Oh my....Phil Klass! On the Trent/Heflin Photos

While I eschewed a few regular visitors bringing the Phill Klass "crap" over here to this blog from Kevin Randle's, I'd like to present something I found in Official UFO magazine for November 1975 that I found interesting, and showing how reasonably skeptical Phil Klass could be or seem to be.

It's an interview by George Earley with Mr. Klass [Page 20 ff.]

Entitled "Why I Don't Believe in UFOs" it contains two segments that we've touched on here, and with which I am in agreement.

They are the Trent and Heflin photos.

Now we all know that Phil Klass could be a S.O.B. and nasty man, using inuendo or worse to undercut or undermine those whose views about UFOs he abhorred, Dr. McDonald, Stan Friedman among them.

Such behavior is not unique to Klass. We have three people, one a BIG name in ufology, who've employed such tactics about me, out of envy or distaste for my views, one of the fellows, a ufological biggie asking Chris Aubeck to remove me from Aubeck's Magonia group at Yahoo, to which Aubeck, I'm sad to say, acquiesced, bringing opprobrium from my friend Nick Redfern but no re-admittance for me by Aubeck, with whom I remain friends despite his kowtowing to a spiteful man.

That aside, click HERE to get Scan One of Mr. Earley's interview with Klass -- the Trent photos, and click HERE for Scan Two of the interview -- the Heflin pics.

N.B. I've provided the material as a (JPG) scan so you'd get it intact, from the pages of Official UFO. (Click on the images to enlarge them for reading.)

RR

Man in the Moon?

From Curious Myths of the Middle Ages by S. Baring-Gould [1867, Kessinger Publishing reprint, Montana] Page 198:

The belief in the Moon-man seems to exist among the natives of British Columbia; for I read in one of Mr. Duncan’s letters to the Church Missionary Society, “One very dark I was told that thre was a moon to be seen on the beach. On going to see, there was an illuminated disk, with the figure of a man upon it. The water was then very low, and one of the conjuring parties had lit up this disk at the waters edge…It was an imposing sight. Nothing could be seen around it; but the Indians suppose that the medicine party are then holding converse with the man in the moon…After a short time the moon waned away…”

This is just one of many such accounts of beings seen inside ships (or moons). Aubeck’s and Vallee’s Wonders in the Sky is replete with such tales.

But what do such tales tell us, about UFOs or anything else?

I suppose that had such an incident as this occurred today, a few avid researchers would descend on that beach and look for tell-tale signs of a moon-landing.

The Indians would be sought out, and one or two would provide testimony and maybe even a drawing of what they purported to have seen.

This is what happened in the Socorro/Zamora sighting of 1964, and in many other so-called UFO or flying saucer sightings.

Such occurrences are not rare. And their redundancy may be intrinsic to the phenomenon we discuss here.

Yet, anyone with a yen to discover the meaning of such accounts is stymied by a lack of concrete substantiation, having only witness testimony as evidence of such events.

So what is the point of pursuing such accounts/stories?

There is nothing that can be examined scientifically.

Those who find such tales to be intriguing or curious are left with ephemeral data, and I’m using the term “data” loosely.

Today, photos and videos are compromised by the onslaught of concocted imagery.

Witness testimony is besmirched by the vicissitudes of modern man: stress, psychological and medical aberrations, the insertion of mind-modules from movies, books, and television, plus the belittled but rampant UFO meme.

Governments and military agencies are holding what they know within the province of secrecy or corrupting what they impart to the point that anything they disclose is virtually worthless.

There is no way forward, as far as I can tell.

Along with our outcry about the unraveling of ufology, the matter of UFO research is beleaguered by the above constraints and the ineptitude or cavalier approach to UFO study hat has been and is endemic to the topic.

Ufological newbies haven’t the expertise to pursue the UFO phenomenon, and the UFO old-guard has missed so many opportunities to clarify significant sightings by diligent research and acumen that those with a penchant for the enigma are hamstrung; separating the wheat from the chaff, as it were, is daunting, to say the least.

