Rating the Protagonists for General Truth-Telling

By, let us say, 2035, I believe that we will know the truth about the UFO/UAP phenomenon.  We are, now, on a trajectory towards inevitable disclosure.

But I don't expect to be here in 2035.  In the interest of post-mortem "I told you so," then, I offer here my view of the personal credibility of some of the principal protagonists in this story, believers and skeptics alike, and also of some mere tellers of the story, which is to say journalists who have taken it more or less seriously.  

But time will tell! --

• Ralph Blumental -- A
• Gordon "Gordo" Cooper -- A
• Philip Corso -- C
• Ross Coulthart -- A
• Dr. Eric Davis -- B
• Tom DeLonge -- C
• Luis Elizondo -- B+
• David Fravor -- A
• Stanton Friedman -- A-
• Steven Greer -- D
• Richard Dolan -- A
• Betty and Barney Hill -- A
• Leslie Kean -- A
• Philip Klass -- D
• Bob Lazar -- A or F (TBD)
• John Mack -- A
• Jesse Marcel -- B+
• Christopher Mellon -- A-
• Edgar Mitchell -- B+
• Barack Obama (then) -- D
• Barack Obama (now) -- B
• Nick Pope -- A
• Jacques Vallee -- A
• Travis Walton -- A
• Admiral Tom Wilson -- C
• Lonnie Zamora -- A
• Linda Moulton Howe -- A-
• The children of Ariel School -- A
• The children of Westall School -- A

 

Ross Coulthart Reports

Reliably, that there are levels of confidentiality within the United States Government that are beyond the purview even of the President of the United States, and even when he asks to be informed directly about a particular matter.  He has not demonstrated the requisite "need to know," it seems.  

Who has demonstrated the requisite need to know?  Certain discrete (and discreet) people within Lockheed-Martin and Raytheon Corporation, for example.

Not for nothing did General Eisenhower warn us against the quiet evolution of a military-industrial complex.

 

Deserving Neither of Heaven nor Hell

A former colleague of mine died this week.  He used to enjoy belittling me, as well as others.  He did it for sport.  He was sycophantic towards his superiors.  He tried to manipulate his clients.   He thought he was good at it, but he made many secret enemies in the process.  He went through the motions of being a devout Catholic.

I mention him because it's so hard to see how the vetting process of Catholicism could be applied to him today.   I picture him standing at the Pearly Gates waiting his turn, perhaps behind Zsa Zsa Gabor and maybe (if he conveniently dies to complete the picture) Richard Simmons.

It will be very hard to judge him finally and to impose the right punishment on him because his flaws were so organic and also so petty.  And yet he was not Hitler; he was not Stalin; he was not even Don Rickles.  Maybe his baptism will be judged after 73 years to have been procedurally defective, and he will be consigned therefore, for eternity, to Limbo.

 

Lawrence Krauss

The celebrated astrophysicist (and UFO skeptic!) explained something remarkable a couple of weeks ago during a long-form conversation with Jordan Peterson.

If we wind the clock back to 1920, and look through the then-most-powerful telescopes with the then-most prominent cosmologists, we will conclude as they did that our galaxy -- the Milky Way -- is the universe.  Everything that we see is within it and, presumptively, there is only empty space beyond it.

It was Edwin Hubble who disabused the world of that notion.   Those smudges way out there?   They are separate galaxies, each containing billions of stars, and there are billions of such galaxies!  This discovery, made during my father's lifetime, was a putting of man in his place on the same sort of plane as the work of Galileo and Copernicus.

But now we know that the universe is expanding, and that because of the forces associated with the lately-discovered "dark energy," that expansion is accelerating.  As a consequence, more and more of the outer universe (from the perspective of Earth) is receding from our view, because the light that it emits, while it is coming towards us at the speed of light, is drawing away from us as well at speeds greater than light, as part of that accelerating expansion.

So, Krauss explains, there will come a time -- a time whose distance in time from 2021 we can measure -- 5000 years? -- when, looking through the most sophisticated telescopes and other sensing devices of that time, we will see only what is in the Milky Way, just as in 1920.

Of course we assume that there will be some history at that point in the future that allows people to remember what is out there; Krauss's point is not that it will truly be forgotten.  Rather, his point is that this phenomenon proves that just because we now have a horizon beyond which we see nothing tells us nothing about what is beyond our vision.  We simply do not know and cannot know.

 

There Was An Explosion in the Night

It came after the dueling Ducatis of Rte. 9, but before our latest in a string of strong electrical storms.

I took comfort in it just because it was so clean and unambiguous.  I waited for the sound of sirens, of emergency vehicles.  There was none.

And later, when the storm arrived, the sound of the wind could not be disentangled from the sound of the rain.

