Men in Black and Shades of Gray

I've been reading up on 1950s UFO writers lately, and honestly, I'm beginning to think that these guys in the 50s who first started writing about aliens and UFOs were even more colorful and slippery than their mercurial subject matter.

There's a hell of a book in THAT for anybody with the time and means to write it--Hey maybe it will be me. (Weird things have happened.)

Yesterday I watched an excellent documentary about Gray Barker, the one time editor of the 1950s rag The Saucerian Review, and author of such classics as They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, The Silver Bridge (Barker's book about the sightings of the Mothman creature that preceded the collapse of the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant, WV in 1967), and MIB: The Secret Terror Among Us. 

The documentary film, entitled Shades of Gray, is focused more on Barker than it is on flying saucers, but it's well worth watching, and it opens up quite a few compelling questions about the nature of paranormal research and the motivations of the people who do it.

Gray Barker and John A. Keel both wrote books about Mothman and the collapse of the Point Pleasant Silver Bridge, and both tied the events to UFOs to a greater or lesser degree. Barker's book preceded Keel's by five years, and took a more methodical, detached approach to the topic that didn't stress the UFO connection as strongly as Keel's more popular Mothman Prophecies.

Some years after Keel's book came out, Barker complained to the skeptical press about Keel's tendency to whip up witnesses by inserting his own paranoia and is own theories into his interviews, and he also accused Keel of changing some of the 'facts' presented in his version of the events.

While it appears to be true that Keel's personality was impossible to extricate from his investigations and his theories (some of Keel's witnesses said many years later that Keel terrified them, and that for weeks after he left they were unable to sleep or relax), it's also true that Barker himself was quite the hoaxer and that he loved playing mean-spirited jokes on fellow authors and subjects. Keel's counterfeit letter from the State Department to contactee George Adamski is now famous--a staple of ufological history and myth--so the very idea of Barker criticizing Keel's integrity is pretty funny.

Barker was a complex man by any standard. The Saucerian Review was the first publication of its kind to present contactee information as plain fact. The more outrageous the content, the better Barker liked it.

At the same time, Barker clearly believed that something genuine was going on with some UFO phenomena, and that paranormal phenomena were sometimes more than simple delusion.

He was fascinated by his subject matter, yet he wasn't above exploiting its weirder aspects in order to make a buck. He also had no problem with pranking others in the field or with mocking his own contributors, a quality that on the only hand is less than admirable, but on the other makes him all the more interesting a character in his own right.

I thought that one of the strangest and more poignant aspects of Barker's career was his attempt late in life to market the true story of his daily life as a fictional novel. This came after years of marketing patently ridiculous stories as plain truth and having all kinds of fun doing so. In some sense, Barker could only write his true story as fiction. This irony could not have been lost on a man of his unique genius and bizarre humor.

Barker was a homosexual in the South at a time when it was a lot safer and less awkward to be from outer space. The kind of duplicity and secretiveness required of a writer in such a position had to be toxic beyond imagination.

I hate armchair psychoanalysis, especially when it comes to writers and historical figures, (so here I go, diving in anyway), but it really is hard not to see relevance in this case. Barker's work revealed an obsession with dangerous secrets, duplicity, and illusion. It put me in mind of Charles Fort's procession of the Damned, the march of the excluded--or even, one might say, the alienated?

I also find no small measure of romance in the gritty, drinking, smoking, 50s sleaziness of these guys--Keel and Barker both seem larger than life, the kind of writers who pound out the latest bit of pulp insanity on a manual Royal typewriter with a scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other. There are photos of a young John Keel floating around the internet that make Brando and James Dean look like pussy poseurs.

They were bad, bad boys. That much is undisputed. 

I've lately been playing with the idea that UFOs can't really be studied in a detached way, that it isn't even possible--that at least when it comes to this specific topic, the observer needs to be embedded in the observation in a way that science does not allow. Gray Barker gave me much to think about in this regard, and now I want to know more.

You can watch Shades of Gray yourself on your desktop at Netflix, or order it from the filmmaker's website.

BTW, if you find a copy of The Saucerian Review at a yard sale this summer, jump on it.

Those little rags are worth hundreds of dollars now.

And anyway, how cool is this stuff? I'm on the hunt from here onward, rest assured.

