What Do UFOs Do?

"What do UFOs do?"

Whereas we might give that limited question an honest try, we must admit that it will be unlikely that we'll come to clarity on WHY they do it. Some of us have been quite frustrated about that, even leading to retirement from the field of UFO research with bad feelings. I'm not.

Researching this mystery has been some of the greatest fun. In a way, it's nice that it hasn't resolved quickly. In most ways the "fun" of it would be gone. I'll happily take it either way: all-knowledge-revealed-tomorrow or go-to-the-grave-not-having-it-all. UFOs, fascinating as they are, are peripheral to our lives [or should be], as we can wake up each morning and live and love and be good members of society whether they're around or not. It is my opinion that even those people who think that they are having a more intense experience with these things still have the choice as to how they're going to live their waking lives.

So, rightly or wrongly, my view is that UFOs have been "spice" in my existence but not the meat and potatoes of it. But how does one stay interested in any intense or at least ongoing way if THE Answers don't come? Well... I think that answers DO come, just not final ones. ALL the truths about human foolishness [the poor way we handle the subject] can come and this embeds within it profound knowledge about ourselves and our individual and organizational flaws. I've learned more about humans and academia and the military through UFO Studies than any classroom or "normal" life experience.

But we also have learned things, little fragments of things, about the phenomenon itself. We haven't spent decades learning nothing.

To learn these fragments we must immerse ourselves in the phenomenology --- the cases, and LOTS of them. I continue to be stunned as to how many persons [even those who define themselves as "UFOlogists"] have minimalist familiarity with the incidents which should make up the foundation of their opinions. Due to this, I have [and this is hard to say without sounding like an overinflated ass] almost no respect for the vast number of persons, academics, or UFO commentators when they open their mouths to give us the "benefit" of their unearned conclusions. STUDY THE CASES DAMMIT!!

But enough of that. Raving doesn't help. What I'd really like to do today is to explore a little more into the case files and just see if anything can be seen today. Maybe some little thing slightly new will arise; maybe just a slightly different thought; maybe nothing at all except a bit of fun in wonderland.

What do UFOs do?

If you and I were sitting alongside Colonel George Garrett at the USAF Pentagon Collections desks in the late 1940s, and the military and civilian sightings were trickling in, we would almost assuredly come to the same tentative conclusion that he did: these things were aerial technology of a very advanced sort, but they don't have any particularly noticeable agenda. They seem to be involved with overflights, but why? They don't get particularly close to anything, and when they do, it could be seen as just accidents of coincidence --- i.e. we and they only happened to be in the same general area at the same time. One might entertain the idea that these things were not much interested in us "personally" at all.

That, of course, changed. Maybe it was always changed, but the dominant feeling about the phenomenon seemed "distant." When this seemed to change however, it still didn't take on the up-close-and-personal flavor until the bizarre wildness of the 1954 European and South American waves, which were difficult to credit if you were a distrustful American. The USA up-close-and-personal seemed to wait until the 1957 "electromagnetic interference" wave. Even there, for the most part, the feeling was that these encounters could just as easily been accidents of paths crossings rather than deliberate. But maybe we should have looked more closely.

What should we have been looking for and chronicling? How might the UFOnauts have decided to become more interpersonal? How could they have become more "directed", and DID they?

With the benefit of hindsight, one might deride oneself with the viewpoint that the UFOs had already done this en masse during WWII in both theatres of war. The foo fighters seemed definitely "interested." Incident after incident they paced our planes. They didn't seem to want to interfere with anything, but pace they did. This happened so often that no statistician could claim random behavior or coincidental placement. Of course we civilians weren't privy to the extent of the foo fighter phenomenon, and the military refused to release information [they still to a degree refuse], and so it's hard to complain about John Q Public not seeing this about UFOs, but we can be free to question the military's obtuseness in not focussing on it later.

Still this military density points the way to our conversation: what, without blunt overt landings in DC, might the UFOs do without getting too spectacular?

