Sunday, July 27, 2008
On UFO Magazine Blog: "Kindred Souls"
Alfred doesn't know I'm posting this, but I'm posting the link to his piece Kindred Souls on "The Green Room" here because the article has to do with people; with individuals and the UFO experience. Well, it all has to do with people, doesn't it? Anyway. Read it here. Great image too!
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Greg Bishop has a great piece up at UFO Mystic: Anti-Structure in UFOlogy.
Boy, wish I had said that!
Applying our standard concepts of information gathering to UFOs and the paranormal may be like trying to catch water in a fishnet, except that we don’t even know that the water is there.
Boy, wish I had said that!
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Gray Matters: The Women Get It
Lesley (The Debris Field, Beyond the Dial, etc.) writes in her current column on Binnall of America, titled The Women Get It, about objectivity and nasty mean people.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Alien Abduction and Mystic Experiences (Gralien Report)
Micah Hawks, of the very excellent Gralien Report blog, has an item on Alien Abduction and Mystic Experience, with a link to Brad Steiger's piece on his My Strangest Alien Abduction Case" on UFO Digest.
There are so many aspects to the UFO phenomenon; nuts and bolts, the usual. And the mystical. What to make of those kinds of experiences in connection to UFOs? Some have not seen UFOs in the typical sense, yet have experienced deep mystical/spiritual events that include non-human entities that the individual puts into the UFO category. Like Nahu, for example, author of UFOs: Gods From Inner Space,who I wrote about some time ago in UFO Magazine. He, and his partner, have gone on to experience events like this, including seeing beams of energy, having psychic characteristics, etc.
Are some types of extraterrestrials capable of inducing these encounters? Is it something within us that enters into a symbiotic relationship with some of "them?" Are they more earth bound, or inter-dimensional, and not strictly UFO connected?
As always, there isn't any one answer to what UFOs are; except to state the obvious, which is that there are many varities of types and experiences. One type does not negate or invalidate the other.
There are so many aspects to the UFO phenomenon; nuts and bolts, the usual. And the mystical. What to make of those kinds of experiences in connection to UFOs? Some have not seen UFOs in the typical sense, yet have experienced deep mystical/spiritual events that include non-human entities that the individual puts into the UFO category. Like Nahu, for example, author of UFOs: Gods From Inner Space,who I wrote about some time ago in UFO Magazine. He, and his partner, have gone on to experience events like this, including seeing beams of energy, having psychic characteristics, etc.
Are some types of extraterrestrials capable of inducing these encounters? Is it something within us that enters into a symbiotic relationship with some of "them?" Are they more earth bound, or inter-dimensional, and not strictly UFO connected?
As always, there isn't any one answer to what UFOs are; except to state the obvious, which is that there are many varities of types and experiences. One type does not negate or invalidate the other.
One Person's "Abduction Memory"
Abduction Memory, by Daniel J. Burkhart, of the Rochester Paranormal blog.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Monday, June 30, 2008
The Rehabilitation of Rich Reynolds?!?
The Rehabilitation of Rich Reynolds
One of the fundamental principles of the criminal justice system when it comes to sentence is denunciation; another is rehabilitation. In the case of ostracizing people from certain groups or communities for bad behaviour, the same rules should apply - go beyond the boundaries of civil discourse, and punishment is in order, so that the community as a collective can denounce the offensive behaviour. But, after a time spent in the wilderness, everyone deserves a second chance - that's the rehabilitation element.In the world of ufology, Rich Reynolds has served his sentence as far as I'm concerned. What issues remain between Reynolds, who was just profiled / interviewed in issue #3 of Stuart Miller's Alien Worlds magazine, and those he wronged, are between them to settle; as far as the community of ufology is concerned, Reynolds should no longer be persona non grata. Reynolds has always had some useful things to say about the UFO phenomenon, and the people who study it, just as he has had some absolutely ridiculous things to say (the percentages on those two categories are for each individual to judge for themselves). It's time to consider those views based on their merits, and not the person who offers them.Now, I can't control what others do, obviously, but as far as I'm concerned, Rich Reynolds has a second chance to make a positive contribution to the discussion about the UFO phenomenon. His prior bad behaviour has been sufficiently denounced, and it's time to move above and beyond things that happened in the past, and judge him by what he offers now, and into the future. He won't be the first person who has gone through this process in ufology, and he won't be the last.Paul Kimball
Posted by Paul Kimball at 4:13 AM
I'm reminding of the old fable ending with the line, "...but you knew I was a snake when you picked me up."
