The UFO Iconoclast(s)

The Face on Mars

2012-01-31T11:05:00.005-05:00

A little back-and-forth with Nick Redfern about comic book artist Jack Kirby (The Fanatstic Four et cetera) and his 1958 "prescient" comic book entry The Face of Mars, which the Above Top Secret site also took a look at, forced me to remind Nick that the movie Rocketship XM (1950) was the intigator of the Face on Mars and the idea that a once-advanced civilization existed there.

Nick brought up the Viewmaster series and Tom Corbett, Space Ranger TV show as sources for The Face....

But it was the 1950 film from which The Face on Mars derives, even for Richard Hoagland's (1996) The Monuments of Mars — A City on the Edge of Forever.

Try to find the film, and get a whiff of where the idea for life on Mars originated.

RR

Nick Redfern on Jack Parsons

2012-01-31T08:27:00.003-05:00

Jack Parsons is pictured above.

Nick Redfern, and others, find Mr. Parsons to be integral to the UFO history.

Click HERE to read Nick's take on the mysterious (and weird?) Jack Parsons.

The Fantastic Four plus Two?

2012-01-30T13:24:00.006-05:00

One of the RRRGroup contributors sent us an e-mail listing six UFO sightings (but mistakenly noting "seven") that he thinks are....well here's his e-mail opening:

Cash Landrum is part of what I call the Fantastic Seven. Seven specific UFO incidents that are of extreme interest:

1) Roswell
2) Bentwaters/Rendlesham
4) Kecksburg
5) Wanaque
6) Shag Harbor
7) Cash/Landrum

I think these sightings are UFO swill [sic]!

But what do you think?

N.B. Visitors saw that our contributor left off number three so I reworked the posting, as I couldn't get a reply about the missing Number 3.)

RR

NIck Redfern inadvertently abets The Distortion Theory?

2012-01-30T08:00:00.003-05:00

Nick Redfern provides grist, sort of, for Jose Caravaca's UFO encounter hypothesis: The Distortion Theory.

Click HERE to see Mr. Redfern's addition to the UFO entities scenario

UFOs: Distortion and/or Insanity?

2012-01-29T13:01:00.001-05:00

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

While some us think that UFO encounters – not UFO sightings per se – may be hallucinatory in essence, others (Jose Caravaca, Jacques Vallee, and some visitors here) believe that witnesses to UFO or UFO-like landings and encounters are dealing with real tangible or near-tangible events.

Who or what creates those “events” is up for grabs – some saying the “who” are extraterrestrials and others (Caravaca and Vallee) thinking the who or what is something a bit more esoteric than ETs.

My contention that mental aberrations account for some if not all of the events is questionable by virtue of what one finds when they look for aberrational images from those who can be said to be on the cusp of insanity or actually insane.

That is, if one examines the output -- writings, drawings, art and other “creative” outpourings by those adjudicated by psychiatry or commonsense to be off kilter mentally – one can only conclude that those who’ve reported UFO encounters are not mentally incapacitated in the same way as those who are permanently hallucinatory.

However, one can make the case for temporary insanity, but that seems, to me, to be a stretch too.

I think that UFO encounters may be exactly what they appear to be: interactions between something absolutely bizarre, maybe even other-worldly, and normal human beings.

For example, here are drawings and art work by people on the fringe of reality, mentally.

These images come from these two books:

(And one can find many more examples of hallucinatory art via a Google search using “outsider art” as the search criterion.)

The images:

Now here are some paintings by Henri Rousseau, who wasn’t insane, surely, but had an immature, naïve imagination when it came to his artistic output:

Would someone, with a similar mental make-up, have visions that made him or her think they had an other-worldly encounter?

Perhaps. That angle might be profitably pursued.

There was one drawing, by a six-year-old, Sasha Powers of Truro, Massachusetts, that I find interesting:

That is not outsider art but, rather, an example of some imagery that influenced this child, or a recounting of something she experienced perhaps.

But, all-in-all, one has to consider that UFO encounters differ significantly, from the images of those who have aberrant mental conditions, and therefore UFO encounters need to be taken at face value rather than be evaluated psychologically or neurologically.

I hate that that may be so, but mental quirks don’t seem to apply, at least not in the psychotic arena.

But there is the possibility that something else, besides a total mental break-down, is at work, something less than paranoia but something not quite right either – something that only a few experience while the whole of mankind doesn’t.

What that mechanism is may be Caravaca’s Distortion explanation, but why distortion at all?

It doesn’t make sense, logically, aberrantly, or in any other way….so far.

RR

Brainstorming or Group Think?

2012-01-28T21:15:00.003-05:00

The current New Yorker [1/30/12] has an article about "brainstorming" and what is needed to provide meaningful thought from groups (and individuals).

The article is by Jonah Lehrer.

It's a must-read for Kevin Randle's "Dream Team" and Chris Aubeck's Magoniax people.

(And we think some of our participants, at this blog, would do well to peruse it.)

Click HERE to access the article, and let us know what you think...

Lucius Farish R.I.P.

2012-01-27T14:33:00.002-05:00

A. J. Gevaerd of Revista UFO reported at UFO UpDates that our friend, Lucius Farish, died January 26th, 2012.

Lucius was a UFO buff of the highest order, providing us and many others, via his clipping service and personal contact, sightings and information that would have gotten lost in the backwaters of ufology without his dogged accumulation of newspaper and other media items.

He also was a researcher and writer, contributing information about the 1890s airship sightings and UFO events that the rest of us have used to opine or write about.

We will miss him, actually. He was one of the few good guys in the UFO community.

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and UFOs

2012-01-27T09:47:00.003-05:00

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

The great, depressive philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, like other philosophers (Plato, Berkeley, Hume., Kant, Fichte, et al.) thought that reality was built on the world we see (or experience) – phenomena and the world as it really is – noumena.

I’m not going to get into a philosophical discourse here, as philosophers are only little less nutty than psychiatrists, but the idea, the thought, that we humans are subject to various realities, at least two, comes into play when we find proposals like that of Vallee and Caravaca about what is going on when UFO encounters take place.

And how does Nietzsche factor into this?

Nietzsche eschewed religion, science, and philosophy, itself, allowing that we (humans) have explained nothing; such phenomena (as that perceived) is as magical to us now as it was to the most primitive of our species. [Introducing Nietzsche by Gane and Chan, Totem Books, NY, 1998, Page 59]

And Nietzsche’s nihilistic view is applicable to our ongoing discussion about what is happening, really happening, when Caravaca’s “witnesses” have a UFO or UFO-like encounter:

“The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.” [Ibid, Page 35]

Marx is brought into the discussion by Gane and Chan (regarding morality, but applicable for our views here):

“On the one side we have the events, on the other we have human interpretation of these events (but only one version will be correct).” [Ibid, Page 113]

Schopenhauer’s view that “behind the appearance of [things] lies the reality of my will or desire. This will does not exist like my body in time and space – it is not a physical entity at all, but underlies the whole of animate and inanimate nature throughout the cosmos.” [Ibid, Page 9]

“This timeless, non-physical cosmic force doesn’t lead Schopenhauer to the idea of a god," Gane and Chan write. [Page 9]

Schopenhauer’s “will” underlies his pessimistic take on life, and is the cause of human suffering.

But I think we might posit this underlying non-physical reality as, perhaps, the presence that Caravaca gives to the instigators of his Distortion theory and the events that take place within his hypothesis.

Nietzsche would have no part in such a conjecture but he would allow us to ruminate upon it, without disparagement or criticism.

Okay, my point, without further Duensing it, is that thoughtful or creative men and women intuit a reality that transcends – Lecome du Nouy -- or sometimes supersedes – the psychological view -- our material, sensed reality.

This reality intersects with people – UFO encounters, ghostly apparitions, et cetera – and does so, not purposefully, as Caravaca or Vallee has it, but “accidentally” or inadvertently, as when some natural phenomenon adjusts one’s senses or neurological mechanisms. [Persinger]

But Nietzsche would offer that Caravaca’s and Vallee’s views can’t be dismissed out of hand.

So we are left to interject our opinions and thoughts as that is what the Ubermensch does.

RR

UFO UpDates and Magoniax

2012-01-26T13:02:00.001-05:00

We sneak into UFO UpDates now and then to see how the lower half lives.

Surprisingly, the site for “list members” – the mantle readers and users of the site like to be known by – has become a link source for newspapers, magazine, and internet sites, losing it’s previous cachet as a source for UFO news and ideas by ufology’s “best and brightest.”

Errol Bruce-Knapp has lost his site’s dominance for unique UFO ideas and news, mostly because most UFO mavens seek more dynamic sites and blogs about UFOs.

UpDates is really old school, using a format that was good for the 1970s but not anywhere near what the trends are for 2012.

UpDates is so over…

Our friend Chris Aubeck allowed us back into his Yahoo sited Magoniax (once Jerry Clark departed), where “members” provide UFO and UFO-like observations from archived sources mostly.

Chris’s forum is a repository more than anything, used by such oldsters as Ray Dickenson and Martin Shough (both are also UpDate “contributors”), who like to gather UFO materials, just to have them.

They don’t do anything, as far as we can tell, with the stuff they collect. They are hoarders.

We’ve touched on this before: the collection of sightings, just to collect then.

What Chris is planning is not known by us, but we hope it’s something more than a litany of old observations that have a UFO patina.

Getting rid of the hoarders and encouraging theoretical UFO hobbyists would go a long way toward cleansing Magoniax and saving UFO UpDates.

The Klingons have arrived

2012-01-26T11:21:00.004-05:00

Invisibility is an inevitability for humans but maybe a fait accompli for UFOs.

Click HERE for more....

Nick Redfern on Dr. LaPaz, Fugo Balloons, and Roswell (again)

2012-01-26T10:05:00.002-05:00

Nick Redfern may not be obsessed with Roswell but he's darn close to being so.

Click HERE for his latest insert about the troublesome and time-consuming incident.

(Roswell is the Michael Myers of ufology.)

Barry Goldwater on UFOs and Roswell?

2012-01-25T19:13:00.002-05:00

CDA questioned the Barry Goldwater/Curtis LeMay imbroglio in the linked piece of the previous post here.

Anthony Bragalia found a rare interview about the incident, which you can access by clicking HERE.

Barry Goldwater was a true patriot and great American. (I worked in his 1964 campaign.)

When he said something, one could consider it the absolute truth.

RR

Roswell: The Morphing Metal and More....

2012-01-25T10:19:00.006-05:00

Anthony Bragalia, who has been an avid advocate for the idea that the U.S. government and military have been studying the alleged Roswell debris, especially the attributes of the metal found: the so-called morphing metal, that was the major contruction element of the reported crashed flying disk.

Mr. Bragalia stumbled upon a web-site that antedates his conjectures and research and I thought some of you might find the site as intereasting as he and I have.

Click HERE to access the site, and let us know what you think...

RR

Distortion Theory: Jose Caravaca makes a valid point

2012-01-25T01:00:00.001-05:00

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

Jose Caravaca is developing an hypothesis to explain UFO encounters, and he’s tagged it The Distortion Theory.

I find his ideas intriguing, and accept his views – up to the point where he posits an external force or presence as an integral, instigating agent that creates, with the help of UFO witnesses, the various but somewhat similar scenarios that make up the events that we’re all familiar with (and many that we are not familiar with for which he has provided details here and at his blog).

UFO encounters, where entities are observed and often engaged in out-of-the-ordinary activities, are seen, by some, as visitations by extraterrestrial visitors, whose behavior is attributed to alien purposes that we humans just do not understand.

Or the encounters are part of a paranormal reality that has been concomitant with humans since time immemorial and whose behavior is obscure for reasons we just do not understand, and never have.

Some of us think that UFO encounters are neural hallucinations that are made somewhat tangible by actions of the witnesses while they are in a kind of fugue state, whose psychological and/or physiological etiologies are yet to be determined or found.

But Señor Caravaca challenges the neurological explanation by pointing out that the encounters he’s listed and those that are better known (the Hill abduction, for instance) all occur in a kind of dramatic scene that is similar in many ways, across he encounter board.

That is, if a neurological explanation or stimulus were the cause of UFO encounters as we know them, why are they always, or nearly always, along roadways and in rural or semi-rural venues?

Why no neurologically induced encounters at football games, or in restaurants, or the grocery store, or at a corporate picnic or gathering?

The settings for UFO encounters, by and large, are in venues that are sylvan-like, not urban.

The 1966 Ann Arbor/Dexter/Hillsdale sighting by Frank Mannor and that in Hillsdale, Michigan at the same time were in rural settings, swamp areas actually, without entities but with air-borne craft commonly know as a flying disk or flying saucer at that time.

The absence of entities is intriguing in that the setting or staged event was ripe for one of those encounters that Señor Caravaca derives his theory from.

So, flying saucer sightings, even those that contain hovering near-the-ground machines, like the Ann Arbor sighting or the Michalak encounter cited here earlier are removed or have to be from the Distortion theory.

Or do they? Not necessarily. Jose Caravaca’s hypothesis allows for limitations on what occurs during a UFO encounter.

The limitations stem from the inherent limitations that the witness imposes upon the encounter; e.g., a witness with limited exposure to science fiction imagery would have a much less vivid encounter than a witness who had much exposure to science fiction movies, books, magazines, or archetypal forms, such as the Michelin Man that Señor Caravaca so amply displayed in his most recent distortion presentation.

Thus, the Hillsdale College co-eds and farmer Frank Mannor (whom I met when I worked for The Detroit News) would not have as vivid an encounter as would someone who had proximity to things that are science fiction oriented.

But did anyone determine exactly what science fiction materials or materials of an other-worldly nature came into contact with those who have reported their alleged encounters?

The forensics are missing.

So we, and Jose Caravaca, are working with incomplete data and incomplete information.

But Señor Caravaca’s point that UFO encounters have not taken place, spontaneously, in public venues or urban venues, at least not in the numbers that encounters have occurred in rustic settings.

If psychological or neurological stimuli were the cause of UFO encounters, one would expect encounters to occur in places other than where they have generally occurred: pastoral settings mostly.

ET proponents might suggest that extraterrestrials pick arboreal places for their visitations to hide their agenda or presence, for reasons that only they, the alien visitors, know.

I’m troubled by such views, and even by Señor Caravaca’s “others” who, he says, conceive and direct the encounters and purposely select their marks who, as I see it, are often not in the highest I.Q. categories.

But his point that psychological or neurological causes are not selective, as far as we know, is well-taken.

Jacques Vallee’s views are stymied also by a lack of logic or coherency that is endemic to his Magonia selections.

The ETHers are similarly hobbled by the incongruity of their extraterrestrial visitors.

How could an alien culture, able to put together vehicles for interstellar travel, be so silly after they arrive here, engaging in behavior that borders on insanity or, at least, inanity?

Again, we are back to phenomena that are adjuncts to the categorical UFO phenomenon, and no closer to a sensible denouement.

But Jose Caravaca’s Distortion Theory is very interesting, One has to give him that….

RR

Tropic of UFOs?

2012-01-24T12:05:00.002-05:00

My Google UFO notification e-mail had a link to the Open Minds site, about author Henry Miller (pictured) and his interest in UFOs.

Mr. Miller wrote Tropic(s) of Cancer and Capricorn as you literati or Seinfeld aficionado types know.

Click HERE for the Open Minds article by Antonio Huneeus.

It's quite interesting...

RR

Brain Waves and UFO Encounters

2012-01-23T16:44:00.002-05:00

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

My foray into the psychology of UFO encounters and Jose Caravaca’s implication of mental interference causing UFO “events” have to be tempered by the findings of neuroscience.

The brain is always awash in interferences, some sensory, some electrical, and some extra-sensory.

There are also other interferences, at the fringe of exploration and understanding that haven’t received the exposure that takes them from the obscure and arcane.

Dr. Michael Persinger has touched on such interferences. (Google him.)

To clarify, I’m linking readers here to this interesting paper…

The Science Behind Holosync® and other Neurotechnologiesby Bill Harris (Director of Centerpointe Rsearch Institute A Revolution Institute) subtitled A Revolution in Neuroscience: Tuning the Brain

Which contains such statements as these:

David Krech, Ph.D., a University of California at Berkeley psychologist, predicted almost twenty-five years ago: “I foresee the day when we shall have the means, and therefore, inevitably, the temptation, to manipulate the behavior and intellectual functioning of all people through environmental and biochemical manipulation of the brain.”

There are four categories of brain wave patterns. The most rapid brain wave pattern is that of beta, from about 14 Hz to more than 100 Hz. This is the pattern of normal waking consciousness, and it is associated with concentration, arousal, alertness, and cognition, while at higher levels, beta is associated with anxiety. As we become more relaxed, the brain wave activity slows into the alpha range, from 8 to 13.9 Hz. These are the brain wave patterns of deep relaxation, and of what has been called the twilight state between sleep and waking, while the higher end of alpha represents a more relaxed yet focused state. Slower still are theta waves, between 4 and 7.9 Hz. This is the state of dreaming sleep and also of increased creativity, super-learning, integrative experiences, and increased memory. The slowest brain wave pattern is delta, that of dreamless sleep, below 4 Hz. Generally people are asleep in delta, but there is evidence that it is possible to remain alert in this state—a very deep trance-like, non-physical state.

