How the Trent/McMinnville photos were created?

This photo from The NEW Report on Flying Saucers magazine [True/Fawcett, NY, 1967] appears on Page 27 in a Lloyd Mallan article entitled “There’s More (and less) to Saucers than Meets the Eye.”

The saucer depicted consists of two paper plates glued together by Gary Buboltz, hung on a clothesline with a thin thread and photographed from fifteen (15) feet.

The photo may be found in the Project Blue Book files.


Here is the uncropped photo:


Ibid: Back Cover

It shows, as Mr. Mallan points out, how easy it is or was to fake flying saucer photos.

J. Allen Hynek authenticated this photo from 1967:



The saucer shown was a balsa-wood model, created and filmed by the Jaroslaw brothers of Michigan who hung it, by a thread, from a tree at the edge of Lake St. Clair:


Ibid: Page 31

The idea that the Trents may have strung a truck mirror from overhead wires rankles even me. The iconic photos have their supporters and defenders, such as Bruce Maccabee, and also their critics, such as Robert Sheaffer and deceased skeptic Phil Klass.

What allows me to accept the possibility [sic] of a Trent hoax is the time factors involved in the episode: the sighting by Mrs. Trent, the calling of her husband, his trip inside the house to get their camera, and the time to take two shots before the object departed.

Moreover, the object doesn’t move far enough in the sky if Bruce Maccabee’s estimate of the time between photo one and photo two taken by Mr. Trent is correct: 31 seconds.

(See a previous post here for copies of the Trent photos.)

Photos can offer proof or disproof of UFOs, as the Mallan article delineates, among other critiques of UFO photography; the advent of computer programs that can create or manipulate images exacerbates the problem of hoaxed UFO photos.

The Buboltz photo, above, emulates the Trent photos. Does it remove the “authentic” rubric given to the Trent pictures? You decide.

RR

Egregious actions and blunders?

UFO Report magazine [August 1976] had an interview with J. Allen Hynek by Timothy Green Beckley [Page 18 ff]. This clip is from Page 20:



Hynek’s “marsh gas” or “swamp gas” explanation was for the Ann Arbor/Dexter/Hillsdale sightings in March of 1966, not April 1967.

This kind of inattention to detail is what has undermined Hynek by any serious UFO investigator or maven.

Adrian Vance provided an article for that same UFO Report magazine [August 1976, Page 36 ff]: Vanishing UFOs: A Dimensional Dilemma.

In Vance’s piece he related that Edward U Condon destroyed all the Colorado Projects UFO materials right before his death.



And in a following paragraph, Mr. Vance tells how Hynek mislaid some UFO photos and negatives that he (Hynek) took of a UFO himself.



Click HERE to see that portion of Mr. Vance’s article.

Can anyone substantiate the Condon and/or Hynek actions?

If either actually happened, it represents behavior that is egregiously unscientific and sickening, as Mr. Vance indicates.

Condon was a security risk, who should not have had access to any materials from the Air Force or any other government agency. We went after Condon’s security status right before he was handed the Colorado Project and you can read about our efforts here in a very early posting – the second one in the archive:

Condon's Security Woes

Hynek was just scatter-brained.

Is this any way to do science?

Is this why the UFO phenomenon is a joke?

Are UFO hobbyists investing their productive lives in a topic that is so befouled by past and present stupidities that they (the hobbyists) can be maligned for wasting their lives?

I ask you…

RR

Merlin, Arthur, UFOs, and Mac Tonnies

A letter to the Editor of UFO Report magazine [Summer 1975, Messages, Page 6] from a David A. Krouse of Wallingford. Pennsylvania refers to the ancient British work, The Brut, an account of English history from antiquity to the Middle Ages.

Mr. Krouse wrote that the text contains a segment for the period 900 A.D. which tells that a small boat, piloted by two women, dressed in strange garments, rose out of the sea, to take Arthur, the King, to Avalon.

Here’s the actual Brut account:



Mr. Krouse didn’t remember the story exactly as it exists in The Brut.

