At the McMinnville UFO Festival in Oregon last spring, the Bales brothers gave a simple, yet on the edge of your seat presentation about their giant triangle sighting in Idaho. During the Q & A one man chided the brothers for not being more involved in UFO research. He expected them to be sudden experts, with a mission and message of spiritual alien based insight. An astoundingly arrogant and condescending comment to make. After a slight pause, one of the brothers, who looked a bit confused at the comment, simply said "We're here, aren't we?"
Peter Davenport, who provides us with a much needed database of UFO reports, is perennially irritated at people who won't "take ten minutes" to write a UFO report in "black ink on white paper." His frustration is understandable, but not everyone feels comfortable putting such experiences down on paper. Treating UFO witnesses like stupid school children discourages people from making UFO reports.
I've been involved in a few local UFO minded groups through the years. The seeds of such gatherings are simple: people getting together to talk about UFOs. The purpose of these groups is to have people with experiences to share with others, but I've found there isn't much honesty happening in these groups. Because as soon as you have the "leaders" of such groups state what will, and what will not, be accepted, you are being dishonest. Telling witnesses to keep things positive -- in other words, don't talk about the scary, negative parts of your experience -- is a type of control. Creating a forum of only what you want to hear, in the form you want to hear it, is being dishonest. It sets up false forums of data; if you are continuously rejecting accounts you don't like based on your biases, you're not after genuine UFO experiences.
None of these methods consider the individual's experience. We listen and decide they're too negative, or not spiritual enough, or not literate enough, or are too lazy because they won't write something down, or . . .
And maybe they are some of those things, sometimes. Maybe some witnesses are too lazy or incompetent to write a report. Maybe the witness is still experiencing trauma from their encounter and are stuck, for the time being, in a dark place. Maybe their paranoia and fears, their nervousness and confusion, is part of the process and where they need to be for awhile. Making witnesses feel bad, lazy or stupid -- or crazy because they're depressed or anxious -- pushes them away.
All we can expect from people who have decided to come forward in whatever small way with their UFO experience is honesty. Negative, positive, spiritual, literate, sloppy, bad spellers, -- doesn't much matter, if they are being honest.
Notes
BOA interview: Tim Binnall interviews Peter Davenport
http://www.binnallofamerica.com/boaa12.9.9.html
Peter Davenport: National UFO Reporting Center
http://www.nuforc.org
McMinnville, Oregon's UFO Fest.com: annual UFO Festival in May
http://www.ufofest.com/ufofest07/
1 comment:
I saw that Peter Davenport was going to be on Binnall of America and do you know what crossed my mind as soon as I saw that?
I said to myself, good! - because maybe now he'll update his website UFO sighting reports as to not look like a sluff-off since his website will sure be mentioned.
Peter had not updated the UFO sightings page since August 23. Now that he's gotten a bit of attention over at BoA he did exactly what I figured he would do and finally posted August 24 to December 12.
Those sighting reports are for everyone to see and not just Davenport. He really appears to have lost interest and your comment about his condescending tones about reports I've read about in the past elsewhere. As well, I listened to him on a YouTube and he had a real disgruntled attitude toward the reports on the same subject.
It's been over a year now where he'll have 3-month gaps on reporting. Not reporting the UFO sightings to us in a timely fashion is worse than a lousy report. So who's calling the kettle black?
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