UFO “researchers” (actual and otherwise)

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The Science Channel reprised its earlier Contact: Alien Mysteries series Thursday, 10/29 and I watched it again, thinking I’d pan the series for inept UFO investigation.

But I was stunned to realize that the show and its hosts and investigators we’re much more astute and serious than I had remembered.

The crew looked back at the Rhoades photo and Rhoades himself and gave the 1971 Delphos “ring” episode a thorough rehash, actually engaging some large equipment to dig up the area where the incident occurred. (The farmer, who witnessed the UFO, when a teenager, had buried the site because UFO enthusiasts kept showing up on his land to see it.)

A trio of fellows traveled to South American and Mexican locales where UFO events and sightings were pronounced or noteworthy, even recovering some previously classified documents of the Brazilian government’s UFO investigation, bought earlier by Robert Bigelow.

The show’s investigators re-examined the Phoenix light happenings, digging up some previously unknown aspects, and they did this with many other iconic and lesser-known UFO episodes, including the AATIP disclosures, from which some USO information was culled – information I hadn’t heard before nor remembered from the first airing of the Science series.

(The problem I had initially, and still, with the show is that it inferred that all the events, and strange artifacts, cave sketches or pictographs, and the accounts indicated above, were tinged by an extra-terrestrial explanation: UFOs, USOs, and everything else were certainly an a posteriori ET conclusion.)

The Contact show’s efforts were a tad more thorough than those provided by the History Channel’s UFO Hunters with Bill Birnes and crew a few years ago (and also rebroadcast a few weeks back).

As noted here, there are many, many more UFOers than most of us know, many surfacing on Facebook.

But most are just gatherers or re-introducers of old UFO accounts, none actually researching or investigating those old sightings and most just offering new sightings to appear as if they are “researchers’ of significance.

I’m not a researcher by a very long-shot; a UFO theorist of sorts, nowhere of the caliber of a Jacques Vallee. There are other theorists, many actually, all but a few in the same league as Vallee.

But researchers – not investigators like Nick Redfern, John Keel, et al. -- are rare, almost non-existent. If you know anyone who qualifies, leave a comment here.

RR