UFOs could show interest in several ways --- my imagination isn't good enough to spell out a long list, but here are a few behaviors. A). the UFOs could engage in some forms of appearance which were/are obvious displays for the "benefit" of individuals or groups. As UFO research has matured, several sorts of these display behaviors have been noted and described. I'm personally proud of the "astro-alignment" form of directed display --- sorry for the ego-trip but can't help being human. These sorts of displays could be interpreted as being somehow for the benefit of the audience displayed to, even if we cannot figure out what that benefit is.

B). the UFOs could engage in forms of responsive behavior --- Father Gill's waving UFOnauts, UFOs which return light flashes, or which engage in motions coincidental to actions taken by us humans. There are many other such cases showing seemingly responsive behavior. This sort of thing could too be interpreted as for the benefit of the observer, again even though we might not be able to define the nature of that benefit.

C). the UFOs might engage in some sort of persistent motion or presence apparently keyed upon an individual or group or even a structural form, while we are watching. This behavior is messier. It could be labeled "monitoring", or maybe "curiosity", or it might be labeled simply "pursuit" without any further human interpretation, or it might be labeled as some form of "stalking." It is in that latter designation that one would "turn a corner" as far as interpreting the actions of the UFOs. At this point, the behavior seems to shed the "for our benefit" aura, and transform into "for THEIR benefit."

Do UFOs "stalk?"

I'm going to delay my feeble analysis of that question for just a minute to look at "monitor", "curiosity", and "pursuit" because maybe that will be useful in deciding whether we should put the emotional "stalking" adjective into these affairs.

Do UFOs "monitor?" Well, I believe that such a descriptor is legitimate. The foo fighters seem more like "monitors" than anything else to me. The disturbingly regular flyovers of places like Oak Ridge and Los Alamos/White Sands seem the same. In 1952, a disk-shaped object parked itself over the Douglas Aircraft facility in Santa Monica, CA resulting in the establishment of a private in-house study group of elite aerotech engineers wanting to research UFOs. During the 1950s, at two different time periods, a gold-metallic globe appeared about monthly in the same part of the sky in sight of the Goldstone Tracking Station near Banning, CA. I can't help saying "monitoring", when I read such cases. Certainly they occasionally are acting in SOME sort of intentional behavior.

Do UFOs show "curious" behaviors? My sister-in-law's best friend had a father who worked the nightshift at the aluminum refining plant at ORMET, OH. He was on break when he saw a structured UFO turn out of the region of the hills to the north and begin to fly precisely down the center of the Ohio River, When it got to the dock area of the plant, it turned sharply to its right and flew over his head into the plant area. It slowly dived down, as if to get a better look at the buildings, and cruised through. After getting to the end of plant property, it rose back to its original height, turned north into the mountains, and went its way. "Curious?" Seems so to me.

In the lower diagram above, non-military pilots were flying over Pasadena, CA airspace when three red-orange disks cruised by, then broke off their flight path to make a rapid circle-and-a-half around the plane. they then shot off on another path. Was this "curiosity", or just showing off what they could do? They didn't try to intimidate the pilots, just "fly rings around them."

The well-known and extremely odd case from Logrono, Spain leaves us straining to interpret the action as anything other than curiosity. In the encounter a smallish bright BOL entered the seminary student's window and noiselessly floated across the bedroom. When it got opposite the audiotape deck, it emitted a coherent beam of light which entered the slot of the recorder [where one would normally place a tape.] Shortly the beam was retracted [this thing acted like the cases of "solid light"; it even seemed to "bump" an object once upon touching it] , the BOL moved about the room a short while more and then left by the window as it had entered. Although the witness himself was terrified, that doesn't seem to have been the intent of this "intrusion." Still, this whole beam-in-the-recorder business seems absurd in the bigger picture, so what the actual intent was remains obscure.

I'm going to shortshrift the "responsive" category --- there are many cases, some sort-of-distant objects, some not-right-on-top-of-you close encounters [there seems to be a "civilized distance" wherein these responding UFOs act generally] in which the UFO seems [usually clearly] to react to something that the humans do --- most often flashing lights at it, or turning lights off. As to the agenda here, one might only say that the operators of the UFO are affirming the reality of their presence to the witnesses. These responses are almost always extremely simple and not long-lived before the UFO goes its way.