Other scientists have noted that these slower brain wave patterns are accompanied by deep tranquility, flashes of creative insight, euphoria, intensely focused attention, and enhanced learning abilities. Dr. Lester Fehmi, director of the Princeton Biofeedback Research Institute, has said that hemispheric synchronization represents “the maximum efficiency of information transport through the whole brain” and “[it] is correlated experientially with a union with experience, and ‘into-it-ness.’ Instead of feeling separate and narrow-focused, you tend to feel more into it—that is, unified with the experience, you are the experience—and the scope of your awareness is widened a great deal, so that you’re including many more experiences at the same time. There’s a whole-brain sensory integration going on, and it’s as if you become less selfconscious and you function more intuitively."

Other scientists have noted that these slower brain wave patterns are accompanied by deep tranquility, flashes of creative insight, euphoria, intensely focused attention, and enhanced learning abilities. Dr. Lester Fehmi, director of the Princeton Biofeedback Research Institute, has said that hemispheric synchronization represents “the maximum efficiency of information transport through the whole brain” and “[it] is correlated experientially with a union with experience, and ‘into-it-ness.’ Instead of feeling separate and narrow-focused, you tend to feel more into it—that is, unified with the experience, you are the experience—and the scope of your awareness is widened a great deal, so that you’re including many more experiences at the same time. There’s a whole-brain sensory integration going on, and it’s as if you become less selfconscious and you function more intuitively."

Budzynski and psychobiologist Dr. James McGaugh of the University of California at Irvine have both found that information is also more easily processed and recalled in a theta state. Noted researchers Elmer and Alyce Green, of the Menninger Foundation, have also studied this phenomenon, finding that memories experienced in a theta state “were not like going through a memory in one’s mind but rather like an experience, a reliving.” Individuals producing theta waves also had “new and valid ideas or synthesis of ideas, not primarily by deduction but springing by intuition from unconscious sources.”

As you can see, there is room here to interject such comments, as those above, into most, if not all, of the UFO accounts we (me and Jose Caravaca) have presented recently.

The paper, as you will find, when you access it, is heavy on the electrical aspect of brain interference or manipulation.

What is missing from the UFO accounts that have been gathered by UFO investigators, over the years, are informational needs such as what electrical facilities were close by the sightings they gathered, as well as other pertinent information and data, perhaps.

That is, we are missing important ingredients that are needed to evaluate UFO sightings and encounters properly, even “scientifically.”

We are slipshod in our hypotheses here, not because we wish to be so but because those who have provided UFO accounts have given us emasculated renditions.

Those who’ve garnered UFO tales have been remiss, mightily so, in gathering all the forensic information that one needs to adequately get at an explanation for what really occurred when someone saw a UFO or encountered entities and scenarios that evoke incredulity when we examine UFO reports.

I think that neuroscience is a discipline that can explain many UFO accounts.

As a step in that direction, I invite you to access and thoughtfully read the Harris paper.

Click HERE for the PDF.

RR

Jose Caravaca elaborates on his Distortion Theory

2012-01-22T11:38:00.003-05:00

Jose Antonia Caravaca has provided a significant elaboration of his Distortion Theory, using the Michelin Man logo as the prima causa for some UFO and non-UFO events.

This is must-reading for those who've found, thus far, Senor Caravaca's views palatable as an explanation for many, if not all, UFO encounters.

Click HERE to access his blog and latest effort to define his developing "theory."

UFO Witness Testimony: True or False?

2012-01-21T10:10:00.003-05:00

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

The Michalak UFO encounter at Falcon Lake, Canada in 1967, noted earlier here, has dubious value for some of you.

I think it has a patina of authenticity.

Speculating about witness testimony creates all kinds of amateur opinion and brings forth shards of erroneous information from the internet.

However, witness testimony is often, or usually, all that we have when it comes to UFOs.

When someone or a few people report a strange light in the night sky or a strange object in the daytime sky, one can equate the observations with misperceptions of mundane things or one can catalog the observations for what they are: strange lights or objects seen my normal people with normal or near-normal eyesight.

And that’s it. Nothing more can be done with such observations.

Our foray into witness testimony from Roswellians always causes a ripple of contention and debate.

But Roswell’s witnesses, for the most part, didn’t see a UFO, in the sky or on the ground.

Some said they held pieces of “metal” that behaved oddly when toyed with.

Some said they saw a field of debris that was different from what they normally saw in the deserts and farms around Roswell.

Some even said they saw bodies of entities, in the desert, in hangars, and other venues.

But no one saw a UFO or flying saucer, and all the testimony about bodies and strange metal fragments came forth in the late 1970s and early 1980s after some UFO hobbyists started poking around, culling testimony that is besmirched by flawed questioning and psychological projections by the hobbyists.

So Roswell isn’t a platform from which worthwhile UFO testimony can be gotten or evaluated.

Roswell is a potpourri of maltreated memories and contrived imaginings better left to psychiatry and sociologists.

But there are many other UFO-related encounters, like that of Stefan Michalak, or Lonnie Zamora, the police officer who came across a unique craft and attending entities.

There are dozens, hundreds even, of accounts where people have seen something that has come to be defined as a flying saucer, and many of those accounts include entities that rival creatures from fiction.

UFO books and the internet are replete with such accounts.

But what are we to make of such accounts?

I think that what has been presented by those who’ve experienced encounters with craft and creatures are as they have been recounted, caveated by the personal peccadilloes of observation that plague human beings.

But those peccadilloes are minor, and the over all experiences provided are essentially as they are described.

Michalak encountered a machine that caused him some physical pain and markings.

The 1959 Father Gill sighting in Papua, New Guinea is what it is: a sighting by an Anglican priest and his mission staff and members of a object that floated above them, from which entities waved or interacted with the observers.

The sighting may be ascribed to a kind of mass hysteria, but it makes more sense to allow it to be as it was recounted, without the psychological overlay.

The following accounts are detailed in John Spencer’s World Atlas of UFOs; Sightings, Abductions, and Close Encounters [SMITHMARK Publishers, NY, 1992]

The 1979 Mindalore Quezet “abduction” was what it was: a experience of a mother (Meagan) and son (Andre) who, under hypnosis, elaborated on a sighting of this object and its occupants:

Was there an Oedipal element that explains the sighting? Perhaps. Or it was as it later was remembered. (More of this, upcoming.)

The 1970 Imjärvi, Finland encounter, in which two young fellows (Aarno Heinonen and Esko Viljo), while skiing, spotted a saucer-like craft that shot a beam of light to the ground near them, from which a short humanoid creature emerged, wearing a helmet, and glowing like “phosphorous.”

The being held a black box that emitted a light that struck the young men, creating a mist, that beclouded the creature, and the beam of light that went back up into the craft, taking the little being with it.

One of the boys, Aarno, was partially paralyzed, and both fellows had symptoms similar to radioactive poisoning.

(Aarno went on to have other sightings and encounters with space women and men. He became a kind of contactee.)

Did these young men actually have the experience they reported? Their after-event symptoms indicate that something happened, but like Mr. Michalak’s encounter, exactly what?

The 1979 Taylor encounter in Livingston, Scotland, detailed here in an much earlier blog posting,
fascinates me.

Sixty-one year-old Robert Taylor was a forester who, while inspecting some new trees, was confronted by a globular object from which emerged to spiked spheres that grabbed Mr. Taylor by the legs, dragging him toward the large, globular object.

Mr. Taylor lost consciousness, but awoke disheveled and unable to stand comfortably. His truck was mired in mud and he had to walk home.

He suffered a headache for some hours after the incident and had a inordinate thirst that lasted for two days.

His heavy blue serge trousers were torn, ostensibly from the spikes on the spheres that grabbed him.

Mr. Taylor had an unsullied reputation in his community and BUFORA, a British UFO investigative group, found ground traces that seemed to confirm Mr. Taylor’s account.

Did Mr. Taylor concoct his story? Why?

Like Mr. Michalak, Lonnie Zamora, Reverend Gill, and the others noted here, what would be the motive, the reason for such bizarre contrivances?

Did each of these people misperceive a mundane event? Unlikely. Misperceptions with such similarities would create a category of hallucinations that would throw psychiatry in to a dither.

Are each of these encounters, of which there are many, many more, neurological quirks? Again, a neurological etiology would force neurologists to establish a mental substrate that lies outside the sensate reality humans work within, or misconstrue.

Are such stories evidence of Jose Caravaca’s Distortion hypothesis or Jacque Vallee’s ethereal others explanation?

Perhaps. But that would mean something is intertwined with humanity to the exclusion of any other kind of rational reality; that is, something or some presence is fixated on inserting experiences in the minds of common folk, and to what end?

But does the idea that alien visitors are engaged in such foolery make any more sense?

What we are left with is the question of witness testimony.

Is it as it is recounted? I think it is. But I have no idea what it means, nor do I have any inkling of an explanation.

While memory over time fades and/or confabulates, these encounters were reported in situ and do not have the flaw of time to corrupt the descriptions.

What was said to have happened happened.

Now where does that take us I keep asking…

RR

Nick Redfern is back in the desert, near Roswell...

2012-01-19T14:51:00.002-05:00

Nick just can't leave Roswell alone.

Again, he caters to the Roswell quidnuncs with this HERE.

Tangible Distortion, Psychological/Physiological Affliction, or actual Alien Encounter?

2012-01-18T11:43:00.000-05:00

Stefan Michalak, a mechanic by trade and amateur prospector, who died in 1999, came across a cigar-shaped craft while on a weekend prospecting jaunt near Falcon Lake, which lies between Manitoba and Ontario, Canada; this on May 19th, 1967.

Click HERE for an excellent précis of the encounter.

Mr. Michalak, as the story, presented in the link tells, was burned by some kind of exhaust that emanated from the craft he chanced upon:

According to Jose Caravaca’s developing hypothesis, dubbed Distortion, Mr. Michalak was intersecting with a presence that co-mingled its imagery with Michalak’s to provide a scenario, for reasons not clear, but palpable.

However, would Señor Caravaca’s scenario create something as palpable as severe burns which eventually produced nausea and illness that resembled radiation poisoning?

Or did Mr. Michalak create his burns by psychological inducement, much like those who create stigmata out of their religious fervor?

Or do we need to concede that Mr. Michalak confronted a flying machine that was either a military prototype or a craft from another world or universe?

Here’s Mr. Michalak’s drawing of the machine he came across:

A reading of Mr. Michalak’s account and the follow-ups by UFO researchers and mavens indicates to me that Mr. Michalak wasn’t faking his encounter or producing a hoax.

His background and subsequent illness mitigate against a fraud.

If he created his stigmata-like burns marks from a psychological or mental thrust, we would have a new category of psychiatric etiologies.

If he was the recipient of a Distortion scenario, the instigators were a little harsh in their instigation of the “drama” – not an impossibility, but a bizarre encroachment on reality as we know it.

My feeling is that Mr. Michalak met up with a tangible machine, and suffered physical and mental trauma afterward.

The question is what was the origin of the machine?

Your take(s)?

RR

Nick Redfern provides an intriguing story

2012-01-17T15:32:00.002-05:00

Nick Redfern brings forth a story about a British Air Marshall's brush with a human-looking alien, dubbed Mr. Janus.

Click HERE for Nick's interesting tale.

(No, that's not Mr. Janus, pictured, but our favorite movie extraterrestrial.)

Ufological censorship and envy

2012-01-17T08:49:00.001-05:00

I see that Paul Kimball is over at Kevin Randle’s blog railing against Anthony Bragalia.

Why not here, Paul?

And Lance Moody has slid into the anti-Bragalia mode there also…probably because I won’t let him get a foothold here.

Paul and Lance are guys who would censor weird UFO ideas and methodologies that offend them.

This is a topic, UFOs, where there is no core, no moral or scientific rectitude, about which one (or many) can revolve, intellectually.

The UFO enigma eludes ratiocination. The very unknown nature of UFOs prevents sensible reasoning.

And since Mr, Bragalia engages in hyperbole and obtuse, but interesting to me, research, we, the RRRGroup, give him an open forum.

Mr. Moody is a reactionary, a debunker and skeptic. I like his skepticism.

But he would censor and censure the likes of Mr. Bragalia but never dare to go after the UFO UpDate quidnuncs who give reason and commons sense a bad name.

Mr. Moody, as far as I know, doesn’t theorize about UFOs. He just attacks those who do.

Now don’t get me wrong, I like, as I said, Lance Moody, and when he comes here to comment, I’ll engage him in counter-argument if need be….to no avail, but at least face-to-face as it were.

Paul Kimball is a “friend” of mine or so I believe.

He has a thing about Mr. Bragalia, and Scott Ramsey – the Aztec crash promoter.

I’m not privy to why he “hates” these men or, rather, their ideas.

But to lump Mr. Bragalia in with the likes of Kal Korff and other UFO reprobates is shameful and unreasoned.

That Lance and Paul go to great lengths to besmirch Mr. Bragalia offends me.

I know how hard Mr. Bragalia works to get at what he thinks are important UFO issues.

We, Tony and I, are not on the same page about many things.

I don’t think the Zamora/Socorro event was a prank, but Tony has mustered some intriguing circumstantial evidence for his view that it was.

And I think the Wanaque UFO beam photo is a hoax, but Tony, again, has gathered information that belies my hoax opinion.

As for Roswell, the story is so screwed up now that one can’t have a sensible opinion about it, although Kevin Randle’s “Dream Team” is going to try to clear away the dross and get back to the facts and/or the reality of the “incident.”

I say let them have at it, cold-case style.

Mr. Bragalia has hovered around Roswell for some time, with memory metal follow-ups and his latest probe that has caused a ruckus: Veterans who say they weren’t at Roswell during the 1947 episode but whose military records indicate otherwise.

Tony calls their denials of service dishonorable, which make Paul and Lance, and others (CDA and Gilles Fernandez) to cringe.

Now the cringers haven’t talked with the veterans. Mr. Bragalia has.

He is competent, in my mind, to ascertain whether these old men are lying or holding back information, and Mr. Bragalia is better suited to pass judgement on their positions than anyone else….he (Tony) has made a connection with them.

That Lance, CDA, Paul, Tim Printy, et al. don’t like how Mr. Bragalia has defined these veterans’ responses is fair game.

But to attack Mr. Bragalia’s conclusions because they – the cringers – have some misplaced affection for old guys who were in the military and now refuse to admit to such is intellectual insanity.

It’s an attempt to control the UFO debate, which is a sin of UFO UpDaters, like UFO compiler, Jerry Clark and his lackey Don Ledger who try to do that with obtuse views at Errol Bruce-Knapp’s forum.

I won’t allow a censoring of Anthony Bragalia, or my own oblique views, or anyone else’s that we choose to highlight here.

That they have carte blanche to use Kevin Randle’s blog to vent their spleens is fine with me.

But they won’t get an easy path to show their envy or unreasoning personal attacks here without a fight from me.

That’s all….now back to the UFO phenomenon, which is what we all should be trying to explain.

RR

Roswell Vets don't own up to being at Roswell (1947)

2012-01-16T09:30:00.002-05:00

Anthony Bragalia has interviewed a number of veterans whose military records indicate they were stationed at Roswell in 1947, during the alleged flying disk crash.

However, those veterans continue to say they weren't there, despite the official records indicating otherwise.

Click HERE to read Mr. Bragalia's account and research about this quirk that is endemic to Roswell veterans.

It's a significant element in the Roswell story.

Two UFO things that baffle (me)

2012-01-15T14:16:00.004-05:00

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

In Peter Kolosimo’s Spaceships in Prehistory (noted here in a previous posting) are these two pictorials of ancient drawings on cave walls:

Such images are used by Ancient Astronaut theorists to indicate that the pictures depict extraterrestrials wearing space helmets, like those used by today’s Earthian astronauts.

The extraterrestrials, apparently couldn’t breathe Earth’s oxygen-rich air, when they visited eons ago.

However, today’s alleged extraterrestrial visitors – the so-called “grays” – don’t need helmets, as they are generally spotted without any.

Why would this be?

Also, why would AA’s space visitors be wearing space gear like that of Earth’s Twentieth Century space travelers, but not something a little more advanced?

It’s queer.

Then, while I continue my reading of Kevin Randle’s very interesting book, Reflections of a UFO Investigator, I read a case study on Page 50 about an unnamed farmer who, among several others, found weird, circular depressions in his fields.

But this fellow also saw an egg-shaped craft, from which emerged two small entities (and left with a blue-flame propulsion thrust):

Mr. Randle cites the Lonnie Zamora sighting from 10 years earlier, and wonders if the farmer was telling a tale based on that famous sighting.

