Where I'm at with UFOs

Hello once again UFO enthusiasts, transhumanists, science fiction aficionados, and all who are strange and esoteric.

I hope you can pardon my lengthy absence, but I have been dealing with a great many things. Among those things (albeit but a competitively small portion of them) is research and writing for my book on Dulce. In the process of those activities, I've spent a fair amount of time dwelling on my overall position on UFO phenomena. I know that I've already addressed this somewhat with essays such as UFOs and the Muddy Middle, but I keep coming back to these thoughts. I shall explain.

Someone on a Facebook UFO page once asked me if I had ever seen a UFO. I answered that I had not. He responded "You don't look up enough!" as if to imply that the things are basically tripping across the sky at any given time. In fact, I do look up. Quite a bit. Every night when I take my dogs outside, I stargaze. I take in as much of the starry sky as I can. I have yet to see anything I cannot explain. Granted, that means nothing in the grand scheme of things but it compounds the frustration of my next point.

So many of the "big" UFO cases, ones that I used to think had tremendous evidence behind them, are beginning to fall apart under scrutiny. No, I never considered Dulce to be one of them. I'm talking about cases such as Barney and Betty Hill. I once considered theirs to be one of the few credible allegations of alien abduction. Not only that, but I thought it to be evidence supporting the ExtraTerrestrial Hypothesis (ETH). I mean, one of the beings supposedly showed Betty a star chart, right? Turns out there may be a few defects in the story or at the very least indications that something altogether earthly was responsible.

(Yeah, ok. So you hate Robert Sheaffer. Fine. I'm linking him as an alternative point of view and an argument worth at least considering if you wish to be intellectually honest.)

The Rendlesham Incident is another. While I consider the initial claims of the case to still be worthy of investigation, a few of the principles involved have made specious and eyebrow-raising claims in recent years that depart from the primary narrative. I'm talking about claims involving binary codes and time travelers. Debunkers have also attempted to poke holes in other aspects of the case, such as with the Gieger counter readings and allegations that the "tripod landing marks" in the ground were actually mere gopher holes. A few have even taken to calling the case RendleSHAM online.

Even the Malmstrom AFB case has grown suspect. This is the one where UFOs appeared over a field of nuclear missile silos in Montana and took the launch system offline. I'm honestly too lazy to go looking for the links right now, but a mere Google search should lead you to criticisms of both Robert Salla and the claims of the case. Hell, search this blog for Malmstrom and you'll see a few lengthy comments from readers critical of the case.

So what is someone to do? I said this would be a semi-coherent musing on my current thoughts on UFOs so here they are.

First, my inner child is rather disappointed. You know, that seven year-old I told you about who pulled that UFO book off the shelf of the children's library? He's a little bummed there probably aren't saucers full of aliens visiting Earth. He's also more than a little frustrated that the so-called "big" cases have cracks starting to show in their facade. But we must go where evidence leads us and not to where we think would be cool. Frustrating and even perhaps exasperating, but that is how we arrive at truth.

That said, I still believe there is something strange going on as there is a small percentage of reports that still cannot be adequately explained...and the ETH is but one possible explanation. It is not the only one. A combination of MUFON, Internet sites, and History Channel programming ("aliens!") have established a cultural norm of sorts, perpetually linking UFOs with aliens, mostly for the simoleons. This ignores a wide variety of other possibilities, both mundane and bizarre.

For more on that I'll turn it over to Greg Bishop and his wonderful essay, ET Go Home.

For now...good to be back.

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