Should we give up the pursuit of an explanation for the UFO phenomenon? Common sense says we should, letting the dust settle, and allowing the old-guard to pass away so a new beginning might be attempted, as we’ve written often before.

The muck and mire that afflicts ufology needs to wane, just as that moon waned in the above story.

RR

The Unraveling of Ufology

It is obvious to the observer who’s paying attention that the topic of UFOs has reached a nadir.

The problem is much worse than when we noted the submersion several months ago or when Paul Kimball saw the writing on the wall causing him to ostensibly withdraw from the UFO scene, again, in July.

UFO debate is either totally bizarre, as practiced by newbies stumbling on the raft of UFO blogs and web-sites extant or the UFO debate has become impotent and irrelevant because of the site-tracking of substantive issues by protracted and silly confrontations about peripheral issues – really peripheral – as one can see at Kevin Randles’ blog or UFO Updates (about Phil Klass at Randle’s site and totally inane topics at UpDates).

The UFO subject matter has been weakened more than ever by the onslaught of stupid argumentation -- and I really mean stupid!

The oneupsmanship desired by some skeptics (and UFO advocates) has pulled UFO hypothesizing and investigation from the realm of intellectual or intelligent discourse to a realm of petty bickering about minutiae that is so much farther on the fringe of practical reality that it makes ufology as a “discipline” seem positively profound.

Visitors to our blog(s) and Randle’s, among others, more often than not, skew the original posting premise and take the material to the outskirts of banality.

I thought that we might corral some intellectual discussions here, but I was wrong.

For instance, Anthony Bragalia has done research on the 1966 Wanaque sighting that is intriguing but his work has been stiffed by most who’ve read it.

And we note that a discussion at Randle’s blog, about UFO curmudgeon Phil Klass’s malevolence had some sidebars about the alleged Socorro sighting, as a set-up job or hoax.

Yet, no one had the temerity or smarts to incorporate Anthony Bragalia’s hoax hypothesis (which, even if discounted, has enough circumstantial elements that allow a sensible person to see the possibility that a hoax was in place during or concomitant to the 1964 sighting) into the comment section where Randle, himself, has succumbed to the red-herrings and non-topical broadsides of the commentators.

One-time UFO devotees has become harpies, persons who want to show how much UFO minutiae they’ve accumulated and how that puts them atop the Ufological mountain which, itself, has been a dung-heap for a long-time now.

UFOs, as a topic, have become slimier and slimier of late and we, like Paul Kimball and a few others, have to weigh whether or not we wish to muck around in the effluvia any longer….

RR

UFOcus

An article in UFO Report, September 1978, by Alex Evans, about two young fellows in Maine [1975] who saw a UFO, were allegedly abducted, then visited by some so-called “men-in-black” got me to thinking about how shattered the topic and study of UFOs is.

I found Mr. Evans’ piece to be very interesting, for several reasons, so I Googled the names and found a MUFON link to Bob Pratt’s web-site – Mr, Pratt died in 2005 – that has a rather thorough, bizarre, account of the Maine episode.

Click here to access the Pratt rendering

The young men, David Stephens and Glen Gray, should be contacted now to see what they can add to their totally intriguing experience.

They were inside a ship, saw alien beings, and had a total abduction experience, plus their initial UFO sighting, supplemented by a visit from strange people, that have received the sobriquet “men in black” by UFO investigators.

The problem is that there are several conjoined UFO events here, or several disparate UFO events, depending upon one’s perspective.

First there is the UFO, then there is an “abduction,” followed by a description of the inside of a UFO and the entities responsible for the UFO. Afterward, the young men and their families were ‘assaulted” by strange phenomena, as was a doctor who regressed the two fellows at the behest of UFO investigators, Shirley Fickett and Brent Raynes.

