Ufology’s Insane Asylum: UFO UpDates

The pathology inherent to or study of UFOs is rampant and overt at an internet place that designates itself as The List: Errol Bruce-Knapp’s UFO UpDates.



A cursory glance at the postings on UpDates provides evidence of a psychopathology that is substantiated by a perusal of such dolts as Jerry Clark, Don Ledger, Stanton Friedman, and especially the sour and intellectually misguided Alfred Lehmberg.

Recently, sensible and coherent thinkers such as Britain’s David Clarke and the eminent Jeff Ritzmann have departed UpDates, realizing that the venue now contains a gaggle of very mentally-sick persons, who are spouting jeremiads about the Alien Abduction brouhaha that Paratopia started by its anti-Hopkins revelations of Carol Rainey, Hopkins’ ex-wife and colleague, and the Jacobs/Emma Woods imbroglio that has captured the noses of ufological morons and idiots who haven’t a clue as to what malfeasance is or perverse bias is on their part or others,

UpDates is the last refuge of the ufological residue that has been marginalized by UFO newbies and true intellectuals, who refuse to habituate the site.

The scandalous asides of The Listers is grist for psychoanalytic study, if one wants to examine minds that have gone off the deep end of sanity.

The once scholarly UFO historian Jerry Clark has descended into a state of Libyan-like autocracy, where he thinks he’s the sole-arbiter of what is germane about UFOs and what isn’t.

Don Ledger is just dumb, and grammatically lax.

Freidman is defensive and self-aggrandizing.

Lehmberg is egregiously loopy, ruining the English language with his grammatical faux pas and incoherent ramblings.

Bruce-Knapp likes the idea of having a lot of material in his UpDate archives, and encourages postings of every kind. He’s the asylum’s wayward director who should have retired a few years ago, before senility hit him square in the head.

There are others, too many to name here, who complete the inventory of psychopaths who once were atop the ufological list of responsible UFO mavens but who now make up the raft of silly persons that time has made irrelevant and rationality has subverted.

UpDates is the list alright – but the list of UFO nuts and crazies.

Alien Abductions

We're not going to get immersed in the alien abduction brouhaha that is running amok all over the UFO community...

But we are making available, a compilation (by Jeff Carney), of some papers by alien abduction mavens (including some in the current abduction imbroglio).

The PDF is mostly for newbies to the abduction phenomenon, but some regulars here might find a few interesting morsels.

Click here for the PDF.

Edward U Condon and pink UFOs

Way back when, before many readers here were even extant, we pursued the allegation that Edward U Condon, the person responsible for the flawed Air Force/Condon Report on UFOs, was a communist sympathizer, a "pinko" as The John Birch Society called him and his ilk.

We posted our inquiry online, earlier at his blog and others, but provide it again for your edification.

We believe that if Condon was, indeed, a commie sympathizer (or worse), his perversion of the Colorado Study of UFOs was compromised for reasons more substantial than stupidity.

Click here to see our paperwork for what we call The Condon Affair.

Scientology, Ufology, and Psychology

The New Yorker issue for February 14/21, 2011 has a lengthy piece by Lawrence Wright [The Apostate, Page 84 ff.] about a Scientology defector.



The article presents an overview of Scientology and especially L. Ron Hubbard (its founder).



Those interested in the Navy’s connection to UFOs will find clues to that connection in the article, but they will find much more about the founder of Scientology, and it’s not a pretty picture.

Just as Christianity is marred by the machinations of its early followers and Constantine, and psychology is saddled by the permutations of Freud to make psychoanalysis viable to his colleagues [See Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s “The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory” – Ballantine Books, NY, 1984/2003], Scientology is riddled by the flaws of its founder L. Ron Hubbard.



And ufology? Where has that artful and contrived discipline gone wrong?

Ufology has no definitive founder, but the progenitors of the faux “science” were (and are) men flawed by a lack of scientific acumen and a lack of intellectual credentials.

Whereas Freud has great insights about the human mind and behavior, he muddled those profound insights by fudging truths and facts to make his (psychoanalytic) movement palatable to psychologists and the Victorian populace of his time.



L. Ron Hubbard had no profound insights, but his movement (Dianetics and then Scientology) has been promulgated by a patina of distortions and concocted legends of his acolytes, just as happened with Christianity. [See Bart D. Ehrman’s “Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible…” – Harper One, NY 2009]



In Ufology, one can’t point to a single person who led the study of UFOs astray but one can point fingers at persons such as Phil Klass (a perverse skeptic), Stanton Friedman (a biased researcher), and a host of other “ufologists” who had or have an agenda that has little or nothing to do with truth or science but is, rather, a ploy for self-aggrandizement.



The raft of persons who’ve led the study of UFOs/flying saucers astray is too vast to list here, and most readers know to whom we refer.

The point is that movements are always corrupted by followers or instigators who have self-promotion as their premise or ignorance at their foundation.

