The UFO Decline

Reading the plethora of UFO sightings and incidents in old magazine articles – one by Kevin Randle in the Spring 1975 issue of UFO Report, “Mysterious Clues Left Behind by Flying Saucers” [Page 36 ff.] – one can’t help but notice that UFO sightings today do not have the spectacular characteristics of the episodes related in magazine/newspaper accounts just thirty of forty years ago.



It’s not that media has changed but, rather, that the UFO phenomenon has changed -- from a dynamic, weird presence to a prosaic, non-landing, alien-absent swath of lights or one lonely light that isn’t much different from that of a star or planet in the sky.

An occasional cigar-shaped craft or triangular vehicle shows up nowadays but those UFOs lack duration and details that are present in earlier reportage, such as this from the Randle UFO Report cited above:

[A farmer] cultivating the fields one day….could see a silvery object in the distance…The object slowly came toward him…The egg-shaped UFO then descended into his corn field.

Just prior to landing, legs, or landing gear, appeared out of the bottom of the strange craft as it touched down gently in the field about 100 yards from the startled farmer. “A port of some sort opened on the side , near the bottom,” he told investigators, “and some peole got out. They moved around the corn for a while, got back in, and took off….”

The “people” were about four or five feet tall and seemed to be wearing one-piece “flying” suits…

When the humanoids reentered their craft, a blue flame shot out of the bottom of the vehicle and the legs retracted. With a slight roar, the ship disappeared into the sky.

[This event took place in 1972, eight years after the Zamora/Socorro, New Mexico landing, which is similar in detail.]



Randle’s piece goes on to tell of other incidents, with humanoid beings, robots, metal residues left at landing sites, Air Force investigations, and military airplane pursuits.

There is even a Travis Walton-like incident where a young boy is shot by a beam of light from a UFO hovering above trees, which knocked him down and caught his jacket on fire.

[Travis Walton’s “abduction” took place in November 1975, several months after the above account appeared in UFO Report.]



The Randle presentation is not alone. Jerry Clark has provided a slew of interesting UFO and flying saucer stories over the years, in many magazines, as have other noted ufologists.

Our point is that those UFO accounts, from the 50s through the 60s and 70s, have a kind of cachet that current UFO sightings don’t have.

Have UFO investigators/reporters gotten lazy, or have UFOs gone into decline?

We think UFOs are in decline.

You see, Randle, Clark, Hall et al. are still around, and new people like Redfern are active in the UFO field, checking into sightings with a kind of journalistic acumen.



It’s not the reporters who’ve gotten small; it’s the UFOs….

UFOs just don’t matter [Redux]

In the vast scheme of things, UFOs and/or flying saucers don’t count. That’s an absolute fact of life.

UFOs don’t affect the economy, your family’s practical existence, your kids’ college tuition, anyone with cancer or any other possibly fatal disease, wars, poverty, political considerations – UFOs don’t affect anything.

Those absorbed by the phenomenon – as we continue to note – are merely escaping into a false reality that is meaningless in our mundane or real reality.

Sure, UFOs have a place in the paranormal sphere or esoteric environment that enthuses those who like curiosities and weird things generally.

But as an artifactual or anomaly that impacts life, UFOs just don’t cut it.

Pursuing the phenomenon is futile, and insane, unless a person doesn’t have anything better to do, which is the case with some long-time “ufologists” – who shall remain nameless this time around (but you all know who we mean).

UFOs have never altered everyday life for the population as a whole, and has rarely affected those who’ve seen something described as a UFO, that is those who didn’t try to capitalize on their experience.

(Those who’ve milked their UFO experience have almost always come to ruination.)

Normal persons who’ve had a UFO experience or sighting have always resumed their everyday life, with only an occasional nod to that thing they saw in the sky.

UFO cases are intriguing, but don’t matter, philosophically, theologically, militarily, or in any other way.

They are curios in a panoply of curios that have intruded upon humans since time immemorial, but that’s all they are – curios.

We, like you, find the phenomenon interesting but it doesn’t cause us to mismanage our lives as it has to many in the UFO community.

Yes, UFOs are real, and flying saucers have landed; even extraterrestrials have debarked from them.

But have those UFO incidents changed the world’s momentum one iota? No.

That doesn’t mean that those interested in such esoterica should abandon their curious perusal of the UFO phenomenon (or phenomena).

It just means that a more judicious and sensible scrutiny should be in place for so-called ufologists, and UFOs should be given a lesser role when one’s priorities are established.

This would go a long way to eliminating the foolish factor that now inundates the UFO reality – a reality that should be subliminal more than overt.

But reasonable persons already know this, right?

The Roswell clue that everyone overlooks

Kenneth Arnold’s June 24th 1947 sighting of nine objects near Mount Rainer spurred media to take Arnold’s description of the objects' movement – like a saucer skimmed over water (which itself was a strange way to describe aeronautical movement) – eventually coining the term “flying saucer.” But the term “flying saucer” wasn’t in common use for some period until well after June 24th, 1947.

Strange flying objects seen in the period just before the (in)famous Roswell incident of July 1947, just two weeks after Arnold’s sighting, were described, almost invariably, as disks or discs.

(See NICAP http://www.nicap.org/waves/1947fullrep.htm but disregard Ted Bloecher’s and Ed Ruppelt’s anachronistic use of “flying saucers” or “UFOs” in the NICAP rundown, as those terms are wrongfully inserted backward into the flying disk history.)

Even most accounts of the Roswell episode referred to a “flying disk.”



And even an FBI memo referred to a “flying disk.”

The alleged William Blanchard/Walter Haut press release had described the recovery of a crashed “flying disk” but the newspaper account – in the July 8th edition of The Roswell Daily Record -- referred, in its headline (above), to a captured “flying saucer” [sic].

Further, the newspaper account went on to report the following:

“The intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment group at Roswell Army Air Field announced at noon today, that the field has come into possession of a flying saucer…

Major Marcel and a detail from his department went to the ranch and recovered the disk, it was stated…

The intelligence office stated that no details of the saucer's construction or its appearance had been revealed.”

The question to ask is this: Why did the newspaper and Jesse Marcel, as quoted, use the term “flying saucer”?

The term wasn’t indigenous, as we’ve noted, to media or the common parlance.

It may have been, however, part of the military argot, but Jesse Marcel and/or the newspaper wouldn’t know that.

Therefore, Marcel use of term could only have came from sources privy to the military jargon, and he passed the term on, in his quotes, to the newspaper.

This means that someone, high up in the military establishment who communicated with Major Marcel used the term, because it applied to what was recovered in one or two places near Roswell that July.

Flying saucer was the newly minted term for flying objects that the military had deemed material and real, and possibly extraterrestrial.

And the crashed disk(s) near Roswell fit the description.