But his note spurred me to look into the Arthurian legend, again.

That much of the legend is immersed in, near, or within water, Arthur’s story took me to Ivan Sanderson’s thesis that UFOs may derive from bases in and under the oceans of the world, which brings me to Mac Tonnies conjecture, in Cryptoterrestrials, that a concomitant civilization to our obvious civilization has thrived for millennia and may account for UFO sightings over the years.



Mac’s hypothesis leaves much to be desired, but along with Sanderson’s ideas and legends such as that of Arthur the King, and the fish-god Oannes who came from the sea to enhance early Babylonians, one has to consider the possibility that UFOs may come from underwater bases or a civilization evolved within the waters of the Earth.



What’s interesting to me, however, is that abduction tales never have anyone taken down into waters but, rather, up into the sky.

If UFOs do come from the seas – a big IF I grant you – one would think that the beings who are allegedly abducting people would take them downward, into the watery depths instead of upwards, into the heavens.

After all Jesus ascended into the sky; he didn’t sink into the Sea of Galilee when he departed this Earthly realm.

And Mohammed went up, not down.

Nonetheless, the fact that water makes up 70% of the surface of the Earth, as Anthony Bragalia reminded me recently, the idea of an underwater world of aliens is not out of the running to explain the source of UFOs.

Yet, Vallee’s and Aubeck’s Wonders of the Sky, which contains a raft of strange UFO or UFO-like sightings, isn’t entitled Wonders of the Sea.



So, either scrutiny of the Tonnies’ crypto-world or Sanderson’s little-talked-about underwater UFO hypothesis has been remiss or there is no real cause to pursue the underwater explanation for UFOs.

But can we readily dismiss the legends that Gods and Kings came from beneath the seas so easily also?

(One aside: I know that most visitors here, maybe all, have not bought or read the Vallee/Aubeck book, or Nick Redfern’s Contactees book, and many other books referred to here, and elsewhere. That dearth of reading or effort is distressful, for it indicates a slovenly approach to the topic of UFOs and attendant ideas. To continue to ramble on and on here without a connected base of well-read individuals is a futile effort, as Paul Kimball has seen it and we, here, are starting to see also. While Wonders in the Sky is disappointing – it lacks evaluation of the sightings listed – it is an invaluable source for those who truly wish to know what UFOs are or may have been, just as legends such as that of Arthur allow hints to supplement conjecture, about UFOs and related matters.)

RR

The Carlos Alberto Diaz abduction, not unlike the Antonio Villas Boas episode

Joseph Brill wrote, in Official UFO magazine [February, 1976, Page 12 ff.] about an alleged “abduction” of an Argentine man, 28 year-old Carlos Alberto Diaz, in 1975.

The picture above is a sketch, from the magazine, depicting what Senor Diaz experienced.

He was “absorbed” by a descending light [UFO?] in which he was succumbed by three entities of human form but stumps rather than arms, and faces without mouths, noses, or ears and greenish-tinted skin.

He was unceremoniously deposited in a vacant field about 200 miles from the spot where he first encountered the light. The time of his “capture” was 3:50 a.m., according to his stopped watch. When he was found, during mid-day following, he had a newspaper with him that he bought in his Naposta neighborhood of Bahia Blanca, which lies southwest of Buenos Aires by the 200 miles noted. That newspaper provided credibility for his story, Brill writes.



During his stint in a hospital, it was noticed that hair on his head and chest had been cut or taken (not by shears). He suffered no ill after-effects.

The Villas Boas case is one said to be instigated by a CIA/military psy-operation, according to DoD/CIA operative Bosco Nedelcovic, who told me the story in the late 1970s.



Nick Redfern covers the account in his book Contactees [Chapter 20].

Nedelcovic presented a scenario that’s hard to accept by some but readily accepted by those who’ve studied the machinations of the CIA and military, the so-called psychological operations.

