Welcome To The Blog
Thanks for being here at the beginning of something we hope will grow into something so big that everyone posting and commenting at Ufomystic is accused of being part of the “conspiracy,” which is after all the ultimate compliment.
Perhaps I should begin here by describing where I’m coming from to remind readers (and me) of some of the viewpoints that will inform my posts.
1)
If something has been done to death, even if it seems “right,” I’m immediately interested in the opposing viewpoint. For example, Nick Redfern’s Bodysnatchers In The Desert got my attention immediately for the most part because it threw almost everything we assumed about Roswell in the trash. I almost don’t care if it’s the “real” story or not, as long as it stirs up the pot and causes debate. Documentation and supporting evidence is nice too, and keeps me interested past the initial rush of novelty.
2)
I’m so sick of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) that I want to throw up. As Paul Kimball said, “I put more emphasis on the H than the ET.” While I’m pretty sure that something extra-human is interacting with us and has been doing so for thousands of years, I don’t know why we have to jump to the extraterrestrial conclusion. Jacques Vallee wrote “I would be very disappointed if it just turned out to be aliens coming from other galaxies in spaceships.” Think beyond the established models. Many of the best advances in history came from people who others thought were “weird” at first.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of certified weirdos out threre too. Like I said, supporting evidence helps.
3)
Fundamentalists of any stripe are the bane of intellectual evolution. In the context of this site, I refer specifically to the UFO believer/ skeptic dichotomy. When someone asks me if I “believe” in UFOs, my reply is that belief is the wrong word. Most of the time, this shuts off the conversation right away. Good.
I’m fairly convinced (almost to the point of belief, actually) that there is something behind the thousands of UFO reports collected over the years that begs our attention, and cannot be attributed to hoaxes, misidentifications, fantasy-prone personalities and the like. This brings us to the “skeptics.” True skepticism involves looking at a question without an a priori assumption of the outcome. The loudest of the lot tend to be what I refer to as “Fundamentalist Skeptics.” They know beforehand that there is nothing unidentified about the UFO phenomenon. Where they get this godlike view of things is beyond me. UFO Believers are exactly the same, but in the opposite camp. Same arguments all the time, both virtually useless. The believers tend to be more fun at parties, though.
This doesn’t mean that those of either side don’t have something valuable to bring to the table.
4)
Do not confuse the importance of the message with the messenger. Just becuase someone claims to be opening the doors of official secrecy on UFOs doesn’t mean that we have to believe everything they say. For example, many years ago, a man claiming to be from Naval Intellgence started telling me all sorts of stories about government involvement with UFOs. He talked a good line, and told me things that were not generally known about intelligence and defense. As I realized later, just becuase he could tell me when the (then newly announced) Stealth fighter would land at Burbank airport or what week the U.S. would invade Bosnia (he was right on both counts) did not mean that I should also believe that his stories that an alien race is in cahoots with the government. Facts can be checked. Until I meet someone who is demonstrably not human, stepping out of a fantastic spaceship, I’ll have to leave that one in the “maybe” file. Fun to talk about, but questionable as something on which to base my life or thinking. Also, some of these people might be nuts, or crazy like a fox. Everyone has an agenda. That goes double for spies.
5)
Maybe there are aliens coming here to probe our butts and impregnate our women, mutilate our livestock and doodle in ripe wheat fields. Like I said, the prevailing wisdom, especially in an area such as this, makes me look for other theories to consider. We must not give in to the idea, pounded into our heads since childhood, to definitively make up our minds about everything. The sort of person that has to be right all the time is one of the most annoying things I can imagine. Get some counseling, dudes.
and 6)
The UFO subject is above all, a fun and stimulating intellectual excercise that brings up important scientific and philosophical questions: Are we alone as a species endowed with consciousness? Can we learn something from our non-human friends? Are they just us in another guise? Is the history of humankind intimately connected to something that we have called “gods” “spirits” or even “aliens?” Is this all just wishful thinking by minds hungry for contact or weary of the problems of this world? I think the answer is a combination of all of these, and that’s one of the most exciting things we can consider.
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Dec 15 2006 
December 16th, 2006 at 6:00 am
Years ago I came across Whitley Streiber’s books about the Grays and subsequently read them. I found some points interesting… Perhaps these beings are responsible in some way for giving us consciousness? I always think it strange that we are so like our cousins the chimpanzee but yet are not. I think evolution cannot really explain why or how we’ve evolved as we have. Other beasties walk on two legs but that does not make them more aware. I always try to keep an open mind to the infinite possibilities out there, look at quantum physics!