What intrigues me is that the farmer’s egg-shaped craft was drawn, by the farmer, with the egg standing upright on landing legs, not unlike another sighting noted earlier here.

Zamora’s craft was drawn with the egg-shaped craft horizontal, not upright (similar to the La Madera craft seen in the same time-frame – 1964):

Why would a hoaxer not follow the Zamora drawing if they were using that sighting as the template for their fraud?

Or did Zamora have it wrong?

Just wondering….

RR

Ufology: Ignorance and the concepts of Freud’s Totem and Taboo

2012-01-14T12:07:00.003-05:00

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

It is highly disturbing for those who have an intellectual bent to have to cope with the ignorant comments and asides of those who presume to beset blogs and web-sites with their broadsides or to create wholesale pastiches of palaver like mine, this being an example.

But here with are, within the internet world, exposing our biases and stupidities for all to see, most not getting enlightened by anything they read or discover online.

Buying a book and devouring it is passé for the great unwashed, from whom we derive, here, a cursory commentary that is steeped in gatherings from other rabble on the web.

And this rabble is enamored of the paranormal, infusing it with more than it deserves.

Freud tells us in his monumental work from 1912-1913, Totem and Taboo, page 113 of the Vintage paperback, 1960:

“Thus the omnipotence of thought, the over-estimation of psychic processes as opposed to reality, proves to be of unlimited effect in the neurotic’s affective life and in all that emanates from it.”

And the insistence that UFOs and all the ruminations about it are important goes to the heart of this neuroticism.

An example of how I suspect that we are suffused here with neurotics is the avoidance of any discussion about the posting, by me, a few days ago, about an Orgasmic UFO event.

The subject is taboo for UFO aficionados, even though sexual elements are rife in UFO cases, as one will see by reviewing UFO accounts from ancient references right up to and including the contactee era (as delineated by Nick Redfern in his book, Contactees and many of the cases that Kevin Randle investigated or provides in his new book, reviewed here partially, yesterday, 1/13/12).

The sexual aspect of UFO abductions are blatant, obvious. The subtler sexual aspects of UFO sightings, generally, are not obvious, but there nonetheless.

And here is an example of the sexual nature found in UFO iconography from the past, and overlooked by Ancient Astronaut theorists;

This from Peter Kolosimo’s wonderful, pictorial book, Spaceships in Prehistory [University Books, Inc, Secaucus, NJ, 1976, Page 223]:

This is a stele of the Lunigians, preserved in a museum at Spezia, Kolosimo writes.

It is representational of the many statues and images of the Phallic god of ancient times, of which the Hebrew god, Yahweh, was one.

Did the gods of old, the so-called extraterrestrial visitors of the AA crowd, accentuate sexuality, the procreation of humankind, and are still doing so today?

Ah, but the subject matter is taboo. Why? Because UFO mavens are an ignorant, repressed lot, as psychoanalytics would have it, and social historians, like Tocqueville, would also.

One can’t really broach the topic of sexuality in the realm of UFOs, because the field is flush with sexist attitudes (See UFO Updates for example after example) and perverse sexual psychopaths who concentrate on the homosexual insinuation of “probes” while ignoring the generic sexual symbolism that has been substantiated by psychologists and anthropologists for decades.

I agree, it’s not a comfortable topic, but it needs to be addressed, even if only peripherally.

I won’t go further with this here, or generally, at this particular blog.

The topic is for cognoscenti, and a few enlightened individuals, for whom psychology is not an esoteric realm, like alchemy or witchcraft and ghost-hunting.

But, at least, consider the possibility that UFO accounts have a sexual underpinning, psychologically or even extraterrestrially.

RR

Nick Redfern tackles the Roswell dummies

2012-01-12T12:48:00.002-05:00

Nick Redfern continues to look at Roswell, despite Paul Kimball's chagrin about Nick, me, and others continuing to plumb the Roswell effluvia.

Click HERE to access Nick's latest salvo, if Roswell still intrigues you.

Orgasmic UFO Encounter?

2012-01-11T15:38:00.002-05:00

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

In Ronald Story’s Encyclopedia of Extratrerrestrial Encounters (recommended earlier here), on page 120 ff. there is an account of an apparent abduction on the Vermont side of Lake Champlain, north of Burlington, at a girls camp – Buff Ledge – on August 7th, 1968.

A young man (16) and a young girl (17), both workers at Buff Ledge, were alone on a dock, while most of the campers and counselors were away on a two-day break.

A white, cigar-shaped [sic] object appeared over the lake. The object dispersed three small, round objects “which performed acrobatic maneuvers” before two of the objects disappeared.

The one remaining object headed toward the boy and girl, stopping about ten feet from them on the end of the dock.

The boy, recalling the experience, said he saw a “classic ‘flying saucer’ with a transparent dome and revolving, multicolored glowing rim.”

The girl was in a trance-like state.

He then saw two short entities “behind the dome clothed in tight-fitting uniforms. They had large heads, big oval eyes, and a small mouth. They told him, telepathically, that they were from a distant planet and were not about to harm him or the girl.

The entity remembered

The craft moved overhead, bathed them in a beam of light, and the boy and girl were rendered unconscious.

When they came to, it was dark, and the campers had returned, two or them (girls) thought to have seen the object depart, the boy recalled.

The boy and girl felt inordinately tired went to bed in separate quarters.

Ten years later, the young man contacted J. Allen Hynek, and was subjected to hypnotic sessions to recall his alleged “missing time.”

He and the young woman, who reconnected evidently, both remembered, under hypnosis, the craft’s dimly lit interior, the entities (as described) and guides that attended them, she being “probed” and inspected by “strange figures” – while she was told to keep her eyes closed(!).

The young man recalled standing by, with his guide, as his friend was being examined.

Both “abductees” remembered that while two entities conducted the alleged examination, a third entity “monitored a console below an array of screens.”

The young man didn’t recall an examination on him but did remember, under his hypnosis, that he and his guide journeyed to the “mother ship” from which the object came that took him and his friend aboard.

The tour “included riding a tube of light (!) across a giant hangar, the placement of a helmet on his head” which provided the imagery of a park-like landscape, where his (girl) friend joined him.

Three possible supporting witnesses, to the sighting of the object, were found, but there was a discrepancy in their dates.

Walter N. Webb, from whom Ronald Story recreates the story, wrote a book about the event: Encounter at Buff Ledge: A UFO Case History, and the encounter may be found at the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, 1994.

How is the “event” delineated above orgasmic in kind?

On page 81 of The Good Life, Sexually Speaking by Sigmund Stephen Miller [Prentice-Hall, NJ, 1972] is this (about orgasms in women and men):

“At that moment she is disconnected from the world, unrelated to anything that happens outside her body. She has lost all awareness of time and space, nor is she even aware of the man who is making love to her. She is totally immersed in herself…”

Havelock Ellis in Psychology of Sex [Mentor Books, 1933, 1938, 1954] in the section on Erotic Dreams in Sleep [Page 87 ff.] has this on page 92:

“…erotic dreams of the hysterical are by no means always, or even usually, of a pleasurable character. In some cases the illusion of sexual intercourse even provokes acute pain….such persons are often quite innocent of any knowledge of the erotic character of the experience.”

Sandra S. Kahn, M.A. and Jean Davis, Ph.D. in The Kahn Report on Sexual Preferences [St. Martin’s Press, NY, 1981] present in Chapter 4, The Sexual Consensus: Results, page 114 particularly, reports that women fantasy about having sex with two men simultaneously.

But let’s start at the beginning of the narrative…

A cigar-shaped object is seen. (Need I refer to Freudian symbolism?)

Then the cigar-shaped object spews three smaller objects. (You understand that, right?)

One of the spewed objects contains uniformed entities, inside the domes carapace (representing the super-ego).

A beam of light washes over them. (Tantric imagery)

You can get an idea of what was going on psychically from the Chapter, How to Lose Your Mind (Page 187 ff.) in Total Orgasm by Jack Lee Rosenberg [Random House/Bookworks, NY/Berkeley, 1973]:

“This takes you away from what’s happening right now – here and now…” [Page 188]

Your unfinished business may just fade…Many unfinished situations cannot be completed in actuality so fantasy is the only method available to you…Sometimes professional help from a competent therapist is required before you can complete a more deeply disturbing unfinished situation.” [Page 189]

The physical examination of the girl is elucidated in Modern Psychoanalysis, Edited by Judd Marmor [Basic Books, Inc., NY/London, 1968, Page 135 ff.]:

“Each person must be passive and aggressive…”

(The biologic aspects, I shall let you find for yourselves; they are too graphic for here, but go to what the young girl experienced, while her male companion watched.)

The homosexual elements within the account as told by the young man – about being with his guide on a trip to the mother-ship involving a tube of light, a helmet, and a hangar is rife with sexual symbolism and reference, so an exegesis seems unnecessary here.

The account is not dissimilar to the Hill abduction, and took place less than a decade after the Hills’ alleged abduction, which was also fraught with sexual overtones.

Do such stories confirm or add to Jose Caravaca’s Distortion hypothesis? Or are we dealing with a psychological archetype that is sexual and basic to humans, in near conscious dream-like states, and rather common, as found in mythical accounts, religious texts, and historical tracts?

Since sexual intimations are taboo or outside the realm of staid ufologists, the matter of sexual innuendo in UFO accounts, especially encounters, is without much literature and investigation.

Even I hesitated to place this event here, as we are suffused by some perverse UFO mavens who will besmirch legitimate research along the lines of psychosexuality.

But there it is…

RR

Little man seen by a "little man"

2012-01-10T09:16:00.008-05:00

On pages 207 and 208 of Mysteries of Mind, Space & Time, Voume 2 [H.S. Stuttman, Inc., Westport, Conn. 1991] is a story about eight-year-old Tonnlie Barefoot [sic] who, on October 12th, 1976, in Dunn, North Carolina, saw a little man "not much bigger than a Coke bottle" wearing black boots, blue trousers, and a blue top with "the prettiest little white tie you ever saw."

Adults scoffed at the story, upsetting young Tonnlie, until they discovered tiny footprints where the lad said he saw the little man.

What do we have here -- a Vallee-like tale? Or the intrusion of a mini-alien from outer space?

Note the surname of Tonnlie: Barefoot.

And the subsequently found footprints (not bare apparently) but related to feet, obviously.

A Coke bottle, a white tie, black trousers and blue accoutrements -- black and blue.

Are the incidental details important in discovering what young Tonnlie saw?

(And I don't discount what children relate; they invariably are telling the truth, as they perceive it -- their spin is up for grabs, but the essential elements are basically true.)

The story is a minor one, in the context of Magonia-like tales and UFO encounters generally, but it is typical of what Jose Caravaca reports as "distortion" events, provided by observers and caused by the intercession of an ethereal presence.

The strange encounter of young Tonnlie wasn't investigated by anyone, in a thorough manner. Why would it be?

It's what was known in the 1976 time-frame as a human interest tidbit that news media gave a minuscule slot to in the local newspaper(s) or television newscast(s).

My preference for imparting a psychological interpretation might go to an explanation but I think that would be a stretch, as the eight-year-old seems, from the niggardly report, to have been a normal boy without a penchant for making things up or for having neurological mishaps.

Jose Caravaca's and Nick Redfern's intrusion by "others" (causing the imagery and event) is even less likely that my psychological approach.

Why would an extra-human presence create such a small event, with a eight-year-old, in Dunn, North Carolina? It's an absurdity on the face of it.

A Jacques Vallee's Magonia-like event is out of context, for the time-frame, locale, and garb of the little man spotted by Tonnlie Barefoot, but is a possibility, because of the fairy-like ambiance.

But, again, why?

There are a plethora of such accounts as this one.

However, do they impact the UFO question?

Does there need to be a categorical roster, separating UFO reports so that lights in the sky, objects also in the sky, landed craft, with beings interacting with people and/or the environment, or bizarre encounters without UFOs -- a roster that allows a specialistic investigation of such anomalies so we can, eventually, determine what such events mean, if anything, to humankind.

Are some people the butt of jokes by an external, unknown presence?

Are some people neurotically inclined or on a psychotic cusp, and experiencing things totally imagined by a malfunctioning psyche or mind?

Or are we all misperceiving observational quirks, imbuing things with seen or felt cultural encrustations garnered from books, magazines, movies, television, and now the internet?

What's your take? (And stay inside the topic, please....no flights of arcanity.)

Addendum:

Purrlgurrl left a link in a comment below, a link that provides more detail for the account here (above) and attendant material about an AmerIndian "legend" that pertains.

Click HERE for PG's link....it's relevant.

RR

UFOs: The “Other”

2012-01-08T11:09:00.005-05:00

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

The dialogue here, of late, is about the cause of images and activities described by persons who’ve had an encounter with UFOs that goes beyond a mere sighting of a light in the sky or a disk-shaped aircraft flying overhead.

Jose Caravaca has provided, here and at his blog (The Caravaca Files), a slew of cases where a person or persons report remarkable interactions with UFOs and entities from those UFOs.

Señor Caravaca points out that the cases he presents don’t include interactions between humans and exotic animals or Disneyland characters, or any other kind of imagery but only that which is clearly UFO oriented.

That is an important aspect of his developing Distortion Theory.

But I’m going to deal, again, with the prima causa that Señor Caravaca and Nick Redfern say or think is responsible for UFO events.

That prima causa, as Jose and Nick see it, is a psychical influence that has been interacting with humankind since the beginning of sentient life (and maybe even before that).

Now I call that prima causa God or the Universal Sentience: the universal, omnipresent mind.

That mind remains apart and aloof from human beings, unless humans try to make contact with it.

(This is the gist, as I keep writing, of Herman Melville’s epiphanic work, Moby Dick, which you can find an exegesis of by Googling Lewis Mumford, among others.)

God or the Universal Mind intersected with the likes of Moses, Socrates, Joan of Arc, and countless others over the eons of human existence.

But why would my Universal Mind use UFO imagery to make contact with some hapless humans doing nothing but engaging in mundane activities?

Señor Caravaca’s “other” and Nick Redfern’s psychical presence seem more suited to the UFO events they have proffered.

My ubiquitous and totally engaged “divinity” seems a bit too grandiose to take part in the UFO events that have been reported over the years, even that of Ezekiel in the Hebrew Bible.

But in the hierarchal categories of the Gnostics and other esoteric theologies there are minor divinities that one could attribute to the bizarre UFO encounters that have occurred over the years.

So I can accept (and do) the idea that something has interacted with some humans, in former ages as witches or various chimerae, and in (relatively) modern times as elements with the accoutrements of extraterrestrial technology.

But is it possible, and I think it is, that, perhaps, no outside “presence” is involved in UFO activity at all, that psychological or neural machinations may be an integral part of or the prima causa of UFO experience(s).

I think Bruce Duensing agrees with me.

Don Ledger, a peripheral and irrelevant ufologist, mostly in situ at UFO UpDates has been pooh-poohing the psychological etiology for UFOs.

Why do I eschew Don Ledger?

Here’s Mr. Ledger’s recent broadside, at UFO Updates, against Joe McGonagle, a British (skeptical) ufologist with much cachet among UFO cognoscenti about a questionnaire that Joe brought to the attention of UpDate “listers” (as UpDate members like to be known):

From: Don Ledger
Date: Fri, 06 Jan 2012 13:45:42 -0400
Subject: Re: Participation In Psychology Dissertation Study

>From: Joe McGonagle
>Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2012 23:12:14 +0000
>Subject: Re: Participation In Psychology Dissertation Study
...
Any damn fool can find the nut cases out there and lump them in
and poison the whole data pool.

And cut the poor-mouthing Joe; your [sic] not fooling anyone. If I ever see anything positive/upbeat come out of your postings, it will be a day of wonder.

Don Ledger

Note the errant use of “your” for “you’re.”

Mr. Ledger strikes me as a pinhead, so when he eschews the psychological explanation for UFOs, I dismiss his observation.

It is palpable, to me, that neural parameters have much to do with UFO sightings and especially UFO encounters.

One of the reasons that I accent the psychological is that nowhere in the sightings offered by Señor Caravaca is there sheer terror. Yes, some witnesses expressed fear or anxiety but none had indicated terror, like that which some victims of nightmares, night-terrors have reported.

The UFO encounters noted by Caravaca and Redfern are oneiric (dream-like) or similar to a movie or television show.

Now this is for the “modern” era events.

The horrors that humans experienced in the Dark and Middle ages were sparked by the imagery that the Church promulgated, and such enterprises as The Inquisition exacerbated.

The “modern” era allows for a SciFi ambiance, supported by the fecund presence of SciFi imagery in the magazines, movies, TV shows, et cetera that we’ve inserted here in the past few weeks or so.

It doesn’t take an external presence to create UFO events. That indicates a presence that has nothing better to do but play games with a few, insignificant human beings, in lonely places who have no significant societal presence, and only are known by the deep-digging research of such persons as Jose Caravaca (and his Spanish colleagues) or the investigative work of Nick Redfern.

