UFO Witness Testimony: True or False?

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

Movies and TV have created the UFO phenomenon

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

UFOs have never impacted humanity or civilization

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:

The Mochica (an accent on sexuality and death):

Ancient Europe:


Our Oriental Heritage:


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

UFOs: Distortion or Mental Aberrations

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

Is Technology the Indicator of an Advanced Civilization?

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

UFOs: Hallucinations and Delusion

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

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

Copyright 2017, InterAmerica, Inc.

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

UFO Symbology and Extraterrestrial Thought

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

Source(s) for real UFO buffs!

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

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