UFOs and Marian Apparitions

DIMENSIONS: A Casebook of Alien ContactREVELATIONS: Alien Contact and Human DeceptionMessengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults

When I was small child, I had a recurring nightmare that should not have been a nightmare at all:

In my dream, I'm standing on our neighbor's front porch. (I used to walk to grade school every day with two kids who lived in that house--a boy my age and his younger sister. I also spent a lot of time on that porch playing with those kids and with other kids on our block.)

So in the dream I'm standing on this large porch which spans the whole front of the house. The front door is positioned in the center with two knee-to-ceiling windows on either side. One pair of windows looks into the living/dining area of the home, and the other pair looks into a small bedroom. 

As I look through these windows (it's hard not to peek into them, because of the way the porch is set up) I see, standing there, either in the bedroom or the living room--it doesn't matter, it's the same no matter which set of windows I look through--the Blessed Virgin Mary, just kind of looking back at me. 

Immediately I am struck through and through with a paralyzing, overwhelming terror. It is as if something wholly and completely 'other' is wearing a full-body Virgin Mary mask, and a lame one at that--kind of like one of those Richard Nixon masks, only the BVM. This 'other' thing is looking right at me, and I cannot move.

The reason this should not have been a nightmare is that the BVM is supposedly a beloved, merciful figure and a special favorite of Catholic children, especially Catholic girls--kind of like the best Mom a kid could ever want.

This characterization (which is still very much a part of being a Catholic kid) is in itself kind of weird. Whenever the BVM puts in an appearance anywhere around the world (as she did at Lourdes, Fatima, and Medjugorje, to name a few of her most recent visits) she almost always appears to children, tells them God loves them and blah blah blah, but too bad, humankind is about to die, fry, starve, kill each other, wreck the planet [fill in your own catastrophic future event about to occur as a consequence of our innate sinfulness].

She usually brings scary, scary news. To little kids. So why do they adore her? I can't answer that. 

It always goes down like this:

"You kids are great. Too bad my Son has to fry your little carcasses on account of the horrible things the grown ups are doing. Don't take it personally. Oh yeah, and tell your folks and the rest of the village about the warning. Gotta run, but I'll back so keep your eyes peeled."

The BVM always comes armed with prophecy, usually dire prophecy. This is interpreted as merciful by the Catholic Church. Presumably the BVM could just not tell us at all and leave us to the natural consequences of our sins, but because she's the BVM and she cares, she intercedes for us on her Son's behalf and advises, "Clean up your act. Do it now."

Marian apparitions have much in common with UFO sightings and close encounters, so much so that some of the most prominent and credible UFO researchers have written about the connection extensively.

The Marian Apparition

The typical Marian apparition begins when a group of small children unexpectedly encounters a very bright light. As their eyes adjust, 'a beautiful lady' emerges from this light. Interestingly, the beautiful lady never claims to be the Virgin Mary--this is assumed by the witnesses.

(The Catholic Church does not approve all BVM apparitions as official miracles and has its own concerns about them.)

If the religious interpretation is dropped out of the eyewitness and percipient descriptions of Marian apparitions, what is left strongly resembles a standard UFO encounter.

Here is Jacques Vallee talking about Fatima:

"The crowd that stood in a field
in Fatima, a small village in the district of Leiria, some sixty-two
miles north of Lisbon, on October 13, 1917, was waiting there for a
miracle, because three children had been assured such an event would
take place after a number of meetings with an 'entity' that came from
the sky in a globe of light. The witnesses were three shepherds:
Lucia, aged ten, and her cousins Francisco Mario and Jacinto Marto,
aged nine and seven. Today, Fatima is one of the most celebrated
places of pilgrimage in the entire world. 

"...According to the very words of the Reverend General Vicar of
Leiria, who was one of the witnesses, the lady came in an 'aeroplane
of light,' an 'immense globe, flying westwards, at moderate speed. It
irradiated a very bright light.' Some other witnesses saw a white
being coming out of the globe, which several minutes later took off,
disappearing in the direction of the sun. 