So, where are we in this discussion?

We (my group and some aligned visitors here) have got to find the neural mechanism that could cause he UFO events that occurred in the recent past, but are not taking place now. (And why is that?)

Or Jose Caravaca and Nick Redfern (and even Jacques Vallee) have got to come up with the viable “presence” they say is the instigator of the UFO events or reports that create an awe in some of us.

That’s where we are.

RR

Frank Stalter is trying to tell us (all) something....

2012-01-07T12:13:00.000-05:00

Jose Caravaca provides more "evidence" for his Distortion Theory

2012-01-07T12:02:00.002-05:00

Jose Antonio Caravaca insists that UFO events are a product of "distortion" by something or someone co-creating with UFO witnesses a scenario that is different from a psychologically induced mental configuration, which is what the RRRGroup feels is the sine qua non of UFO experiences.

To read Senor Caravaca's latest thrust for his developing "theory," click HERE to access his Reynolds Group blog.

JS

Try to remain objective and less self-absorbed

2012-01-07T06:54:00.003-05:00

When I post things to this blog (and others), I’m opening the blog to a discussion or discussions relevant to the posting.

I’m attacking ideas. Not people or their character.

I try to follow academic procedure for scrutinizing and challenging ideas that are grist for debate.

Paul Kimball was offended by this from me about him and Nick Redfern, in a comment:

That you and Paul Kimball place so much stock in synchronicity goes to the neurotic, mild form of hubris.

The context was about persons thinking that the gods or the “other” supposedly interacting with humans, and I was suggesting that Nick and Paul were being egocentric in assuming that the outside entity or thing was so enraptured by them that the thing made it a point, to the exclusion of other activity and concerns, to pay attention to their daily lives, providing synchronistic events to wake them up to another reality.

Nick answered my academic accusation graciously and thoughtfully, as usual.

Paul, on the other hand, was defensive, writing that he didn’t put “much stock” in synchronicity and I was mischaracterizing his position about the matter.

Maybe I was, but Paul did, admittedly, provide commentary about synchronicity at his blog, on Facebook, and in a few radio broadcasts.

That may not be “much stock” to him but it is to me.

However, if he wants to dilute my mistaken impression, that’s okay with me. It’s a small matter, a matter of interpretation.

It’s got nothing to do with Paul’s ethics or intelligence or anything to do with him personally.

It was an observation about something he noted, (only?) a few times, nothing more.

His pique seemed unwarranted, to me but, hey, that’s his prerogative: to go after my misperceptions.

I’d rather he would attack the gist of my postings rather than my asides, but the choice is his.

Then we got a note from Bruce Duensing telling us he was out of the campfire circle.

This because I suggested he stay within topic and try to be cogent, succinct in his comments.

Often, I and others have no idea what Bruce is saying or thinking. He’s avidly abstruse, out of brilliance I noted, but he took my suggestion as a personal affront to his cogitation and ideas.

I was merely trying to tell him to be less abstruse.

His clotted prose is often beyond me (and others), over my head perhaps, but not understood regardless.

He shouldn’t take my “editing” proclivities personally.

I merely want an understandable flow of ideas here – without grandstanding or defensive comments because someone is trying to protect their public persona.

This is our, my blog. It’s a minor effort in the great scheme of things, but should be what I want it to be, not what others would like it to be. (They can have or have already their own outlets and blogs.)

More importantly, visitors here can go outside the discussion, but only so far.

This isn’t a free-for-all.

So comment away, attack my stupidities if you need to, but don’t take my petty broadsides personally.

This is a forum for debates about UFOs and attendant matters.

It’s not UFO UpDates where personalities take precedence over ideas.

RR

The Accursed ET/Other Theology of My Friends

2012-01-06T13:29:00.001-05:00

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

I consider Nick Redfern and Jose Caravaca to be “colleagues” (of a kind) and friends, surely.

But when they both associate UFO encounters with an unknown but palpable presence as the instigator of UFOs and UFO events, generally, I am intellectually shocked.

While neither Nick nor Jose thinks that UFOs are vehicles belonging to extraterrestrial visitors – alien entities from outer space -- both do think that a psychically induced something is responsible for UFOs and the encounters that some humans have experienced.

This view, for me, is as tenuous as the ETH position of most ufologists and UFO mavens.

Jung deals with the psychological etiology of UFOs in his book, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (R.F.C. Hull translater) [Princeton University Press, 1978].

Those who believe that UFOs are, indeed, space vehicles by extraterrestrials are not out on a limb necessarily. Visitors from space is a tenable idea. It’s just the magnitude of UFO sightings over the years that mitigates, for me, ET visitations: too many sightings, too many alleged visits, too improbable (mathematically or practical, as I’ve noted before).

But for all intents and purposes, the outside entity or entities favored by Jose and Nick is as iffy as the idea of God, which, for Nick, is anathema. Nick is an “atheist” or so I thought.

The need to have an external presence involved with humanity has been addressed by many thinkers, mostly about the belief in God, but the belief is applicable to a belief in an external presence and source for UFO events, which has, as Jose and Nick see it (without saying so exactly), god-like attributes

A concise rendition of the reality of God (for some) is found in Edward Glover’s “Freud or Jung?” [Meridian Books, NY, 1956, Page 156 ff.];

Adler’s view is that God (or the Other) is a combination of Jung’s Self and the idea of God; an archetype.

It’s the God within, not the God without.

The Self, in a fit neurotic imbalance, projects itself on to an entity called God (or the Other, as I see it).

My friends, Nick, Jose, Tony Bragalia, Lance Moody, Paul Kimball, et al., like me, have super-sized egos, otherwise we wouldn’t be pontificating so vividly here and elsewhere.

Extrapolating our egos to create God or, in this instance, a presence outside ourselves is a manifestation of neurotic hubris that is unconscious or semi-conscious.

It’s not serious, like a pathology; it’s merely a neurotic tic or quirk, but does allow for an unscientific position about UFOs that rankle me and others who find the ideas of Vallee, Tonnies, and my two friends to be equivalent to a belief in magic, witchcraft, and other elements of the arcane, and somewhat crazy.

UFOs are either tangible nuts and bolts craft from other reaches of the Universe or Time, as Frank Stalter would have it, or UFOs are the remnants of psychological machinations as yet unexplained or unexplored by qualified neurologists, psychologists (except for Jung), or science generally.

To persist in the idea that UFOs and UFO encounters are the products of an external, psychical or even material presence is a bit far-fetched for me, at the moment.

But I’m open to further discussion and evidence – even evidence that is circumstantial and/or hypothetical.

RR

Jose Caravaca Challenges the Psychological Hypothesis for UFOs

2012-01-05T20:59:00.003-05:00

Jose Antonio Caravaca is developing a "theory" for UFO encounters -- a theory that eschews the psychological thesis we've been presenting here lately.

Jose's hypothesis is labelled "Distortion Theory" or just "Distortion" and he has provided another case, from 1979, in Spain, to bolster his view(s).

Click HERE to access his blog and ongoing conjecture.

Thank you Bruce Duensing (and Parakletos)!

2012-01-05T12:52:00.006-05:00

Bruce Duensing provided a video link in a comment for my UFOs: The Tangibility Factor post today [1/5/12].

I found the interviewed witness to be so impressive that I'm placing his link here:

1977 UFO Interview of a 1954 sighting

Her story is remarkable for several reasons, as Bruce discovered and shared with us.

View the video and let us know what you think.

Addenda:

Parakletos has provided some additional material for this posting....

Another YouTube interview of Jessie Roestenberg (the woman) which you can view by clicking HERE

And a rather current photo of her holding a depiction of what she "saw":

RR

UFOs: The Tangibility Factor

2012-01-05T10:45:00.002-05:00

Are UFOs tangible?

While some ufologists, over the years, have compiled accounts of trace elements (indentations in the ground, for example) allegedly left by UFOs, a close examination of such reports leave much to be desired in the way of conclusive evidence.

Our favorite UFO sighting, which didn’t involve a UFO at all – the Zamora/Socorro sighting of 1964 – is a case in point.

The impressions supposedly left by the egg-shaped object Zamora spotted, and he did, indeed, spot an egg-shaped object, are what has always raised doubt in my mind.

Why did this one UFO set-down leave marks in the ground when every other UFO or flying saucer seen on the ground didn’t?

Because Zamora’s UFO was a Hughes Aircraft prototype.

(We like Anthony Bragalia’s prank theory of the Socorro sighting, but it is, for us, a bit flimsy when it comes to scrutinizing all the elements of the sighting as reported by Officer Zamora and details recovered by UFO researchers, even those who muffed their investigations: Hynek, Stanford, et al.)

Jerome Clark, in his 1998 work The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial [Visible Ink Press, Detroit], covers “Close Encounters of the Second Kind” – those UFO sightings where J. Allen Hynek placed UFO sightings that left traces or interacted with the environment [Page 82 ff.]

Clark admits that the evidence for the trace elements he cites are not incontrovertible as no one really examined the remnants or indicators supposedly left behind by UFO; experts in the kind of forensics needed to study what was claimed as UFO detritus just do not do so, and ufologists are just not have the expertise to perform a scientific or thorough scrutiny of elements said to have been left by or cased by a UFO encounter or sighting.

Clark provided some accounts of tree limbs being snapped off or waters being parted by a UFO, but there are no sightings in his CE-2 listing which left tangible residue behind, residue that could have provided grist for study.

Ronald Story in The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters [New American Library/Penguin NY, 2001] also provides a roster of sightings that include trace elements within the witness accounts: The Flatwoods “landing,” the 1954 Quarouble, France encounter, the Delphos, Kansas trace landing (where a “fairy-ring-like” spot was created).

[Ronald Story’s book is a must-have, must-read book for UFO aficionados. It covers the UFO waterfront, totally.]

What strikes me is that most of the accounts, almost all of them, in both books cited above contain descriptions of UFO sightings and encounters that are dream-like, oneiric in nature.

Tangible elements are not a part or parcel of UFO sightings, generally or specifically.

The fact, and it is a fact, that almost all UFO cases and accounts are evanescent rather than materialistic is where UFO researchers should muster their investigations.

The neural aspect, which we’ve been touting and which seems to invite counter debate by many, is the key to a UFO explanation I think.

Yes, I like, and always have, the nuts and bolts sobriquet for flying saucers, which became tempered by the term UFO, which has an ephemeral cachet, better suited to the phenomenon.

The more I look at sightings, old and new, the more I am convinced that UFOs are “creatures of the mind” more than creatures from alien galaxies or other worlds of any kind.

What causes the ephemeral UFO experience is where “ufology” should focus its efforts to explain the phenomenon.

The oneric idea allows for the multiplicity of sightings that are reported.

(Extraterrestrial visitations in the numbers indicated by reported sightings seem improbable; mathematically impractical.)

RR

A Real Cloaking Device?

2012-01-04T16:47:00.000-05:00

Click HERE for news story

Kevin Randle's New Book

2012-01-04T15:53:00.003-05:00

Anomalist has published Kevin Randle's latest book: Reflections of a UFO Investigator.

Kevin has been around the UFO block as you know, and his journey has enlightened him and his fans.

(We find him in the earliest of UFO magazine pages, and he's aways provided UFO grist of a thoughtful kind.)

Check out Anomalist.com, Amazon.com or any other bookseller you prefer, for a read that will surely edify you about UFOs and a prominent UFO researcher.

RR

Research, No Research, and UFO Research

2012-01-03T09:11:00.004-05:00

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

UFO Research is oxymoronic, to be generous.

Research, scientific research, or any kind of research operates with, first of all, an overview of the matter or things to be scrutinized – a gestalten observation.

Then, if there are patterns or elements that stand out, the researcher culls the standouts for special attention, a thorough scrutiny perhaps.

I’ve noticed a the tendency, the habit, of most UFO “researchers” to get sidetracked, without a gestalten view of a UFO event, by a side issue or minor aspect of a UFO sighting or event that may or may not be important.

For instance, when I brought up, here, recently, the Aztec/Scully account of an alleged flying saucer crash near Aztec, New Mexico in 1948, the comment section got smuckered by a sidebar involving Silas Newton, a player in the Aztec saga, but a man who has little or nothing to do with the essential story: a crash of a flying saucer near Aztec, from which bodies and the saucer were taken for study by the United States military.

Newton is said to have concocted the story which Variety reporter Frank Scully took, in toto, and wrote one of the seminal books about flying saucers – Behind the Flying Saucers [1950] – at the outset of the saucer craze.

But to zero in on Newton as the premise for Scully’s story strays from the research modus; an intense Newton scrutiny takes researchers away from the reported saucer crash to a vetting of a man who was only a part of the Scully book and story.

Surely, a quirky element that shows up in a researchers studied domain needs to be taken aside and seriously deconstructed to see if that quirky element is an essential part of the thing under scrutiny.

But to laminate a quirky element or detail with such encrustations as seen in the Newton commentaries is to miss the forest for the tree.

And then there is Roswell and the Mogul balloon scenario…

Like the Newton “footnote” some UFO aficionados continue to dissect the Mogul explanation by the United States Air Force for the Roswell crash of 1947.

UFO writer, Kevin Randle regularly opens his blog to a discussion of Mogul and Roswell, which is, for some researchers, what did not happen near Roswell: Mogul is an AF red-herring they contend.

The Mogul balloon hypothesis is a side-bar, but some “researchers” can’t let it go.

The vicissitudes of Roswell place Mogul in a subservient position as far as the event, in totality, is concerned. Mogul balloons don’t provide substance for all the witness accounts and subsequent mythos that has derived from the Roswell incident.

But Mogul is grist, ample grist, for protracted commentary and discussion by Roswell skeptics and Roswell ET die-hards.

Speculating on the Mogul operation takes researchers far from the total Roswell picture, just as concentrating on Silas Newton takes researchers far from the tale of the Aztec crash.

Then there is the 1957 RB-47 event, which is touted by Paul Kimball and others as the “Best” UFO incident, for study and confirmation of the UFO reality, ever.

But researchers, like Tim Printy, Brad Sparks, and Kimball, have circled their research wagons around the reported radar returns that the RB-47 Air Force crew experienced.

The radar returns are a subtle element in the whole RB-47 account; cold war exigencies, crew psychology (as a totality and individually), mechanical quirks of the aircraft (if any), et cetera, have to be considered before researchers grapple with only one random aspect of the total event: the radar mischief.

UFO “researchers” approaching their subject, then fixating on one subtle, minute irrelevant detail within that event is typical of the UFO mavens modus operandi.

UFO researchers don’t seem to have the wherewithal to take on UFOs in a scientific way.

Go to UFO UpDates for myriad examples where UFO fanatics get hooked on a particular detail of a sighting and pummel that detail until it is so bloodied and broken that it is of no value to anyone, least of all to a real researcher, who might be able to connect it to meaningful patterns in other UFO accounts.

The side-bar researcher makes banal something that might be important. They do this by trivializing details, which they use to show-off or feign expertise, where there is none.

Newton, Mogul, the RB-47 radar, are all without scientific cachet, in the context of the whole that their UFO reference represents.

But scrounging around for meaning in such minutiae is what most UFO researchers do.

And that’s why the UFO mystery remains intact; amateurs and research-pretenders have spoiled the UFO pottage.

(And lest anyone think we are excusing our own side-tracks – the Socorro symbol, for instance -- we’re not. We are as guilty as anyone of getting caught up in a footnote. But, at least, we know that we’re culpable, and do not fool ourselves, or anyone else, that we’re real researchers. We’re as flawed as those we’re excoriating here.)

RR

Jose Caravaca finds another antecedent for a noted UFO encounter

2012-01-02T16:16:00.002-05:00

The picture above is a from a 1944 painting by SciFi artist Hannes Bok.

Spanish UFO researcher Jose Antonio Caravaca finds the painting and a poem about the painting to be prescient; the painting anticipates the 1955 Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter.

Click HERE to access Senor Caravaca's blog -- The Caravaca Files -- for the association.

More images to support the media influence on UFO observations and encounters

2012-01-02T13:06:00.002-05:00

Our friend and colleague, Spanish UFO researcher Jose Antonio Caravaca, in an effort to support my post about the influence of movies and television on alleged UFO encounters (and his developing "Distortion Theory") has provided a plethora of magazine covers from 1915 to the 1960s.

One, above, from 1915, antedates the Wanaque Reservoir intrusions of 1961, covered by Anthony Bragalia at his blog (The Bragalia Files) and here.

I've inserted, at our private UFO web-site, all the covers that Senor Caravaca has provided, in a size that allows you to see the dates and imagery clearly.

Click HERE to access the covers and, as usual, your pertinent comments are welcome.

RR

French UFO Researcher, Gilles Fernandez offers a newsletter about Paul Kimball's "Best" UFO Case: The RB-47 Incident

2012-01-02T08:29:00.007-05:00

There has always been some contention about the intriguing 1957 RB-47 "episode" where an Air Force crew interacted with "something" that tagged along its plane, playing with the radar.

