Where is UFOlogy at in 2015?

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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2011?

Postby barracuda » Wed Aug 03, 2011 2:20 pm

ConcreteJungle wrote:I want any future kids of mine to have a place to live and worrying about this shit won't get us there.


Neither will worrying about music or art or any of hundreds of other subjects one might name.
The most dangerous traps are the ones you set for yourself. - Phillip Marlowe
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2011?

Postby ConcreteJungle » Wed Aug 03, 2011 2:22 pm

Wombaticus Rex wrote:Those types of replies make me see how scared much of the population is. I'm inclined to agree with you, and never made any big claims about helping your kids secure habitation space in this thread. Walking the thought police beat won't get you there.


Scared no, but fed up yes. I've not much years under my belt, but the complacency with tyranny and the fantasy escapes people have created show themselves more to me everyday. We are only fooling ourselves to think the solution to the future is anywhere but on Earth.



I want any future kids of mine to have a place to live and worrying about this shit won't get us there.
Neither will worrying about music or art or any of hundreds of other subjects one might name.


Music and art have the ability to translate messages to a large group of people, not quite the same as worrying about ET, ya digg?

e: Just wanted to put an edit in here as something occurred to me as re-reading. Music and art can be used as manipulation tools as well and their path should be tread with care (i.e. futurist manifesto etc)
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2011?

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Wed Aug 03, 2011 2:23 pm

If you need a more productive direction for that "fed up" -- keep this thread going, it died many pages ago:

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=32625
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2011?

Postby ConcreteJungle » Wed Aug 03, 2011 2:26 pm

Wombaticus Rex wrote:If you need a more productive direction for that "fed up" -- keep this thread going, it died many pages ago:

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=32625


Thank you for the link. I have for the past couple months wanted to start a website about urban farming, how to get started, etc. Good post of information, much appreciation.
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2011?

Postby operator kos » Wed Aug 03, 2011 3:53 pm

as to the OP:

the Mutual UFO Network, the Center for UFO Studies, and the Fund for UFO research all seem to still be doing active research.

Also, I somehow ended up on the mailing list for the Paradigm Research Group, which is active but seems to be a bit more of a mixed bag. At the least they do seem to be progressively building up a public interest and push for disclosure (not that those in charge give a crap what the peons want).
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2011?

Postby Simulist » Wed Aug 03, 2011 3:57 pm

Wombaticus Rex wrote:Narrowly avoiding a novel-length recap I shall instead nail the question directly: Did the military win this one? Is UFOlogy now a social phenomenon detached from any actual line of inquiry, while the serious research is conducted either privately and quietly, or under the auspices of state secrecy?

Out of respect for the kindness of your brevity, I'll return the favor:

Yes and yes.
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2011?

Postby operator kos » Wed Aug 03, 2011 4:21 pm

Simulist wrote:
Wombaticus Rex wrote:Narrowly avoiding a novel-length recap I shall instead nail the question directly: Did the military win this one? Is UFOlogy now a social phenomenon detached from any actual line of inquiry, while the serious research is conducted either privately and quietly, or under the auspices of state secrecy?

Out of respect for the kindness of your brevity, I'll return the favor:

Yes and yes.


I was wondering if for my benefit you'd be willing to expand on that. Ufology is of interest to me, but it isn't my main area of study right now. What do you think of the groups I named?
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2011?

Postby 8bitagent » Wed Aug 03, 2011 4:43 pm

One of my first "conspiracy" searches online(remember webcrawler and altavista? lol) was UFOs in the summer of 1996(along with TWA 800 and CIA crack, both of which were popular conspiracies at the time)
But it lead me to scary right wing militant chatrooms on yahoo(I remember asking 'what the hell is a zog?') and it wouldnt be til years later id get back into "truthseeking".

But in the mid to late 1990's, UFO pop culture was masssssssssssiiiiivvvve. Huge. It was everywhere. Not since the 1950's had it been like that.

Have you guys seen Shades of Gray? From 1950's pulp and underground zines to alleged declassified documents found in the 70's and 80's, it covers the American UFO interest.

But now days, whenever a UFO story or video comes out, its quickly debunked as fake. Why is there such a focus on fake videos? Even the "Belgian" thing is fake, though so many accounts from 1989 and 1990 point to something more real.

