The point of my post, for those who missed it, was that Gray Barker and others from fifty years ago or so made up a lot of the UFO stuff (Men In Black, elaborations on the Roswell Incident, the Bermuda Triangle, etc) that is now pretty much part of contemporary folklore. - silovik812
Indeed. Your original links are to an organization called CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (it's now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, or CSI), which has always been devoted to debunking "pseudoscience" and the paranormal such as UFOs. Critics of CSICOP/CSI have accused much of the group of being as overly zealous about debunking as those whom they are trying to debunk (specific "guilty" CSI individuals include James Randi, Martin Gardner, and Philip Klass, whose specialty has been UFOs).
It's been a while since I looked deeply at UFO literature, pro and con, but it is a topic that has fascinated me since I was a kid, probably when I read Erich von Daniken's
Chariots of the Gods (and saw the documentary film based on it). Reading von Daniken's book as an adult, I didn't find it nearly as compelling (one critic dubbed him the king of the rhetorical overstatement or some such epithet), but the questions brooked by his tract are timeless and valid ones: Are we alone in the universe? If not, have we been visited by extraterrestrials?
Diving into the books and documentaries, the dichotomy becomes pronounced: The pro and con sides are sharply divided, and there is no middle ground. Or as UFOlogist Jacques Vallee puts it, it's the Democrat versus Republican debate: Either you believe a UFO is a spacecraft piloted by an extraterrestrial, or it is swamp gas or a reflection of Venus. There is no middle ground.
Of all the writers I've read on the subject, Vallee has the most thoroughgoing and informed view of them all. (He was the inspiration for the Lacombe character, played by Francois Truffaut, in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, although Lacombe was more of a believer than was Vallee at the time.) For example, Vallee states that he would be "disappointed" if UFOs turn out to me "merely" mechanical craft. He thinks of them as "psychotronic devices," similar to a projector and a movie screen: If you are watching
Star Wars, you are not seeing actual spaceships--you are seeing representations of spaceships in front of you that actually originate from a source behind you. The representations are manifestations of a larger, more mysterious "truth" put into an understandable form.
More to the point of MIBs, skepticism, and so forth here, Vallee allows a third possibility, one that is quite subversive: Whether or not UFOs are "real," the phenomenon of people believing in them is real, and terrestrial governments could be using that phenomenon as a smokescreen for secret weapons testing and psychological-warfare operations for social engineering and manipulation. He explored this idea in one of his earlier books,
Messengers of Deception, and although he has expanded his overall view to include "visitations" of some kind, he still thinks that terrestrial governments are not above using the UFO phenomenon as a smokescreen for very Earthbound manipulation.
For example, in one of his later books (
Dimensions or
Revelations; I'd have to look it up), he examines a famous 1980 case of multiple witnesses to a UFO sighting, the Rendlesham (AKA Bentwaters) event at which several military personnel at a US Air Force base in England saw what looked like a UFO land in the woods. Vallee's conclusion is that it was a psy-ops exercise designed to monitor reactions to an extraterrestrial event and not an extraterrestrial event itself.
(Significantly, Vallee is rarely included in the standard UFO documentaries that feature the usual suspects such as Jenny Randles, Brad Steiger, and the ubiquitous Stanton Friedman.)
My own take is that we don't know what is "out there," or whether what is "out there" has visited us in the recent or ancient past, or is doing so now. And as numerous investigations from Project Blue Book and the Condon Report on down have noted, most sightings can be explained. It's those few that cannot be explained that are fascinating--although we should not rule out the possibility of terrestrial manipulation there, as the capacity for human deception is pretty extensive.
What I've noticed with
Men in Black,
The X Files, and so on is, as you note, the "mainstreaming" of UFOlogy and the growing acceptance of visitations, abductions, etc. Maybe these are elaborate psy-ops run by terrestrials? (
The X Files did allow this to some extent in the famous "Jose Chung" episode before reverting to "The Conspiracy" orthodoxy.)
Finally, when I saw your thread title NOW IT CAN BE TOLD, the first thing I thought of, as a devoted Kurt Vonnegut fan, is Vonnegut's fictitious science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout, whose best-known book is
Now It Can Be Told, with "best-known" being relative as hardly anyone has heard of him.
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"We hear very little, and we understand even less." - Refugee in Casablanca
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silovik812
10 years ago
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
I take everything that comes out of CSICOP with a grain of salt, as some of its members, particularly Joe Nickel, have a habit of coming up with a "rational explanation", any rational explanation will do, and then act like they just explained it away whatever it is they're trying to explain away. I do read Skeptical Enquirer and Skeptic Magazine frequently, as they give a refreshing level-headedness and a down-to-earth perspective, where such a thing is sorely missing in most other examinations. Like anything other kind of advocacy group, though, you need to be a bit skeptical of what certain authors say when they seem to be too sure of themselves, and too sure that the other guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
The publication that most nearly matches my own thinking on most of these subjects is Fortean Times, a British publication which is not widely available in the USA and is very expensive besides. The website doesn't have much on it, considering how long the magazine has been around, but there are some articles on http://www.forteantimes.com.