December 16th, 2006 at 8:15 am
Gentlemen –
I applaud you both for not stipulating some byzantine tome of “terms of service” as Loren and company did over at Cryptomundo. I recognize the internet is potentially a very complex environment legally (and I’ll stop myself here before I go on a long heated rant that you would have to edit or wipe … )
Anyway, I like what I see and best of luck to both of you.
Daniel
December 16th, 2006 at 9:46 am
Think beyond the established models. Many of the best advances in history came from people who others thought were “weird†at first.
In UFOlogy and music much of the interesting stuff is from crossover. What guys like the sociologists, mystics, magicians, linguists, etc etc have to say about the UFO phenomenon is more refreshing than what the True Believers have to say.
Talking of that, looks like our old chum Lam is alive and well
December 16th, 2006 at 12:05 pm
Most scientists explain consciousness as “simply” the ability to recall past events and apply them to the present, and more importantly, the future. Why they choose to ignore other manifestations (like compassion) hasn’t been explained to my knowledge.
Some of the “other beasties” walk on four legs or swim in the ocean, and I’m not ready to write them off as not having consciousness. Dolphins save people from drowning and elephants have a highly developed social structure. It has been recently reported that due to the loss of habitat and continued poaching, elephants have begun to attack each other, people and other animals–just like humans when they feel threatened. Leonard Nimoy once remarked that in the case of whales, they have not developed not “ahead” or “behind” us, but “off to the side.” I think that’s a valid model.
So maybe evolution explains this, but it also might be that consciousness is inherent in matter, if you wait long enough (like 4 billion years.)
December 16th, 2006 at 3:32 pm
Daniel
Good to hear you’re enjoying the blog.
Yeah, we’re really trying to get people thinking about the UFO subject as a whole, and address all of the theories, etc., and not just get bogged down with just the ETH.
Hopefully, it will stimualte good debate.
December 16th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
Elmicko
Seems like you think on a similar path to me and Greg.
It’s good to see that there are more people out there (in fact, from private and published comments I’ve received - a LOT more).
December 16th, 2006 at 3:37 pm
Greg
Excellent “Welcome to the Blog” post.
December 16th, 2006 at 10:10 pm
Hey Mick! Glad you found us. One of my OTO friends once asked if I wanted to do a LAM meditation. I declined. Seemed like a bad idea at the time.
Daniel–thanks for the support. We need it! We have little or no control over the “terms of service.” Perhaps the fine people who make all this possible have done a little market research.
Nick–I had to do something. You’ve already posted 10 or 12 times!
More exciting and exclusive stuff to come from both of us. I will start posting UFO-related music files too. Should be able to do that by next week.
December 17th, 2006 at 10:49 am
“For example, Nick Redfern’s Bodysnatchers In The Desert got my attention immediately for the most part because it threw almost everything we assumed about Roswell in the trash. I almost don’t care if it’s the “real†story or not, as long as it stirs up the pot and causes debate.”
..and sells books, you mean…real stories might not do that as well…
December 17th, 2006 at 4:58 pm
Wearethemetrons:
If you think that UFO books sell in massive quantities, you are very wrong. In fact, for the most part, you could not be further from the truth.
No-one I know is (or if they are, they shouldn’t be) in the UFO subject just to sell books.
It’s about (or should be about) trying to get to the core of the UFO mystery (or “cores” is probably a better description, given that there are probably several things going on) and then trying to get that across to people who care and who are interested.
You might not agree with the info in Body Snatchers (which is fine; I put the information out there for people to see; not shovel it down their throats like some evangelical preacher).
But your selling-books comments shows you know not a damned thing about me and my reasons for being in ufology.
It’s to inform people.
December 17th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
Elmicko:
The Lam workshop looks very interesting. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.
December 17th, 2006 at 6:50 pm
My first reason for writing about this subject is to learn things for myself, and pass that info along to the reader–much like Nick.
If you think most authors are getting rich off of UFO books, try it yourself. The best way to do this is pander to the common wisdom and go a step or two further (but staying comfortably within the ETH belief system.) It doesn’t matter if you have absolutely nothing to back it up with, in fact, it’s probably better.
