UFOs and the Old Geezers

Many times when someone posts something somewhere that is ridiculous or meanspirited, I just ignore it. Ignorance is in great supply in the world of the Internet and all you need to do to see that is take a look at the comments appended to news articles. Ignorance of the UFO world is overwhelming.

Just recently the RRR Group posted a picture that my wife took at the MUFON Symposium in Denver and claimed that those of us on the Speakers panel were a bunch of geezers who had failed to solve the UFO question. It was time for us to get out of the way and let those younger, brighter and more enlightened take over. We had our chance and we failed.

Except we haven’t failed. We solved the problem. We have the proof that some UFOs are alien spacecraft and we can make that point over and over. The evidence for that is overwhelming, but not unlike Galileo, who failed to convince the church that there were moons orbiting Jupiter, we get a bunch of people who "refuse to look through the telescope."

Old geezer Ted Philips, being interviewed during th MUFON Press Conference made an important point. Talking about the four thousand or so landing trace cases that he had investigated, he mentioned that once he had a description of the craft, he could predict what the landing traces would be. In other, more scientific words, we had reproducibility, meaning the same things observed under similar circumstances and the predictability that comes from repeated observation. This was science at its best and it’s something that the debunkers, the skeptics, and apparently those in the RRR Group ignore.

Old geezer Chris Rutkowski (seen here) reviewed, at length, a longitudinal study of twenty years of UFO reports in Canada, looking for trends. Here again was a statistical study that provided information about what people saw and how it was identified, if it was identified and what it meant when the mundane, or what some would call the rational, did not explain the events. These were unidentified sightings that suggested alien visitation.

Old geezer Stan Friedman (seen here) diverted from his normal "Flying Saucers Are Real" talk and spoke about the possibilities of interstellar travel, something the youngsters, the debunkers, and the skeptics will always reject out of hand. The distances are too vast and we just can’t travel that far with our chemical rockets.

Well, of course, a chemical rocket would quickly run out of fuel, but other methods of propulsion have been discussed everywhere from science fiction to science conventions... and ways to generate the necessary energy have been discussed. Methods that aren’t beyond our current technology so that when the opposition says the Voyager spacecraft will take 70,000 years to get to the nearest star, they don’t mention that it is not accelerating. Any trip to another star will require constant acceleration until a point is reached that the craft will have to begin to slow down, but the round trip time drops considerably.

Old geezer Bruce Maccabee (seen here) examined the pictorial evidence for UFOs and there are some cases in which there are but two possible solutions. The object is either alien or the case is a hoax. Maccabee mentions the McMinnville, Oregon case which he had investigated for decades and he finds no evidence of hoax... which, coincidentally, is the solution offered by the Condon Committee, the University of Colorado scientific study of UFOs. The object in the photographs matches no known earthly-built craft and was, or is, therefore good evidence of alien visitation.

I, myself an old geezer, would point to the Lubbock Lights photographs taken by Carl Hart, Jr. in 1951. The four known pictures show the objects in V-shaped formations over the town and are either of some unknown craft (which could be of earthly manufacture though no one can point to it) or they are faked. Donald Menzel, that paragon of scientific thought and rationality, for no reason what-so-ever, declared the pictures to be fakes. Carl Hart, Jr., told me in an interview a number of years ago that they weren’t faked and he doesn’t know what they were.

I could point here that the Air Force has been less than candid in its investigation of UFOs, slapping on ridiculous solutions just to be able to label the case. For the 1957 sightings in Levelland, Texas, which involved multiple witnesses, the UFO interacting with the environment, sightings by law enforcement officers and even the suggestion of a landing trace, the Air Force decided the sightings were weather related and the culprit was ball lightning... at the time, even science denied the existence of ball lightning. No one then seemed to catch the irony of using something that didn’t exist to explain the sightings of something else that didn’t exist, at least according to those in the Air Force.

If you are interested in the duplicity of the Air Force, let me point out that according to their nearly day long investigation, their representative spoke to only three witnesses. Later, when Major Don Keyhoe suggested that there were nine witnesses, the Air Force all but called him a liar.

But the truth is that both Keyhoe and the Air Force were wrong. There were many witnesses in thirteen separate locations. Many of their stories, gathered before the publicity and within minutes of their sightings were strikingly similar, including the electromagnetic effects on their vehicles engines, radios and lights.

What all this means is that we geezers have solved the UFO question. We know what is going on and we use our experience to provide answers for those cases that we can and we suggest that some of these UFO sightings are the result of alien visitation. I believe that we know what is going on with the cattle mutilations, a subset of UFOs, I’m fairly certain we know what is happening with crop circles, another subset, and the jury seems to be out on alien abduction, though we have some very interesting terrestrial solutions.

And now we have people... scientists saying the evidence is anecdotal but, of course, that is a way to reject it without having to examine it. We have people claiming that after 60 or 70 years of investigation we have no answers, though we have many solid answers, and we have one group waiting impatiently for those they consider geezers to die off and get out of the way of the new breed who can bring a fresh approach to the problem.

I ask, just what will this new breed do differently? Use the Internet for their research? Rehash the cases that have been solved and involve us again in messes like the Allende Letters, which was explained thirty years ago? Or maybe the RRR Group will support more experiments like those two clowns in New Jersey who proved that witnesses report accurately what they see and that UFO investigators provide answers quickly...

Old geezer Marc D’Antonio told me that he knew the objects in the New Jersey case were either Chinese Lanterns or flares after examining the tape of the lights. The only people fooled were the news media who haven’t conducted much in the way of investigations in thirty years and the employees of a Ford dealership. The two "twenty-somethings" who conducted the "experiment" lied to the media, lied to the researchers, interjected themselves when the publicity began to slip, and then drew conclusions that were not based on the research but on their own personal bias. So much for the new life interjected into UFO investigations and research by the young, hip, enlightened youth.

Here’s the bottom line in this. We know the answers but we can’t get the scientists, the Air Force, the media and the debunkers to look through the damned telescope. They know there are no such things as alien visitors and any evidence that shows otherwise must be manufactured.

And now we have to put up with those enlightened individuals who believe that we have failed in our mission the last several decades. But no, that’s not where we failed. It was in the public relations war. The bad guys had access to the media who are too sophisticated to believe that creatures from another world were smart enough to get here from there. They’re too sophisticated to believe that an average person is smart enough to distinguish between the mundane and something extraordinary. They’re simply too sophisticated to look through the telescope.

So what is the answer here? Simply do a better job communicating the results of investigations to the press. Make sure that everyone knows when an explanation is the result of a desire for a specific truth rather than the culmination of an investigation. And to get those who refuse to finally look through the telescope.