French UFO skeptic Gilles Fernandez supports Tim Printy's analysis that dismisses the event, and Gilles provided us with a newsletter (PDF) that presents the counter view to what Brad Sparks, Mr. Kimball, and others extol.

Click HERE to access that newsletter.

(For the RRRGroup, I can say the RB-47 event remains an open question if Paul Kimball, a studious UFO researcher, believes it to be significant and not explainable in prosaic terms; although a Printy/Fernandez dismissal is not to be shrugged off either.)

RR

Movies and TV have created the UFO phenomenon

2012-01-01T16:33:00.001-05:00

Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.

While watching The Twilight Zone marathon on the SyFy network over New Year holiday weekend, I noticed how the idea of extraterrestrial visitors suffused the series and, as I see it, impacted or influenced the unconscious minds of viewers.

As most of you know, those who’ve had UFO experiences – (somewhat) blasé encounters, abductions, and bizarre interactions (those listed by Jose Caravaca in his Distortion hypothesis) – recount those experiences in ways that mimic scenarios that one finds in movies – Invasion of the Body Snatchers, This Island Earth, et cetera – or television programs – The Outer Limits, said Twilight Zone – and some old radio shows – The Inner Sanctum, for example.

Colin McGinn’s 2007 Vintage book, The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact, provides a non-psychologically afflicted approach to the influence that one will find in UFO encounter accounts and reports.

Although Freud is mentioned, McGinn uses little or no psychobabble to present his views.

Serious visitors to this blog know (or should) that human kind is subliminally impacted by ads and media presentations, and now images and offerings on YouTube, Facebook, and the internet generally.

Vance Packard, in his 1957 best-seller, The Hidden Persuaders, presented his substantive views on how media (ads in particular) seeped into the societal mind and influenced buying and attitudes that marketing people and companies exploited.

A Columbo program from 1973 with Robert Culp delved in the how subliminal messages in film and TV ads could influence behavior.

While Columbo’s airing and Packard’s book insinuates that all classes of people, and in particular, intelligent folks could be influenced as easily as the mentally deficient (and I don’t mean those with inferior brains), those who have lower I.Q.s than the population generally.

But UFO aficionados know that those who’ve reported and report UFO encounters (Hickson and Parker, the Hills, and those noted by Jose Caravaca at his blog, et al.) are not at the top of the intellectually sophisticated file; the encountered are common folks, generally: persons prone to be influenced by social and cultural elements.

When has a MacArthur Grant person experienced a UFO landing, or a Hawking assistant, or one of Einstein’s associates come face to face with UFO occupants?

When has a Tolstoy, or Fitzgerald, or Pynchon type had a UFO encounter?

My point is that persons with lower mental abilities have UFO encounters – and that includes Ezekiel in the Hebrew texts; he was prone to believe in things and people from the skies.

I’m not taking about UFO sightings, per se, here. Many of us have had UFO sightings, but those sightings stop at the observation.

When a UFO sighting triggers an “encounter,” one has to consider the Caravaca “theory” that a kind of oneirism takes place, and this is what McGinn covers in his book (see above).

We are dealing with something a little more complex than an hallucination, arguably, but something that is palpable enough to be studied or researched by those hoping to get a handle on the meaning of UFOs – those at ground level anyway.

RR

Happy New Year blog visitors

2011-12-30T16:49:00.002-05:00

Click HERE for a treat

UFOs have never impacted humanity or civilization

2011-12-30T09:28:00.001-05:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

While some visitors here and even ourselves appear to be absorbed by Roswell and/or other UFO incidents (Socorro for one), and while our friend Chris Aubeck (Wonders in the Sky with Jacques Vallee) scours antiquity’s dcouments, via his Yahoo Magoniax Forum (where people submit ancient UFO accounts), we, all of us, have to realize and accept the “fact” -- and it is a fact –- that UFOs, for all our attention, have not affected humanity’s evolution, humanity’s civilizations, or any significant human enterprise.

Looking through the books below, we found not one item or footnote that referred to UFOs or anything that could be construed as a UFO; on the contrary, lots of things that prior civilizations embraced and noted (with art, writing, and action) were so removed from the UFO phenomenon that one is stunned by the attention Ancient Astronaut theorists get with their seemingly abundant litany of extraterrestrial artifacts and influences. Such artifacts and influences just do not exist, on a scale that betokens (meaningful?) alien visitations in the past.

The books listed here are only a few of the many that we (the RRRGroup and The Einstein Fellowship in Ann Arbor) perused for UFO or UFO-like references:

The Hittites by O. R. Gurney [Originally a Penguin Book, 1952, reissued by The London Folio Society, 2000]

Ancient Europe: A Survey by Stuart Piggott [Aldine Publishing Company, Chicago, 1965/1970]

The Mochica: A Culture of Peru by Elizabeth P. Benson [Praeger Publishers, NY, 1972]

Our Oriental Heritage (Part One of The Story of Civilization) by Will Durant [Simon and Schuster, NY, 1954]

We have culled from those books, the images created by the cultures examined, and present some here, noting the obsession that humanity, the peoples covered by the tomes, had with hunting, war, dress, sex, and death. (None had an obsession with visitors from the sky, except as anthropomorphic renditions of their gods, who also seemed consumed by war, dress and, especially sexuality.)

The Hittites:

Gurney [ibid]

The Mochica (an accent on sexuality and death):

Benson [ibid]

Ancient Europe:

Piggott [ibid]

Our Oriental Heritage:

Durant [ibid]

My point is that human culture (art, writing, warfare et cetera) has been noted by the ancients right up to today, with no ubiquitous insertion of UFOs or things that look like UFOs.

UFOs play no part in the modality of human evolution, mental or physical.

UFOs are a minor, peripheral phenomenal insertion in the movement from primitivism to human intellectual advancement.

That is why historians, archeologists, anthropologists, evolutionists, and science, generally, eschew UFOs; the phenomenon is essentially meaningless, like comets or meteors passing through the skies, or the aurora borealis, which is fascinating, but ephemeral in the great scheme of things.

RR

The Roswell “Dream Team” is off to a bad start!

2011-12-27T19:52:00.001-05:00

Kevin Randle’s blog, the epicenter of the new attempt by some Roswellian “experts” to get at the heart of the Roswell incident, decluttering it, we suppose, of all the erroneous and biased accretions the episode has acquired since about 1980, is immersed in another round of hyperactive back-and-forths of the old kind.

Skeptics Lance Moody, Christopher Allen, and Gilles Fernandez are contending with David Rudiak, the latest ufologist to join the sobriqueted Roswell Dream Team. Even open-minded Nick Redfern has been drawn into the fray, defending broadsides from Roswell neophytes.

Unfortunately the comments have descended into the same arguments that suffused Mr. Randle’s blog previously, several times actually, in the past few years.

If Mr. Randle and his gang of dreamers are to make a new mark – some inroads to the Roswell story that bespeak new information and new approaches – he (Mr. Randle) has to jettison the regurgitated arguments that David Rudiak has puked up again, to counter the skeptical effluvia that always drowns the Roswell event with biases as ugly as those fostered by Roswell ET fanatics.

The slate started out clean, but has now been muddied by the same old, same old stuff that all of us are so damned tried of hearing, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, ad eternum.

Mr. Randle has got to shut his portal until such as time as he and his team can provide something completely new about the 1947 matter.

If he doesn’t do that, he will scuttle an opportunity to garner a thoughtful and intelligent new appraisal of Roswell, one that isn’t beclouded by the detritus that Rudiak, Sorcerer, CDA, Moody, et al, keep shoveling on to the plate of intellectual research and rediscovery.

RR

Frank Scully’s Behind the Flying Saucers: An Inquiry

2011-12-27T10:08:00.002-05:00

Frank Scully’s exposé of an alleged flying disk crash near Aztec, New Mexico in 1948 is dismissed by most UFO cognoscenti, although writer/researcher Scott Ramsey and The UFO Chronicles web-master, Frank Warren, do not dismiss the often ridiculed account by Mr. Scully.

I have an inordinate affection for the book and its story; it was my first book report for a high school English class – for which I got and A -- and I still find the Scully recounting of the supposed incident to be credible, in many ways.

A precis of the incident can be read by clicking HERE.

That aside, I’d like to ask a question…

On page 43 of the original paperback publication [Popular Library/Henry Holt, Inc., 1950], Scully has the discredited, by some, Silas Newton say that “The Air Force took some film [of the saucer alleged to have crashed near Aztec]…But it [the film] fades in two hours, for reasons of security. A special chemical, got only on license, restores the image for another two hours.”

Has anyone heard of such a film?

Remember this is in the 1948-1950 time-frame.

RR

Roswell's Secrets

2011-12-26T03:42:00.003-05:00

One of the sticking points for Roswell skeptics is the idea that "witnesses" and participants would not be or would not have been able to keep the secret of what happened near Roswell in 1947 for as long as they had or have.

But here is a cautionary news item that indicates secrets are sometimes kept for decades, sometimes forever:

Click HERE for a Cold War Secret

And note this aside in the middle of the news account:

So too is the human tale of the 45-year-old secret that many took to their graves.

RR

Thought made Solid?

2011-12-23T10:45:00.004-05:00

Psychologist Robert Crookall, in his paper Practice Astral Projection, presents some "cases" that seem, to me, to be relevant to our discussion here of UFO encounters: Distortion or Mental Aberrations.

Also, this case impacts the Alien Abduction phenomenon, as I read it:

Dr. Crookall provides an encapsulation of "Thought Forms" with this:

There is some pooh-poohing over at UFO Updates about thought creating tangibility.

And I am disinclined to believe that one's thoughts can create matter, but Lucretius, Einstein, Jung, and some Quantumists would allow the possibility it seems, as clinical psychologist Terry L. Pulver notes in his 2004 paper From Inflation to the Ordinary [Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice]:

Lucretius

Jung

Wolfgang Pauli

Dr. Pulver graphs the "procedure" by which this happens:

There is much more to consider, and I'll be posting that material upcoming.

My point is to accomodate Jose Antonio Caravaca who is developing his theory of "Distortion" and Bruce Duensing who seems to accept the ideas of Dr. Michael Persinger who feels that the human mind can be and is affected by physical attributes such as electro- magnetic waves, which produce imagery and experiences of the kind that show up in the UFO encounters that Senor Caravaca and I have listed here.

Such esoteric topics as Astral Projection, Cosmic Consciousness, Out of Body experiences and a few others seem germane to the conversation, even though I am hard-pressed to accept them as part and parcel of UFOs and UFO encounters.

But an open-mind is a must when it comes to UFOs, is it not?

RR

Christmas greetings from Jose Caravaca (for all)

2011-12-22T16:51:00.000-05:00

UFOs: Distortion or Mental Aberrations

2011-12-20T15:21:00.000-05:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

Spanish UFO researcher Jose Antonio Caravaca proposes the hypothesis (which he is trying to develop into a theory) that UFO encounters are a mixture of a staged event by “others” and mental remnants of those having the encounter.

You can read his ideas at his blog by clicking HERE.

Mysteries of Mind, Space & Time: The Unexplained [Volume 1, H. S. Stuttman, Inc., Wetport Connecticut, 1991, Pages 56 and 57] present three incidents that fit Señor Caravaca’s suggestion:

Five creatures with webbed-feet alit from a UFO and examined chickens on a Puerto Rican farm on March 30, 1980:

Two teenagers, awakened by a dog espied the creatures from their bedroom window, and two men sleeping in a car nearby spotted the same creatures, at the same time.

The sleeping men saw a domed UFO; the teenagers didn’t see a UFO.

A house painter in Trowbridge, England, on January 5th, 1980, awoke a 5 a.m. and saw a yellowish-green figure, like a projected image, at the foot of his bed:

The figure said he came from a planet that, because of over crowding, eliminated portions of its population.

Further, he was visiting Earth to seal a crack in our planet, with cement, to keep it from splitting apart.

In October 1974, a couple, with their three sleeping children, were driving to their home at Aveley in Essex (England) when they saw that they were being paced by a blue light.

The light disappeared but they drove into a “well-defined bank of eerie green mist” which caused their radio to spark and crackle.

When they got home, they turned on their television set to see a program they had been rushing to see.

But the TV station was off the air and it was two hours later than they thought it should be.

Bothered by dreams related to the experience, they were placed under hypnosis and recalled being taken aboard a craft…

...where they were shown about the “ship” and underwent medical examinations by creatures described thusly:

None of the persons noted above tried to capitalize on their experiences, so we are left with a few possibilities:

Firstly; they each encountered extraterrestrials or alien visitors from outer space or inter-dimensions.

Secondly; they encountered a concomitant race of beings who reside alongside Earthlings – the Mac Tonnies’ crypto-terrestrial hypothesis.

Thirdly; all of them had a mental aberration that is yet to be defined exactly but falls into the category of hallucinatory hysteria.

Or, they were subject by “entities” yet unknown (or explained) who subjected them to a staged event (for reasons equally unknown), using their own mental remnants to create a scenario that’s weird but not so far from reality that the incidents can be dismissed out of hand: the Caravaca “Distortion” hypothesis.

Whatever occurred, the persons relating the encounters are not insane, in the usual sense, nor are they hoaxers (seemingly). They are normal individuals who’ve had a bizarre experience that is with parameters others find hard to accept or understand.

But note the “sleep factors” and the house painting connection in one of the events above.

What interests me -- there are several things that interest me -– but what stands out is that such occurrences don’t seem to be happening nowadays or are not being reported.

Your thoughts, as usual, are welcome…

RR

Lost Civilizations & Secrets of the Past

2011-12-17T15:58:00.002-05:00

Edited by Michael Pye and Kirsten Dalley

I've reviewed this interesting book for our blogs The Explicator and Fringeology.

You can read the review by clicking HERE or HERE.

RR

2011-12-17T11:18:00.007-05:00

A photographer, J. Laurent, took some photos of the Cadiz skyline in about 1850 or so.

Jose Caravaca found that the photos contain something in the sky, on two of the photos.

The "object" is reversed for each photo; that is, the thing is pointing one way in one photo and another way in a second photo.

He's asking if anyone has an opinion about the "thing" seen.

I think the "object" is a photo or lens flaw.

But your opinion is what Senor Caravaca seeks.

Click HERE to go to our UFO PHOTO blog to see the photos and leave a comment, if you have one.

RR

A 1914 UFO?

2011-12-15T15:40:00.004-05:00

Jose Caravaca has come across a 1914 photo that puzzles him.

He asked if I might have some information about it. I don't.

But maybe one or two of our visitors here might know a little bit about the photo.

Here it is, with the "object" pulled out for closer inspection:

It's not a spectacular UFO image, but is intriguing because of the date it was taken, when photography was relatively new and hoax free pretty much.

RR

Jesse Marcel passes "Truth Test"

2011-12-14T11:11:00.003-05:00

Anthony Bragalia employed an innovative "lie detection" program that ascertained Jesse Marcel Sr's statements about The Roswell crash and its debris were truthful.

Click HERE for Mr. Bragalia's account of the technology employed and the results.

Jose Caravaca bolsters his Distortion Theory

2011-12-12T16:49:00.004-05:00

Spanish UFO researcher Jose Antonio Caravaca provides an account of a UFO landing that he suggests "confirms" his developing Distortion Theory.

Click HERE to read this interesting account from our colleague Senor Caravaca

Nick Redfern recommends a new book detailing a 1964 UFO encounter

2011-12-10T11:25:00.002-05:00

Jose Caravaca and I agree with Nick Redfern that the book pictured here is a must-read in the context of Jose's Distortion theory, and UFOs generally.

Click HERE for Nick's link to information about the event.

Is Technology the Indicator of an Advanced Civilization?

2011-12-09T23:57:00.000-05:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

Revisiting Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery (about the African Dogon tribe’s alleged contact with extraterrestrials 5000 years ago), some questions came to mind.

Why would extraterrestrial visitors visit a small, primitive tribe in the isolated, at the time (and even now), heart of Africa.

Yes, the Sumerians and other cultures on the rim of the Mediterranean Sea are said by some, including Carl Sagan and I.S. Shklovskii in 1966’s Intelligent Life in the Universe, to have been contacted by extraterrestrials, that left intimations of writing, agriculture, math, and other accoutrements of civilized living.

Oannes, the being from the sea who supposedly proffered these gifts is not unlike the Dogon visitors who told those peoples about their place of origin, a planet in the Sirius star system.

Click HERE for an online precis of the Dogon story.

But extraterrestrials would have to be significantly advanced to get here from the Sirius planetary environment, and one would think that such emissaries would seek out cultures and peoples who were much more advanced than the Dogon tribe, to whom they would communicate the locale of their home planet(s).

The chatter between the Dogons and the Sirians would have had to be something beyond difficult.

Even today, the Dogons do not represent an advanced element of Earth’s global society.

