Malcolm Robinson placed this on Facebook. (I grabbed it and asked his permission to post it here; I didn't get a yes or no)

Copyright (ownership) 2020, Malcolm Robinson

ALIEN ABDUCTION AND PHOTO FROM YORKSHIRE ENGLAND!

DECEMBER 1, 1987 ……YORKSHIRE ENGLAND

One of the most [sic] unique accounts of alien abduction comes to us from the Ilkley Moor in Yorkshire, England. The witness and subject of this case is a former policeman named Philip Spencer. Spencer claims that in the early morning of December 1, 1987, he was taken aboard an unidentified flying craft, and after his release managed to snap a picture of one of the alien beings.

The Ilkley Moor is very much as you would picture it. Reminiscent of the setting of the moors of Baskerville Hall in Conan Doyle’s “Hound of the Baskervilles,” it is an eerie place. It has been said that “The Ilkley Moor can scare you to death during daylight, and at night it’s even worse.”

It is a place of mystery. There is the Swastika stone; boulders etched with strange markings; the Badger Stone; and the Twelve Apostles stone circle.

Many times the only living creatures on the moor are the sheep. Ilkley has other legends too, like the hovering lights at night, which bring occasional reports of UFOs. There are strange, swirling lights that are filtered through the fog and seem to have a mind of their own. Possibly some of the mysterious sights can be attributed to the not too distant Menwith Hill Military Base, or the nearby Leeds Bradford Airport.

The activities of these two facilities will not, however, explain what happened to Spencer. There were also stories of strange creatures that roam across the moor at times.

After four years of being a policeman in another city, Spencer had moved his wife and child to the Yorkshire area to be closer to her family. He was walking across the moor on this December morning heading for his father-in-law’s house and on the way was hoping to get some photographs of the strange light tricks of the moor. To be able to get the images he desired he was using a high ASA rated film to compensate for the poor light in the area.

Unfortunately, the picture that he took was somewhat blurred, but there is no doubt that the creature in the photo is a one of a kind being which basically resembled the small grays.

Along with his camera, Spencer also took a compass to navigate through the fog before sufficient daylight shone through the moor. As he was searching for some photo angles, suddenly he caught the sight of a strange looking being in the slopes ahead of him. He aimed and snapped a picture of the creature which seemed to be gesturing for him to stay away.

It then ran away. Spencer gathered his wits and took off in pursuit of the being. Today he says he doesn’t know why. It was just an impulse reaction. He arrived just in time to get a glimpse of a flying craft with a domed top rise up from the moor and disappear into the sky. Atop the dome was a whitish square. He was not able to get a photograph of the object.

There was silence now. When he saw nothing else of the being or its craft, he began to walk to the nearest village. This walk took about 30 minutes, and during this time, a couple of things became apparent to him. First of all, his compass now pointed south instead of north, and secondly, the village clock showed the time an hour ahead of his…

Spencer was confused now. Did he see what he thought he saw?

To answer this burning question, he headed by bus to the nearest town with instant film development. Sure enough, he had a picture of the creature! It looked to be about 4 foot tall, and had a blue-green tint to its skin. He knew he had something of importance, or at least, he thought he did. He found the proper channels to contact UFO investigator Peter Hough.

Hough knew what he was hearing was a “too good to be true” case, and it worried him, but after meeting Spencer, he was convinced that he was a man of integrity and was not seeking fame or fortune for his picture. There was no reason to not believe what Spencer had told him. Hough began a thorough investigation. The film with the alien picture would be the first thing to undergo professional scrutiny.

The alien picture was first looked at by a wildlife photography expert. The object in the image was not an animal of any known kind. It could not be determined either way if the figure was animate or static. A reconstruction of the original site did establish the alien’s height at or near 4 and one half feet.

The photograph was next sent to Kodak laboratories in Hemel, Hempstead. An analysis showed that the object was indeed part of the original photo, and not superimposed. This conclusion did not, of course, determine what the creature was.

Next, the picture was sent to the United States for computer enhancement and analysis. Dr. Bruce Maccabee, optical physicist with the United States Navy rendered his expert opinion; He stated that the slow film speed used for the low light conditions made the film too grainy for proper testing. “I had great hopes that this case would prove definitive. Sadly circumstances prevent it from being so,” Maccabee stated.

Something strange was noticed in the picture. Appearing on the hill at exactly the spot where Spencer says the UFO was is a white square. Could it be that he had gotten a part of the UFO in the shot unknowingly? He was not sure.

MR

The Human Factor smothers UFOs and everything else

Copyright 2020, InterAmerica, Inc.

A short précis-like review in TLS for May 22, 2020 by Vernon White of Graham Ward's book Theology and Religion: Why it Matters [Polity Paperback, £9.99] praises the book mightily but walks back that praise in the last sentences of the review.