"The last episode was the miracle itself. It was seen by seventy
thousand persons, among whom were pious individuals and atheists,
clergymen and reporters from a socialist newspaper. As promised, it
happened on October 13 at noon. Among the crowd was Professor Almeida
Garrett, of Coimbra University, a scientist, who described the
phenomena in the following terms: 'It was raining hard, and the rain
trickled down everyone's clothes. Suddenly, the sun shone through the
dense cloud which covered it: everybody looked in its direction. IT
LOOKED LIKE A DISC, OF A VERY DEFINITE CONTOUR. It was not dazzling.
I don't think that it could be compared to a dull silver disk, as
someone said later in Fatima. No. It rather possessed a clear,
changing brightness, which one could compare to a pearl. It looked
like a polished wheel. This is not poetry. My eyes have seen it. This
clear-shaped disk suddenly began turning. It rotated with increasing
speed. Suddenly, the crowd began crying with anguish. The sun
(disk?), revolving all the time, began falling toward the earth,
reddish and bloody, threatening to crush everyone under its fiery
weight...'" 

Ultraterrestrial Messengers of Deception

Jacques Vallee, John A. Keel, J. Allen Hynek, and many others abandoned the ET hypothesis fairly early on in their UFO investigations, noting that encounters with UFOs and the beings associated with them resemble encounters with angels, fairies, ghosts, demons, and other paranormal phenomena, and that significant psychological elements also appear to be at play--not psychopathology necessarily, but elements of mind control and deliberate manipulation of human consciousness.

John A. Keel, an amateur hypnotist and professional magician, believed that the bright lights at the beginning of a UFO/alien encounter represented the material aspect of the experience, but that once attention was captured with the bright light, a hypnotic state was induced such that much of the rest of the experience was hallucinatory or psychic. This psychic dream-like experience or vision was then interpreted according to the belief system of the percipient. This analysis fits Marian apparitions very well.

What is actually seen by the  children initially is a very bright, often pulsating light that descends from the sky. The lady is seen after that, emerging from the light itself, and she is seen only by thc children.

Keel used to use the word 'demonic' when talking about UFO phenomena, but he did not mean the word in the way Christians would use it. Though he did see a dark side to UFO phenomena, when he called himself 'a demonologist',  he was referring in a value-neutral way to the duplicitous nature of the supposed aliens--they were like the 'daimons' of ancient Greece and earlier, like 'spirits of place' or nature spirits.

Keel, a Fortean with a unique background and perspective, observed that absurd elements were often a part of these alien encounters and that the absurdist element was edited out by ufologists as often as skeptics. He noted that although genuine and correct prophecies were made with unsettling frequency, once belief was established in a human subject these accurate prophecies were often followed by catastrophic false prophecies. Aliens (and Mary) are especially fond of gathering believers in fields and on hillsides to await the end of the world, which then does not come.

The spiritual content of Marian apparitions is also very similar in tone to the generic, bland, New Age-y sort of content channeled by UFO contactees. Vallee also noted this similarity as well. These prophetic apparitions/aliens don't tell us much spiritually that we don't already know, and they tend to prey on the fear of the day. At the time of Fatima, the Soviet Union and nuclear build up was a hot topic so they talked about that. Today, the aliens are worried about the environment.

Vallee and Keel both suspected that a genuine 'other' intelligence was at work in Marian apparitions and UFO contact/abduction experiences, they just didn't believe it was extraterrestrial. They both felt that the materialistic emphasis was wrongheaded and that more could be learned by taking detailed accurate accounts and doing information science on the results--analyzing patterns and taking everything into account, not just the bits that fit preconceived pet theories or beliefs.

Vallee, an esteemed information scientist who currently runs a venture capital firm in France, eventually got very disgusted with the circus that surrounds ufology and backed away from the subject almost entirely.

Vallee still thinks the phenomena are real and deserve serious attention, but he became sick of all the drama and duplicity surrounding both the topic and the community pretending to 'study' the topic. Vallee feels that ufology has devolved into cultish religion at this point and is part of the problem, actively making things worse rather than shedding much light on anything.

Keel believed that the aliens (disguised sometimes as the Blessed Virgin) are actually from earth, that they have always been here, and that they inhabit a dimension of time and space we do not fully understand. He often called them 'Ultraterrestrials'. Keel saw the aliens as another race of beings that share this planet with humans and for their own reasons enjoy messing with us sometimes.

Both men (and many others) see mechanisms of social and psychic control in the human interventions initiated by these ancient Ultraterrestrials. In other words, these beings, whatever they are--angels, demons, ultraterrestrials, aliens, fairies--intervene in human affairs by choosing susceptible people, changing their consciousness in very specific ways, and messing with the culture of the day through magic and hypnotic mind control tricks.

