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Terra Obscura - Culture | Theory | High Strangeness
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Terra Obscura - Culture | Theory | High Strangeness

The Modern UFO Malaise

1/10/2016
PictureWhere have you gone ET? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you...
A few months ago, Seth Shostak wrote a piece for the Huffington Post entitled "UFOs: The Trail is Stale" exploring why modern ufology is not delivering "the goods". In other words, why isn't there a modern Roswell incident or Rendlesham Forrest? Where have all the aliens gone? Why are the reports and evidence showing up for modern day cases so...blah. 

Picture
As some "experts" suggest, maybe it's an E.T. dry-spell. They came, they saw and they left. Some "believers" are suggesting that governments truly know what is going on and the only way to get it out of them is via the "Disclosure Movement". Finally, the "true believers" are saying that they are still here, just hiding among us, telepathically communicating with "chosen" people and maybe even attending UFO conferences...

 So what can we glean from Shostak as well as from the evidence out there?

One major factor is that reporting sightings is as easy as filling out an online survey. It is not a long or arduous process involving the writing of actual paper letters, finding the right people and addresses to report to. Google will generally direct you to the MUFON website or one of the other major reporting agencies and a few clicks later, done. I can do it, get it out of the way and move on without dealing with the actual work in making an accurate report. Please see MUFON CMS for excellent examples of two sentence "detailed long reports", lovely grammar and terrific spelling to back up my point.

Due to the ease and sloppiness of reporting, the data collecting agencies like MUFON become massive landfills of data that need to be sifted through to find those rare but truly interesting cases (which are not necessarily aliens...).

It's not that the aliens have "gone away"- it's that we've brought them too close to home. Popular culture has permeated our collective consciousness with images of little grey men and their taller skinny counterparts. We've allowed our fantasy to run amok, and the surest thing about fantasy is that it is better than reality. We want E.T. to be real more than we want to find actual scientific proof of his (its?) existence. Belief and faith is often stronger in our minds than fact- "so long as I believe, it is true."

Does the malaise of modern ufology exists because too many people believe? Do too many people watch alien "documentaries" on History and Discovery Channel, and that has fouled the pool?  One thing is certain, we continue to hear about and rehash the same tired old cases. What is the Roswell of the twenty-first century and why haven't we heard about it?
Here is a link to the original article.

3 Comments
richard collins
1/10/2016 05:42:24 pm

The story is quite reasonable and believable, right up until he says "We've allowed our fantasy to run amok", because this is where the reality train leaves the rails and the author himself is in fantasy land. He has not spoken to a single witness, has done no research, knows nothing about ufology, just a poor journalist struggling to pay his bills. Don't listen to this journalist for sure, he knows nothing about this topic. Listen to Leslie Kean and read her book "'UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record".

Reply
Michael
1/11/2016 04:00:30 pm

Rich,

Thanks for the comment. I appreciate the work of Leslie Kean and other ufologists. I will not debate with you her merit nor her work, as that is not the point in this post.

You can not argue against the fact that the UFO and ETI phenomenon has become a significant player in popular culture. There are dozens of television programs alone that present this topic, both as fiction (ie: The X-Files) and "reality" (term is used loosely here; ie: Hangar 1).

The collective consciousness of our culture and it's media is filled with images and videos of aliens and their space craft. This saturation of media content would, without a doubt, affect people's perceptions of what they see in the sky, their nightmares and what they assume those events to be.

We see this in the mythologies of cultures around the globe; using paranormal or divine explanations to make sense of common and natural phenomena. In our modern world, where most natural phenomena have clear explanations that are taught in school, there are few "otherworldly" explanations for odd events still out there.

So what do we rely on? Well, for some, the media is a primary teacher and if they are inundated with content concerning aliens and the like, people will begin to believe it. Not only that, people often want to believe it. ETI brings order and potentially answers to a dark, mysterious and often chaotic universe.

Reply
Chris Rutkowski link
1/11/2016 03:41:43 pm

I have suggested the problem is that our society has transitioned from "modernism" to "post-modernism"... to "metamodernism." This latter era is summed up as: "anything goes." Anyone's view is as valid as any other. All opinions are valid. There are no experts. Anything and everything is possible. From the Metamodernism Manifesto: "All information is grounds for knowledge, whether empirical or aphoristic, no matter its truth-value. We should embrace the scientific-poetic synthesis and informed naivety of a magical realism. Error breeds sense."
See: http://www.metamodernism.org/

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