Just For Fun: Lunch With The Illuminati.

August 18, 2012 a day which will live long in infamy!! On that auspicious day in Kalamazoo Michigan, the UFO Illuminati [translation: CUFOS' brain trust] met at a certain retired professor's home  to reshape the UFOlogical Cosmos!! { Hey Jack!! Come off the overinflated hyperbole!! All you guys did was have lunch!}.

Well, OK, if you insist. We DID have lunch... a mighty good lunch in a perfect Michigan day, both of which were provided by me. { Hey Gov'ner, you're losing it again!}. Alright. I provided the lunch, GOD provided the day. Satisfied?  {Well, better, anyway}.

In the picture above, Don Schmitt runs down the latest Roswell information, while Mark Rodeghier, Eddie Bullard, and Bill Murphy pretend that he's making some kind of sense. Jerry Clark has his back to the camera in the foreground, with Dave Ford pensive at the far right. My young UFO friend Will Matthews was off to tend a sick cat at the moment, which is why he isn't in the picture.  [I'm not in it because my arm isn't long enough]. But all kidding aside: Spending a day talking UFOs with these guys is a pleasure beyond my descriptive writing abilities. If there's such a thing as an intellectual UFO blast, this is it.

I wish that I could give you a taste of such a thing, but it's just impossible. Don told us a great many, some quite surprising things about his latest investigations. Some I can't yet say. Here are two not-Top-Secret things: Two deathbed things.

1). Carl Sagan had a close colleague in the Cornell academic medical programs [Sagan had a higher degree in genetics along with his astronomy, which is something few know]. In those later very sick days, in one of the last conversations that the two had, Sagan suddenly volunteered the thought that "if there was a strong UFO case, it would be Roswell". I didn't take too much from that EXCEPT ONE THING: Sagan STILL at the end of his life was fascinated by UFOs. Despite all his [required] debunking of the subject, they never got out from under his skin. Sagan was an intelligent man. He knew that the UFO phenomenon was the logical endpoint to his lifelong ideas about the amounts of ETI in the galaxy.

2). One of the earliest witness-claimants to having seen the Roswell bodies was a staff sergeant, Melvin Brown. Brown said that he was sent out to a site somewhere north of Roswell where some "clean-up operations" were taking place. He was stationed near a truck with blocks of ice and a tarp with something beneath it. He was told just to stand guard and not to look under the tarp. Well, that was too much for the soldier and he peeked. Small bodies, discolored skin [possibly from exposure], leathery look to the surface. Brown was not believed by his own family [the only ones he ever told], but on his deathbed, in a tremendously poignant moment, he grasped his wife's hand, told her that he had never lied to her about anything, and that he wanted her to believe him that those non-human bodies were real.

Don's stuff is almost always more dramatic than that of us academic-style guys, but some of the others had intriguing things to mention. Example: Eddie Bullard is thinking of unloading his ~700 airship case files into the intellectual mindspace for all our edification; Jerry Clartk has a book appearing in about two weeks [one feature is a large treatment of several dozen "mermaid" encounter claims that he's been digging up for years], and Bill Murphy is beginning to create short descriptive CUFOS internet site entries for lesser-known but high quality cases from CUFOS [or my] files. They'll probably start showing up on the CUFOS site [along with things from the rest of us] within the September month.

One thing about these guys: they were just as wowed by the files [Sanderson, Ruppelt, GHWilliamson,  McDonald, Timmerman, et al] as a far more "rookie" researchers would be. They are still full-of-life and happily on the Quest. Great friends. May all of you be so lucky.

If Dave Ford hadn't moved in the time it took me to get to the other side of the room, I could have claimed that I instantly teleported over, as the rest of the guys are almost locked in place. Oh well, I never wanted to be a hoaxer anyway....

I promise, gang, that if Don gets further along on the main thing he talked about and gives me the go-ahead, I'll "tell-all" here on the site... but it's hush for now.