BELL's, BOOKS, and CANDLES

The blog has been MIA for over three weeks [a long stretch for me], but with the burnout at the end of each Wheeling "session", the transition to Kalamazoo, and hosting seven UFO knuckleheads all last weekend, I'm not too apologetic. The blast effect of having those guys over has lessened [the kitchen sink is still a mess], and I'll try to start up a bit with the "meeting" as a beginning. If you recognize Kalamazoo's famous Bell's Beer in the photo above, you are not only a beer connoisseur but are having intuitions that certain UFOlogists can be bribed to be more congenial and talkative by the effects of good tasting alcoholic beverages.

The "illuminati" in secret discussion: Closest to camera = Will Matthews, my local UFO friend; going around the table then: Robert Powell [book project administrator and MUFON Director of research], Richard Thieme [ former MUFON and CUFOS associate and world traveling lecturer on subjects too esoteric to mention], Jan Aldrich [Mr. Sergeant Major of FOIAs], Don Schmitt [The only person who knows more about Roswell than the government], Jerry Clark [Of Whom there is no Whomer], and The Maestro of Abductions Scholarship, the esteemed Dr. Eddie Bullard. Note that no beer is on the table at the moment, so they were still making some sort of sense.

Kidding aside, the weekend was an intellectual and anomalistic blast.

Because it was at least interesting to me, I'll say a little about what we discussed in our saner moments.

Abductions: I was surprised [even as well as I know these guys] that not one of them was buying the hypothesis of a colossal numbers of abductions taking, or taken, place. Not even Eddie. Not even Jerry nor I, who considered Budd Hopkins a very good colleague and friend, and have felt similarly about Dave Jacobs. Everybody around the table considered the infamous Roper poll to be a piece of garbage as far as indicating anything about abductions is concerned, although it MIGHT be indicating "something" about "something" undetermined.

When the actual idea of a specific case was brought up, people tended to say "Buff Ledge sounds like a solid case. The Hills' case looks pretty good. Maybe Travis Walton's experience [the reported one, not the movie]. Maybe the three ladies in Louisville Kentucky.... " and so it would go with very few particular "on board experiences" cited. I was a bit amazed at the uniformity of the opinions, even Jan's, who I thought might go thumbs down on all of them, but he did not.

Well, what's the problem with all the others?, one might reasonably say. This is a group of UFOlogists who don't readily leap to conclusions on cases unless they are pretty solidly investigated, which includes good looking into witness credibility and using convincing investigative techniques. I'm not going to get "down-and-dirty" on any of that, but just leave that statement stand. Also, there are "many", in the sense of a couple dozen or so, CE4s which I did not mention above, which might join those noted, upon dragging out the case files and micro-analyzing them. But not thousands....

The ones which would come under serious negative evaluation would be things like Andreasson [where SOMETHING is going on, but unlikely to have anything to do with UFOlogy], Allagash, Linda Napolitano, any "recent" claims from the Rocky Mountain conferences [despite all of us loving Leo Sprinkle as a human being and a friend], etc etc .

We talked about many other things as well, of course; most far less controversial. We are happy that the UFOs and Government book is plowing forward in sales and recognition, and [slow as such things are], we're patiently optimistic that all the work will have been worth it. Don even bought an extra copy that I had and insisted on me signing it --- pretty embarrassing since he's one of my best friends in the "business".

Don also mentioned that he's working with a fellow who has a few, very small, [thumbnail-sized or smaller], pieces of potential Roswell debris. These bits of Aluminum/Magnesium+ alloy have VERY good provenance [for a change], and are exactly the sort of thing that one would imagine possible to get and test. We are hoping for a mysterious isotope shift in the data. THAT would "put the fox in the hen house".

We discussed "models" for what's going on. I gave my "Three Categories of Ultra-Advanced Civilizations" hypothesis, and the supplement that I felt was necessary to keep Roswell from being a hard-to-swallow "outlier". The guys seemed interested, but it was probably just that I was the one providing the food.

Jerry wanted to talk about his "experience anomalies" concept, with which he [and I] try to cope with the non-core-UFO phenomena like high-strangeness encounters with Faerie, ABSMs, Lake monsters, Black Dogs, the weird end of the MIBs, etc. Neither he nor I think that these things have anything to do with the physical textbook universe normally experienced [whereas we think that the core UFO phenomenon is nothing except that]. Jerry and I tend to lean towards a parallel sort of world, which "overlaps", or "slips", or creates "portals" occasionally, and "things get in" occasionally before slipping back. Or, maybe rarer, we slip over briefly. The other guys at the weekend we at least tolerant of this arrant nonsense on our parts.

Jerry brought up one of the encounters which has stuck in his craw for decades: the Samuel Eaton Thompson encounter way back in 1950. Read about it in his UFO encyclopedia or in his Extraordinary Encounters. Thompson comes upon a group of naked cherubic children, and shortly their parents, in the Washington state woods. Communication takes place, largely either nonsensical or romantically Utopian. None of which fits Thompson's own interests nor character. So what the heck was THIS?

I of course don't know. It sounds paranormal, but Thompson has much "physical" reason to believe that these are physically real entities. It sounds a lot like Faerie. But where's Faerie? I gave my not-even-close-to-half-baked concept of the privileged universe collapsing its wave functions [our universe], flanked by two reasonably robust parallel almost-twins-but-lesser foci to either "side" as the Universal Wave Front collapses "into the future". Between our universe and those, the slippages occur. Everyone agreed that I didn't need to warn them that this was almost certainly BS.

Much else was, of course, touched upon over the three days. We didn't solve the Mysteries of the Universe [thank Goodness, you say, plenty left for us!!], but we did solve part of the Mystery of leading a good life: Open your Hearts and Minds. Find things that make your feelings race. Pursue them honestly and with respect for the Truth within them. Join with good colleagues who become wonderful friends. And sit around your watchfires, like candles illuminating the darkness.

All my best friends are candles illuminating the night. Bless them, and you, all.