UFOs and Zombies?

Copyright 2023, InterAmerica, Inc.

The New Yorker magazine often reprises artists, dancers, actors, and other cultural icons in each issue – people who’ve died but once received a modicum of fame.
 
The persons are generally unknown, even within their own cultural milieu, but the magazine gives them some kind of due, resurrecting them for a moment before they return to the dust of forgotten memory.
 
This is also the case with one-time flying saucer/UFO notables.

Some long dead figures are only remembered when someone dredges the UFO files and presents their long ago activity.
 
Some names are: Donald Keyhoe, the APRO duo Coral and Jim Lorenzen,  James McDonald, Captain Thomas Mantell, the MUFON founder Walter Andrus Jr., the Trents (of  McMinnville photo fame), Donald Menzel, and there are a thousand more, all worthy of memory but mostly forgotten.

 
These folks remain active memories for many UFO old-timers but are completely unknown to the Reddit crowd or Instagram mem- bers and other social media newbies.
 
No matter how significant these past glorified UFO mavens may have been, they, like the cultural icons lauded by The New Yorker, are dust in the wind, meaningless, except for their past efforts which amounted to nothing actually, except a line or two in a book or a whole book, gathering cobwebs on a shelf somewhere in UFOland.
 
What I’m suggesting is that everyone, no matter how much in the public spotlight or press, end up under a pile of lost or mildewed memory.
 
So, what’s that drive that causes some normally sensible persons to seek the modicum of notoriety offered by the UFO sobriquet?
 
It’s a foolish idea to think that getting your name ballyhooed among UFO enthusiasts, at a paranormal conference or in a book on the phenomenon, or a mention in a little-heard podcast means anything.
 
It doesn’t.
 
So, work on solving the UFO enigma, as best as you can, under the restrictions of government secrecy or the latent notation from another UFO wannabe.
 
The “fame” acquired is meaningless – totally.

[Photo atop from Artnet.]
 
RR