Too, I wonder, what the sentiment would be if RR had published to "enemies" and "employers" the suggestion that _you_ had had sex with children, Paul, and then additionally published that you "protested too much" in that regard... Outrage!
...Then RR goes on to wish death on all those not facilitating him or crediting him as you and Stuart do. Light speed "attitude changes" must now abound, so how valid could those "attitudes" have been to begin, eh?
...From "kiss-ass" to "keynote" in one cleansing and forgiving breath?
Well, rest assured. I'll be loping off this snake's head with every appropriate opportunity, and let me apologize in advance for anyone losing fingers in the senselessly insentient stroking of it.
You burn up a lot of earned idiosyncratic credit with me, Paul. And so needlessly, too. Pity.
To Jeff: you're right Sir. It _is_ absurd; however, some cross a line, and in as much there has not been an ounce of apology or reparation regarding false accusations of pederasty, reasonable "dues" have not been paid. Too, a rapist gets a "by."
In sadness,
One of the fundamental principles of the criminal justice system when it comes to sentence is denunciation; another is rehabilitation. In the case of ostracizing people from certain groups or communities for bad behaviour, the same rules should apply - go beyond the boundaries of civil discourse, and punishment is in order, so that the community as a collective can denounce the offensive behaviour. But, after a time spent in the wilderness, everyone deserves a second chance - that's the rehabilitation element.In the world of ufology, Rich Reynolds has served his sentence as far as I'm concerned. What issues remain between Reynolds, who was just profiled / interviewed in issue #3 of Stuart Miller's Alien Worlds magazine, and those he wronged, are between them to settle; as far as the community of ufology is concerned, Reynolds should no longer be persona non grata. Reynolds has always had some useful things to say about the UFO phenomenon, and the people who study it, just as he has had some absolutely ridiculous things to say (the percentages on those two categories are for each individual to judge for themselves). It's time to consider those views based on their merits, and not the person who offers them.Now, I can't control what others do, obviously, but as far as I'm concerned, Rich Reynolds has a second chance to make a positive contribution to the discussion about the UFO phenomenon. His prior bad behaviour has been sufficiently denounced, and it's time to move above and beyond things that happened in the past, and judge him by what he offers now, and into the future. He won't be the first person who has gone through this process in ufology, and he won't be the last.Paul Kimball
Posted by Paul Kimball at 4:13 AM
...Astonishing, dismaying, and not a little depressing.
I'm reminding of the old fable ending with the line, "...but you knew I was a snake when you picked me up."
Too, I wonder, what the sentiment would be if RR had published to "enemies" and "employers" the suggestion that _you_ had had sex with children, Paul, and then additionally published that you "protested too much" in that regard... Outrage!
...Then RR goes on to wish death on all those not facilitating him or crediting him as you and Stuart do. Light speed "attitude changes" must now abound, so how valid could those "attitudes" have been to begin, eh?
...From "kiss-ass" to "keynote" in one cleansing and forgiving breath?
Well, rest assured. I'll be loping off this snake's head with every appropriate opportunity, and let me apologize in advance for anyone losing fingers in the senselessly insentient stroking of it.
You burn up a lot of earned idiosyncratic credit with me, Paul. And so needlessly, too. Pity.
To Jeff: you're right Sir. It _is_ absurd; however, some cross a line, and in as much there has not been an ounce of apology or reparation regarding false accusations of pederasty, reasonable "dues" have not been paid. Too, a rapist gets a "by."
In sadness,
Alfred Lehmberg
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Hiding Data: Excluding the Folk
This was originally published on-line by UFO Digest in May of 2007. It fits in with the theme of this blog, so I thought I'd repost it here.
In a delicious bit of synchronicity, and fitting to be sure, over on UFO Digest, at the end of this article, appeared this image of Monty Python. It's an advertisement for ring tones.
Hiding Data: Excluding the Folk
by Regan Lee
Posted: 00:35 May 12, 2007
Jerome Clark coined the neologism "pelicanist" (initially jokingly awarded to James Easton, who insisted that Kenneth Arnold's 1947 UFO sighting was ... pelicans) to define "the practice of ascribing _any_ explanation, however scientifically unsustainable, illogical, or fantastic, to a UFO event or experience, in a desperate effort to deny that anything seriously anomalous may be going on". Pelicanists are advancing extraordinary claims masquerading as prosaic explanations. Source: hyper.net
I cannot abide, nor understand, the exclusivity factor a handful of so-called UFO and Fortean researchers insist upon maintaining. Actually, they're not UFO, crypto, Fortean, etc. researchers at all; they're wanna bes, new thugs, -- basically chronic cranky skeptics. Sometimes trolls, sometimes confused fence sitters, often a variety of Pelican, they get up blogs and forums and clubs that announce to the UFO/Fortean World that they're all about research. What makes their research different, better and true?