Villas Boas was, Nedelcovic said, collected by a special unit whose purpose was to create simulated alien contact. The unit operated in South America, with the help of A.I.D. and also in Great Britain, where Nedelcovic said they were part of the infamous Scoriton contact with a man named Bryant.

My point is that the Diaz event mimics the Boas incident, but almost twenty years later.

Was Nedelcovic privy to such simulated events. It seems so. (The UFO UpDates archives has more on Nedelcovic, involving the CIA and child-nappings with a perverse sexual element.)

However, Vallee’s and Aubeck’s Wonders in the Sky is replete – and I mean replete – with similar abduction-like events: Listings 48, 108, 116, 163, 171, 233, 337, and many more.

The CIA wasn’t around then to perform such “tricks” nor were there other groups able to create, so imaginatively, such bizarre stagings.

So, was Boas really part of a CIA experiment, and Diaz too? Did both men suffer similar psychotic-induced hallucinations? Or were both men taken by entities unknown, ETs or otherwise?

Can we ever know?

RR

Why do most UFO buffs concentrate on the older sightings?

The early flying saucer and UFO sightings were more exotic than those of today.

Today’s sightings are generally of amorphous lights, abstract triangles, and benign fly-overs.

The earlier sightings often involved landings, with entities, electromagnetic disruptions of car motors or house lights and electricity, and interactions of various kinds, including alleged abductions of sighters.



Also, earlier sightings were free of modern accretions: cynical skepticism, fakery and embellishment for fame, or psychosomatic stress, and media waywardness.

Yes, some contactees, Adamski, the worst of the bunch when it came to fame-seeking, and a slew of teen-agers or wannabes and never-were corrupted the study of flying saucers and UFOs but they were meticulous, pretty much, in their follies.



Today, the fakery and search for fame is cavalier, often slovenly, dismissive even, just a lark for a few minutes of attention.

And UFOs seem to perceive that human dismissiveness, appearing nonchalantly as a phenomenon nowadays, whereas back in the day(s), UFOs or flying saucers really put on some shows.

Where are the Roswell-like events today, or a Socorro, or a Rendlesham, or a Hill experience, a Travis Walton episode, or a Pascagoula?



There are none.

Just lights in the sky, orbs, or triangular craft.

No Flatwoods monsters. No Villas Boas examinations. No Aztec concoctions. Nothing sensational or exotic at all.



That’s why UFO mavens keep harking back to the old-tales, the old sightings. Those sightings and UFO events had something.

RR

Adamski, Allingham, and UFO Propinquity

George Adamski was a blatant charlatan, but one with charisma and some inventive flying saucer photographs and stories.

Flying Saucer Pictorial, Max Miller’s 1967 magazine, provided a segment of a Kodachrome 16 mm film that Adamski took, and which shows, as the magazine has it, two objects in the sky.

But the real object, that isn’t noted, is indicated at the arrow point in the reproduction here:



Then there is this shot of Adamski’s (in)famous flying saucer, which we all have seen somewhere, sometime:



What is interesting to me, is that Cedric Allingham (aka British astronomer, Patrick Moore) faked a flying saucer photo for the book Flying Saucer from Mars (which is being republished and will be reviewed by Nick Redfern), the fake saucer an almost identical replica of Adamski’s saucer:



How or why did Allingham/Moore do that? Perhaps Christopher Allen [CDA] can enlighten us, as he was one of the people who exposed Moore’s quirky hoax.

And finally, this juxtaposition of a photo by Adamski with one of the Trent/McMinnville UFO photos shows an almost identical flying disk. The Trent sighting and photo took place in 1950; while Adamski said his sighting and photo took place in 1951:



Note that Adamski’s “ship” has an engineering flaw: the craft has a slight chink in its rim, on the left side of the image. (Apparently, Mr. Adamski’s scissors slipped when he created the cut-out.)

What’s the point being made here, if there is one?

Adamski was imaginative and, as noted, inventive, to the extent that others, Allingham/Moore et al. emulated his creations.

Why Adamski’s chicken-brooder saucer became so iconic is beyond the scope of this writer, but it is interesting that Adamski’s concoctions (stories and photos) caught the imagination of the public, and still does, in some quarters.