Psychiatry, Scientology says, is a crock. And Scientology may be right. Psychiatry moved away from a therapy based on the study of the mental afflictions of people to an overly of symptomatic suppression with drugs or various kinds, a move away from the methodology of Freud and his followers.

Freud may have compromised his movement by altering the truth of child seduction but his methodology for getting at unconscious truths was remarkable and unique, even helpful to those afflicted by neuroses of a sexual kind.

But the little insight by Scientology about psychiatry and drug-therapy doesn’t offset the flawed premises of L. Ron Hubbard, as you will see by the New Yorker article.



And since Jeffrey Masson exposed the flawed, dishonest Freudian account of child seduction – the root of neuroses according to psychoanalysis, and Bart Ehrman (among others) exposes the flawed, distorted beginnings of Christianity, why has no one exposed the flawed roots of ufology?

Yes, skeptics of UFOs abound, and some in the UFO community have assailed the fraudulent in the UFO/flying saucer era, but no one has made as thorough assessment of the UFO crockery as have Dr. Masson of Freud or Bart Ehrman of Christ’s early devotees.

L. Ron Hubbard has been skewered, and Freud too, along with Jesus’s early disciples. But nowhere has anyone taken on the personalities that have tried to make ufology a valid enterprise, using lies and distortions in the process.



Is that because ufology is seen, intrinsically, as the canard it basically is? Or is it because no one has the intellectual stamina to assail a thing as ridiculous as ufology?

We think it is both…

The New Contactees

Bryan Sentes (a friend) and Susan Palmer have co-authored a paper about the significance of the Raelian "theology" as a replacement for the traditional (religious) belief system.

The paper discusses the flying saucer connection, Carl Jung's UFO thesis, and related matters.

Nick Redfern made little or no note about the Raelians in his book, Contactees, but the sect or cult is everything (and more) that the contactee phenomenon represents.

Click here to read the paper and let us know what you think.

Being and Nothingness: UFOs and Jean-Paul Sartre

Aside from Bruce Duensing, there is little point to suggesting visitors here read Jean-Paul Sartre’s monumental Being and Nothingness, the ne plus ultra of existentialism.

But we will suggest Joseph S. Catalano’s A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” [Harper & Row, NY, 1974].



Professor Catalano’s book provides a concise, lucid overview of Sartre’s book and philosophy. It also defines “phenomenon” – the definition of which (by Sartre and Husserl) is applicable and relevant to UFOs.



Reality is a complex thing, and not clarified by anyone, including philospophers. Jean-Paul Sartre is not an exception but his views are attuned, rather specifically, to the UFO phenomenon as it manifests itself in the modern era:

“As a phenomenologist, [Sartre] begins with a study of phenomenon – that very appearance that does not hide reality but reveals it.” [Catalano, Page 35]

Some UFO mavens – Duensing among them, if I understand his erudite writings – think that UFOs interact with human consciousness, and their [UFOs] existence dependent upon the human interaction.

Sartre says this:

“…the subsistence of a permanent element apart from something which changes can not allow change to be constituted as such except in the eyes of a witness who would be himself united with that which changes and with that which remains.” [Sartre, Being and Nonthingness, Philosophical Library, NY, 1956, Page 143]

That is to say that UFO witnesses are linked, transmentally, with the phenomenon, and become a part of it; an idea that meshes with quantum’s theory of the observer affecting that which it is observing (measuring).

For “nuts and bolts” ufologists, this is buggy and ignored. But should it be?

The superficial approach of mechanical ufologists hasn’t provided anything conclusive in the sixty-plus years of UFO scrutiny. Isn’t it time to give consideration to ideas steeped in such theorizing as that of Sartre or Bruce Duensing (at his blog, Intangible Materiality)?

Sartre, in his Conclusion to Being…,writes, “But here, as in Greek philosophy a question is raised: which shall we call real?” [Ibid, Page 622]

That is the same question that UFO aficionados have been asking for years.

We suggest that the mental gyrations required to understand Sartre can be employed to understand the UFO phenomenon.

But understanding the phenomenon doesn’t determine the essence of the phenomenon, and that still requires scrutiny of an evidentiary kind.

Ontology may be helpful as a methodology fro UFO study, but there still exists a need to touch and hold the phenomenon, which has a tangible reality, as far as the evidence thus far indicates, or does it?

That’s the question, after all, isn’t it?

Review of UFO Matrix magazine

Philiop Mantle has provided a review of his magazine UFO Matrix.

Click here for that review

Close Encounters Conference

Philip Mantle's UFO Matrix magazine is presenting a Close Encounters conference in October 2011.

Click here for the full announcement

NASA/military tests mistaken for UFOs?

Here is an ARMY/NASA position paper that outlines proposals for surveillance of outer space planets, Mars and Jupiter in particular:

AERIAL SURVEY

Has the processes proposed been put into practice and tested in the Earthian sky?

Check the details and specifically the references, and you’ll see that the proposals have, indeed, been put to tests in the last half of the 2000 decade.