December 18th, 2006 at 11:05 am
I think everyone who becomes interested in these “subjects of the damned” (as Charles Fort might term them) generally starts out with a nuts-&-bolts (re: UFOs) and flesh-&-blood (re: Loch Ness Monsters, Abominable Snowmen, etc) outlook on such. This is natural, as the interest usually starts in the just-before-teenage years of eleven and twelve; years in which we are full-time school students being taught (a.k.a. indoctrinated in) all the orthodoxies of science, history,sociology, etc. We have to learn the material and parrot it back successfully to our academic mentors to pass on through the educational system on the “pathway to knowledge and success”. So we are programmed to believe that this is true and that is not, and such-and-such is the way things are and anything otherwise is the way things AREN’T. How do we know this? Because history…and SCIENCE…tell us so.
For these reasons we grow up oriented towards the idea that monsters and such “MUST” be prehistoric survivals of some kind, with a genuinely biological basis in fact, and with breeding populations and food-source requirements like other “natural” animals.
Along with this, we tend to believe (early on) that UFOs..flying saucers…are metallic mechanisms of advanced technologies that “MUST” be from somewhere else beyond this planet.
That is, if such things are real AT ALL. To look for their point of origin we look to the stars and to galaxies and solar systems beyond our own. We hypothesize space-travel time conundrums, types of fuel systems and what-not that might facilitate “their” travel across space to meet up with us…or vice-versa. We take a typically science-fictional (Star Trek/Star Wars) approach to all this, with the key word here being SCIENCE fictional. We are still locked in to the Orthodox thinking paradigm.
But something happens to a lot of us over time. We see and experience a lot of things that start casting serious doubts on the “official,authorized, orthodox” versions of “how things are”.
With many of us this begins with ghosts and moves outwards to other areas of strangeness. In the case of ghosts, these things are encountered with…I have found…much more frequency than is generally realized and quickly lead many people to think twice about official “scientific” dictums of “No Such Thing” existing. From the doubts of science’s omniscience regarding ghosts, it then becomes a short leap over to questioning same on unknown creatures and on UFOs. Once that questioning has begun, there is almost no turning back from it.Not by any thoughtfully intelligent mind that has learned to “think outside the box”. And the more such a questioning mind learns about subjects like quantum physics, and that discipline’s theeoretical implications, the less and less one is likely to be a Pavlovian sycophant to the “This Is How It IS” mentality of Hard Science.
Learning about parallel universe possibilities, alternate vibrational realities and the like, can quickly work to open the mind to a greater range of considerations regarding “where do they come from?” than just “How many light years would it take to reach here from Andromeda?”.
This blog looks to be a “think out of the box” blog, and I like that. I like that a lot.
December 18th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
Thanks for the comments, Bill, and glad you are enjoying the Blog.
Yep, thinking outside the box is essential in ufology, as we all need to remember that the “U” in UFO _still_ stands for “unidentified.” And not for “alien spacecraft.” All bets should still off as to the source of all this weirdness.
You are spot on too - for many people, dinosaurs in Loch Ness, giant apes in the Pacific Northwest, and metal spaceships have been replaced by something weirder, something that is parodoxically real yet unreal, something quantum, and something seriously strange - and not before time.
The problem is that many mainstreamers don’t like their view of reality altered because it can be an unnerving idea to some of them to imagine that the world may be different to how we perceive it - dare I say even Matrix-like.
I say: bring it on.
I want answers; and I don’t want to hear about head-in-the-sand, “I don’t want to know” approaches. And it’s good to know that you don’t either.
December 19th, 2006 at 4:05 pm
So glad to see you both teaming up with this excellent blog to have a regular voice on ‘the Internets’. I look forward to stopping by each day.
December 21st, 2006 at 6:58 pm
WOW! This is very refreshing. I had hoped someone would come along who would start looking more at the John Keel, Jaques Vallee style of thinking where the thought isn’t so plugged up with doctrinal rote B.S. and whack jobs worshiping the “space brothers” to turn this phenomena into another religion is dangerous and irresponsible.
December 23rd, 2006 at 1:18 am
Nick made a very good comment - that the universe may be “Matrix-like.” I once wrote a piece for Kenn Thomas’ excellent zine Steamshovel Press entitled “Why The First 20 Minutes Of The Matrix Is The Best Conspiracy Movie Ever Made.” The film bypasses the B.S. and goes straight to the heart of the spiritual enslavement of humankind by a soulless, power-mad force. William S. Burroughs called this force “Control” and stated that “Control is controlled by its need to control.” How true.
This all will be part of the “symbolic realm” rant I will post in a few days.
Thanks to everyone for your comments! I knew there were honest and undogmatic seekers still out there.