The alien agenda is opaque. Their intentions may be positive, negative, both, neither, or they may have reasons for messing with us that we can't begin to understand.

One thing is certain:

Just like the Catholic Church, they know how to put on a hell of a show.

Shiny Scary People: UFO Cults

The clip above is from a longer program about UFO cults that can be found in its entirety at the History Channel or You Tube. It gives just a flavor of what these cults are all about.

Recently I was sent a little video I won't be posting because it is a fine example of this sort of cult propaganda, and the clip is also a bit sickening and unsettling to watch. The person passing this around was very impressed. I was definitely not.

Over the years, I have noticed a few things about UFO cults myself, even before receiving that clip:

• A focus on transcending the body and getting beyond the earthly problems that come with embodiment. This may be done through energy work, 'ascension' teachings, bogus and incredibly confusing pseudoscience, psychic messages, 'higher' states of consciousness, other dimensions, other worlds, or whatever. The goal is always "get higher."
• An emphasis on fake nonstop happiness and bliss, the like of which you might also get from really good heroin, except in the latter case you'd be nodding off and drooling on yourself and people would be less likely to follow you around, except maybe to steal your stuff.
• A charismatic leader or two or three. Often this person emits a quality of light around the face that is mesmerizing and yet is more disturbing than comforting. Charles Mansion has this quality about his face and eyes, which I find both creepy and instructive. All that glisters is not gold. 
• The idea that the universe is arranged hierarchically and that matter is the crudest, most 'corrupt' form of energy. 'Energy' is presented as better than matter. It's superior. More evolved.
• A conviction that the leaders have been chosen for a VERY SPECIAL MISSION AND TIME IS RUNNING OUT! This same pitch is often made on ordinary TV infomercials for vegetable choppers and hair removers and such, except that with the vegetable choppers you don't have to wear weird clothes and then kill yourself at some point to prove your absolute faith and devotion. You just have to agree to pay four installments of $29.95.
• A tendency to run down people who see things differently, even a little differently. 

Let me be clear here: I think that many UFO and alien contact experiences are real and meaningful and deserving of deeper and more thoughtful consideration than they usually get. That's why I put up this blog, and that's why I write about the paranormal in general and aliens and UFOs in particular.

But I also think that ufology makes really bad religion.

You know, there's bad religion, and then there's really bad religion. 

 Ufology would be that second kind.

In general, I have long noticed two common extremes in response to experiences of aliens or UFOs, and I believe both of them are wrongheaded and disturbing.

At one extreme are debunkers who mock, ridicule, and harass experiencers into seeking out small groups or keeping quiet altogether. These people are just bullies, half of them aren't even scientists, and I honestly don't see the point in acting like a dick just because you personally think something seems weird or funny. What is up with that? Ugh. It's very self-involved and hostile.

At the other extreme are people who take their experiences SOOOOOO deadly seriously they fall off the edge of the earth and start founding their own wrongheaded religions based on the space Masters or whatever--I mean, make up anything here and insert your own dogma, and make sure you have lots of good graphics and lots of cool New Age clothing to wear while you expound upon your crackpot convictions in workshops.

Somewhere in the middle of these extremes is something really fascinating and worth contemplating that I spend enormous amounts of time researching, reading, writing, and thinking about.

That's the part I'm personally interested in--that middle area, that creative tension betwixt and between extremes.

Weirdly, that perspective puts me on the 'fringe' of ufology,  puts me 'out there' with respect to others who consider these strange things, alienates me from self-proclaimed experts in both extreme camps.

Doesn't make me wrong though.

The life we have here is the only life we have. I have no desire whatsoever to transcend it. Nature is good. Bodies are good. Matter is great, especially when it involves chocolate or aparagus. (I love asparagus.)

Nobody feels good all the time. Life can be confusing, unpleasant, and unfair. Spiritual work can be painful and always requires great courage and honesty, and an ability to face pain and loss.

The spiritual life is not a fast path to happy land and never has been. It's a difficult, twisty path, and lots of people who embark upon it--Jesus being one notable example--suffer much and come to a difficult end.

These are my beliefs, such as they are. Tomorrow, they may well change.

Alien Abduction and Dissociation

Dissociation is a term from clinical psychology that refers to a pathological state of detachment.