I’m not going to get into the “theology/religion” matters in the book or review, but I do wish to get at the overlay of both with an aside in the review that Alexander Pope’s philosophical dictum “the proper study of mankind is man” directs author Ward to apply that rule to his study of theology and religion; i.e., “the study of both religion and theology can’t be approached without including the study of mankind, via ethnography,, sociology, natural sciences and cognitive sciences.” [TLS, Page 33]

In a discussion, on Messenger, with my academic buddy Bryan Sentes, I wrote that his views about UFOs are steeped in the hu- manities. (See my link to one of his latest scholarly assaults below.)

That is, Bryan, like my  Anomalist pal Bill Murphy, and many of my Facebook UFO “friends” belabor the UFO phenomenon with studies from the humanities, including those named above for author Ward and a few other disciplines, for Bryan, philosophy, poetry, cultural movements, even economic wherewithals (Capitalism, Marxism, et cetera)  and other academic studies.

When I broached Bryan with this, he wasn’t chagrinned but won- dered why I haven’t lathered my affection on such UFO efforts as those represented by, to quote him, “Wendt and UFODATA or the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, for example...”

(Let me offer that the work he notes is splendid, but technical poppycock; an approach with the veneer of science but actually amateurish “play” at research.)

UFOs, while suffocated by Bryan, me. and others, who keep shellacking the phenomenon with philosophical, theological, or cultural artifacts or thoughts and encrustments do an injustice to the phenomenon, goes about its existence, like a paranormal entity, which it is not.

UFOs represent something from the core of our unknown and real Platonic reality; that is, UFOs can tell us, not what mankind is about, but what reality really is.

And by messing around with the “nonsense” of philosophy or latent technology we are missing the opportunity to outsmart that which has subjected us to a scrim of false reality, for what purpose I do not know, but think UFOs are the key to knowing.

So, enough with the academic overlays or cultural asides, or even the playground toys that pretend to be research and/or science.

Let’s have at the phenomenon by way of some person’s insightful genius, not the fools gold of academic abstractions or pseudo-research.

RR

The use of murder (assassination) to quell [UFO or other] opposition

Copyright 2020, InterAmerica, Inc.

I’m not going to bore you indifferent readers and latent UFO advocates with a litany of mysterious deaths of Truman era Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, James McDonald, Morris Jessup, or Blue Book head Ed Ruppelt:

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

https://www.cufon.org/cufon/fbimcdon.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_J._Ruppelt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_K._Jessup

I’m not a conspiracist but I do wonder why these men (and others) met with early death or alleged suicides, some in the manner of death imposed upon government operatives in the same time-frame by  those wishing them to be silent (for various “national security” reasons).

I just read in the TLS [Times Literary Supplement] 5/22/20 issue, Page 34, a reprint of a 1953 review by Rebecca West of a book about the Alger Hiss/Whittaker Chambers affair.

I also won’t insult your lack of knowledge or care about such a long-ago episode of Communist infiltration of the U.S. government but include the following to make a point that almost every UFO enthusiast has read or heard about with great indifference.

In Ms. West’s review was this, about a witness to an event that the government was prosecuting at the time, a scandalous episode that forced me, intellectually, to support Joe McCarthy and join The John Birch Society in my wayward youth:

“Chambers says in Witness that during the Hiss case … Duggan [the witness] had ‘a fatal fall from his New York office window’ … during the case.” [TLS, Page 34]

You can read about the James Forrestal finality via the Wikipedia link above, but it goes like this:

“On the day of Forrestal's resignation from office, he was reported to have gone into a strange daze ... [and] the former Secretary of Defense [was sent to] the National Naval Medical Center (NNMC) in Bethesda, Maryland ... The announcement [of his death] as reported on page 15 of the October 12 New York Times, stated only that Forrestal had died from his fall from the window.”

Forrestal was ostensibly “assassinated” because he was leaning toward disclosing that flying saucers were interplanetary space ships and that the government knew this from the capture of a disk in the Roswell incident (or so some UFO conspiracy buffs have it).

I’m not about to endorse that “reasoning” for Forrestal’s supposed “suicide” but do find it interesting that McDonald and Jessup plus others who were steeped in flying saucer lore and “researching” the phenomenon also “committed” suicide, in the midst of their UFO investigation(s).

None showed the “depressed” façade that prevails among suiciders before they take their lives.

If such UFO “suicides” were common in the time-periods when “assassinations” of national security risks were also common, why?

What did the UFO researchers know? What did the supposed assassins know? What did the government that ordered the “hits” know, and still does, keeping the information bottled up in red tape and hidden from public view?

No, I’m not a conspiracist or conspiracy buff, but I do find, along with Nick Redfern and a few other UFOers, that there have been some intriguing hints of government and military shenanigans inside or part of the UFO (flying saucer) milieu since (or just before) 1947.

RR