenomenon’s appearance, when Ray Palmer, Donald Keyhoe and UFO enthusiasts like Stanton Friedman and Aimé Michel made headlines with their zeal about the enigmatic appearance of odd things spotted in the skies by people all over the world

Nick Redfern did a piece for Mysterious Universe referring to Jacque Vallee’s Messengers of Deception and John Keel’s UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse and lauding Mac Tonnies posthumous book Cryptoterrestrials.

https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/02/ufos-looking-beyond-the-extraterrestrial-theory/

Vallee’s book is a must read as is John Keel’s work, which appeared when he was still compos mentis.

Mac Tonnies work is a speculation that is rare nowadays.

Such works as those touted by Nick are nowhere to be found today. Sure there are opinionated ruminations all over the place but they are usually pathetic thoughts, produced by non-polymathic authors, who are just overheated UFO wannabes offering their insipid thinking for the residue of UFO oriented chumps still willing to grab a book or two for their paltry collections.

Not only is the UFO phenomenon out of favor with the public and news media, it has become grist for banal science fiction such as the History Channel’s sordid series Project Blue Book.

What appeared to promise insight to existence turned into, almost immediately, a joke and is now fully a product of laughter or avoidance for people who have a taste of intellectual refinement or class.

Skeptics have pretty much won the day.

Recent effort(s) to make UFOs into a topic equivalent to a significant cultural stratum is not only ludicrous. It is an intellectual madness or folly, one like that delineated by Foucault in his books on social maladies we’ve come to call insanity.

The mortem fictem, which is what UFOs have become, is now a rarefied element of social philosophy in some quarters, (See the recent MJ Banias and Bryan Sentes discussion on MJ’s YouTube “station.”)

UFOs are no longer an odd meteorological possibility, nor does any sane person think that the phenomenon is only (or was only) a vaporous imagining affecting radar scopes, (some) video and film, and the eyesight and minds of human beings.

A residue of the lower mental classes still thinks that UFOs are ET craft despite all the scientifically proposed barriers against such delusional thinking.

(The idea of space visitors is exacerbated by films, TV, and books and now social media where the mentally deficient accumulate to infect others with their fantasies and silliness achieving much success in the process.)

Although I think that flying saucers and their offspring, UFOs, had some kind of meaning in the early period of their appearances, the “phenomenon” is now just a shadow of its former self, a pastiche of made-up stories and ill-reported accounts of something seen or interacted with that has become “swamp gas” just as J Allen Hynek suggested in 1966.

RR