This UFO event encompasses almost everything that a UFO researcher might like to get his or her hands on: a seemingly credible account of a UFO sighting, an “abduction” (with a medical examination by alien beings using telepathic communications), and visits by men/people in black.

But what was done? Where’s the denouement?

The episode requires specialization. Someone versed in UFOs, someone versed in the abduction phenomenon, and someone versed in men-in-black accounts.

But there is more. Someone versed in psychiatric hallucinations and/or hysteria is a must, just in case the event is an hallucinosis.

Alex Evans records that Stephens, while inside the alien ship, describing a “mushroom man” (or alien), punched the “entity” (who had, large, slanted, unblinking eyes, no visible mouth, small, round nose, webbed fingers and was dressed in a flowing black robe), with no repercussion(s), accepted the futility of his situation, and laid down, letting the creatures remove his clothing (for a medical examination).



(This variegated incident is the possible psychiatric component.)

I know of no UFO researcher or investigator who has the credentials or cachet to delve into the various facets of such a UFO account as this one, which is not atypical of many UFO events.

MUFON is collecting data, the Examiner is reporting sightings (with no evaluations) and UFO buffs are arguing about minutiae that has nothing to do with UFOs, per se.

(See the current discussion about Phil Klass at Kevin Randle’s blog or the UFO UpDate brouhaha about Jeff Rense’s anti-semitism for examples of “ufology” gone astray.)

A sincere study of UFOs, as they appear today, needs focus, not abstracted, discursive dialogue about peripheral elements that besmudge or side-track the search for what UFOs are (or were) and what their relevance is for humanity, if there is any relevance.

Everything else is entertainment, and not good entertainment either….

RR

Freudian or Jungian UFOs?

Matthew J. Graeber’s “article” from Magonia 52, May 1995 about UFO mother-ships or airships posits the idea that the cylindrical ships spotted since early times right up into the modern era may have a sexual psychical component.

You can access Mr. Graeber’s thesis by clicking HERE

As readers here know, or should, we do not think UFOs are psychical projections or quantum creations, although we have conjectured that quantum mechanics seem to have a bearing on the ‘tangible” objects we designate as “flying saucers” and quantum theory may help explain UFOs, as they appear today.

(Triangular UFO craft, for us, are military prototypes, and don’t factor into our conjectural observations here and elsewhere.)

As for Mr. Graeber’s sexual symbolism for airships, the idea is not anathema to us, but it is a psychological stretch, just as Carl Jung’s hypothesis was in his book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of things Seen in the Skies [Princeton University Press, 1978].



And even though the current thrust in many UFO circles is toward the concept that UFOs are projections of the human psyche or mental impressions coming into the minds of select individuals (from extraterrestrials supposedly), for purposes as yet unknown, we think that persons who imagine UFOs or see them mentally when they don’t exist in any tangible, real form are in need therapy of a serious psychological kind.

However Mr. Graeber would disagree:

Although we might expect to make little headway towards resolving today’s UFO enigma by comparing it to past mysteries, we may, nevertheless, examine both present and past UFO events as being comprised of optically perceived images or imagery that occasionally have an extraordinary effect upon the individual(s) who either observe or come into close proximity with them.

Mr. Graeber’s views are both Freudian and Jungian.

But if UFOs or mother-ships resonate as a sublimated sexual symbol with someone, as Mr. Graeber delinates in his piece, we think that that person should hie themselves off to a psychiatrist immediately. They have serious terrestrial problems.

Nonetheless, Mr. Graeber’s views should have a hearing or reading; they are pondered sensibly and unsensationally.

He closes with this:

Perhaps we have discovered enough about the mythical, sexual, and marked psychic background of the god-ships to determine that their origin is most likely the human unconscious, and not some alien planet situated at the edge of the cosmos. For it seems highly unlikely that a visiting alien intelligence would be so human-like as to possess similar intrapsychical processes regarding the development of their technology, their exploratory aspirations, and their myth-making tendencies.

Not a view we espouse necessarily, but a cogent suggestion by Mr. Graeber.

RR