Either the Sirius visitors were inept at furthering the cultural evolution of the Dogons or the Sirius visitors represent a civilization that doesn’t regard technolocial advance as a sine qua non of their existence; technology is a prosaic tool, and other considerations make up the essence of their existence.

Or the visit never occurred at all.

For the sake of rumination, I’d like to address the second option above; that is, civilizations do not need technology to be advanced.

Perhaps it’s the music, the art, or social intercourse that is the high point of “advanced” civilizations, not the attributes of the ships that transport them hither and yon.

This would explain, perhaps, why UFOs have appeared in various guises, some not so futuristic as we imagine: the airships of the 1890s for example.

This would also explain, perhaps, why flying saucers have had a propensity to crash; they are not technologically refined, nor meant to be.

They are constructed to get here from there, much as Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci did with their rudimentary, by modern standards, ships.

If visitors sought out this planet, for whatever reason, they would impart elements of culture – music, art, writing, mathematics, and the like – rather than methods with a technological bent.

Technology wasn’t and isn’t their primary incentive or objective.

The artifacts touted by Ancient Alien theorists are esthetic not technological: the pyramids of Egypt and Middle/South America, Stonehenge, the Easter Island moai, et cetera.

What the Dogon were and are mimics the alien races and beings - the alien cultures –that seem to have visited the Earth in the past and today.

UFO researchers, governments, military constructs have missed the point.

UFOs visit to impart refinement, high culture.

And that refinement or culture is so foreign to our understanding, we humans can’t grasp it, although one might find hints of it in such workings as that of the Dogons, or the Egyptians, or the Inca, the Olmecs, the Mayans.

The message of UFOs isn’t about nuts and bolts or plasmatic ships.

It’s about existence as a thing rarefied, transcendental, or, shall we say, spiritual?

RR

Nick Redfern's Keep Out!

2011-12-08T02:25:00.000-05:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

Nick Redfern’s latest opus, pictured above, is, as usual, filled with information that readers of his topics think they know a lot about but find they really don’t; Mr. Redfern always manages to provide details that are rarely known, even to cognoscenti.

The book is a listing of Top Secret places that governments (of the world) don’t want you to know about: high security facilities, underground bases, and other off-limits areas as the sub-title and cover inform potential readers.

For instance, Mr. Redfern’s opening salvo, Chapter One, presents the Area 51/Bob Lazar controversy in ways that make readers, skeptical and otherwise, re-evaluate both Lazar and the secret base in Nevada.

Mr. Redfern notes that a Welsh computer hacker, Matthew Bevan, in the 1990s, broke into the computer system(s) at Wright-Patterson Air Base in Ohio, looking for references to the alleged Hangar 18 of Roswell and UFO rumor.

What Bevan found was e-mail that appeared to confirm some of the Lazar story, about an extraterrestrial craft and a super-heavy element (dubbed Element 115 by Lazar). [Page 28 ff.]

Chapter 5 continues Mr. Redfern’s survey of Hangar 18 its “Little Men”:

UFO researcher Leonard Stringfield recounted an incident, in 1965, whereby a visitor to the United States Air Force Museum, housed at Wright-Patterson, stumbled into an “Off Limits” room, where he encountered a “small, large-eyed, heavy-browed creature, clearly unlike any terrestrial life-form.” [Page 85]

The Stringfield tale is made juicy by Mr. Redfern’s atmospheric description of what took place after the weird and surprising encounter by Stringfield’s informant.

Another chapter covers the secretive area known as the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, where animal and human experiments with nerve agents took place alongside, UFOs, alien beings, and secret aircraft prototypes, which our own Anthony Bragalia reported on here a few years back, as Mr. Redfern acknowledges. [Chapter 3, Page 59 ff.]

The infamous Dulce “underground” base in New Mexico is given the twice-over, in which Mr. Redfern elaborates on the work by Greg Bishop that shines a light on the shameful Paul Bennewitz affair. [Chapter 8, Page 127 ff.]

Paul Bennewitz, a physicist and UFO aficionado, was, allegedly, duped by Air Force personnel at nearby Kirkland Air Force Base, and made to think, by machinations of the Air Force, that UFOs and their alien counterparts were operating from subterranean bases in the Archuleta Mesa of Rio Arriba County, Dulce.

The Air Force did this, ostensibly, to keep Mr. Bennewitz’s UFO pursuits from, inadvertently, leading others (Russian agents et al.) to Kirkland where some of the United States' most secret and advanced aircraft were tested and flown.

The actions of the Air Force operatives eventually drove Mr. Bennewitz into a paranoid psychosis and death is how the story goes.

Mr. Redfern supplements the sordid tale with little-known information culled from Greg Bishop and personal investigation that involves cattle mutilations, nuclear tests, and reptilian aliens.

Chupacabras, a pet interest for Mr. Redfern, are discussed, in the context of their Puerto Rico venue: the El Yunque rainforest. [Page 199 ff.]

The Philadelphia Experiment is reprised [Page 210 ff.] as is the Montauk (New York) Air Force Station where research involving time-travel, teleportation, mind control and invisibility took place, and even Bigfoot makes an appearance. [Page 209 ff.]

Facilities in England, Australia, China, and Russia are addressed, as is the Shaver mystery, and NASA’s plans for an eventual moon base.

What I’m noting here is only a taste of the bizarre “goodies” that Mr. Redfern offers in his 288 page book.

And it’s not just the information that is imparted that will thrill and enlighten readers, it’s also how Mr. Redfern writes; he makes hackneyed tales come alive again for those surfeited by their telling, and he brings oft-told tales to life for newbies.

The paperback book is a buy at $15.99 and can be had from Anomalist.com, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell’s and other bookstores, online and off.

It’s a Career Press New Page book (Pompton Plains, NJ) from which you can find out more by accessing their web-sites:

http://www.careerpress.com

http://www.newpagebooks.com

RR

A Mysterious Beam of Light

2011-12-07T16:46:00.003-05:00

Spanish UFO researcher Jose Antonio Caravaca provides an intriguing account in Spain from 1976 that mimics, in some ways, the 1966 Wanaque Reservoir sightings that Anthony Bragalia recently reported upon.

Click HERE to access Senor Caravaca's blog with the story.

UFOs: Hallucinations and Delusion

2011-12-07T09:29:00.001-05:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

That strange “objects” appear and have appeared, to humans, in the sky and on the ground for millennia is a given, an observable truth, as it were.

(Ufologists should abandon their defensive posture; that is, ufologists needn’t continue to try and prove UFOs exist. UFOs are a premised reality. The evidence is palpable and has been verified beyond doubt in any number of ways, and by credible witnesses.)

But what of those “insane” perceptions that Spanish UFO researcher Jose Caravaca provides at his blog, The Caravaca Files or Jacques Vallee has documented in several books and lectures?

Sẽnor Caravaca attributes the bizarre UFO events he lists as a product of witness minds, controlled and used by an alien intrusion, yet to be explicitly defined, for purposes also not explicitly defined, but suggested by sẽnor Caravaca to be an expression of a reality that the intruders wish to display, by their staged images and activities.

Sẽnor Caravaca’s hypothesis is interesting, and defended by his observation that the “mental machinations” he documents aren’t ubiquitous, as they would be if they followed the suggestions offered by some; i.e., electromagnetic effects on the mind (Persinger) and psychic projections by elements of a concomitant spiritual reality that exists with humans (Vallee).

However, one has to consider the idea that some UFO accounts that include strange beings doing equally strange activities are hallucinatory or delusional constructs brought about by an initial event that triggers the images and perceptions recounted.

Still, the initial, triggering event – a UFO sighting or landing – is yet to be explained or understood.

But the descriptive accounts, after the initial event, may be attributable to hallucinations, hallucinations caused by a number of psychological triggers as delineated in papers about how the body and mind reacts to traumatic [sic] encounters and affects:

The Interpretation of Intrusions in Psychosis: An Integrative Cognitive Approach to Hallucinations and Delusions by Anthony P. Morrison (2001)

And, importantly, Visual Hallucinations in Psychologically Normal People: Charles Bonnet’s Syndrome by Robert J. Teunisse, Johan R. Cruysberg, Willibrord H. Hoefnagels, André L. Verbeek, and Frans G. Zitman.

And:

The Charles Bonnet Syndrome (CBS) can account for the descriptive renditions that witnesses have provided over the years for what they experienced.

Such descriptions as those of Betty and Barney Hill, Father Gill in Papua (New Guinea), which represents a “mass hullucination” example, the Hickson/Parker Pascagoula incident, and others that you’re familiar with can all be attributable to the “CBS.”

Click HERE for a table of when and during what activity the Bonnet Syndrome takes place.

Applying what we know about psychopathological pathogens helps winnow many UFO events, but not all, unfortunately.

Some UFO experiences can be traced to psychological operations by various rogue constructs in governments and the military as recounted by me in Nick Redfern’s book, Contactees [Chapter 20] and actual “alien” encounters of a still unexplained kind.

(The word “alien” is used here in its psychological context.)

But looking for more exotic explanations for obvious human mental configurations is stretching human fact into contrived fiction which has, as its downside, a loss of premise stability and subsequent logic – resulting in a wayward search for what UFOs are.

Again, UFOs are real, some strange UFO encounters are actual encounters; it’s the descriptive aftermath that has thrown the topic into a disarray that dissuades science from pursuing UFOs as a topic for scrutiny.

Once the psychological parameters are outlined and clarified, science might be able to tackle the phenomenon itself.

One can only hope…

RR

The "Distortion" Theory

2011-12-04T11:40:00.003-05:00

Spanish UFO researcher Jose Antonio Caravaca continues to develop and explain his theory of "Distortion" during UFO events.

We find much merit in his hypothesis which you can follow at Senor Caravaca's blog by clicking HERE.

A resource for UFO sightings. overlooked by aficionados of the phenomenon

2011-12-03T17:14:00.000-05:00

Intellectually scourged “academic” Immanuel Velikovsky developed a theory about how our planetary (solar) system and Earth were formed and subject to catastrophes that were recorded by humans in many histories and works, such as The Bible, (Asian) Indian hymns and stories, Greek myths, Egyptian hieroglyphic remnants, Homer, and many, many more ancient accounts.

His theory may be found in two works, Worlds in Collision [1950] and Earth in Upheaval [1955].

Science has eschewed Velikovsky’s theory, but his insights keep popping up as NASA and cosmologists scrutinize the planets in our system.

While Velikovsky insisted that cosmological events were what humans saw and recorded, one can look pass his interpretations to find what could be UFO sightings.

For instance, this…

In The City of God by Augustine it is written:

“From the book of Marcus Varro, entitled Of the Race of the Roman People, I cite word for word the following instance: ‘There occurred a remarkable celestial portent; for Castor records that in the brilliant star Venus, called Vesperugo by Plautus, and the lovely Hesperus by Homer, there occurred so strange a prodigy, that it changed its color, size, form, course, which never happened before nor since. Adrastus of Cyzicus and Dion of Naples, famous mathematicians, said this occurred in the reign of Ogyges’” [Worlds in Collision, A Delta Book, 1965, Page 158]

Velikovsky supplemented his theory in later books, Oedipus and Akhnaton [1960], Peoples of the Sea, Ages in Chaos, Ramses II and his Time, and Human Amnesia.

Astronomers made it a point to suppress Velikovsky’s views and have been rather successful.

But that’s not what we should be concerned with.

Our interest is in the cited works and accounts that seem to be sightings of UFOs.

Velikovsky’s books provide sources that resonate in ways that might – might! – support Ancient Astronaut theories.

The difference is that Velikovsky’s “catastrophic” intrusions don’t interfere with or interact with humans; his events remain observational, not intercessional.

Also, many of Velikovsky’s cited events were eschewed, it seems, by the Vallee/Aubeck book, Wonders in the Sky, probably because Chris Aubeck’s resource venue (Yahoo Magonia X) for many of the sightings in his and Vallee’s book was controlled by the machinations of UFO stalwarts such as Jerry Clark, who held sightings and input hostage to his (Clark’s) view of the UFO phenomenon.

I suggest you get your hands on Velikovsky’s books. Overlook the catastrophic theory if you like – a mistake, as I see it – and cull the events that bespeak UFOs in days of old.

If UFOs were as prominent as they appear to have been, their appearance belies current hypotheses about military misidentifications, mental aberrations, or trickery by entities out to flummox modern humanity.

The brilliance and edification of Dr. Velikovsky will enlighten you, in a number of ways; that is certain.

RR

Nick Redfern's latest

2011-12-02T10:26:00.002-05:00

Nick Redfern addresses, in his latest book, the "forbidden" sites that the government and military don't want us, the public, to visit.

Click HERE to read more about Nick's invaluable resource.

UFOs: The numbers obviate reality

2011-12-01T04:04:00.003-05:00

This paper by Francis Ridge, listing a century of UFO sightings in parts of Indiana and Midwest America, prodded me to consider this...

The sheer number of reported UFO sightings, just in the modern era, is so vast that they rule out, sensibly, the idea that the Earth is being visited by extraterrestrial civilizations, or visitors from time and/or other dimensions.

Those following the subject of UFOs are inundated with a raft of new sightings everyday. And adding the new sightings to those reported since 1947, in publications like that pictured above, not to mention the historical sightings found in such works as the Vallee/Aubeck book, Wonders in the Sky, one can only conclude that the numbers mitigate against the propositions of alien visitation, unless....

Earth is a "tourist" attraction for curious from the far-reaches of the galaxy or Universe, or even from other dimensions.

That scenario is ludicrous on the face of it. But what else do we have?

There seems to be a tangibility to many (earlier) UFO sightings.

So there is some kind of reality at work here.

Then we have the Vallee/Caravaca/Persinger theses that posit mental intrusions of some kind that have evoked images of flying saucers and UFOs over the years.

But the interceptions of sensory input with material disruptions of various kinds (burns, indentations in soil, automobile failures, radar images, photographs, videos, et cetera) work against the idea that something or someone causes UFOs to
be products of the mind, only.

Just as the raft of sightings, over the years and currently, dissuade against a concrete reality, mental machinations by "others" is just as foolish.

What kind of entities would have the time or inclination to spend such time and efforts as that required to befuddle human minds?

It makes no Earthian or interplanetary/interdimensional sense.

UFOs, which are real, in some way or other, need an explanation that takes into account the obvious ubiquity of the phenomenon.

The ET hypothesis doesn't explain UFOs, nor do the mental quirk theories.

Something else is needed, but what?

RR

Anthony Bragalia "discovers" use of Roswell memory metal?

2011-11-30T12:56:00.002-05:00

Most UFO aficionados know that Anthony Bragalia has spent many hours and much effort researching witness testimony about the strange metal found after the alleged flying disc crash near Roswell in 1947 -- the so-called memory metal.

Mr. Bragalia has gathered a significant amount of circumstantial evidence that Battelle was given some of the memory metal for examination; the metal defined as nitinol.

Mr. Bragalia stumbled upon a video being vaunted by a French engineer (Philippe) purportedly showing memory metal employed on the super B-2 bomber (pictured above).

Mr. Bragalia didn't take the video (which was located on Europe's prime video aggregator, Vodeo) at face value but, rather, ran some checks on the video (since removed from Vodeo), finally finding the original video on YouTube from the Military Channel, thus establishing a legitimate provenance.

Mr. Bragalia has posted his find at his blog and asks you to examine the video and voice your opinion about it.

You can click HERE to access Mr. Bragalia's blog and the video in question.

RR

Dr. Michael Persinger and EM stimuli: UFOs

2011-11-29T09:21:00.002-05:00

Bruce Duensing is a devotee of Dr. Michael Persinger, a theoretical psychologist (as I see him).

Dr. Persinger insists that electromagnetic waves stimulate the mind, producing images and experiences that become "reality" for those affected.

He answers his critics HERE and I suggest you Google his name to find his erudite work and ruminations on the ephemeral, yet "real," manifestations that EM evokes in some persons.

While his studies don't account for all UFO events or sightings, they can help explain many.

UFO mavens should not ignore the Persinger papers.

RR

Help requested

2011-11-25T15:25:00.004-05:00

French UFO researcher, Gilles Fernandez asks a favor of visitors here (to our blog).

Gilles’ forum (in France)– Skeptic Ovni: Forum d’étude pragmatique du phénomène ovni is seeking information about UFO accounts you consider solved or explained.

He writes this, in his fractured English, which I’ve deciphered as best as I can:

What are your best 3 ufological cases* - belonging to the shared/general casuistic** - that you consider now as explained, or enough explained, and which precisely have had the greatest impact on you, when you discovered/understood they were trivial/prosaic?

These cases have had just a "good level of strangeness" before for you, but precisely they are now for you explained, or enough explained?

In others words, what are your top 3 IFO [Identified Flying Objects] cases which have had the greatest impact to you personally?

Thank you very much for your participation, open to all, no matter what your main opinion regarding UFOs is.

Best regards,

Gilles Fernandez

* You can give less or more
** I mean not a case you were a direct witness to or one of your own possible sightings.

