The sickening, depressing ennui of the UFO community

Copyright 2024, InterAmerica, Inc.

When, a lot of years ago, my small magazine crew brought attention to important news media, that Edward Condon was not appropriate to head up the Colorado study of UFOs, sponsored and paid for by the Air Force (with taxpayers' monies of course), we were less than surprised that the New York TIMES, CBS, and the National Review acknowledged our observation but did nothing to make it public.
 
The reason, we suspected, was our premise that Condon, having been considered a security risk – he was so adjudged earlier and lost his status to see classified materials – was too much akin to Senator Joe McCarthy’s communist searches that everyone – even true patriots – thought was an incendiary hunt, often nailing “nice” people who flirted with the Communist Party and now were employed by the U.S. in various sensitive positions, military among them.
 
No one in the UFO community picked up on Condon’s ratty activities and now was about to scuttle – after seeing the Air Force’s UFO secrets – the search for a UFO explanation.
 
Did he pass information found in the Air Force papers to the Russians? Who knows.
 
When I talked to Condon, he said if the security issue came up again, he’d drop out of the UFO study.
 
Well, the rest is UFO history.
 
My point here is that UFO people, along with news media, are coddling persons who are iffy as UFO boosters or demeanors: Corbell, Strieber, Bigelow, Kirkpatrick, and a plethora of YouTubers and podcasters who are less than qualified to deal with the UFO matter – intellectually or honestly.
 
The UFO community always has let ride skullduggery in its ranks: The MUFON scandal, the misinterpreted videos pushed forward to news media, and accepted by them, of Jeremy Corbell, the fictional works of Whitley Strieber changed to non-fiction and now touted as actual, the fraudulent underlying story of Jacques Vallee’s TRINITY personages, the Kirkpatrick pussyfootings as he now slinks to Battelle where secrecy and UFO shenanigans are de rigueur, abduction stories with a patina of Swiss cheese they are so flimsy with actuality, and the Ancient Alien twists by a group of fellows who have no shame when it comes to perverting truth, et cetera.
 
We (you reading this more than me) accept and avoid chastising the likes of SCU where lousy data is lauded as scientific enterprise, or where promotion of squirrely videos and photos are praised for their visions of truth when we all know that this is not exactly the case.
 
Nope. UFO people are flaccid when it comes to allowing con persons (men and women) to flaunt half-truths or out-and-out falsehoods.
 
We look the other way, rather than call them out.
 
We don’t want to appear nasty or unkind, no matter what mischief is afoot.
 
That has become the norm today when debunkers and skeptics are no longer extant and do-gooders and con-men thrive in the rise of social media where everyone, no matter now mentally ill or sociopathic, has a platform to pour forth the madness that now runs amok in the world.
 
RR