Well, it's only for the few. The bona fide researcher, as the bloggers at the UFO Iconoclasts blog refers to them. The serious, somber and apparently humorless individual, with some vague criteria that is never openly revealed, seems to be the type who can join these private research groups.
Documents, books, writings, research, data (allegedly) is kept from the common folk. Only the privately invited and arrogantly sanctioned can access such real information.
One of the messages of such pompously covert shenanigans is that only real researchers will get to join, therefore only real researchers will have knowledge of the real information. The great unwashed masses (that's me and you, according to the UFO Iconoclasts) don't deserve to know. We're all idiots anyway. We're time wasters, wasting time blogging about our experiences, theories, research and thoughts, trying to find out what happened. What the hell do we know? Not a thing. Who are we to dare to speak? And who dares to listen? No one worth mentioning. No one serious. They're all over at the private bona fide UFO Iconoclast group, or the Magoniax Project, or some other full of themselves group. Those of us out here aren't serious, nor are we telling the truth. If we were, we wouldn't be out here, so public.
But more than being just full of themselves, and silly, puffering around in their musty slippers among piles of squirreled away data, is the fact that this mind set hurts UFO and Fortean research.
It is also highly ironic. It's ironic, because such things as UFO experiences, Fortean experiences, Bigfoot sightings and the like are of the folk. They are folklore. They are experienced by, and told by, the folk, the everyday person. Which is most of us, including you and me. We're everyday people with jobs and families and bills who've had some weird things happen. The very nature of UFO and Fortean experience is folklore; living folklore. It lives on the fringe among the folk, forever outside the institutions of society.
To have stuffy individuals who sneer at the folk; the so-called unwashed masses, and keep their doors closed to the very people that experience and make up the phenomeana, is not only ironic, it's hypocritical, and harmful to research.
It hardly needs mentioning, the fact that there is a lot of bad research out there, or, what passes for research. The field is littered with liars, hucksters, the deluded, the sad, the mean, the weird, the disinfo agents, the garbled. But it's part of the folk and the answer isn't to hide behind thick doors, eeking out data and research to a self-imposed holy few.
The next time you read a blog or article that supports the following: exclusive research organizations, hoarding data, rejecting other forms of data, and calls for some sort of cleansing of the UFO and Fortean landscape, watch out. They do not have the truth as their objective, they do not want the truth at all. They do not seek knowledge; inner or outer, and they do not wish those of us with experiences or a vital interest good will.
In a delicious bit of synchronicity, and fitting to be sure, over on UFO Digest, at the end of this article, appeared this image of Monty Python. It's an advertisement for ring tones.
Hiding Data: Excluding the Folk
by Regan Lee
Posted: 00:35 May 12, 2007
Jerome Clark coined the neologism "pelicanist" (initially jokingly awarded to James Easton, who insisted that Kenneth Arnold's 1947 UFO sighting was ... pelicans) to define "the practice of ascribing _any_ explanation, however scientifically unsustainable, illogical, or fantastic, to a UFO event or experience, in a desperate effort to deny that anything seriously anomalous may be going on". Pelicanists are advancing extraordinary claims masquerading as prosaic explanations. Source: hyper.net
I cannot abide, nor understand, the exclusivity factor a handful of so-called UFO and Fortean researchers insist upon maintaining. Actually, they're not UFO, crypto, Fortean, etc. researchers at all; they're wanna bes, new thugs, -- basically chronic cranky skeptics. Sometimes trolls, sometimes confused fence sitters, often a variety of Pelican, they get up blogs and forums and clubs that announce to the UFO/Fortean World that they're all about research. What makes their research different, better and true?
Well, it's only for the few. The bona fide researcher, as the bloggers at the UFO Iconoclasts blog refers to them. The serious, somber and apparently humorless individual, with some vague criteria that is never openly revealed, seems to be the type who can join these private research groups.
Documents, books, writings, research, data (allegedly) is kept from the common folk. Only the privately invited and arrogantly sanctioned can access such real information.