The Humanoids Factor by Jose Antonio Caravaca

2011-11-23T19:41:00.002-05:00

Spanish researcher Jose Antonio Cravaca has provided some unusual humanoid encounters in his attempt to further his views on The Distortion factor in UFO sightings.

You can read his current elaboration, at his blog, with us, by clicking HERE

UFO Symbology and Extraterrestrial Thought

2011-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

An attempt to decipher symbols or writings seen on UFOs in the few instances where such markings are reported is stymied by misinterpretation of markings that aren’t intelligent attempts to communicate or are hoaxed concoctions, such as the UMMO logo.

One of our obsessions has been the symbol or insignia reported by Officer Lonnie Zamora during his sighting of an egg-shaped craft in Socorro, New Mexico, April 24th, 1964.

His drawing and observation has been compromised by the allegation that the popularly known symbol is not what he really saw, but a substitution, suggested by an Air Force investigator to hoodwink possible copycat UFO witness.

(We’ve dealt with that foolishness earlier here and elsewhere, along with our views of what and where Zamora’s symbol originated; the real symbol and the contrived symbol.)

Another account of symbols allegedly observed shows up in accounts of Jesse Marcel Sr, and Jr. who reported that the debris they gathered or saw was rife with hieroglyphic-like markings.

What those markings were has been debated often and long in UFO circles, and we dismiss the Marcel reports here to avoid a rehash of the controversy.

The question for us is how could an extraterrestrial civilization or culture develop symbols or markings that are clearly recognizable or understood by Earthlings?

Sensate human writing, symbolism, and abstract mathematical renderings evolved from about 10,000 B.C. and derive from the cultural milieu that is unique to this planet and its inhabitants.

Cave paintings originated even earlier, from 40,000 B.C. but also remain unique to the human environment.

And even then, the diversity of writing and pictorial representation, acting to supplement the variety of linguistic communication, could not replicate what an alien culture would have developed to communicate within their civilization.

Ancient alien devotees will say that if there is any similarity between UFO markings and human elements of communication, the similarity derives from contact between ancient astronauts and human beings early in the history of mankind.

I won’t dismiss the AA Hypothesis out of hand, here, but will set it aside to make other points.

Mathematical symbols and mathematical processes are unique to humankind, and a quirky abstraction that could hardly be identical to concomitant extraterrestrial abstractions.

The odds of an alien culture coming up with mathematical symbols and processes like ours is beyond a statistical probability.

(Read Mathematical Thought, Volume 1, by Morris Kline, Oxford University Press, NY, 1972 to see the gist of my view.)

Either human thinking is unique or the culture subtext of imaging and writing permeates the Universe, and would have had to be generated by a prima causa – God?

Non-believers would be aghast at the suggestion that one supreme thought process infected all living, sentient things in the Universe, but that would be the only agent by which alien civilizations could have similar symbolic manifestations to those that evolved on Earth.

(Of course, one can posit that UFOs come from our future, or past, but that begs the question for some.)

Moreover, if UFOs and their markings come from inter-dimensions, alternative universes, or a realm yet to be discovered or imagined, would the mode of communication for the inhabitants of those esoteric venues be similar enough to ours to resonate?

The UFO markings gathered (or created) by Adamski and a few other UFO “witnesses” are so unesthetic and illogically represented that one can discount their authenticity out of hand.

Egyptian hieroglyphics. Sumerian clay indentations, and even cave paintings have an inherent logic and beauty to them, while markings remembered or drawn by supposed UFO witnesses are sloppy and without cryptological sense, as far as we can tell.

(Maybe extraterrestrial cultures are messy or illogical, but that would presuppose an ability to move between realities despite a lack of methodical coherency of any kind.)

If UFOs represent craft of a non-human kind, would they have insignia on them at all?

The Zamora-seen craft’s insignia is conjectured by Anthony Bragalia as a NMIT student creation as part of the activity that he writes they engaged in to prank Officer Zamora.

We see the Zamora symbol as representation by Hughes Aircraft/Toolco engineers who created the prototypical planetary lander for the military or government.

The IU engineer who remembered a hot-air balloon excursion by a paper company sees the Zamora symbol as the paper company’s logo.

Believers in the extraterrestrial explanation see the Zamora insignia as an alien symbol.

The Rendlesham symbols, remembered by one of the military witnesses seems to portray script and/or images that bespeak an Earthian origination.

A true, alien visitation would hardly display a recognizable albeit inscrutable symbol that resembles a human creation….because an alien culture would not have evolved in a way that communication or identifying marks (symbols) would be so near to what humans would construct or create.

It’s an incongruity to conjecture that UFOs would mimic human endeavors or simulated symbols; that is, unless one posits that UFOs are figments of a kind that tease human beings (the Vallee hypothesis) or that UFOs distort reality to some unfathomable end, as Spanish UFO researcher Jose Caravaca believes.

(Caravaca also questions why Betty Hill’s aliens would have, on their craft wall, a map of their interplanetary routes; such a depiction so unfuturistic and prosaic seemingly, when we humans, today use GPS or Google maps on computers to find our way around our habitable planet.)

Until we get a clear depiction of a UFO symbol or mark, from a credible witness or source, whether by photography or observation, I think we can rule out the idea that extraterrestrials are using insigniae in the same way that we Earthlings do.

RR

Moon Men on Earth?

2011-11-18T13:05:00.007-05:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

Mysteries of Mind, Space, & Time: The Unexplained [H. S. Stuttman, Inc., Westport, Connecticut, 1991, Volume 1, Page 54/55] used this picture to supplement a story by Mario Luisi of an alleged alien (extraterrestrial) encounter on a November night in 1980 in a Lake District village (otherwise unidentified):

Jose Caravaca provided this picture from an 1898 First Edition (he owns) of AN UNKNOWN WORLD; Two Years in The Moon, by Pierre Selene (pseudonym: A. Bétolaud de La Drable) and illustrated by Gerlier. [Spanish, Edited in 1896 by Montaner i Simon]:

The images are strikingly similar, and reflect how such representations are either in the universal mind or come from a psychical source whose essence is unknown.

Precognition can be used to explain the coincidental imagery, or elements of the collective unconscious accounts for such similarities in UFO iconography.

Whatever is the derivative for such extraterrestrial depictions, in books, magazines, movies, television shows and other media constructs, the process has not attracted serious research by ufologists (ahem) or persons involved in anthropological or psychological disciplines.

The underlying hypothesis that UFO sightings are primarily psychical in nature skirts the issue of the mental component in UFO events by making the subliminal assumption that psychic phenomena, like the existence of God, lies outside scientific evaluation.

Persons in the Vallee camp throw up their hands and decare, without declaring it, that Fortean phenomena is beyond the ken of human minds, or science, and can only be categorized, not explained or ultimately understood.

While that may be the case, it's a cynical view, one that we eschew.

Everything is grist for human scrutiny, everything...

RR

Images and the UFO Reality

2011-11-17T09:51:00.002-05:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

Tristan Eldritch provided a link in a comment to our piece, below, about images that prefigured UFO sightings.

Tristan’s image-find was this:

And he proposes that the image influenced how ufologists and Roswellian witnesses depicted the 1947 event from 1980 onward.

Tristan’s suggestion is not without merit.

While the entity and crashed saucer were not archetypal in 1957 when the magazine cover appeared, the images of both (entity and saucer) have become archetypal, as you discover by getting or reading this book:

Man and His Symbols was the last piece of work compiled by Carl Jung, before he died I n1961.

It is supplemented with essays by noted Jungians: Franz, Jacobi, Jaffé, and Henderson.

I imagine that the first host of UFO writers and researchers (ufologists thereafter) were science fiction addicts, who indulged in sci-fi imagery on book and magazine covers, which influenced their thinking and conclusions.

Jung writes:

"…cultural symbols…retain much of their original numinosity or “spell.” One is aware that they can evoke a deep emotional response in some individuals, and this psychic charge makes them function in much the same was as prejudices." [Man and His Symobols, Page 83]

Since, as Roswell skeptics have noted, witnesses didn’t get on board the Roswell mythos until the late 1970s, after books appeared, spurred by Stanton Friedman’s chance encounter with Jesse Marcel Sr., it was the pictorial overlay of ufologists (those sci-fi addicts) that created the Roswell scenario and images that prevail, and which Tristan’s sci-fi cover portrays.

Has such imagery entered the category called the “collective unconscious” that Jung thought was endemic to mankind’s mental make-up?

Jung’s thesis calls for such archetypal imagery to be part of the human mental genetic after a hundred years of prominence.

But the Roswell incident, because it resonated dynamically in the context of the Cold War anxieties and mankind’s possible extinction, one can suggest that the collective unconscious is incorporating images (archetypal symbols) faster than the evolutionary time-frame that Jung indicated.

This allows such images as that which Tristan found to be part of the human mental fabric sooner than the time-frame of Jung’s collective unconscious.

This conjecture fits with the mythic contention that some Roswell skeptics use to explain the incident and its aftermath; that is, skeptics say that Roswell is a self-generating myth, and they have a case.

Of course, for a myth to be promulgated, something has to generate the myth; a “seed” of some kind is necessary for a myth to germinate.

Roswell’s reported “flying disc crash” was that seed.

And the myth is “watered” by science-fiction addled writers and “researchers” – the so-called ufologists who keep the myth alive, much as the disciples of Homer’s Iliad has kept that myth alive.

RR

Jose Caravaca and the Betty Hill Star Map

2011-11-16T09:13:00.002-05:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

Jose Caravaca provided this newspaper image to us:

When I told him that we had an “hypothesis” about the Hill abduction online here (early on), at this blog and at our RRRGroup blog, he sought it out and found the map we contend was displayed at the government offices where Betty Hill worked, and which she incorporated into her “experience” as the alien “star map.”

This is the map:

It is a picture of World War II troop movement.

Coupled with the initial Hill recounting that the Hill’s “abductors” had the appearance of uniformed military, similar to that of the Nazi’s, with a facial feature that contained, in Betty’s first accounts, a Jewish stereotype – large Jimmy Durante-like noses, Jose Caravaca and I think that the Hill UFO episode, including the highly touted “star map,” needs a rehash.

Senor Caravaca worked on our WWII map, overlaying it with the drawing of Betty Hill’s star map.

Here are his (progressive) renderings:

With the Nazi association, the (maybe) Jewish stereotype, and the World War II map, one can make a (hypothetical) case, which we have already done, some time ago, that the Hill “abduction” is based on a traumatic event, perhaps a racially motivated attack – the Hill’s were a mixed-marriage couple (he, African-American, she white) as you know – and the event reconfigured by Betty Hill, mostly, deriving from internalized images she garnered from her science fiction interests.

Jose Caravaca believes that the Hill “abduction” is an example of his “Distortion Theory” which you can find at his blog – The Caravaca Files (http://caravaca-files.blogspot.com).

Here’s how he put to me, in an e-mail:

I understand that the Hills had "live" experiences induced by each other, reliving psychic material belonging to both.

I bet the Hills, one or both, saw a report on the 2nd World War in the days or weeks before their "encounter."

Reviewing the atrocities committed by Nazi medical teams in concentration camps, many for pregnancy -- there was an experiment similar to that described by Betty Hill -- I do think that the experience of the Hills may have been the result of an "hallucination."

Both experienced a phenomenon of distortion.

I think all cases, if analyzed in depth, contain details as we have found in most UFO experiences and are built on human psychic material.

For example, the case of Juan Gonzalez Santos, the witness seeing a television documentary on the Apollo XI mission a week before his UFO event. Hence, his experience has details of a space mission. It is all due to distortion.

At any rate, the Hills had a bizarre experience, certainly. I don’t think Betty Hill concocted and maintained a fabricated hoax.

But what she and Barney Hill was subjected to is (still) open to interpretation, regardless of the categorical imperative – an extraterrestrial encounter -- that persons such as Stan Friedman apply to the “event.”

RR

Anthony Bragalia challenges Red Baron UFO shoot-down

2011-11-16T07:04:00.006-05:00

Anthony Bragalia finds the Red Baron UFO shoot-down story (noted here, by me, below, from Mack Maloney's book, UFOs in Wartime) at the online tabloid, Weekly World News.

The 1999 story derives from Richthofen fellow pilot, Peter Waitzrik, who was 105 years old when he told the story...

Mr. Bragalia doesn't demean the Waitzrik tale because it comes from a very old man but, rather, because The Weekly World News was prone to create bizarre (untrue?) stories, such as this one:

Whether the Weekly World News gathered a made-up story from a Red Baron compatriot or not isn't for me to say.

I like the account, as rendered by Mr. Maloney in his book (Page 15 ff.)

Mr. Bragalia wants the record to be accurate and true. He assumes, sensibly perhaps, that all Weekly World News stories are bogus, and maybe they were (and are -- the tabloid maintains a web presence).

Moreover, Mr. Bragalia assures me that old people (whom I often find to be senile-prone) still maintain adequate mental faculties, and Mr. Bragalia relies on them for his continuing scrutiny of Roswell and Socorro.

If Mr. Bragalia's old witnesses provide valid information, it's possible that Captain Waitzrik's account is valid also.

At least, the Red Baron UFO shoot-down is a juicy UFO tid-bit, true or not, and I'm accepting it, for what it is -- a mythical truth of some kind.

RR

Pseudo/Fringe Science

2011-11-15T13:35:00.002-05:00

A paper by Cornelis de Jager -- Science, fringe science, and pseudo-science -- from 1989 addresses some errant efforts disguised as "science" (including a segment about flying saucers).

Those interested in supplementing their skepticism about things that some think are valid scientific efforts can click HERE to access the erudite paper (a PDF).

RR

A 1947 Precognition of UFO sightings to come?

2011-11-15T13:33:00.002-05:00

This Science Fiction book [Dorrance & Company, Philadelphia, 1947], with a flying saucer-like craft and three entities emerging seems to pre-figure a number of UFO events, some of which we have highlighted here as has Jose Antonio Caravaca at his blog (The Caravaca Files).

Do such images (from book covers, movie posters, advertisings, et cetera) form a sub-text in the collective unconscious, which manifests itself when there is an existential crisis in the body politic or a societal pathoneurosis (caused by other factors)?

That UFO sightings, en masse (generally), might be a result of a techinical imago dei should be addressed, seriously, by UFO buffs.

Such an "investigation" won't resolve all UFO sightings, but it may help explain some notable sightings; i.e., the 1890s airship observations, Roswell, the 1954 European wave, and the late 1950,early 1960 abduction accounts...among others.

RR

Source(s) for real UFO buffs!

2011-11-14T10:39:00.002-05:00

Mack Maloney provides many interesting UFO sightings, some well-known, and many more not so well-known, as noted in my slight review earlier here (below) of his 2011 book, UFOs in Wartime (Berkley/Penquin).

But I’d like to note a few that fit with our single-minded efforts to find details that show up, consistently, in early UFO sightings, but not so much in current sightings.

For instance, a strange object spotted by World War I ace, von Richthofen (The Red Baron), in the spring of 1917, was shot down by von Richthofen, according to fellow pilot Peter Waitzrik, crashing in the woods below.

Two occupants of the craft climbed out and ran into the forest.

Two occupants? Again?

The craft was said to be saucer-like, according to Waitzrik. [Page 15 ff.]

And if some UFO buffs think that the mysterious airships of the 1890s went dormant shortly thereafter, Mr. Maloney recounts found in a 1925 book (German Air Raids on Great Britain, 1914 –1918 by Joseph Martin) that indicates the airships were still being seen many and event years later.

On January 31st, 1916, a British Royal Navy Air Service sub-lieutenant J. E. Morgan espied, during one of his nightly reconnaissance flights, what he thought was a German zeppelin over London.

The ship had a row of lighted windows and an under-carriage with drawn blinds.

Despite its weird appearance, Morgan thought is was a German blimp on a mission to bomb England’s capital, as Germany had done earlier in 1915.

The object was about one-hundred feet long and Morgan drew the only weapon he had, a pistol, and shot at the thing, which “shot straight up at tremendous speed and disappeared…”

The airships departure was so fast that Morgan thought his plane was losing altitude. Disoriented by the airships action, Morgan crash-landed in a marsh.

Another pilot sighted, fifteen minutes later, something unusual caught in the searchlights scanning the London skies. Others, on the ground, also said they saw the strange object. [Page 17 ff.]

Just as the Vallee/Aubeck book, Wonders in the Sky, provides sightings from which important clues about the UFO enigma can be culled, Maloney’s book does likewise, and I suggest that those who really are serious about finding an explanation for UFOs or UFO sightings get both books and peruse them for details that might evoke an epiphany of some sort.

RR

UFOs in Wartime by Mack Maloney

2011-11-13T10:06:00.003-05:00

Mack Maloney has written the 294 page book pictured here [Berkley Books/Penguin, NY, 2011].

The $7.99 paperback can be found at fine bookstores, and online at Amazon, Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, et cetera, and should be in every UFO maven’s library.