One might conclude that Adamski was the progenitor of the ET idea that has infiltrated and consumed most followers and devotees of the UFO phenomenon, Stanton Friedman, among them.

And that’s my point: Adamski, as fraudulent as he was, created the flying saucer/UFO agenda [UFOs are ET craft] that we are stuck with to this day, at least some of us are……

Kevin Randle -- UFO researcher? Really?

Here is an excerpt from a piece by Kevin D. Randle in UFO Report magazine, Spring 1975, entitled, Mysterious Clues Left Behind by Flying Saucers (Page 37):



Note the third paragraph, where Randle writes that "The military showed up in strength..."

Where's the substantiation, the citation that proves the military did, indeed, show up?

We have a number of other Randle articles, and many by Jerome Clark, which, in hindsight, indicate some sloppy reportage, and mind-sets that indicate a bias toward believability of accounts by anyone, anywhere when it comes to UFOs.

The questioning mind is absent by those fellows, at least, in their early incarnations as "ufologists."

Even Allen Hynek, who smothered the Mannor and Hillsdale flying saucer sightings in 1966 by attributing them to "swamp gas" fell for the faked 1967 Jaroslav photo seen here:



Hynek said that the "Analysis so far does not show any indication of an obvious hoax." [Flying Saucers Pictorial, 1967, Page 44].

The teenage Jaroslav brothers admitted, not long after, to making the "saucer" and faking the photograph.

Hynek was dismissed by reporters as unreliable after the 1966 "swamp gas" fiasco and he never regained credibility with news media after that episode.

He never regained credibility with us either.

We eschew the so-called noted ufologists because they've proven to be incompetent or just plain wrong, often back-tracking and making excuses for their earlier "nonsense."

One can forgive them, but one can't forget...their blunders and errant "research."

RR

UFOs: Past, Present, Future

Wonders in the Sky by Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck have countless sightings that are replicated in modern UFO literature, with modern sightings sometimes providing photographic support.

For instance, Vallee and Aubeck provide this sighting [Number 417] on Page 306 of the paperback:

12 January 1836, Cherbourg, France – A “luminous body…two-thirds the size of the moon” was witnessed at 6:30 p.m. “Central to it there seemed to be a dark cavity.”

Here is a series of photos taken by George Stock of Passaic, New Jersey July 28th, 1952:



The UFO depicted mimics the Cherbourg sighting listed in Wonders…

(And note that the Stock UFO resembles, almost exactly, a few other UFOs photographed in the 1950s and 1960s:








One of the allegedly hoaxed Heflin photos

Anthony Bragalia thinks UFOs are shape-changers.

Wonders….has a number of sightings that indicate shape-changing; e.g., Item 371, Page 274

This photo, which I think is fake, from Anthony's Wanaque research shows a luminance that showed up in the other photos below:






The questionable 1954 Darbishire photo

A plethora of sightings listed in Wonders…also indicates luminance; e.g., Pages 55, 103, 114, 123, 195, 235, 252, 253, 266, 283, 298, 305, 330 343.

Anthony also notes UFOs that emit rays of lights, as in the (in)famous Wanaque photograph.



Wonders…also lists sightings where rays of light are emitted; e.g. Item 167 Page 141; Item 329 Page 253; Item 346 Page 261; Item 410 Page 303

Then we find a rather well-known UFO photo that emulates the vapor-trail of the alleged Aurora prototype:



Wonders…lists some old sightings that also precede, by witness observation, the Aurora residue; e. g., Item 89 Page 96

My point?

That “modern” sightings antedate very similar, almost exact sightings and peculiarities as noted by Vallee, Aubeck, and Bragalia’s interests, among others, emulate ancient or older sightings which seem to confirm that something with a pattern is at work when it comes to UFO phenomena.

What’s old is new again, apparently….

RR

Is Earth an alien zoo?

A new study says that Earth is home to (approximately) 8.7 million species.

