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….
posted by RRRGroup at
8:41 AM
2 Comments:
Being a big admirer of Nick Redfern, I'm glad to hear you apparently subsuming him under the rubric, "It’s not the reporters who’ve gotten small; it’s the UFOs…"
But there's a point you seem to've missed about UFO sightings that is exactly the sort of things writers like Nick, (and for that matter, yourselves), are up against in the modern era.
Back when all the classic sightings were actually occurring, not only were people far less sophisticated, (on every conceivable level, particularly regarding the kind of havoc the media can wreak upon the lives of anyone daring to come out in the open about this type of thing), but, far more crucially, most of them experienced a devastating sense of utter isolation.
They knew no one was likely to believe them but having seemingly undergone a cosmic-scaled experience, (amounting to their own personal version of Moses beholding the burning bush), the internal pressure from the experience made them feel they'd go stark raving mad if they didn't put it out there.
These days, though, claims of such experiences are so widespread, (especially with the advent of the internet), the sense of isolation is diminished and only individuals who feel burdened with a sense of mission or a need for attention are likely to come forward.
But these are precisely the sort of people who, no matter how authentic their accounts may be, are usually taken for frauds, miscreants or psychotics.
The point being, UFO encounters, (whatever their true nature), are still occurring out there. They're just as vivid, (if not more so), as any of the classics, but most of the people who undergo them're better able to handle the experience.
For those who find such encounters more problematic, however, it's far easier to hook up with fellow experiencers who can provide the sort of support that, formerly, people like Nick provided, a development which tends to cut journalists out the loop.
Borky,
You're have it right, pretty much.
But a scrutiny of the old accounts, in UFO mags from thirty or forty years ago, show UFO episodes that are really fraught with details that are missing in current UFO incidents (O'Hare, Stephensville, Phoenix, Kokomo, et cetera.)
Persons reporting sightings or landings are either remiss in their story-telling or those writing down the tales are leaving a lot out.
Or UFO events are not just as wild as they used to be.
RR
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