It is a compilation of UFO encounters during armed conflicts, from Constantine’s history-changing vision to the Iraq war.

Along the way, readers also get a general UFO sub-text that underwrites Mr. Maloney’s exegesis of wartime UFO sightings.

Most UFO aficionados think they know every UFO sighting that counts, but Mr. Maloney presents some sightings that have not made the upper layer of referenced sightings, such as those recorded by servicemen in the Pacific arena during World War II, along with numerous sightings over Europe that are subliminal or unknown.

Several World WAR I sightings are recounted, along with a segment about the 1917 Fatima apparitions.

Foo-fighters during WW II are noted, of course, and the ghost rockets over Scandinavia too, plus other UFO sightings that seem to have been submersed in most of the UFO literature.

The United States Air Force’s Project Blue Book is taken to task for its lax responses to such sightings at the famous 1952 Washington D.C. intrusions during the Korean conflict, and Mr. Maloney doesn’t pull any punches about the tepid reactions to UFO sightings at or near U.S. nuclear missile bases.

Of course there is the intimation that governments have covered up or suppressed many sightings, but Mr. Maloney’s book now shines a spotlight on some of those set-aside UFO events.

There is a bibliography, but no Content listing or Index, which I would have liked for ease of skimming.

But this isn’t a book to be skimmed; it’s a book to be savored.

Mr. Maloney touches most of the UFO bases that buffs are familiar with, including, unfortunately the odious Rense site, but that’s a minor misstep.

I suggest that readers here would do well to supplement their UFO acumen by getting Mr. Maloney’s book so they have a fuller picture of how UFOs have been spotted by credible persons, during wartime, when the stress of war normally obliterates outside considerations, but didn’t when something as strange as a UFO shows up.

RR

The 1924 Mars Telegram -- Addenda

2011-11-13T08:19:00.006-05:00

An earlier posting here provided a telegram from the Navy to astronomers in 1924 about signals from Mars.

Jose Antonio Caravaca, who provided the telegram has found supplemental material.

Click HERE for a 1949 article about the telegram (in Spanish).

Click HERE for a pertinent paragraph (in Spanish).

A translation:

SIGNS OF OTHER PLANETS (by Morrison Colladay. International Digest. Published in Spain in February 1949 in Revista Meridiano, Meridian Magazine)...

"In 1924, when Mars was very close to the Earth, radio engineers were trying to connect to the red planet, to hear signals that could not be identified with anything terrestrial." The New York Herald Tribune said, on August 23, 1924 that these unexplained signals were received simultaneously in London, Vancouver and Newark (New Yersey). Engineers at the station WOR, Newark, insisted that they had heard and believed regular signals that were not due to static electricity. Several Newark appliance operators heard signals simultaneously for several hours,and said it appeared as if someone was playing a low key of a piano."

The 1961 Simonton UFO Event

2011-11-13T07:49:00.002-05:00

Jose Antonio Caravaca has provided an analysis of the Joe Simonton Eagle River UFO encounter (in 1961), and his (Caravaca's) "theory" of such encounters and the UFO phenomenon, in general.

Click HERE to access Jose's blog -- The Caravaca Files

Quantum Non-locality and UFOs

2011-11-11T13:05:00.000-05:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

Discussions here indicate a loathing, by some, to accept UFOs (and flying saucers) as tangible objects; some interpretations centering on psychical manifestations, others centering on a mental interaction between percipient and the UFO (image).

There are other hypotheses, and one that should be addressed is the possibility that UFOs are intrusions of a quantum kind from other places in the Universe or psychic ether, if you want) that appear because of quantum non-locality.

To get a grasp of the thought and theorizing about quantum non-locality, click HERE for a 1997 paper about the topic by John G. Cramer of the Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.

One paragraph focuses on what Bruce Duensing and Jose Caravaca call “observer-created reality” (which I eschew). Here’s that paragraph:

The nonlocality of the quantum mechanics formalism is a source of some difficulty for the Copenhagen interpretation. It is accommodated in the CI through Heisenberg's "knowledge interpretation" which views the quantum mechanical state vector (y) as a mathematically-encoded description of the state of observer knowledge rather than as a description of the objective state of the system observed. For example, in 1960 Heisenberg wrote, "The act of recording, on the other hand, which leads to the reduction of the state, is not a physical, but rather, so to say, a mathematical process. With the sudden change of our knowledge also the mathematical presentation of our knowledge undergoes of course a sudden change." The knowledge interpretation's account of state vector collapse and nonlocality as changes in knowledge is internally consistent, but it is rather subjective, intellectually unappealing, and the source of much of the recent misuse of the Copenhagen interpretation (e.g., "observer-created reality").

I’m asserting that UFOs may become present when an object tangentially connected to our area of the Universe is made visible because an observer here is conveniently in situ to see the non-local inspired manifestation.

The UFO may even come about by a quantum intersect across dimensions or parallel universes, ours and theirs.

The quantum possibilities strike me as more reasonable (feasible) than the psychic hypotheses.

Psychical hypotheses are prosaic and mundane for me.

The human mind is given too much credence and power in the psychical response, and we all know, intuitively and intellectually, that psychism leaves a lot to be desired in repetitive and scientific experimentation.

UFO mavens want some control over the UFO phenomenon and applying a mind/UFO interaction allows that control to remain intact, somewhat.

This is akin to the Einstein approach about quantum mechanics, and John Cramer’s paper will take you through Einstein’s caveats and the quantum renunciation.

Einstein couldn’t accept the quantum quirkiness, and those in the UFO community can’t accept the UFO quirkiness, unless they keep control of the phenomenon by saying that it’s the human mind that is needed for a manifestation of UFOs.

That view is unimaginative and errant.

The human mind is hardly able to deal with practical reality, let alone incomprehensible reality (such as that in the quantum world).

(Schizophrenics and paranoiacs display examples of what happens when the human mind accesses realities outside the norm.)

While quantum non-locality is best represented by light photons, there are indications that quantum artifacts can exceed the atomic level and are manifested macrocosmically.

(I’ve provided some of that information online here earlier and at the RRRGroup blog.)

More importantly, perhaps, is the notion that UFOs may derive from intrusions, accidental or purposeful, across dimensions or between parallel universes, as string theory allows.

This would keep intact my preference for UFO tangibility, which is obvious and well-witnessed.

The psychic view of Jacques Vallee and his devotees is old-hat for me. It’s something like the hysteria of the Salem witch trials or the insanity of the Catholic Inquisitional thrusts.

More on this approach to the UFO phenomenon will be ferreted out from other sources and pertinent quantum theorizing, and will be presented here upcoming.

Meanwhile, you “UFOs as psychic phenomena” people can have at it.

RR

The Plasma argument for UFOs

2011-11-11T09:54:00.003-05:00

Paul R. Hill (pictured) has provided a scientific evaluation of the UFO phenomenon, one that Bruce Duensing will like as will others who see UFOs as nothing more than a strange physical phenomenon.

Click HERE to read about Mr. Hill's erudite hypothesis

A Russian pilot or a UFO entity?

2011-11-10T17:52:00.002-05:00

Jose Antonio Caravaca provides a strange, French UFO case from 1954 that supports, sort of, Bruce Duensing's view of the phenomenon.

Click HERE to access Jose's account.

The World-Wide UFO Wave of 1954

2011-11-10T11:10:00.003-05:00

Esteemed UFO researcher Albert Rosales has compiled a raft of UFO sightings in 1954, most with little, strange entities.

This is his account of one:

Location. Petare Venezuela
Date: November 28 1954
Time: 0200A
Driving a truck, Gustavo Gonzalez and his helper Jose Ponce found the street blocked by a luminous sphere 8-10 ft in diameter, hovering 6 ft above the ground. They got out to investigate, and saw coming toward them a dwarfish being 3 ft tall, with claws & glowing eyes. Gonzalez grabbed the little man, who wore only a loincloth, & lifted him up, finding him surprisingly light, hard, & hairy. The entity gave him a push than knocked him 15 ft. Gonzalez then tried to stab him, but the knife glanced off. Ponce saw 2 others emerging from the bushes with soil in their hands. They jumped up into the sphere, and shone a blinding light at Gonzalez. His antagonist also jumped in, and the craft flew away. Gonzalez was left with a deep scratch in his side.

Humcat 1954-135
Source: Apro Bulletin, 11/54

You can read the vast list of other sightings HERE

A 1967 UFO sighting in Canada

2011-11-09T12:35:00.002-05:00

Here's the story in brief:

23 August 1967 04:00 Joyceville, Ontario, Canada...

4' white suit helmet. Driving home witness saw green light in field off road. Huge lens-shaped craft. two humanoids 4' tall white uniforms, helmets, repair activity.

The story, as compiled by Donald A. Johnson HERE...

1967, Joyceville, Ontario - While driving from his home in Toronto at four o'clock in the morning Stanley Moxon, age 20, saw a green light in a field ahead of him, not far from the road. He turned off his headlights and swung onto a side road to get closer. Turning his lights on again, he saw a huge greenish colored lens-shaped craft, and two somewhat bulky human-like entities about four feet tall, wearing white uniforms and helmets. They "seemed to be at work around the machine." When they were discovered, they quickly jumped into the craft, which took off silently at tremendous speed.

(Sources: Toronto Telegram, August 23, 1967; Kingston Whig Standard, August 24, 1967; APRO Bulletin, September-October 1967, p. 14; David F. Webb & Ted Bloecher, HUMCAT: Catalogue of Humanoid Reports, case 1967-81, citing APRO and police reports; Richard H. Hall, The UFO Evidence, Volume II: A Thirty-Year Report, pp. 264, 473).

23 August 1967 04:00

French reward offer for UFO "proof" --1954

2011-11-07T13:58:00.003-05:00

This is the last paragraph, confirming a plethora of flying saucer incidents in France, in 1954:

New Jersey Economic Development Ad -- February 1947

2011-11-07T08:14:00.002-05:00

A book recommendation for some....

2011-11-06T23:12:00.003-05:00

This 256 page book by Albert Budden [Blandford, London, 1995] is a must-read for a few of our visitors here.

Nick Redfern may have a copy, but if not, he should get one, as should Bruce Duensing, Jose Caravaca, and maybe Kandinsky (because the many UFO events exampled in the book take place in The United Kingdom).

Auhtor Budden presents an extended hypothesis that UFOs are intertwined with electromagnetics, which he has dubbed electro-staging.

Mr. Budden writes that UFOs and encounters with UFO entities derive from changes in the Earth's magnetic field and present a psychic "reality" of high strangeness.

The author is no tyro, and his compilation of data and UFO accounts should be taken very seriously by those who think they are UFO researchers.

This isn't a review as such, just a suggested read.

RR

So Kenneth Arnold was a sober, sensible man, right?

2011-11-06T14:29:00.002-05:00

Where is this film?

2011-11-06T10:21:00.000-05:00

UFOs and Little Beings: Continuing Metaphors

2011-11-05T13:50:00.003-04:00

Jose Antonia Caravaca presents his Vallee-like views about UFOs, including incidents -- one we have always found intriguing (pictured) -- that he examples to bolster his thinking on the subject.

Click HERE to read Jose's latest posting

That damnable Socorro Symbol

2011-11-04T10:44:00.003-04:00

Jose Antonio Caravaca has provided, at his blog (with us), an evaluation of the Socorro insignia or symbol as described by Officer Lonnie Zamora.

Readers should be cognizant of the various drawings and interpretations of the Socorro symbol, by us and others, to discern Senor Caravaca's analysis.

Click HERE to access Jose's analytical effort

Three Universes?

2011-11-02T15:25:00.001-04:00

A piece by Dietrick E. Thomsen, in Science News [Volume 105, 2/16/74, Page 109] presents a conjecture about the multi-verse, which has been adopted or adapted by theoretical physicists since.

Thomsen also addresses the "faster-than-light" conundrum currently in the news.

But, hey, you can read all that for yourselves by clicking HERE

RR

UFOs with little beings: France in the 1950s

2011-11-02T09:23:00.001-04:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

In the 1950s, circa 1954 probably, a spate of flying saucers were spotted, with creatures that were thought to be Martians.

Here are some clips from a major magazine – Life, I think – that described the saucers and the beings seen near them…

Pierre Lucas of Loctudy saw an orange ball fall from the sky, from which a small, bearded figure with one eye in the middle of its forehead emerged and tapped him on the shoulder:

Serge Pochet of Marcoing was approached by two small shadows:

Gregoire Odut saw a golden disk zoom away from Wassy after a two-legged creature leaped out for a look around:

Jean Narcy saw a craft, also near Wassy, from which a little whiskered man in a fur coat and orange corset emerged:

Marius Dewilde of Quarouble is carrying a railroad tie upon which he saw a rust-colored “flying contraption” land:

Yves de Gillaboz (left) and Emile Renard saw a “Matian machine” belching puffs of smoke in the sky over Amiens:

Francois Panero and Jean Olivier draw an image of a “dumpy little space man” they saw land in a luminous sphere on a basketball court near Toulouse:

We don’t get those kinds of sightings nowadays, do we? And why not?

RR

Jose Caravaca reminds us of a 1954 Socorro-like UFO sighting

2011-11-02T07:48:00.002-04:00

1954 – 15 October: In Boaria, Italy a farmer was leading his cows to a pond when he suddenly saw an object fly over his house. The cows panicked and ran away, knocking a girl to the ground, while the object emitted a burst of light. The farmer ran to the house and then fainted. Three other persons saw the craft depart. It was dark in color but surrounded by short blue and yellow flames. It was egg-shaped, flew at 15 meters above the ground, and emitted intense heat. The little pond was found desiccated, and haystacks caught fire as it flew over while the cattle suffered burns. (Source: Jacques Vallee, Passport to Magonia, pp. 229-230).

Roswell Dream Team?

2011-11-01T10:40:00.003-04:00

Kevin Randle’s blog indicates that he, Tom Carey, and Don Schmitt have formed a “dream team” – no ego in that! – to re-open an investigation into Roswell – a cold-case kind of thing Randle writes.

Mr. Randle is as obsessed with Roswell as we are with Socorro and a few other UFO incidents.

We actually wish Randle et al. some success, as Roswell remains an open question; something happened near there in July 1947 and no one has really discerned what that something was. (Maybe it was just a minor event that has gotten blown up into a UFO mythos as Christopher Allen, Lance Moody, and French UFO researcher, Gilles Fernandez, among others, believe)

That said, let me tell you that Anthony Bragalia should have been invited to join the dream team. He is one researcher who has discovered some important Roswell minutiae over the past few years.

Moreover, Anthony Bragalia has recently found some revelatory and truly significant material – no, not about nitinol (that so-called memory metal).

If what Mr. Bragalia has found turns out to be as real as it seems to be, Roswell may become as relevant, as some think it is, to the UFO enigma.

I cannot disclose what Mr. Bragalia has uncovered in his exhaustive research; that is for him to do.

But I assure you, that what he’s stumbled upon is not trivial and opens cans of worms that will cause some in the government, if its disclosed, to fill their pants with merde. I do not exaggerate here.

So, dream team? Without Bragalia it’s just dreaming…

RR

Commie Contactees?

2011-10-31T09:34:00.003-04:00

Nick Redfern approaches the idea that some flying saucer contactees were "pinko" -- that is, sympathetic to Communist propaganda or worse -- spys or agents for the Soviets.

Click HERE for Nick's conjecturing

Deadly Lights by Jose Antonio Caravaca

2011-10-30T12:04:00.003-04:00

Spanish UFO researcher, Jose Antonio Caravaca, has contributed two UFO accounts in Spain, from 1897 and 1917 that readers here will find interesting, surely.

Click HERE to access Jose's special blog with us to read his intriguing report(s).

1924 Telegram requests help for extraterrestrial signals from space

2011-10-30T10:21:00.003-04:00

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

Jose Caravaca, with Jesus Pertierra, have re-discovered a 1924 telegram, from the Navy [!] which requests astronomers’ help in locating signals from Mars.

Click HERE for a readable version of the telegram.

Noteworthy is the Naval interest. (We’ve always maintained that it’s the Navy, not the Air Force, where ufologists will find significant clues to the UFO mystery.)

Also note that the request is for any electrical anomalies.

Mars, in 1924, was considered by most scientists, to possibly harbor life. That suggestion is not unusual in the time-frame, but that it was the Navy asking for the help is something to take into account.

The Navy has had a long interest in the extraterrestrial, and it has never given up that interest to the U. S. Air Force.

Look for UFO materials from the Naval branch of the U,S. military. You may strike pay-dirt, as they say.

RR

UFOs and Collateral Damage

2011-10-29T14:55:00.008-04:00

Jose Antonio Caravaca has a new piece about two UFO episodes in Spain in the mid 1970s during which witnesses seem to have been harmed by actions from the UFOs.

You can read Jose's detailed account(s) at his blog, The Caravaca Files, by clicking HERE