Btw, what did you guys think of the history channel 2 seasons of "UFO Hunters"? I actually thought they had some interesting stuff.

My view remains the same as it has for some time: some are black budget craft or misidentification, a lot of others are spiritual/inter dimensional trickstery/manifesting for specific personal audiences who see it...but that can also manifest as physical objects(such as the 1980 UK/US base event and Brazil in the late 1970's)

I've often thought...what in the heck could top coverage of OJ and 9/11 as 'where were you' type moments. I thought maybe a giant sea creature washing up on shore or being caught...but thatd barely make the front page.
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2011?

Postby Simulist » Wed Aug 03, 2011 5:01 pm

operator kos wrote:
Simulist wrote:
Wombaticus Rex wrote:Narrowly avoiding a novel-length recap I shall instead nail the question directly: Did the military win this one? Is UFOlogy now a social phenomenon detached from any actual line of inquiry, while the serious research is conducted either privately and quietly, or under the auspices of state secrecy?

Out of respect for the kindness of your brevity, I'll return the favor:

Yes and yes.


I was wondering if for my benefit you'd be willing to expand on that. Ufology is of interest to me, but it isn't my main area of study right now. What do you think of the groups I named?

Hi, Operator Kos. I feel similarly: UFOs remain of interest to me but, perhaps ironically, "UFOs" have become of much less interest to me as I began to realize that a lot of the other interesting topics surrounding them have been incorrectly glued to the phenomenon.

For example: the purported "aliens" many thought were abducting people for so long have been pretty much engaged and then wedded to the topic of UFOs. Personally, I think we need a trial separation. Maybe even a divorce.

Because, as things pretty much now stand, one topic (wedded as it is to the other) manages to do a fairly capable job of befuddling inquirers about the other topic — and yet I consider both of these phenomena to be real (that is, as "real" as things get in this realm).

The entire set of these topics became of great interest to me at a certain point because I have actually witnessed some very inexplicable things in this regard, and I was earnestly searching for a self-consistent explanation for them. But I concluded eventually that the public discussion is normally too-narrow (and too-limited because it is focused on connecting dots that don't always connect — namely "UFOs" and the various "alien" entities people have witnessed) to provide much in the way of real answers or, as things now stand, continued interest in an ongoing public discussion.

Whatever these beings really are, I don't think we even have a good WORD for what they are. We can't seem to NAME them appropriately — and all the words and names we do have actually may lead us away from the reality (or realities) they may represent.

Because I deeply suspect that these beings represent a paradigm completely outside the one we're normally accustomed to thinking inside.

(And that, my friend, and a couple of bucks will buy you a bottle of beer. Maybe. :blankstare )
Last edited by Simulist on Thu Aug 04, 2011 1:44 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2011?

Postby gnosticheresy_2 » Wed Aug 03, 2011 6:01 pm

On one hand you've got military/ intelligence/ industrial types messing round with new tech in secret. Pretty standard stuff. On the other hand you've got gods/ spirits/ demons messing round with reality in secret. Also pretty standard stuff. Where it gets confusing is that nobody can agree on which side is using the other. Again, this is pretty standard stuff.
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2011?

Postby barracuda » Wed Aug 03, 2011 6:19 pm

8bitagent wrote:But now days, whenever a UFO story or video comes out, its quickly debunked as fake. Why is there such a focus on fake videos?


Fake UFO videos are proven page-view and revenue generators following the Bat Boy business model.
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2011?

Postby Searcher08 » Wed Aug 03, 2011 8:25 pm

There is the question where is Ufology at in terms of organisations and then in terms of the individual.

I am not now, nor have a ever been a member of any Ufology organisation.

At the start of the year, I became very interested in (for want of a better word) high quality physical contact physical (not astral / channeled) experiences.

There seem to be very very few. I tried to find good researchers and found very very few.
It was a case of trying to 'triangulate' good reports. Wendelle Stevens (who passed last year) seemed to do his best to find and document these high quality contacts. Sadly most of his books seem long out of print, however Rune Overby has summaries of the main points on his site. Please note the site is high on content and low on elite web design skillz (!)

http://www.galactic.no/rune/englETdatabase.htm

There were three cases which I think are worth reading the books / source material
Stefan Denerde, Ludwig Pallmann and Michel Desmarquet
The accounts 'rang true' to me. They and although in different decades, geographical areas (Holland, India/South America) and Australia

I was very surprised by the process of reading these three.
I found them very confronting. George Adamski it isnt!

