Saturday, August 29, 2009

My Life with UFOs, Part 2

A kindly correspondent wrote me a real nifty and uplifting note of encouragement last week and has asked me to continue w/ my UFO series.

Somewhere I read, and I wish I knew where so I could give a proper citation, that 90% of Americans believe that they originated on another planet. This says something about the political climate of our democratic republic, though I am not sure exactly what it says. It may be equivalent to belief in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and various historical religious figures. There is no need for a theory of evolution once we have determined that we came from Alpha Centauri. But I do believe that this crisis of origination indicates that if you are a woman, and pregnant, that you should talk to, have the father talk to, have all your family and friends talk to the baby before it is born just so’s there is no confusion later on as to where exactly it is that they came from.
Texian secession movement?

In the late 1990’s, nostalgic for the sorts of people who talked about universal mystery as I remembered in my childhood I sought out the Long Island UFO Network (LIUFON). This was after our local crash in Southaven Park and the claim was that they had a film of the alien creatures... which in fact they did have a film and I saw it on a Saturday at a hotel conference/meeting room. I was impressed.

What I saw was a lizard-like humanoid creature that had eyes and looked a bit dazed and maybe terrified sitting and was leaned up against the base of a tree, at night in the dark with people walking around. At one point a human hand moved across the screen. It held a red plastic flashlight. I also saw an alien being carried away on a stretcher.

John Ford, the fellow who showed the film, it was VHS, was nervous and fumbled with the equipment having a problem getting it to run. He had been telling us that there were probably FBI agents planted in the small hotel conference/meeting room. I had sat close to the action and when I offered to help him with the machine he freaked a bit. I have been told in the past that I sometimes look like a street cop.

Then there was some professor from some school, it could have been a community college, not sure about that, who was an expert on telling people that films are authentic and not faked. I suggested that since the flashlight was obviously real they may want to track down what kind it was... I mean, the people walking around in the film were described as some sort of special UFO black ops and so I imagine they have special issue UFO investigation flashlights. John Ford did not like my idea.

Preston Nichols, the famous author who has writ books on the Montauk Project spoke for a while and explained that the particle accelerator recently built at Brookhaven Labs is actually a proton beam canon and that the deadly instrument had been used to shoot down the UFO. He went into some detail as to the physics of how a little bitty proton can knock down a UFO.... but that got confused with another story about how the craft was actually a captured one that humans trained at Brookhaven Labs were trying to fly, but they crashed. Stupid humans.


something akin to a sensory deprivation tank?
you can do this at home with half-cut ping pong balls
taped over your eyes,
an incandescent bulb, a fan blade
and an i-pod

Then there was this chain smoker lady -- I had seen her previously outside the hotel. We were told she was from some exclusive investigation group out of Washington, DC. She explained to us how the aliens abducted people at random and had sex with them in some sort of cosmic breeder’s program. The really old guy in the chair behind me woke up at that and snarked that we don’t need aliens to do that ‘cause everybody in our community already swaps partners.

We were told about how some black preacher that lives near the park how the battery on his car died. We were told that the perimeter fence of the park had reversed polarity. And we were told that the town had installed a new horse stable on the crash site as a cover up.

They did a real good job of the cover up as my wife and I spent an entire day wandering around the park with a loony poetess lady and her young boys looking for evidence. We found nothing. I understand some of the trees lean over in the park. I found something burnt but it was very small and may have been a penny doll's head.

Here is a snippet that I found elsewhere on the Internets:

“The most Coherent information on Southaven was located in the LIUFON Press Release on August 3 1998. The actual crash occurred at 7:00pm on Nov. 24th, 1992. A man was driving east on Sunrise Highway heading toward WIlliam Floyd Parkway. There was a patch of trees separating Sunrise from Montauk Hwy. To the south of Sunrise he saw a large craft that he describes as, "tubular in shape with two large bright blue lights on each end with a bright white light in its center whose structure was composed of a dull metallic grey texture". He saw the object make a very tight right angle, cross the highway, and crash into the woods of Southaven Park. When it hit, the object emitted a dazzlingly white beam that was said to turn night to day for a moment. “

John Ford later got in trouble for putting some sort of radioactive material in the toothpaste of a local small-time politician and he was put in jail.

We Took a Special Class:
that is me in the middle
with my arm on my hip
finding out that
I am not really from
around here.

Of the people that follow UFOs there are some distinctive types:

1. Skeptical: Those who have seen weird things that make no sense and yet they remain ever hopeful of a reasonable explanation. Sometimes a scientific explanation is sought. The late J. Allen Hynek fits into this category.

2. Technical Hams: The folks that like electronics and gadgetry and will go into excruciating detail about things like anti-gravitational generators. They like to play with oscillators and strobe lights. They are apt to try to do a home-built craft. Preston Nichols fits this type.

3. Religious Folksters: Karl Jaspers talked about UFOs as religious phenomena, and this is where angels, fairies, elves and creatures living in an alternate parallel universe seem to fit. This is also where the likes of Jacques Vallee seem to settle. John Mack the Harvard psychologist borders on this region in a secular manner with his investigation of abduction experiences.

4. Fakers: Those that know they are full of crap but laugh their way to the bank, particularly when we buy their books and pay to attend their séances. I put Whitley Strieber square in this camp.

5. Schizoid: Hallucinatory paranoids... which is where I see the unfortunate John Ford.

On a good day I will find myself anywhere on this scale.

If I am fortunate to ever get to a Part 3 in this remembrance I hope to talk a bit on my thoughts in respect of the wealth of UFO related literature. We are a long way past when a friendly Norwegian looking babe would walk through the wall, tell us that the earth needs to be saved, and that we – us and only us who are always diligently paying attention -- can save it, and then casually share a cold lemon soda with them. I am intrigued as to how people come to believe stuff through reading words. If we can figure it out with outer space then pretty soon we may have it under control as a global MASH with Facebook and Tweeter.

One of them mysterious crash sites.