Oh, What A Tangled Web(site) We Weave……………………………………………..
In 1964, when I was a boy of 9, my father, a Scottish immigrant, WWII U.S. Marine, and Detroit Police beat patrolman, and I witnessed a UFO while driving through a suburban neighborhood on our way to our home in a riverfront neighborhood off Fort Street. The details of the sighting itself aren't important; it was a rather mundane event by today's standards. We weren't abducted, mutilated, or hybridized -that we're aware of. We merely saw a lighted craft maneuvering oddly, silently, in a manner unfamiliar to one with my father's experiences. I was just a child. It was an unidentified object, and it was flying.
That event and the endless discussions it caused between my father and I over the next few weeks engendered in me the seeds of a lifelong interest in the outré, the strange, the abnormal, and throughout my teens I spent a considerable number of hours confined to my room, grounded, a prisoner of my own wildness and hopelessly inept abilities for evasion of justice. I was there left to pore -not regretfully -over endless pulp paperbacks gleaned from neighborhood garage sales and purchased with the proceeds from stolen hub caps, fender skirts, and soda pop bottle returns. All the book titles required was inclusion of the words, "Stranger Than….". I was 17 years old before I read a book without "25 cents" written on a piece of masking tape stuck in the corner of its cover.
By such "literature" was I introduced to Berbalangs, Evil Robots Over Peru, Yeti, and Sasquatch. To Ghost Ships, Ancient Astronauts, Cottingsley Faeries, and New Jersey Devils –the kind of Devils that don't heft a hockey stick. And I ate it up.
And then, along with the rest of the world, I watched intrepid men land on the moon, right there on the TV in our living room, less than one hour after Bill Kennedy's "Afternoon Movie" daily television show broadcasting from CKLW Channel 9 over in Windsor, Ontario, and before the latest body count from Viet Nam. How could I not follow when the country turned its diversion-hungry eyes skyward?
Pulp fiction immediately abandoned big ol' hairy snowmen and Flying Dutchmen, and the pages, grimy with cheap ink on cheaper paper, now were filled with tales of space men in their ships dashing about our skies, teasing our vaunted Air Force jet jockeys, and confounding those damnably dull and sullen stuffed shirts known collectively in the late 60's as "The Establishment". Hell, these aliens had 'em all sussed.
Alas, these incredible UFO stories aged even quicker than I did, and by the end of the 70's, by which time I'd attained 25 years of age force-fed 75 years of experience –I never did learn to behave. But, more importantly, those street smarts one learns in a poor urbane setting coupled with the case steel-hard training imparted by a former Marine & beat cop father (who advises that the only "ex" Marine is Lee Harvey Oswald) and his 10-15 precinct squad mates, unofficial 'uncles' every one, fostered in me an undeniably keen sense of knowing Shiite from shinola, and the Wonderful World Of UFOs took on a decidedly Goofy aspect.
From that point, doubt prompted research, research garnered knowledge, and Ufology as a childhood playmate I'd once known then ceased to exist, supplanted by a weasel-like little bastard child, parented by capitalism and cynicism. The UFO phenomenon was a misunderstanding, turned myth, turned money-maker. And I wanted my money back.
Since those days of 'street smart and book stupid' I've learned to discriminate, and while my skepticism is born not of science but of necessity, nonetheless, I have since adopted science, and study it daily. During these ensuing decades, one telling truth cements my unwavering conviction that the UFO business was just that, a business, and that truth is this: The way one determines pseudo-science from genuine science, hoax from fact, method from madness, is to check the record. If there is no record of progress in the "study" it is something other. Ufology continues to pitch the same stories and wild-assed theories it pitched 50 years ago. Demonstrable hoaxes are debunked and live again. Gross misunderstandings of natural phenomena survive scrutiny and nothing is learned. "Science" which suffers 50 years without progress is not science, it is bunk, a drunken monkey chasing its own tail –and never catching it.
So how does ufology manage to survive, to continue existence without progress? What powers it? Where lies the motive for its practitioners? Simple: MONEY.
Check your TV Guides and Guide Channels, so-called "Discovery" channels, and ersatz "History" channels increasingly have slipped away from their original formats and have succumbed to the lure of ratings dollars. I don't blame them…..big bucks, credulous audience of essentially 'science-illiterate'Americans with more discretionary money to spend than we've ever before enjoyed. Easy pickings, no doubt. Check your Search Engines –I'd wager there exist 100 pro-UFO sites for every skeptical site. "Dog Bites Man" is not news, of course. Check your book stores: rows and rows of pseudo-science and ufology, six science books in a milk crate by the door. Prospective scientific writers and film producers will tell you it is very difficult to sell "Alien Hoax Revealed" when it's sitting next to "Alien Dingoes Ate My Baby!- The Francine Osgood Story".
During my time here on Parascope the most often heard battle cry of the Bleever Corps is that there exists such a mountain of evidence, albeit all anecdotal, testimonial, and circumstantial, that there simply MUST be something to it. Of course, they are absolutely right, there must be something to it, we've no disagreement there, but I must diverge from their self-serving assumption that the 'something' must be alien to our planet. I will not here belabor the logic behind this entirely reasonable position –no one will read this article who isn't already familiar with at least the basics of this contention. All I wish to do is show how ephemeral, how fleet, how illusory that 'mountain' of evidence is.
I set out to determine the larger minefields from whence the Bleevers dredge up these age-old myths about UFOs, and from my shallow perch on the message boards at Parascope, the answer was clear: Sightings.com and the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), were hands down the most often cited source, the agencies whose websites were most frequently cannibalized via cut and paste in the hunt for "evidence". Target acquired.
I'd often scanned Sightings.com's headline stories for much the same reason I guiltily scan the headlines of The National Inquirer while standing in line at the Piggly Wiggly, bag of Oreos in hand, and was always rewarded with a chuckle or two. I'll never vacation in South America, that's for sure –if the chupacabras don't suck you dry the aliens will.
I recently came across an entry on sightings.com called "Filer's Files #35 –2000", a weekly collection of UFO sighting reports from all over, supplied by George Filer, a veteran of military intelligence, and Eastern Region (U.S.) Director of MUFON. At the end of his weekly article, close by to real estate ads and other pitches for funds, I found an email address by which one was to submit UFO sightings. Of course, I'd long doubted the efficacy of UFO investigations and investigators…..50+ years without a shred of tangible, test-surviving evidence…….and on a whim I decided to see just how deeply and thoroughly a reported UFO sighting would be investigated. I clicked the link, and unashamedly typed out a fake UFO "sighting" made up entirely on the spot and then submitted it. It appears along with this article. See the fourth story, NORTH CAROLINA DISC SHAPED UFO. Odd that. I clearly described the object as "boxy" in shaped, not "disc shaped". Myths apparently require some level of conformity, eh?
Suffice it to say that my hoaxed report went directly online, without investigation whatsoever –not one call, not a single email requesting further information. It is my guess that the Skeptomaniacs will appreciate this confirmation of suspicions, but will experience little surprise, and that the Bleever Corps will remain completely undaunted and unchanged in their beliefs, but at least I now know the truth of things. I hope we all remember this exercise whenever we read UFO reports online, in books, presented on TV. In a sense I've relegated myself to landscape work –I've made a molehill out of a mountain of evidence.
One question remains: If truth is not the goal of sites which post such "sightings" as NORTH CAROLINA DISC SHAPED UFO, what is their goal?
I thank you for your time,
Grendel The Martyr