Phenomenon or Phenomena?

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I think it was Jerry Clark who insisted in commentary at UFO Up- dates back around 2005 that UFOs were a phenomenon not phe- nomena.

But that designation – phenomenon – flies in the face of what has been seen, reported, or encountered.

There have been too many different experiences to allow phenom- enon to be the term used to describe UFOs, although many of us will continue to use the singular for the things.

Comments here from Bryan Sentes, Bryan Daum, along with José Caravaca’s examples of UFO encounters reminds us that there are various manifestations of the unexplained phenomenon.

There are modern, advanced aircraft often misinterpreted by observers, encounters with landed UFOs allegedly containing entities, mute flying things in the skies or seas, odd lights, and other phenomena [sic] that make up the UFO (flying saucer) panoply.

For me, hoping to make clear what I’m consumed by, I’m centered on flying “objects” with apparent tangibility and controlled by awareness or consciousness.

José Caravaca’s Distortion Theory fascinates as it plumbs a psycho- logical or neurological disorder or symptom that accounts for many UFO reports in the 1950s and beyond.

But there are those many sightings and reports that do not involve encounters or entities acting out bizarre activity or behavior.

From those non-encounter sightings one has to draw a conclusion about what they are or mean.

During Monday night’s [6/29/20] repeat airing of  the Science Channel’s How the Universe Works “Big Bang”program, the voice over said “The universe doesn’t care what we [humans] think about it.”

That’s how I see some UFO things: unconcerned with humanity or human civilizations and societies, and anything else within the human perspective.

Bryan Sentes is highly irritated with me, thinking I do not know and incorrectly convey his thinking about UFOs.

I see him as thrusting a human overlay on the phenomenon, whereas he writes that when it comes to UFOs, no human per- spective, no mystery…or curtly, no humans, no enigma.

I keep trying to make the point that, long ago, Paul Kimball in reading my UFO musings for the RRRGroup blog recognized: Rich Reynolds has gone religious on us.

UFOs (flying saucers) have a metaphysical patina as I see it. They, those things outside the phenomena noted above, represent a clue (or more) to our reality, the real reality that exists atop the one we deal with every day, the reality outside Plato’s metaphorical cave.

That reality, like the Universe, doesn’t care what we think of it or about it; it just is.

UFOs are ineffable, not ET aircraft, nor something with an explanation that is obvious to humans.

UFOs are the one thing that actually conforms to a reality that can explain what humans are and their purpose for being.

RR