An online medical dictionary describes the condition as follows:

Dissociation: In psychology and psychiatry, a perceived detachment of the mind from the emotional state or even from the body. Dissociation is characterized by a sense of the world as a dreamlike or unreal place and may be accompanied by poor memory of the specific events, which in severe form is known as dissociative amnesia. 

Over the course of the 1990s, dissociation became a sensational topic on talk shows and in the popular press under the rubric of multiple personality disorder. 

MPD  has since that time been changed to the more clinically precise dissociative identity disorder.

The concept of personality is vague, subjective, and currently out of favor with clinical psychologists, (who BTW change their minds a LOT). Identity is--at least for now--seen as a more neutral term that refers to the individual characteristics by which a thing or person is recognized or known.

Abductees and researchers alike take great pains to 'prove' that abduction experiences are not the result of mental or emotional pathology, and yet even a casual observer can recognize problems of dissociation and dissociative identity in alien abduction accounts.

Many abductees say openly that since remembering their abductions, they have realized that they possess a 'dual identity', and now understand themselves as both human and alien.

People who believe abductions are real say that abductees experience something similar to PTSD post-abduction because the experience is so terrifying. Symptoms such as amnesia for the event, hypervigilance, nightmares, confusion, persistent anxiety, etc., are all common.

People who believe that abductions are fantasies, dreams, or out of body experiences suggest that people who already suffer from PTSD for some violent earthly trauma can be induced to believe they were abducted by aliens as a kind of 'screen' for the memory of the real event.

At first glance, the idea that alien abduction memories make good 'screen memories' might seem ridiculous. Abduction researchers commonly protest that the consequences of coming forward with an alien abduction story are so negative (people accuse abductees of being crazy or of being attention-seekers, for instance) that no one would choose to do this unless the experience was genuine.

This point only makes sense however if the alternative is saying nothing and feeling fine. If a person is already feeling anxious and disturbed, or is plagued by nightmares, or is baffled by a relatively non-emotional instance of missing time, the mind has a strong inclination to resolve this tension.

What is less upsetting in this context? The notion that you might have blocked out a brutal assault, rape, or murder--which, seriously, no one wants to hear? Or the possibility that you were abducted by aliens, which, although upsetting and bizarre, lots of people are ready to validate?

I'm not saying the alien abductees are all victims of earthly trauma suffering from PTSD and a culturally suggested delusion. All I'm saying here is that researchers often fail to ask hard questions because they want so badly to believe the phenomenon at face value.

In fact, MPD came under fire for similar reasons shortly after it made the rounds of the talk show circuit back in the 1990s. Debunkers appeared hot on the heels of the dramatically damaged, armed with 'false memory' research, damning studies, and convincing examples of lying and hysteria.

After a time, clinical psychology had to to admit that at least some of the 'multiple personalities' who had written books based on their supposed early sexual traumas were not what they appeared to be, and some of the therapists who had been treating them were quacks.

The problem was that some of the MPD patients were not lying and their originating traumas could be proven. Many reputable psychologists came forward to defend dissociation as a clinical reality.

In the furor and uproar that ensued, both at universities and within clinical practice, much confusion was generated and little was accomplished. In the end, the DSM-IV changed some terms around and refined diagnostic categories, pitching the term 'MPD' in favor of 'DID', and adding subcategories and variants that were meant to provide clarity.

Is anyone feeling better yet?

Well, not really. PTSD is now one of the most common mental illnesses, and dissociation is pretty much a feature of everyday life for most people.

It always was, really.

Who hasn't had the experience of driving home from work only to realize that absorption in some issue or thought process has all but blanked out the entire trip? Who doesn't act one way in one situation and another way in another, to the point that it sometimes feels like two different identities altogether? It's hard to hold a corporate job these days if you don't know how to put on a identity and remove it on command as if it were a three-piece suit.

I personally believe that something real and interesting is going on with abduction experiences, but that we are asking all the wrong questions--those of us who are even asking questions.

"...a perceived detachment of the mind from the emotional state or even from the body..."

Doesn't that describe the normative way we approach the world as a culture? Doesn't science always attempt to detach itself from emotion? Isn't the body seen as separate from the mind? Aren't human beings seen as separate from nature?

Maybe, just maybe, abduction experiences happen not so much to provide us with the answers we seek, as to get us to ask better questions, different ones.

Or, maybe I'm just being too detached about it all.

