I
had noticed over the last few months that there were fewer posts to UFO UpDates
than there had been in recent years. I’m not sure why there was a decline, but
there is fallout from it. Errol Bruce-Knapp who ran the list for many, many
years, has posted the following:
Not, perhaps, the merriest Christmas news for
some subscribers and readers to/of UFO UpDates, but the time has come...
The world has moved on, apparently beyond the need of a centralised service such as this List - witness the dramatic drop in List-bound traffic of the last few years.
So, the plan is to mothball the List and for Glenn Campbell to take-back the Archive, by this coming New Year's Day, via his hosting company. Glenn wrote the script that made the Archive work and originally hosted it. The post@ufoupdateslist.com will also be retired at the end of the year.
The Archive's addresses - depending on how you access it - should not change. Nor should the search facility. "Should",because until we actually move the Archive we won't know.
I'm grateful to all those who contributed 90,00+ posts to UFO UpDates over these many years, increasing the awareness and knowledge of the phenomena and my 'ufological' education.
My thanks to Glenn Campbell for his advice and support over the years and for taking over the Archive for the benefit of succeeding generations of the 'seriously interested'.
I've been retired for the past six years tho' there are still things on my bucket list to be completed, such as the digitising and uploading of several hundred hours of my Strange Days... Indeed radio program to virtuallystrange.net ...
Trusting that all will be revealed, eventually,
Errol Bruce-Knapp
Late-Moderator of UFO UpDates - Toronto
Facebook & Twitter
errolbk_at_virtuallystrange.net
The world has moved on, apparently beyond the need of a centralised service such as this List - witness the dramatic drop in List-bound traffic of the last few years.
So, the plan is to mothball the List and for Glenn Campbell to take-back the Archive, by this coming New Year's Day, via his hosting company. Glenn wrote the script that made the Archive work and originally hosted it. The post@ufoupdateslist.com will also be retired at the end of the year.
The Archive's addresses - depending on how you access it - should not change. Nor should the search facility. "Should",because until we actually move the Archive we won't know.
I'm grateful to all those who contributed 90,00+ posts to UFO UpDates over these many years, increasing the awareness and knowledge of the phenomena and my 'ufological' education.
My thanks to Glenn Campbell for his advice and support over the years and for taking over the Archive for the benefit of succeeding generations of the 'seriously interested'.
I've been retired for the past six years tho' there are still things on my bucket list to be completed, such as the digitising and uploading of several hundred hours of my Strange Days... Indeed radio program to virtuallystrange.net ...
Trusting that all will be revealed, eventually,
Errol Bruce-Knapp
Late-Moderator of UFO UpDates - Toronto
Facebook & Twitter
errolbk_at_virtuallystrange.net
Over the years the discussions have
sometimes been acrimonious, sometimes heated but always interesting. It was a
way to communicate with fellow travelers, a way to see rich and divergent
points of view, and to learn a little about some of the more obscure cases.
Errol, as moderator often directed the conversation and eliminated some of the
more heated comments, keeping the list on a fairly even keel. It was a fun way
to start a day, seeing what others had to say about the world of UFOs.
For
Errol, this was truly a labor of love because I can think of no other reason
someone would devote so much time to the list. He kept it going, gently
reminding the subscribers of the rules and generating controversy. I know that
I used the list to learn more about specific cases, engaged in dialogue with a
wide range of researchers around the world, and to expand my horizons.
UFO
UpDates was a fine source of information and controversy and I have missed it
in the last year. In fact, just the other day I noticed that it had been a long
time since I had seen anything from it. I’m sad to see it go, but I wish Errol
the best and thank him for providing the resource and keeping it going for so
long.
16 comments:
When Errol's significant other died a few years back, his heart seemed to go out of the List (and his podcast Strange Days Indeed) and it went into decline, with few people commenting. Also blogs like yours have come in as substitutes, though are more constrained in content by their nature.
You could also go into more detailed arguments on UFO Updates, without the constraining blog post limitations, where longer comments have to be annoyingly broken into multiple posts.
And finally, UFO Updates reached a much wider audience of true UFO experts than individual blogs. I learned a lot from the long experience of others. There was Richard Hall, Jerry Clark, Stan Friedman, and many, many others.
Blogs tend to be more plagued by the nattering, vacuous comments of mostly ignorant skeptics with absolutely nothing of value to say, though we had some of those on Updates as well, including some nameless ones who continue on, even here and on other blogs.
I had been very interested in the UFO field for many years when I first found the UFO updates list webpage. It was an amazingly good surprise to see the opinions, comments and discussions of many prominent ufologists. I learned a lot from the list. Many thanks to Errol.
As KR suggested, I too find the List to be an occasional excellent resource for research. However, I would not agree with those who state that EBK was even keeled or objective in his actions as moderator.
I always felt UFO Updates was a bit of a closed club. I tried posting there a few times over the years and was either ignored or set upon. After that, I settled back into a lurker role and, frankly, most of what I observed were pissing matches among the usual suspects. Seriously, are we any closer to a solution to the phenomenon for all the posts on UFO Updates? While it is sad to see the end of an era, it underlines the fact the mountain of words we've generated now far exceeds the evidence.