There seem to be very few people who want to discuss these matters intelligently.

I found the epistemology that worked best for myself was shamanic - allow it to sink in and mentally 'mulch' during solitary walks in nature, think about it as a dream intention and most of all read them several times. Each time it was like reading totally new material - quite bizarre.
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2011?

Postby ConcreteJungle » Wed Aug 03, 2011 9:24 pm

Searcher08 wrote:There seem to be very very few. I tried to find good researchers and found very very few.


When you get into these surreal and unbelievable events, that seems to be the case. I've also noticed what seems to be the case is the presence of many teasers. They keep us watching by hinting, showing glimpses, and building suspense. Very rarely is there any substance to these stories. It is mostly fluff to keep a curious individual tuned in.
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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2011?

Postby DrVolin » Wed Aug 03, 2011 9:56 pm

I'm an oldtime nuts and bolts UFO guy and a collector of UFO books and magazines. I think there was a genuine period of government interest in the phenomenon starting in WWII and peaking in the early cold war years. Part of the government response involved disinfo, some of which was by fairly high visibility public figures (e.g. Frank Scully) for public consumption, and some by low level infiltrators of the hard core (e.g. Gray Barker). There was a real fear of panic, and there was a real attempt at controlling the message. This first wave of Ufology started with the chase for nuts and bolts alien craft in the skies, stark black and white pictures of discs, and debates about propulsion systems and travel times to nearby stars. By the late 50s, the nuts and bolts guys had either become bored by the decade long drought of any solid evidence, or had been driven away in disgust by the first wave contactees who turned Giant Rock into a epi-beat, proto hippie, nearly environmental carnival (e.g. George Adamski). With the generally anti-nuke message of most contactees, it was inevitable that western intel would take an interest, and that east block agencies would take note of these new potentially useful idiots.

The 60s were a long dark period for Ufology. Bluebook had petered out, Condon was waffling, and all the nerds were absorbed in the space race. The sky watching fools were looking for satellites, the hams and radio intercept geeks were listening to doomed cosmonauts drifting away from home, cursing their quantity over quality space program, and the co-conspirators, drawing heavily from a Lovecraft novelette, were nodding knowingly and telling tales of men in black towncars disapearing any evidence which would have been solid, had they allowed it to see the light of day.The government knew, they said. The government was behind it. The most forward looking of them made connections between UFOs and John Dee's mirror, and an invisible goverment, having acquired one of the more contagious traits of the contactees. This was the era of the big galactic governments (Urantia, Ummo), and UFOs were their tools and messengers.

The pessimistic and claustrophobic 70s saw a brief return to nuts and bolts concerns. This is when the current dinosaurs (Stanton Friedman, Brad Steiger, indirectly, Whitley Streiber) got their start. The space program, ended suddenly and without explanation, left a gaping void in the minds and the attention span of techno freaks everywhere. With only the meager pickings of Janes and Aviation Week on which to chew, they quickly resumed the old debates about radar sightings that might have been weather inversions, or perhaps migrating geese, or even a new soviet spyplane. And of the many, a few persisted. And sadly, they reached a point at which UFO conferences and books made a significant enough part of their income that they were trapped. The latest rumor had to be pursued and talked out as long as possible, whether solid or not. The fewest of them all stayed very true, like Richard Hall lugging his heavy kodak boxes of pre-loaded slide carrels from student union building to Legion Hall well into the age of powerpoint. The many gave in to easy publicity and the tyranny of ratings, like the infamous Jaime Maussan, the televisual Art Bell of Mexico.

The 80s brought cheap home video technology and even cheaper UFO fakery. Audiences, unused to the flatness and high saturation of VHS recordings, endlessly debated Billy Meier's videos and the Gulf Breeze phenomenon. Cheap four colour printing and Apple and Correl's page layout software allowed the proliferation of UFO tabloids such as UFO Magazine. As the 80s wore on, they perforce had to turn from the repetitively hazy sightings of lights in the sky to the ironically more substantial accounts of beings of light. And not all of them were friendly. As the West was turning into a collection of police states, terrified citizens who imprudently left their windows open at night woke to an orange glow and an inexplicable inability to move or speak. They were the object of oscultations by creatures who vanished by morning, their hybrid children the only claimed physical evidence of their passage through our material plane. But the loss of control had been foreshadowed in the 70s by a former motor sports Journalist who called himself Rael and claimed to have been abducted, brought to an Alien planet, and given a message of light and redemption. There was nothing here for the old propulsion warriors and the knights of the airwaves.

