Hello folks, after a hiatus of two weeks. Even though I was back in Michigan for a while, there was no time to get deeply involved with any reading and therefore nothing much that I could rationalize presenting to you. I don't have much of anything today either except "news". But I'm using that as an excuse to get started again, and give warning that the blog may become more frequent again.
The main news involves "The Book". The cover is above. And what's new is that it is at the printer. Depending on the "place in line" The 600-page [or thereabouts] beast should be seeing the light of day by the end of the month of July or sooner. You could check Patrick's website at Anomalist Books to get the latest.
For those who don't know: this thing began as a dream of several veteran UFO historians [you'll recognize Barry Greenwood, VJ Ballester Olmos, Clas Svahn, Bill Chalker, Jan Aldrich, and insider MUFONers might well know Robert Powell and Steve Purcell. Bill Murphy also worked a lot with the book, as did Richard Thieme. Jerry Clark wrote the Foreword. Patrick Huyghe, great friend of UFOlogy and anomalies in general, is our publisher. Hopefully Patrick will get enough sales to break even on this production. If he does, he'll be the only one who makes anything from it. As usual, we UFO stiffs work for love.
We wanted to break an ugly unhelpful UFO tradition and work on this as a team, recognized as a team, and everyone's name [Bill Murphy said that he did not feel comfortable with the publicity so he is the exception, and we honor him] on the cover. We ARE "The UFO History Team" and this book is our accumulative product. My name's first on this --- I couldn't come up with any counterarguments --- because I wrote the majority of the chapters. Even though true, I could not have done this job without the other guys, nor without Loren Gross' monumental run of History Chronicles to set a skeletal matrix. We proudly dedicate the book to Loren, one of the great unsung UFOlogists [and one of its nicest people].
The book begins with WW2 and goes on to the Ghost Rockets era, and into the big sweep of military and intelligence community involvement through Colorado/Condon and somewhat beyond. The difference is that this story is told almost in its entirety from the "inside documents" of the military. It gives you the opportunity to see what was going on with the guys who were making the decisions, what they were trying to cope with, what they were worried about, why they brutally man-handled Truth and gave us the strange world that we live in today: one of the most robust mysteries ever, yet one which is thoroughly "forbidden" to do serious work upon. We also have three of the world's best to tell you how their countries handled it, and we take smaller focussed peeks into several other nation's activities. The book ends with massive indices, including copies of several of the most significant documents from the text.
Even though I wrote a lot of this, let me be the first to say that there will be mistakes that we, and I, made. This was a huge effort, and we really do not have a foundational history guide to "polish up". This was close to uncultivated ground. How many little details to get accurate? 60,000? We're going to mess up. We tried to reduce speculation beyond the documents to a bare minimum. Still, some will object that we got it wrong. That's history. We're tossing a rather large stone into the pond and the future can re-write its message as appropriate. On the other hand: I like this book very much. For me, it explains almost all of our government's heavy-handed actions over the Blue Book years. I hope that you folks will like it too.
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Other than that: The SITU archives are in better shape, and were even visited by an old SITU member who wanted to talk about the wonders of upper Michigan and also read the "BOZO" notebooks of Ivan, as a relative of his had seen the Minnesota Iceman "in person". So we did some good there.
My goal for the blog in the near future is to tackle the issue of whether there are any useful UFO pictures, drawing as usual on my own files, as I have shipped that case category here to Wheeling. I do not know if this will be interesting to you or me --- I just dive into these things and see what happens. I've also stumbled across an old journal article [from one of those old magazines I saved from disuse by buying them from the local Old Book Shop] on the interaction of humans with elephants in North America pre-Columbus. I brought my own file on this with me from Kalamazoo, so may be able to make a good post on that once I get organized. This could take a few days. The third floor apartment here was not being cooled, and I was hit with 93 degrees when I walked in a moment ago. My air conditioner is one step up from a piece of junk, so it will take a few days probably for this space to be workable.
In fact, with sweat dripping onto the keyboard, I'll stop.
Get back to you soon. Hopefully.