It was a forum that seemed to have outlived its time in the format it was in. It needed to be brought out of its 1960s thinking and 1980s tech.
Perhaps there's a younger, tech savvy UFO nerd who'd be willing to develop a new forum in a contemporary format with a more up-to-date point of view?
Here! Here! Errol's work has been largely unappreciated by the ufological community. His forum was at one time the only place where good information on current cases, conferences and confabulation could be found. The good and the bad, it was all there in Updates.
And beyond that, Errol also had a radio show on CFRB for many years, the archived recordings of which he is now converting for access by all. To see Errol on the air and in action, you can go the rarely-seen UFO documentary "Magnificent Obsessions" at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBlXZ-VZu_E He's right at the beginning and is the carrying theme in the film.
purrgurrl -
I have heard, from many, that we are stuck in the 1960s or the 1970s. I would like to know what you would do to bring all this thinking into the 21st century... and no, I don't mean a suggestion that we think in terms of ultraterrestrial, or intraterrestrials, or think of time travels but something that is fresh. I believe that most of my colleagues, who have been around for a long time, have explored various possibilities. I think we have all looked at explanations and solution that avoid the extraterrestrial. To many of us, the best solution is extraterrestrial though we all realize it might not be the only one or that it might be incorrect.
So, the question remains... what suggestions do you have?
I thought for many years that UFO Updates was a great forum for people interested in the phenomenon. But, like Jack, I disagree that Errol was fair and disinterested in his moderating. For my posting of factual, documented material about David Jacobs' and Budd Hopkins' dangerous "research" techniques, Errol banned me from the forum. He made a completely untrue, public statement about what I'd said on the forum and refused to withdraw his untrue statement or my "banishment," such as it was. I believe that he was persuaded to make this dictatorial, far-from-fair move by a short cadre of his buddies. Hero worship and denial of the abductee leaders' grievous errors--how helpful was that in furthering outside respect for this marginalized field?
I will miss it though the quality had gotten quite bad (for the most part, Jerome Clark vainly trying to correct cranks).
The archives show many lively and informative debates. My favourite is Martin Shough schooling Stanton Friedman on the Hill-Fish map.
The low point was watching many serious UFO people saying "Budd Hopkins has made mistakes" but refusing to engage his deceptions and delusions because "he was a friend." Anyone who thought that wasn't how scientific ufology should be done, they got savagely attacked. Shameful.
Sorry, but I don't buy the best solution is extraterrestrial and am rather bored (and so are many being driven away from Ufology) by those who are stuck in that paradigm who feel the need to dump vitriol all over other explanations that don't involve bug-eyed grays from another galaxy.
It's quite noticeable that most of those stuck in the mud tend to have come of age in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. No wonder Millennials don't give a rat's patoot about UFOs.
I get that you want it to be ET because of all the time and resources you've put into trying to prove Roswell was an ET event, and aliens are still a cottage industry for many in Ufology (although that might be waning; I'm sure done spending money on anything promoting that point of view). But the ET explanation has been a dead end time and time again.
One can argue that Ufologists clinging to the ETH are the dumbest rats in the maze, continually going down the same tunnel that has no cheese at the end and rejecting tunnels that might be more profitable after merely sticking their noses only a little way into them.
Sorry if this comment offends you, but this is how it looks to me as well as others who don't even bother to pay attention to UFOs anymore.
Carol -
I am distressed to hear about your treatment on UFO UpDaates. I never had a similar problem. Errol was always cordial to me. I did know that some had been banished, but they ones I knew had been warned about poor behavior and often engaged in personal attacks. I've deleted comments here when people have resorted to that sort of thing.
Of course, I was attacked because of The Abduction Enigma, but Errol always allowed me to respond, when I felt the urge. I didn't know that you have been banished and am sorry to hear this.
Purrgurrl -
I noticed that you didn't actually respond to my questions. I was not offended by your tone, merely saddened by it.
Those who came of age in the 50s and 60s, as purrlgurrl says, are 'stuck in the mud' (as ETHers) mainly because this was the very time we on earth were preparing to venture into space. Hence it became easy to 'connect', as it were, with space age ideas (either us going out there or 'them' coming here).
Nonetheless there remain many ETHers among the younger crowd and many more will join them as time goes by.
The biggest deterrent to me was the incessant, and ongoing, diatribes that the guys at the top, i.e. the governments, particularly the US, were engaged in some vast conspiracy of keeping it from us, the public.
Yes, Roswell/MJ-12 is mainly to blame, but it started much earlier - as far back as Adamski in fact, or earlier still.
It continues today, of course, in the form of the Disclosure Project.
Come on Messrs Snowden & Assange, where are you? What are you doing about this 'conspiracy'? The UFO community desperately needs you.
b"h
Hello KR,
You can delete this - I just wondered if you had ever posted anything about Dan Sherman, since he was military and claims to have been part of a special black-grey op.
http://www.aboveblack.com/
His entire story is perched so high on self-refuting scaffolding.
best
Hi Kevin, I thought you (and possibly some of your readers) may like to know that I've updated my PDF archive of posts to the UfoUpdates List (from 1996 to the end of 2013) and uploaded the archive to a couple of free file storage websites. Details and links at: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread991506/pg1
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