One of the messages of such pompously covert shenanigans is that only real researchers will get to join, therefore only real researchers will have knowledge of the real information. The great unwashed masses (that's me and you, according to the UFO Iconoclasts) don't deserve to know. We're all idiots anyway. We're time wasters, wasting time blogging about our experiences, theories, research and thoughts, trying to find out what happened. What the hell do we know? Not a thing. Who are we to dare to speak? And who dares to listen? No one worth mentioning. No one serious. They're all over at the private bona fide UFO Iconoclast group, or the Magoniax Project, or some other full of themselves group. Those of us out here aren't serious, nor are we telling the truth. If we were, we wouldn't be out here, so public.
But more than being just full of themselves, and silly, puffering around in their musty slippers among piles of squirreled away data, is the fact that this mind set hurts UFO and Fortean research.
It is also highly ironic. It's ironic, because such things as UFO experiences, Fortean experiences, Bigfoot sightings and the like are of the folk. They are folklore. They are experienced by, and told by, the folk, the everyday person. Which is most of us, including you and me. We're everyday people with jobs and families and bills who've had some weird things happen. The very nature of UFO and Fortean experience is folklore; living folklore. It lives on the fringe among the folk, forever outside the institutions of society.
To have stuffy individuals who sneer at the folk; the so-called unwashed masses, and keep their doors closed to the very people that experience and make up the phenomeana, is not only ironic, it's hypocritical, and harmful to research.
It hardly needs mentioning, the fact that there is a lot of bad research out there, or, what passes for research. The field is littered with liars, hucksters, the deluded, the sad, the mean, the weird, the disinfo agents, the garbled. But it's part of the folk and the answer isn't to hide behind thick doors, eeking out data and research to a self-imposed holy few.
The next time you read a blog or article that supports the following: exclusive research organizations, hoarding data, rejecting other forms of data, and calls for some sort of cleansing of the UFO and Fortean landscape, watch out. They do not have the truth as their objective, they do not want the truth at all. They do not seek knowledge; inner or outer, and they do not wish those of us with experiences or a vital interest good will.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Back in the Fifities . . .
And sixties, and seventies . . . for none of this exists in a vacuum . . . it seemed the only ones reporting UFOs in our skies were "the people." Of course, that's all it ever is; "the people." Including politicians, academics, scientists, for in the end, we're all proletarians. Yeah, I'm just another Jew pinko commie, so there. Seriously, though. . .
All we have is ourselves, where ever we may be at any time, and some of us -- far more of us than would be acknowledged -- experience the unexplained. And some of us from that category go further, forever trying to figure it out. Others join in, out of sincere curiosity, regardless of their own personal weird factor experience.
When it comes to the weird, including UFOs, it's all open, since the only thing we can say for sure is, we don't know what's for sure. Even with the idea that, yep, let's just admit it and say ET is here (which I pretty much will say is the case) that doesn't answer anything, really. Just that "they" aren't "us." Or hell, they could be us in some way . . . see what I mean?
Those goofy amiable types from the Golden Age of Flying Saucerdom were experiencing something (most of them) in genuine ways. And even if they weren't so what? Most of them meant well.
Sure, most everybody was going through Post War Anxiety syndrome -- I remember the Friday sirens and Duck and Cover -- but as I said, nothing exists in a vacuum. Part of the problem in UFO studies is the idea that we can isolate segments of the UFO phenomena and then we'll find The Big Answer. This idea often includes eliminating the witness from the thing. Feh! dahlings, we're in this together.
Myopic Moron
He's a dick all right... make no mistake on that. A scurrilous cur who preys on those who'd advantage him, a bilious scat flinger as bereft of honor as he is of imagination: this is a portrait of a myopic moron as a young man.
.
A young man who would later owe me effuse apologies, damages, and a measure of satisfaction.
.
Below is my version... where the image is fragmented into RR as seen through a fly's eye, a representation of the bombastic literary schizophrenic in his glory... in my opinion, a despoiler of innocence and not even worth keeping around as a good example of a bad example.
.
Here is the pompous and elitist swine who would label good people as a dismissed proletariat, and then wish death on all the rest not supporting him. What a guy!
I was reminded of Caligula... Flush twice to be sure, reader.
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Why the enmity? Glad you asked.
.
http://alienviewgroup.blogspot.com/2005/11/smoke-and-fire.html
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Find you have to cross him on an issue and you may be under Reynolds' gun, yourself. Forewarned is forearmed. More later.
█_Æ£_█
alienview@roadrunner.com
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