Click her for news-story

There has, almost from the beginning of the modern UFO era (1947), been a few hypothetical thrusts saying that Earth might be a zoo where species have been brought or created and dispersed for extraterrestrial purposes which remain totally hidden.

The idea may seem fanciful at first glance, but isn’t outside the realm of possibility,

The idea, along with the penal colony thesis, can be elaborated upon and made sensible when one examines the idea that an alien species from other worlds, should there be any, could very well use the Earth as a laboratory or park containing animals, plants, humans, insects, reptiles, and other elements of life.

This would explain the vast array of UFO visitations over the years, and supports the hypothesis that alien beings have taken a particular interest in the Earth as regards atomic or ecological devastation, both of which having the potential to destroy eons of lab work or eliminating an extraterrestrial “vacation venue.”

Earth could be the lab-source for species meant to be seeded throughout the galaxies or, at least, one of the lab-sources.

Wikipedia has a succinct review of the Alien zoo hypothesis ,which may be read by clicking HERE.

For me, the zoo idea is not as zany as many other hypotheses which have pummeled UFO devotees of the years.

What do you think?

RR

The statistical odds (and common sense) against UFO/ET visits

Universe Today:

[There are] 200 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way [alone]

{There are] 100 to 200 Billions galaxies in the visible or known universe with hundreds of billions of stars

An average galaxy contains between 1011 and 1012 stars. In other words, galaxies, on average have between 100 billion and 1 trillion numbers of stars

[Galaxies can be] small dwarf galaxies, with just 10 million or so stars, or they can be monstrous irregular galaxies with 10 trillion stars or more.
------------------------
NASA:

In 1999 the Hubble Space Telescope estimated that there were 125 billion galaxies in the universe, and recently with the new camera HST has observed 3,000 visible galaxies, which is twice as much as they observed before with the old camera. We're emphasizing "visible" because observations with radio telescopes, infrared cameras, x-ray cameras, etc. would detect other galaxies that are not detected by Hubble
--------------------------
Wiki Answers:

Based on current estimates, there are between 200 - 400 billion stars in our galaxy (The Milky Way).

There are possibly 100 billion galaxies in the Universe. So taking the average of our galaxy, gives approximately 3 x 1024 stars. So about 3 septillion. This has been equated to the same number of grains of sand that are on Earth.

One source (BBC) stated that there are about 1,000 stars to every grain of sand on Earth!! There are an estimated 100 to 200 billion galaxies.

So taking a conservative number of 100 billion stars per galaxy gives an approximate total of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. (Which is 10 sextillion)
-------------------------
Wikipedia:

Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to our Solar System. It lies about 4.37 light-years in distance, or about 41.5 trillion kilometres, 25.8 trillion miles or 277,600 AU.
------------------------------
With the information above, how can anyone, with an ounce of rationality, think that UFOs represent visitors from galaxies, far, far away, or even from the nearest star system to Earth?



The Universe, with its vast diversity and intriguing panoply of astronomical or cosmological entities (by which we mean stars, planet, moons et al., not living beings), offers any curious alien intelligence much better sources for exploration than Earth which, in the great scheme of things, is a backwater and insignificant cosmological element, no matter how hard humans try to think otherwise.

Even if an alien exploratory team stumbled upon Earth millennia ago, what would stir them to keep visiting for centuries or eons afterward?

Of course, some ET believers say Earth was seeded by alien visitors and they keep coming back to see how their humanoid garden is doing.

Or Earth is a penal colony or some sort or a zoo, and extraterrestrial aliens keep checking in or visiting as if this lonely, remote planet is an integral part of a special alien agenda.

The idea that UFOs, with their abundant sightings, represent extraterrestrial visitations in light of the statistical probabilities above which open the whole Universe to such visitations, is ludicrous on the face of it.

No wonder that UFO devotees are seen as cranks and weirdos. Their thought processes invite the opprobrium.

Addictive Ufologists

What one characteristic is typical of virtually all UFO enthusiasts?