 

Recedit Perterritum Omnis

 

A Reciprocal Simile

On the third day, the decisive day, at Gettysburg, the opening artillery barrage of the Confederates sounded to everyone in the town like thunder -- a low and continuous rumble, but one to wake the dead.  And not just in the town; it was heard 20 miles away.  When would it end, and who would survive the onslaught?

But in the wee hours this morning, the thunder sounded like artillery.  In the beginning it seemed that there was no break in the sound, although I knew that it was made up of hundreds of thunderclaps merging in the dense air.  Only when the storm was nearly overhead did the reports become discrete and staccato, and the flashes visible, as if the cannons were Federal now and we were marching up the long incline against flanking fire of canister and grape, soon now to be awarded the Red Badge of Courage.

 

Names of Sports Figures That Are Easy on the Ear, One Way or the Other

• Boog Powell
• Gump Worsley
• Rocket Richard
• Yvan Cournoyer
• Sugar Ray Robinson
• Arthur Ashe
• Johnny Bucyk
• Fred Biletnikoff
• Y. A. Tittle
• Bubba Smith
• Johnny Pesky
• Johnny Bench
• Mickey Mantle
• Dom DiMaggio
• Pee Wee Reese
• Tiny Archibald
• Orlando Cepeda
• Mookie Betts
• Diego Maradona
• Donovan Peoples-Jones
• Cal Ripken
• Yvonne Goolagong
• Satchel Paige
• Jim Kaat
• Catfish Hunter
• Lefty Grove
• Harmon Killebrew
• Rico Petrocelli
• Felix Mantilla
• Arnold Early
• Cedric Maxwell
• Pumpsie Green
• Lance Alworth
• Whitey Ford
• Emerson Fittipaldi
• Pancho Gonzalez
• Carmen Basilio
• Julius Erving
• Babe Parilli
• Johnny Unitas
• Rolly Fingers
• Elston Howard
• Ingemar Johanssen

 

The Same Thing, Said Differently, About the UFO Phenomenon

The general non-reaction of the public to the news that the government believes that UFOs are real, if of indeterminate origin, requires a psychological explanation.  It is to be compared, for example, to the societal reaction in the nineteenth century to the unveiling by science of "the origin of the species," our close relationship with apes that called into question fundamental religious beliefs as well as the ethics of our treatment of our fellow creatures.  The implications of that were at least worth thinking and talking about, whereas here no one, not even the scientists whose job it is to keep us honest by asking provocative questions about the underlying reality, seems to want to touch it, leaving aside "the usual suspects."  "Moving on, then, to the question whether Olympic athletes should be banned for smoking cannabis ..."

Perhaps this is temporary.  But I doubt it.  It comes at a time when all of our thinking seems to be tribal; anyone who takes it seriously is assigned to the Tribe of the Fools.  For the Left, the Tribe of the Fools is a subset of the Right; for the Right, it is a subset of the Left.  In truth there is nothing political about the question at all.

Perhaps the explanation lies, at least in part, in our shared myth that we will be rewarded or punished at the end of the day, or at the End of Days, for conforming to the rules, be they the ones handed down by Moses and Jesus or just the Sacred Rules of Secular Humanism.  Even Noam Chomsky and Richard Dawkins, somewhere in their hardened hearts, anchor their lives in the moral meaning that comes with having "done it right" (unlike the contemptible others).

A vastly superior civilization in our midst, about whose values we know next to nothing, appears to be "tearing the veil."  What do we know about its values?

They have not to date treated us as a source of food.  They have not sprayed the planet with Pest-Be-Gone.   

Some think that they think that we have failed in our role as stewards of the planet. This seems a quaint concern for them to have, one that is out of scale, but who are we to say?  

Some think that they have performed genetic and cross-breeding experiments on us.  This would reflect a cold-heartedness more extreme than that of Chomsky and Dawkins, but such a cold-heartedness is by no means ruled out.

Some see a multiplicity of species, some exhibiting a loving-kindness and others exhibiting the ethics of the mantis.  If this is right, who is the great referee among them (and us)?  What views do they have about powers beyond their own powers, and about survival beyond death, for example?

One of the nuns once told us that God does not banish sinners to hell; He does not need to.  Sinners simply cannot bear to be in His presence, and so they fling themselves into the fiery pit by choice.  How much more universal would this impulse to self-annihilation be if God were as awesome and terrible as the Old Testament God, but He lay down no rules so as to allow us to strive to be His faithful and obedient creatures rather than objects of His wrath?

If there were reason to believe that a like reckoning may be upon us in the present age, we might well erase the warning signs from our collective consciousness in favor of cat videos and more digestible things to fear, like collapsed condominiums.