The great UFO flap of 1990 rescued them. Coinciding as it did with the Gulf War preparations, it provided hope that while the UFOs might not actually be from another world, they might actually be real. The great mass sightings of Montreal and Belgium hinted at NATO preparations for the use of secret weapons against a dangerous Gulf regime. The Being of Light didn't retreat for all that, but they seemed to sever the umbilical cord that had linked them to Ufology since the 50s. After all, what Being of Light needs a coarse contraption to travel through space? Why should their message be constrained by gravity and relativity? If the late 40s and early 50s were the golden age of Ufology, the 90s were its silver age. But as the Beings of Light, benevolent or not, were divorced from the craft in the sky, so were the craft divorced from the aliens. Going back to their Aviation Week roots, the geeks divined Auroras and Stealth Hudson triangles in the fleeting sky lights that littered the decade. The aliens, suddenly orphaned, were adopted by the survivalists and supremacists who worried about governments that sold them off in exchange for the secret of life and allowed them to be harvested and stored in underground Dulce silos. The tax deniers and new patriots shot it out with the feds and some of them, like Bill Cooper, took their hard earned UFO secrets to the grave.The impressionable young minds who had been seared by V in the 80's lived out their fears in the 90s.

And there was 9/11. And the internet. And CGI. And Ufology was dead.
all these dreams are swept aside
By bloody hands of the hypnotized
Who carry the cross of homicide
And history bears the scars of our civil wars

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Re: Where is UFOlogy at in 2011?

Postby AhabsOtherLeg » Wed Aug 03, 2011 10:29 pm

Searcher08 wrote:At the start of the year, I became very interested in (for want of a better word) high quality physical contact physical (not astral / channeled) experiences.

There seem to be very very few. I tried to find good researchers and found very very few.
It was a case of trying to 'triangulate' good reports. Wendelle Stevens (who passed last year) seemed to do his best to find and document these high quality contacts.


I have no stake in where UFOlogy is "at" as a culture/subculture - as far as the researchers and their followers and theories and feuds go, I could care less. The reality of defence and intelligence infiltration/subversion of their work and ranks is fascinating, but their internal spats aren't.

Speaking of high quality physical contact cases, though, I am intrigued by the Dechmont Law Incident, or the Livingston Incident as it might be more widely known. A forestry worker, Robert Taylor, claims to have been gassed and knocked out by a funny-looking spherical UFO with a ring around it's middle, which had two independent small craft/robots looking like WW2 naval mines inside it/near it, which attacked him.

Image

The case is unique (so far as I know) in three main ways:

1/ It is the only close-encounter I'm aware of that was investigated as such by the police - the incident
was even listed as a "common assault", which means charges could potentially be brought against whoever/whatever did
it in the courts. (!!!)

2/ There was quite a lot of physical evidence, for once - unusual tears in the clothing of the victim, and quite extensive
markings on the ground - and all of this was logged not by the victim, or UFO researchers, or local journalists, but by the
police themselves, who back up the victim's story in it's entirety. There has been an attempt to preserve the area it
happened in.

3/ The victim, Robert Taylor, seemed wholly reliable and pretty motiveless if he was lying, and was otherwise totally
uninterested in UFOs beyond this one incident. He never changed his story in any way over nearly forty years, never
asked for payment or courted publicity (tried to avoid it in fact), and was believed by pretty much everyone who heard him tell the tale, which he didn't often.

This video, despite having very bad sound syncing, is a decent short recounting of what happened:



I hope those torn trousers were tested for radioacivity.

Here's a programme made later in his life, with the story still unchanged.



It also helps that all the counter-theories to explain what happened in a "sceptical" way are wholly ridiculous, but we'll come to that if anybody wants to talk about Dechmont Law. Wikipedia is actually a pretty good starting point on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_incident

As for whether the defence crew have won the UFO culture wars, I'd say yes, and they probably won in about 1945.
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