So let's get to the question of pursuit and "stalking." Do UFOs "stalk" humans?

This is a question that I can't in honesty answer. The reason for that is, as we've hinted earlier, the concept "stalk" has a large interpretive emotional element to it, which resides in the heads of the purported stalker and the alleged stalkee. We only have the person experiencing the possible stalk to talk to. ... not the ideal situation.

Still, let's stumble on. I have about eighty case files which might be considered relevant to the issue of stalking. Whether any of them seem more "curious" or "simple pursuit" vs "stalking" [I'm using stalking now as a concept containing some negative impact on the witness --- deliberate frightening, deliberate intrusion into their secure space, deliberate maneuvering the witness into doing something that they don't want to do], you and I will have to guess for ourselves.

In my opinion, the majority of these cases could easily be interpreted as simple pursuit or curiosity. But not all.

Here are a few reasons [from the files] that one might defend the theory that some encounters have an "unfriendly" nature:

A). There are a handful of cases where the UFO not only "dogs" the car or plane but penetrates the driver's area or the cockpit with either a beam or an engulfing light;
B). There are about the same number or more cases where the UFO seems clearly to take over the control of the car, or, in the famous Coyne Helicopter case, the helicopter, for a time before releasing it;
C). In several instances the UFO/BOL not only dogs the automobile but continues in an apparent menacing proximity wherein the occupants are screaming and driving recklessly, and in the case of two different cycling encounters, are driven off the road;
D). In several walking encounters, young women are terrorized by BOLs or objects, and in a few cases these objects will park themselves right over the heads of the concerned observers.

Perhaps "strong-minded" observers could take these sorts of actions in stride, but these witnesses were usually terrified by them.

Why would knowing if these events were deliberately "negative" be important? I have my own theoretical context wherein I try to see if I can understand what's going on, as some of you know. For widely cast reasons, I think that it is a reasonable viewing point to think that very advanced civilizations will be of one of three types. There will be civilizations which have come to the conclusion that there are important moral considerations to living life, a Spirit, a God, a Moral Demand. Or, there will be civilizations which have come to the exact opposite conclusion: no Spirituality, no God, an Amoral Condition regarding "others." Or, there will be civilizations which are still open to the Big Questions of Existence, and take a "anxious to still learn" attitude.

I've described elsewhere how each of these three types of civilizations would have almost no incentives to interfere with newly discovered planet's cultural development. One would not as it would be an immoral violation of freedom. Another would not as the only thing we might offer them would be our "novelty" upon which they could stealthily vicariously prey. And the third would also wish to keep our novelty pure [not imitative] in the hopes of learning from our fresh path.

But these three attitudes seem to me to differ slightly in terms of what behaviors might be on their agenda. The Moral Civilization would rarely if ever become overt even to an individual. Particularly they would not "stalk." The Searcher Civilization {number three in the above paragraph} would only very gingerly tinker with the lives of people in a society which they wished to remain freshly on its own path. But the Vicarious Predator Civilization might well choose to be crudely interactive with individuals, while keeping the culture as a whole blissfully going its own "original" ways.

If UFOs actually "stalk", that could be a sign that at least the Vicarious Predator Civilization is around.

Still, that is far far from being a conclusive thing. Some encounters seem benign. Some seem just delightful. {The drawing about is the array which showed itself to a lady returning from one nearby New Mexico city to her home, and the Array kept its distance AHEAD of her all the way down the road to her neighborhood.} A BOL in Paxson, AK seemed to move so as to save a State Trooper's life. Other encounters have been more openly playful. Maybe the "playful" or beautiful ones are courtesy of the other civilization types, or maybe the vicarious thrill seekers like all the emotions.

There could be lots more said about this, and lots more researched. For me, at least at this moment, I think that we are lucky: whoever's "out there" watching, they don't want to be doing too much messing around --- almost none with "cultural development" and not a lot even individually in any great percentages. Maybe that restraint is self-imposed; maybe it is imposed by the other two super-civilization types.

Either way, or some other way I can't crystallize, the UFO phenomenon doesn't seem THAT scary.

Peace and gentle dreams, folks.