Aliens and Faeries

The ET hypothesis in ufology is more controversial than its adherents like to admit.

Briefly, the ET hypothesis is the notion that UFO sightings and alien encounters are instigated by intelligent creatures from outer space. Some branches of ufology even name the specific part of the galaxy the visitors call home.

Betty Hill, who was abducted with her husband Barney from a rural New Hampshire road in 1961, claimed under hypnosis that the aliens who abducted her had shown her a star map--a map which she was later able to reproduce and which coincided accurately with a cluster of stars around Zeta Reticuli.

Thereafter the Hill abduction came to be known as "The Zeta Reticuli Incident."

But many of the most prominent features of alien abduction experiences, as well as some of the features of UFO sightings (that is, experiences that do not include direct contact with alien beings) were present for hundreds of years in faery lore.

Today faeries mostly inhabit children's books. At least, that's what we tell ourselves. 

The faeries of old were experts in messing with human perception. They could appear to humans in any form them wished and could alter the experience of time. Like the aliens of today, faeries abducted children and young people, and were especially drawn to young women, with whom they were thought to mate in order to strengthen their line. Faeries sometimes took human babies and left faery children--called 'changelings'--in their place.

Faeries depicted as cute, Disney-like imps that flutter around trees and flowers are not the same faeries of medieval times and earlier. Before the rise of science, faeries were considered dangerous, and every culture had them. Being taken by the faeries was like being taken to the realm of the Dead. You might not ever come back, and if you did return, you might not be right ever again.

Like today's abductees, people taken by faeries typically went missing for a period of hours, days, or even longer, and then reappeared suddenly with no memory of what had happened to them and no sense of the amount of time that had passed. When the memories of faery abductees did begin to return, they included the recollection of coming upon small beings unexpectedly, and being invited into their circle.

Today's abductees usually do not remember what happened at first either, but only notice that some time is strangely missing from their lives. Their memories come later, under hypnosis, in dreams or in spontaneous surreal fragments.

Documented examples of fairies arriving in small airships are also plentiful The similarities between these creatures and the smaller 'grey aliens' described my modern abductees are striking, though saying so won't usually garner a round of applause in ufology circles.

It may not be the case that fairies and aliens are one and the same creature, but it seems to me at least worth considering that SOME 'aliens' are possibly not from outer space at all, but from right here on earth.

Every other culture, except ours has thought so.

Roswell, Bamboozelment & False Scholars

I suppose ufologists will still be debating Roswell if we make it to the 22nd century. Yet everytime Roswell comes up I have the same thought:

There goes the Jedi mind trick.

Every American knows the story by now.

In the summer of 1947 something technological crashes just outside Roswell, New Mexico. At first the Air Force sends out a press release announcing that they've recovered a flying saucer. The next day however, they hold a press conference explaining it was really a weather balloon.

Major Jesse Marcel, the Air Force officer who initially accompanies rancher 'Mac' Brazell back to the crash site spends the rest of his life insisting that no, it really was a flying saucer. Rumors of recovered alien bodies surface, and for the next 60+ years writers like Kevin Randle and Stanton Friedman write books and go around the country insisting that there was a big government coverup.

Meanwhile, skeptics and debunkers like Joe Nickell--English major and UFO hater of Skeptical Inquirer fame--perform lame experiments meant to show that the whole thing is not true. So we have lame UFO researchers on the one hand insisting on veracity, and lame debunkers on the other insisting it's all a big lie. Harsh words are exchanged. Believers and non-believers come forward to voice their positions and contribute snark.

Every so often the military comes out and denies something, or denies a denial, or releases some heavily censored document a la The X-Files to keep the argument going.

Every fire needs an occasional shot of gasoline--even one as old and tired as this. This puppet show is still going strong, right now, right this minute--which in itself is unbelievable, because the discussion is not complex, interesting, or especially polite.

The Roswell problem is always framed this way:

Either UFOs are physically real and their material reality can be readily proven by 'science', or else UFOs are figments of the public's hungry imagination (and therefore 'not real') and 'science' must therefore do everything it can to laugh them off.

Yet neither side of this debate is very scientific and both sides use dubious research and logic so rudimentary and so bad that even I can see it is kind of pathetic. The government deliberately adds periodic confusion.