Hoarding, collecting, accumulating UFO material or sightings.

Ufologists just have to get their hands on sightings released by government agencies; that welter of UFO sightings gathered from pilots, military people, and various other members of the population, the general citizenry.

And UFO devotees have to collect the plethora of books about UFOs that show up rather regularly, along with magazines, news-clippings, and web-pages or internet items.

What do UFO mavens or ufologists do with this collection of UFO detritus? Nothing – nothing at all.

They merely hoard it, sometimes giving it a cursory view.

Only a few use the collected material for research or as a supplement to hypothetical ratiocination.

The process of gathering such materials is a kind of addiction, a pathology that is endemic to the subject matter.

It’s not like coin collecting, or stamp collecting or baseball card collecting, which have a monetary value of some kind. It’s just a need to have a pile of stuff related to the UFO phenomenon, as if having it gives the collector a kind of authority just because of the ownership.

The UFO mystery has always attracted people with maladapted personalities.

That, in itself, is a matter for study, but no one with psychiatric or sociologic bona fides gives a good goddam.

And the hoarding is essentially harmless. But there it is…..

N.B. Click here for a news-clip on addiction

UFOs: a lot of data; a lot of nothing

I’m fascinated by the accounts in the Vallee/Aubeck book, Wonders in the Sky, from the earliest of times, in which “beings” (often clothed in white garments) were reported seen in the presence of strange celestial objects [Pages 35, 37, 39, 40, 46, 47, 51, 52, 54, 57, 58, 62, 63, 67, 71, 72, 75, 77, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 93, 95, 103, 105, 106, ff.]

(Remember, Zamora’s Socorro craft was accompanied by beings clothed in white, as were beings allegedly spotted outside Woomera, Australia, which some, us included, tied to the Solway Firth “spaceman” photo. And there are other sightings in which entities were garbed in shiny or white clothing or uniforms.)

And a look at cave art also raises the specter of strange beings mingling among early mankind (used by Alien Astronaut devotees for their hypothesis).



Then, of course, we all have access to hundreds, thousands actually, of UFO stories that have accumulated since 1947, and appear in books, television, and the internet.

But none of this data or information has taken us to an explanation of what flying saucers or UFOs were or are.

That dastardly skeptic Phil Klass said none of us would ever get an explanation for UFOs in our lifetime. His “prophecy” seems to be accurate, at least so far.



My point is that we have the data, lots of it, but we are nowhere near an explanation of what UFOs are or what their raison d’être might be.

And the chase has become wearying for some: Paul Kimball and a few fellows here, plus others who have dropped off the UFO merry-go-round.

Why Roswell remains an active source for UFO mavens. That incident had aspects of concretebility: recovered debris, alien bodies (supposedly), credible or near-credible witness accounts, an official Army Air Corps release, newspaper stories of a captured disk, and the status of a hardened myth.



Roswell is just as evanescent and non-determinant as the data mentioned above, but it, at least for the UFO die-hards, has elements that seem to be provable if one can just break through an alleged government/military cover-up.

However, in a final analysis, no amount of data or information with a UFO tinge is going to solve the mystery.

The phenomenon remains elusive, and Phil Klass’s assessment also remains intact.

RR

UFOs and the Death of God [Redux]

Reading through Wonders in the Sky by Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck [Penguin Group, NY, 2009] one is struck how most of those sightings from antiquity through the Middle Ages up to the beginning of the 20th Century have a direct or tangential connection to persons or enterprises that have a religious patina.



As aficionados of UFOs know, modern sightings, mainly from 1945 on, are secular in nature; that is, UFOs or flying saucers were not attendant or dependent upon a religious overlay.

Why is that?

I conjecture that UFOs had an umbilical connection to those events and people who believed in God and practiced the Faith, no matter if what the denomination or premise what was: Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Pagan, Mayan, Christianity, et alii.

But after the Death of God – and I believe that God died, not metaphorically as Nietzsche proposed, but actually – UFOs became attracted to humankind as a symbolic phenomenon, with meaning that has yet to be discerned.

