In one of your comments above you misspoke and said, “Most serious people tend to look at the unknown in a narrow-minded, right-brain way.” You meant “left-brained.”

The women controlled this village and the government had just put in a road. One truck drove by while we were there and all the women, farming, raised their fists in the air, screaming at this “unidentified object” flying down the road. haha.

No tolerance for pollution or should I say: technology. How could I destroy such a culture of truth? haha. Their language was so ancient that an expert from the University had to be sent in to decipher the Berber. Turns out the village was speaking rhyming verse!

We need more stink bomb UFOs for sure.

When I started reading UFO books a few years ago, I thought I’d exhaust everything after 6 months or a year. Looks like I’ll add Fort’s book to the list. I’ve been to Richard Dolan’s website. Anyone have any ideas when his 2nd book is going to finally come out?

Fort didn’t know if these things really happened, but the fact that they might have, and were reported in scientific journals of the day, made him wonder why there was such a rush to dismiss them. As far as I’m concerned, a lot of it did happen as reported by witnesses, and continues to happen to this day.

By arguing if fish ever fell from the sky, we are engaging in the same sort of semantic discussion that some people accuse Colin Bennett of doing. The important thing is that these ideas and possible events are impinging on our belief systems and what they might be doing to our view of what is “real.”

I think that reported events outside of our normal experience are there to teach us something.

Anyway, how could Fort have gone out in the world and waited for these things to happen? It’s just like UFO reports! Weirdness happens at its pleasure, not ours.

You sould read some Charles Fort if you can. It’s very funny stuff, even if you don’t “believe” in the strange events he discusses. He was more of a punk philosopher than a reporter.

Any number of posts and comments on this site offer suggestions about what could be done with the study of UFOs.

Most of my posts on the subject have to do with taking a more broad-based view of what the phenomenon could be, and other ways to look at it rather than an endless cataloging of sightings. This is of course important as well, but as Bennett points out, it has excluded other avenues of understanding. It seems that the whatever it is behind the UFO subject is not letting us understand what is going on by simple scientific research, at least science as it is practiced at present.

Most serious people tend to look at the unknown in a narrow-minded, right-brain way. I think that we must acknowledge that the UFO subject continually reminds us that there are more ways to look at a problem than with numbers, data, and “facts.” This is why I decry the attitude that witnesses should only tell us what they saw. How did they feel? Was their life changed in some way? These are a start in the sort of questions I would like to see asked, and included in the study of the anomalous. Science has tracked us down a path that blocks out many of our human qualities. Emotions can be just as useful as fact-collecting observations.

I would suppose that enculturation defines what qualifies as a “UFO,” although it would have taken just a little while to talk to the Berbers (if you knew their language) and tell them what was going on. We don’t have that for our UFOs.

“Ufology is in desperate need of updated reconstruction…”

“…to have a Ufology based on the assumption that a clue to extraterrestrial contact might be found in dusty document boxes of long ago is ridiculous. It has reduced Old Ufology to a mundane clerking exercise.”

Ouch!

Ok, we all have pretty much discussed in the past that Ufology needs a change, PRONTO. But what the essay lacks is a suggestion of what could be done. How do ufologists leave their role of clercks and file-gatherers of rusty yellowed government papers and start a new more effective approach?

Well I suppose they don’t fly too often but the point of the secret black pail is to fill it as a stink bomb which then scares away evil spirits.

Also when I was in the Berber village a commercial jet airplane flew high overhead and people totally freaked out in disbelief and mystification — just goes to show that Bob Hope’s technology really is UFO-material.