Here's what I think:

I think that some UFO sightings/experiences are genuine and worthy of further study, and that their material reality (or lack thereof) is their least interesting and least germane attribute. Information scientist Jacques Vallee, a guy who now runs venture capital firms and is hardly a nut, thinks the same thing.

I also think that whether or not a UFO was recovered at Roswell is by now almost certainly less important than the fact that the main players in this boring game are now running an old con also commonly known as "baffle them with bullsh*t, or "control through the confusion."

Street thugs know that one good way to lift a wallet quickly is to confuse the victim by presenting contradictory, baffling cues that distract and disorient the person marked for robbery. Create a diversion, take that cash. Similarly, hypnotists sometimes use a technique of deliberate confusion and contradictory cues to get stubborn subjects to relinquish conscious control long enough that they can be 'put under' and be made open to suggestion.

In short, UFOs may well be a real phenomena worthy of study on many levels, and many different and separate phenomena might be unfolding simultaneously. A UFO might have crashed at Roswell AND the government may well be opportuntistically using that to mess with the public's mind.

Or not.

One certainty is that a disinformation campaign waged by the U.S. military to divert attention away from their own unsavory activities--and there are many--is not at all hard to imagine, and they've certainly done such things before. And why not keep it going for 60 years, Roswell bodies or no Roswell bodies? It's working. If a thing ain't broke, you don't fix it.

When people are arguing about the reality of UFOs (or their unreality), they are not arguing about weapons development, biological weaponry, military intrusions on civilian life, poisonous chemicals, medical experiments (Google 'Tuskegee' for more on that), or any number of other legitimate issues that the general public maybe just ought to care about a little more--or at all.

In 1947, the U.S. military needed attention diverted away from the bomb and the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Today, the dangers we should not be considering (per the military) are so many and so lethal it would take far more than a blog post to list them all.

"Look over there!" is a sad distraction, but it's a distraction that works, and really well too.

Distraction and deception is a definitely a part of UFO lore and history, but it isn't the most interesting or most valuable part--just the most annoying one.

To get to the heart of the matter, I'm convinced we have to think outside of that tired old box.

Charles Fort: A Man Ahead of his Fortean Times

Fortean Times is a classic British magazine about the paranormal and other odd ephemera.

Founded in 1973 to provide "...news, reviews and research on strange phenomena and experiences, curiosities, prodigies and portents," Fortean Times is based on the work of the little-known but fascinating philosopher Charles Fort, who lived from 1874 to 1932.

Fort spent a good part of his brief time on earth researching scientific literature in the New York Public Library and the British Museum Library.

Charles Fort did not leave a huge body of written work, but what he did write packed quite a punch. He annoyed big people, but also found a few fast friends in the world of publishing--friends who respected the uniqueness of his mind, his wit, and his vision. His most famous works, The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932), all concern themselves with what Fort felt was a serious flaw in scientific explanations of what constitutes 'reality'.

Fort argued that science, when rigorously examined, looks a lot more like a belief system than a methodology, and that its conclusions can only stand if anomalous data and experiences are systematically excluded, suppressed, or explained away. Fort blasted the reductionism embraced by mainstream science and its tendency to isolate, separate, and objectify phenomena. He saw science as a force that actually distorts understanding by denigrating mystery in an effort to maintain control.

Fort thought that everything in the known world was in a constant state of flux, always becoming one thing or another, and that the interconnectedness of all things was an obvious given. Like Lovelock (only earlier), he speculated that the universe itself might be more akin to a living organism than to a infinite expanse of inert matter.

Fort was one of the first to wonder publicly whether UFO phenomena might well be craft from outer space, and to this day Fortean Times is one of the first and most willing to publish new UFO findings, theories, and sightings.

Fortean Times has a weird, tabloid sort of vibe that earns it derision by logically minded persons and scientists, but this absurdist quality is grounded in a carefully constructed and always entertaining philosophy that goes back nearly a century. The mocking tone is part of the point.

Fort was notoriously critical even of his own theories, contradicting the oft-made charge that ufologists and lovers of weirdness are unthinking zealots in the process constructing a new religion. Although sometimes this charge rings true, it is by no means true across the board, and the kneejerk need by science to make it true often feels like defensiveness... perhaps because it is.

Fort famously said of science, UFO speculations, and his own work that:

"I conceive of nothing, in religion, science or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while."

That's a perspective that, true or false, leaves room for the creative expansion of the human mind and heart.