After much reading on both sides of the issue, literally since I was a child, I'm convinced that a lot of the famous early stories were either made up by writers by Charles Berlitz, or twisted by them to make a "good story", but there's no doubt that there are a lot of unidentified or unidentifiable things flying around in the sky - that's why they put the U in UFO! I don't think there's any one explanation that covers all cases; one might be fraud, one might be mistaken identity, one might be bad reporting, and another might just be a case of everyone letting their imagination run away with them - and, once in a great while, one of them just might be an accurately-reported encounter with extraterrestrials!
Thanks for the mention of Jacque Vallee, who is probably the most important influence on my thinking on the subject, with his book Passport to Magonia, which pointed out the similarities of UFO/alien stories to traditional stories of fairies and other beings from folklore (small creatures that come out of dome-like structures that are larger on the inside, and cause time distortions? Fairies and fairy hills, of course!) I'm not so familiar with his later books, but I have no doubt that some of those in power can and do use such stories to influence public opinion. Thanks for the reminder, as I presently have much time on my hands, and it would be a good time to catch up.
The other big influence on my thinking is Hilary Evans and his several books on "the entity phenomenon", which collectively make a thorough analysis of encounters with mysterious entities that all rules of ordinary reality say should not be there - not just ETs and fairies, but ghosts, angels, religious visitations, and the like. He's someone else that almost nobody has ever heard of, and is even more obscure than Vallee.
And thanks as well for catching the Vonnegut reference, which didn't have anything to do with my point in this thread, but I definitely had him in mind with the satirical tone of it. Finally, someone who GETS me!
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"Oh, well" said Zanoni, "to pour pure water in the muddy well does but disturb the mud !"
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darryl-tahirali
10 years ago
The publication that most nearly matches my own thinking on most of these subjects is Fortean Times, a British publication which is not widely available in the USA and is very expensive besides. - silovik812
I don't know much about Charles Fort except the bare basics, but I think Forteans have a term called "agnostic skepticism" that describes my approach. I'm agnostic about a lot of things, meaning that I don't know for sure because I'm still learning and haven't formed an ironclad opinion yet, and I'm skeptical about what I'm learning because I've learned that no person, or entity, or institution has a lock on the real story. Our understanding grows, new facts come into the mix, and so on.
That skepticism, though, extends into orthodox thinking, which seems to reject many things considered out of the ordinary without actually examining them. I do not know whether ghosts, angels, and the like exist, and based on the lack of evidence it seems unlikely, but they may not be impossible. We simply do not know for sure. And as for "the evidence of things not seen," I have never physically seen an atom, let alone its component parts, but science tells us that they exist, and based on the argument made, it seems reasonable.
With respect to UFOlogy, though, there does seem to be that distinct polarization between the "Fox Mulders" who "want to believe" at all costs and the skeptics who want to debunk them at all costs. That's what Jacques Vallee means by having the "Democratic" and "Republican" viewpoints--there are only two, and you must choose one or the other.
I'm not sure that Vallee is "obscure" as he did serve as the model for the "Lacombe" character in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He does get marginalized in the debate, though, because he doesn't fit in with the "Democratic" or "Republican" models. I've not read
Passport to Magonia, but Vallee has summarized the book in subsequent books, and I'm familiar with his having explored the UFO phenomenon throughout recorded history. For example, the Biblical prophet Ezekiel was said to have been transported in a craft of "wheels within wheels" that corresponds with UFOs.
And as I'm sure you know, Vallee's approach does seem similar to "agnostic skepticism." Early in his career, working at a French astronomical observatory, he captured some unexplained images on film, but the next day the observatory destroyed the film with the explanation being that "the Americans would laugh" if they were reported. Vallee had no idea what they were, but as a scientist he wanted to investigate further to try to determine what they were without jumping to conclusions. That episode, though, introduced him to the "groupthink" and social implications of UFOlogy that may have very little to do with extraterrestrials and much to do with terrestrial control of information and thought.
Thanks for the tip on Hilary Evans. I will have to investigate him further.
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"We hear very little, and we understand even less." - Refugee in Casablanca
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charly-47
8 years ago
I thought Kilgore Trout's most famous book was "Venus on the Half-shell" (which was a fine read when I first devoured it some 40 years ago)...
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