Why ufologists are NOT taken seriously

Here are some recent statements of Jerome Clark and Don Ledger at UFO UpDates.

From Clark:

"I don't pretend to be privy to what the gummint knows..."

"Of course it gives our ideas so much more credibility if we link those who threaten us to the gummint than to the real source, the mentally ill and the sociopathic in the population."

From Ledger:

"I think you have a lot to learn before you can claim to broaden anyone else's research in the UFO field, KK. You really do run off, hell west and crooked. Now you are attempting to weave Egyptian cotton out of bat-crap."

Do these two fellows think cutesy-poo words like "gummint" or "bat-crap" endears them to intellectuals, the media, or science?

Both men are smart guys. That they try to be cute only demeans their message(s), and their credibility.

They make UFO study look like an enterprise for goof-balls.

It's saddening to see how both men have devolved into blithering spokespersons for the UFO
community.

RR

UFO exist! (Yes, ABC News confirms it)

Click HERE for ABC News report...

Up, up and away? (Maybe not)

The October 1977 issue of Official UFO magazine had the article, pictured above, about Richard Shaver and his “revelations.”

The article by Richard R. Toronto [Page 33 ff.] elaborated on Shaver’s Detrimental Robots (Deros) as related to Toronto by a “guru” – Kid Revahs.

Toronto’s piece also covers Ray Palmer’s insertion into the Shaver oeuvre.

It’s all a little goofy, and can be dismissed by the more circumspect of you.

This is Shaver, visiting a cavern, where he said Deros live:

Richard Shaver was not quite right, as you know.

And I ignore the ramblings of men who sport beards like Shaver’s. Such men are a little off kilter in my estimation, and we’ve dealt with the matter in an earlier posting here (and elsewhere.)

That aside, where and why did the idea of underground men (or gods) derive?

One can understand gods or life-forms from the heavens, but from beneath our feet, from the underground?

No UFO creature, who has allegedly communicated with their witness (see Jose Caravaca’s repository at his blog, The Caravaca Files) indicated they were from the nether regions.

Even as figments of witness imagination or input from an external reality (the Caravca Distortion hypothesis), the underground is virtually absent as the originating venue for UFO visitors.

Fiction writers (science fiction and otherwise) have created people from below, but UFO witnesses haven’t bought into that scenario for their experiences.

(Shaver’s views have pretty much been ignored by everyone who purports to be part of the fringe, either as a witness to strange happenings or as an investigator of same.)

Mythology is rife with gods and beings from the nether regions but, apart from the Irish legends of leprechauns and wee people and the religiously fevered few who have been bedeviled by demons from hell or the underworld, UFO witnesses’s beings are usually (almost always) from the skies.

Shaver’s psychotic creation of The Elders, Deros, Teros, and all the rest, promoted by Ray Palmer, never caught on with anyone, at least any one with an ounce of common sense.

But UFO visitors from outer space still capture the imagination of many and creatures of the underworld have all but disappeared from Fortean literature.

Does this mean that there is some kind of validity to UFO reports of beings from space?

Or will UFO creatures from galaxies far, far away also go the way of Shaver’s beings?

If bearded ufologists have their way, we’ll be stuck with extraterrestrials for some time to come.

RR

UFO Group Think? (Of course)

A piece in the June 25^th 2012 New Yorker (pictured above) by Ezra Klein, Unpopular Mandate: Why do politicians reverse their positions [Page 30 ff.] has material that is applicable to ufology and many who comment at this blog and especially elsewhere (UFO UpDates and Kevin Randle’s blog).

The material I’m referring to is psychological in nature, and caught my attention with this paragraph on Page 31:

“Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at New York University’s business school, argues, in a new book, “The Righteous Mind,” that to understand human beings, and their politics, you need to understand that we are descended from ancestors who would not have survived if they hadn’t been very good at belonging to groups…our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our group’s interests, in competition with other groups…

One of those mechanisms is figuring out how to believe what the group believes…

…once group loyalties are engaged, you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments [italics mine]. Thinking is mostly just rationalization, mostly just a search for supporting evidence.

Psychologists have a term for this: “motivated reasoning” which Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale, defines as “when a person is conforming [italics mine] their assessments of information to some interest or goal that is independent of accuracy [italics mine, again].”

Writing about political parties, which I’m applying to UFO groups, Klein says this [Page 32]:

“…parties, though based on a set of principles, aren’t disinterested teachers of truth. They’re organized groups looking to increase their power [me again]. Or, as the psychologists would put it, their reasoning may be motivated by something other than accuracy [yep, italics mine].

Finally (from Page 33) “…we’re increasingly able to choose our information sources based on their tendency to back up whatever we already believe, we don’t even have to hear the arguments from the other side, much less give them serious attention [italics mine, of course].”

Thought-bias among ufologists and UFO mavens is palpable to most, but that bias need not be endemic to the discussion of the UFO phenomenon.

That group-think remains the so strong in the UFO community is distressing, but not unexpected, as the UFO topic has the tendency to attract a large segment of society that doesn’t have any intellectual acumen.

If we can, here, keep our comments (and postings) free of group think or “motivated reasoning,” we’ll be more than pleased with our small effort to upscale UFO thought and hypothetical thinking.

RR