There are no infrequently discussed aspects of UFOlogy. Our subject is daily blogged to death, with much heat, considerable smoke, and very little light being shed. The reasons for this are pretty obvious- UFOlogy remains, for better or worse, the Original Amateur Hour and lacks the recognition and funding to do a whole lot better investigatively than simply describing and categorizing what is reported. And, since it is relegated to the scientific fringe, it remains the prey of frauds, charlatans, and greedy slugs generally.
Nonetheless we persevere and try to make sense of the data we do have. And one area that seems in need of more serious treatment is the subject of purpose and intention behind the UFO phenomena. A useful discussion of this begins with several questions in need of answers. First, are these phenomena one or several in nature? Two, do any of these several types of manifestations indicate intelligent purpose or are they all natural phenomena on the order of ball lightning or fireballs? Thirdly, if there is intelligence, does it have any awareness of, or interaction with, humans and our purposes?
If the body of observational evidence is of any value, they may give us tentative answers to these questions. The great variety of manifest UFO phenomena would seem to indicate we are dealing with a grab bag of unidentifieds, not a single phenomena. At least some of these, however, seem to react in intelligent seeming ways; approaching planes, retreating from military jets, hovering over military installations and nuclear power plants, landing and taking off when in danger of discovery. It can be claimed that in any given instance the observer(s) are �reading into� these actions an intentionality not really there, but the great mass of similar observations by witnesses across the world make this rather unlikely.
But what is the purpose of this interaction and is it basically benevolent, or hostile, neutral or essentially unconcerned with humans? Most of us would hope, I think,that such intelligences would look benignly at us, and be good� Space Brothers� or at least interact us with some degree of respect for our emotional and physical well being. Does the evidence really stack up that way?
Those of us familiar with the abduction phenomena might well have some reason to doubt it. The abduction reports nearly uniformly indicate a pattern of exploitation and terrorizing of human subjects for reasons never articulated by their alien captors, and with an attitude toward its subjects that,even putting the best face on it., could be described only as total indifference to their welfare.
However, the abduction phenomena is still quite controversial and perhaps it is not the best place to look for intentionality. What do reports of other types of contacts have to tell us?
Well these Close Encounters are certainly an assorted lot! Some, like the Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter in 1955 and the so-called Braxton County Monster sighting near Flatwoods, West Va. in 1952 , tell us more about human fear of the unknown than alien intentions. In the first case, a group of rural Kentuckians opened fire on approaching aliens, in the second case an inquisitive group of teenagers and an adult female investigating an evident plane/meteor crash ran into a UfOnaut whose appearance was rather too unnerving to suggest they might stay around to interview him! In other instances the aliens seem to have been viewed from a safe distance and, when the aliens apprehended they were being observed, quickly took to their ship ( see the Lonnie Zamora New Mexico case and several of the French landing cases in 1954).Some instances of relatively friendly interaction also exist in the close encounter literature,even outside the �contactee� reports.
Nonetheless, there are a distinct category of darker cases,where the visitors showed a rather less tolerant orientation toward humans. Even as early as the 1950�s there were reports of humans approaching aliens at work being zapped by paralyzing beams and rendered helpless for extended time periods. In some cases, like the Travis Walton affair, the application of force to an approaching human seems to have been swift and life threatening. One can, however, in these cases imagine that not hostility but a simple wish to avoid contact motivated the aggressive response.
It is less easy to imagine that in other cases. The famous Cisco Grove case of of 1964 is an example where the alien�s intentions seemed clearly not benevolent. In that case a robot like entity held a hunter named Donald Shrum clinging to the top of a tree, trying to avoid falling from bursts of noxious gas projected by the entity, for the entirety of a very long night. The case itself is a bit outrageous and without other witnesses. Not so in the case of an incident occurring at Itaipu army garrison (near Santos,Brazil) on November 3,1957. Two sentries observed the approach of a huge glowing orange disk from out over the Atlantic Ocean. It hovered over the garrison, causing an immediate shutdown of all electric power to the installation. The two sentries reported they heard a strange humming noise emanating from the disk and both were enveloped by a scorching, smothering sense of heat. Both reported a feeling that their clothes were on fire, and both were hospitalized for 2nd and 3rd degree burns. The curious thing was that their burns were more severe in areas of skin which were clothed and less severe in unclothed areas. To the chief investigator, Dr. Olavo Fontes,this pattern suggested the use of ultrasonics, possibly as a weapon. The greater damage to clothed skin is characteristic of the way such sounds are converted to transverse(sheer) waves at the margins of of different densities, and are thence more readily absorbed by tissue. At any rate, after hovering over a frightened garrison for several minutes, the object reversed its course and disappeared over the Atlantic again. It should be noted that extraordinary heat, perhaps ultrasonically produced, has also been implicated in the deterrence and/or
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