UFOs: Is the medium the message or is the message the message?

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

What is the difference between a surrealist painting and a UFO witness report?

And what is the difference between a science fiction movie and a UFO witness report?

 What about a science fiction story and a UFO witness report?

Or television programs, past and present, and UFO reports?

A UFO encounter, like that delineated by Spanish UFO researcher, Jose Caravaca, may be seen as a unique, yet bizarre event with extraterrestrial overtones, but is it really that?

What surrealistic paintings, sci-fi movies, books, television shows, dreams, and UFO reports have in common is imagery that comes from the mind of the creators or participants.

The source is irrelevant – the medium, whether via oils, digital processing, word processing, or a report provided by someone who has had a strange confrontation that baffles them.

The message is the thing: the image and its attendant peripheral aspects.

And those things – the imagery and its bolstering aspects – come from the mind of a human being; and that message, while encrusted with irrelevant detritus (memories left over from the past of the artist, the film-maker, the writer, the dreamer, or the “UFO witness”), are what need to be deciphered, unencrypted as it were.

The neurological pathways and etiologies are not important nor are the psychological machinations.

And the Persinger electronic assaults or the sociological assertions can be dismissed also.

It’s the message, not the medium that matters; the message within the medium, whether radar displays, video or photographic captures or an artist’s rendering, is what those who study UFOs need to get at.

UFO “researchers” and their followers are so busy looking for the cause, the source, of UFO sightings and encounters, that they are looking past, ignoring, the message that is being presented.

UFO witnesses, like their creative counterparts in the arts, literary, film worlds, are getting a message, and it’s that message that is shirked by “ufologists.”

When a ghost appears to someone, it’s not “where did that ghost come from” that should be asked but what is the message that is being imparted.

The same is true of UFO sightings and encounters.

Like a surrealistic painting or a dream, what is the message being proffered?

RR

A.D. After Disclosure -- an unkind review

Richard Dolan’s and Bryce Zabel’s new book, pictured above, is a cornucopia of information for those of you who believe that extraterrestrial beings have crashed or visited the Earth and the U.S. government has been, not only sitting on that reality, but covering it up, even before Roswell.

The Dolan/Zabel book is lauded (on its cover) by many of ufology’s ET proponents.

The 335 page book is replete with every UFO conspiracy theory extant and then some.

MJ-12 is presented and accepted as authentic, so you get the gist of what the book entails.

Although I scanned the book, the Disclosure idea is repellent to me at a gut level.

And while the whole disclosure/ET panoply is presented with Rich Dolan’s usual élan, I just couldn’t stomach the premise or conclusions – that alien beings have been here and used or exploited by the United States government, leading to a co-operation between them and us.

Dolan and Zabel call their extraterrestrials The Others, which is a nice but loony rubric.

And the authors throw in a lot of contemporary goodies to ruminate upon: economics, political strife, comic books, Ronald McDonald, et cetera, et cetera.

If you’re a ET proponent, this book is for you. If you’re a sane, intellectual UFO hobbyist, the book will give you dyspepsia or worse.

It’s published by Career Press, Inc, {Pompton Plains, NJ] and can be located online at careerpress.com and newpagebooks.com.

It sells for $16.99 and can be found at the usual book haunts: Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Powell’s and other book venues.

It’s not my cup o’ tea but you ET believers will love it.

Dolan and Zabel give you everything ET and conspiratorial -- everything!

RR

Roswell: A lack of debris and a lack of (almost) everything else

Flying saucers or UFOs have left no hard-core evidence to prove their existence or reality, despite contrived accounts that the phenomenon has crashed or been compromised on many occasions.

Roswell’s alleged crashed flying disk, even if scooped up by the United States Army, has not been placed in evidence by any UFO researcher or government official, ever.

The (in)famous Ramey/Marcel photos of foil scraps from 1947 are laughably singular as non-evidence of an interstellar craft or even a secret balloon array (Mogul or anything else).

The pieces of material scattered on a floor, being held by original participants in the Roswell tale, merely confirm, for skeptics and rational thinkers, that the Roswell event was a lot of nothing, blown out of proportion by late-to-the-story UFO researchers with a bend toward extraterrestrial visitations via flying disks.

The incipient Roswell “Dream Team” has its work cut out for it. The “team” has to come up with something tangible – held-in-hand debris from the crashed Roswell disk or a bona fide document, not just alluding to debris or a crash but actually detailing where the supposed remnants of the crashed disk are now.

Recollections of Roswell’s aging population who say they saw debris or alien bodies has little or no meaning to discerning observers of the ongoing UFO saga,

There are no photographs by professed witnesses of the debris, no diary accounts from the period (June/July 1947), no government documents that precisely delineate the collection of or transport of debris (or anything else) from the 1947 context, and nothing that will settle the messy debate about the Roswell incident.

Anthony Bragalia and other members of the Roswell “Dream Team” may have gathered new or refurbished circumstantial evidence, but nothing, so far, that nails down a flying disk crash, extraterrestrial or otherwise.

That’s how it is.

RR