Although as you say, there is a lot of ego-boosting going on in the shadows, there is also a lot of work for which many of these people never get any credit and if trained properly, and is being done for the best reasons, they really don’t need any. As for THEIR puppetmasters, I occasionally see more dark motivations–also as you point out.

As for the MIB charade, I’m not sure if the originators were even aware of the history of the “dark stranger warning the seeker” scenario. As you so rightly argue, perhaps they were unwittingly playing with archetypal fire. During the Paul Bennewitz operation, Richard Doty grilled Moore on the history of the MIB. Moore said that Doty listened carefully and took extensive notes. What he did with this info is anyone’s guess, although I’m sure it was put to good (or bad) use.

Hey, don’t be so quick to call me diplomatic! See my very first post and the most recent one about abductions, but yes, I tend to look at things from the excluded middle POV.

I do have only one real personal dislike in the UFO field, but that is only because of some personal interaction and firsthand witnessing of his shenanigans. He is one of the personalities profiled at Royce Meyers’ excellent and hilarious site UFOwatchdog.com. Have a guess.

The only other thing that gets my dander up is willful and aggressive stupidity, of which there is no shortage on either side of the UFO debate.

My strong suspicion is, though, rather than admit that, and thus admit their own redundance, the main game they’re “very good at playing” is promoting the idea, no matter how much it might appear to the contrary, no matter how mindbendingly incomprehensible and paranormal things might seem to get, it’s only because they like things to seem that way, it’s only because they don’t want anyone to be certain who’s really in charge, who’s really running the show, though really, secretly, between you and them - wink, wink! - be in no doubt, it is them.

The thing is though, I also suspect a great deal of this isn’t purely down to professional self defense, i.e., protection of their continued existence, their budget, their status, their power: a lot of is down to pure ego inadequacy.

In the most recent edition of ‘The Sirius Mystery’, Robert Temple recounts how at the time the book first came out he came to discover Carl Sagan was going around behind his back secretly briefing all manner of influential media people against him, implying to them he was doing this on behalf of the Secret Services who viewed Temple and his book as some sort of hush-hush threat to the very fabric of world order.

And of course, maybe at the time that really was how the Secret Services viewed Temple and his tome.

But then again, maybe Sagan’s behaviour had something more to do with the fact his own book, ‘Intelligent Life in the Universe’, (co-written with Soviet astronomer I.S. Shklovskii in 1966), proposed the closely related thesis the ancient Sumerian culture-bringing god Oannes might have been a visiting extraterrestrial, yet with nothing like the kind of impact or acclaim Temple’s work received.

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p.s. love this new blog format you guys have switched to: the previous one was so fussy and irritating I found it much too easy to ‘exclude’ it from the ‘middle’ of my regularly visited sites.

This way, though, really brings out the powerful contrast between your approaches: yours, considered, diplomatic, Californian; Nick’s, irreverent/antagonistic/anarchic/icono-clastic, latterday British.

Or putting it another way: yours, more ’suit and tie’, (to use a Redfernism); Nick’s more, “Suits you, sir!”