UFOs and God is Dead -- 2009

Carl Jung’s magnificently clear rumination on the nature and reality of God in Answer to Job outlines how God, in a fit of divine despair, about how humans had been treated by Him and the vicissitudes of His creation, became incarnate, as Jesus Christ to atone for His (God’s) misbehavior, and ultimately die as a personal -- shall I say suicidal? – retribution to assuage the divine guilt.



However, that atonement, by partial Deicide, was short lived, and God’s aloof, distant, or hidden nature [See Richard Friedman’s The Hidden Face of God] brought about, in modern times, one of the most horrific episodes against humanity, and a chosen element of that humanity: The Holocaust.



In that human catastrophe and its aftermath, God died -- He either did Himself in (a total act of Decide) or died of a divine heartbreak; either way, God Himself – not his surrogate (Son) but God Himself died in h mid-1940s A.D.

Thus UFOs, whatever they were or are were transmogrified by the Divine denouement, but destined to intervene in human affairs by an eternal mandate of God, had to continue the “mission” and secular sightings became the norm, and the religious connection was set aside or lost from that point on.

This doesn’t explain, admittedly, what UFOs are, their essential makeup, nor their purpose. But it may explain by Vallee’s and Aubeck’s litany of ancient UFO sightings have been replaced by a litany of secular UFO sightings.



To augment my bizarre thesis, I suggest readers here check out an article in the current New Yorker: Is That All There Is? by James Woods, about Secularism [August 15/22 issue, Page 87 ff.]



RR

Wonders in the Sky (and nonsense in the book)

David J. Hufford, Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Psychiatry, Penn State College of Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania provides the forward to Jacques Vallee’s and Chris Aubeck’s book (pictured above).

Professor Hufford is erudite and insightful.

Here are some examples from his Foreward:

I [Hufford] was pursuing the heretical idea that folk belief traditions might actually incorporate accurate observations…

[Vallee in his books, Anatomy of a Phenomenon and Passport to Magonia] recognized the difference between the core phenomenology of [UFO] reports and the local language and interpretations that clothed that core in traditional accounts.

Criticizing conventional UFO investigators for “confusing appearance and reality” [Vallee] said that “The phenomenon has stable, invariant features….But we have also had to note carefully the chameleonlike character of the secondary attributes of the sightings.

The willingness of [Vallee and Aubeck] to cast a very wide net, andn ot to allow the particular cultural interpretations of events to limit their view, offers us a remarkable opportunity to seek patterns that may lead to new understandings.

Those with a view of these matters narrowly focused on a particular interpretation, especially the extraterrestrial idea, may be annoyed by the mixing of the aerial and the religious, the political and the mystical and more.

The problem with “spaceship” is not that it is anomalous; it is that it is an interpetation rather than an observation.

But Vallee and Aubeck undercut these judicious remarks by Professor Hufford by making these comments in their Introduction:

We will show that unidentified flying objects have had a major [sic] impact not only on popular culture but on our history, on our religion…

…the fact would remain that an unexplained phenomenon has played and continues to play a fantastically important role in shaping our belief systems, the way we view our history and the role of science.

…their [UFOs] impact has shaped human civilization in important ways.

Vallee’s and Aubeck’s hubris astounds.

UFOs have never had a “major” impact on humanity or civilization or history or religion.

The phenomenon has always been a remote and peripheral aspect of societal life, of human existence.

UFOs, today, are as inconsequential to humanity and society as a whole as they have always been, despite Vallee’s insistence that UFOs have been and are integral to life on Earth.

Vallee’s view is egocentric, megalomanic almost.

His view typifies that of those, generally, who are absorbed by the pheonomenon.

Irritated by Stephen Hawking’s postion vis a vis UFOs – “I am discounting reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos?” – Vallee and Aubeck don’t get it:

The persons seeing UFOs are not cranks and weirdos. Hawking is wrong. The people who study UFOs are the cranks and weirdos – Vallee and Aubeck among them.

RR