A UFO phenomena book interview that's actually interesting

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techstepgenr8tion
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28 Oct 2016, 5:40 pm

It's pretty rare to hear anyone say anything interesting about the UFO phenomena, but then again admittedly I'm a bit partial when John Michael Greer throws his hat in the ring. He has a knack for deconstructing obscure topics and coming to practical conclusions which is what got me curious to see that he's promoting a new book on the topic.

What makes it interesting is he's not really just theorizing but it sounds like he plans to outline the sociology and history involved - ie. the various now-declassified then top-secret test flight of spy aircraft, matching dates and times with the sighting reports, and talking about how the narrative interlaced with Cold War politics.



The only downside is you have a few four-minute advertisement breaks and the station itself is a little bit campy. Other than that a lot of great stuff.


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naturalplastic
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29 Oct 2016, 11:37 am

Interesting.

The most interesting part is how he relates trends in UFO sightings to specific developments in secret military aviation.How the later may cause the former.



DancingCorpse
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29 Oct 2016, 10:42 pm

I'm sure a lot of things they're testing today will seem like alien craft compared to what is considered 'top of the line' right now, which in turn would seem utterly exotic and jaw dropping to us fifty years ago. I just watched some demonstrations of the lockheed martin F-35 Lightning 2 and was entranced, that thing is unreal if you have an appreciation for warfare stretching back in time, if I'd never had much interest in planes and air combat before I'd have thought how the hell is that thing even possible, if it were disc shaped you'd have the archetypal movement of a ufo on your eyeballs. I've seen two ufos I consider legit before, I don't know whether they were issued by the government or just strange inhabitants of the cosmos drifting by.



techstepgenr8tion
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30 Oct 2016, 12:21 am

DancingCorpse wrote:
I've seen two ufos I consider legit before, I don't know whether they were issued by the government or just strange inhabitants of the cosmos drifting by.


He seems to suggest one split - between test aircraft and espionage on one hand and what you might call Jungian experiences on the other. The only thing I do worry about with shamanic bucket is that it could still be a heterogeneous category. For example it's a spectrum of experience that can range from people having an inexplicable shared encounter that doesn't seem to leave human nervous systems in any recordable way to some rare things that may perhaps jumped that gap slightly - either to the extent of leaving marks on physical objects or perhaps in some cases showing up as an anomalous light in the night sky that a camera can record. It's all well and good to refer to abduction experiences as being of the shamanic category but it's tough to say how tightly or loosely the rest of this ties in with that. These could all be from the same root cause in different intensities or it could be different causes coming through a common media that artifacts them the same way. Sadly its a difficult territory to examine because our culture still has a somewhat morbid fascination with the 'supernatural' and as a result you have an already obscure set of phenomena getting more obscured under loads of hype, fraud, and glamour.

What I think JMG was making a pretty good case for - there's not much here that suggests the emissary behavior of a race whose put either the time or the energy in to show up at our doorstep (unless they came to passively gas-light us, which seems utterly bizarre). On the other hand there's a lot we do have without that which seems to cover most of the bases.


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naturalplastic
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30 Oct 2016, 8:58 am

The guy in the film clip talks about two issues.

The more specific subject of secret aircraft development by the two superpowers.

The other is the more general gestalt of the culture of the time.

He makes a pretty good case that folks in the last seventy years have seen specific real secret aircraft and reported them as UFOs.

The other thing is also a factor (he is not the first talk about it). Folks have seen strange things in the sky since ancient times. And folks interpret odd ball aerial phenomena according their culture of the time. Ancient Greeks and Romans sometime saw "flying shields" in the sky. Mideaval folks saw angels' halos.

Then in the Victorian Age technology began to change at a pace that was fast enough to be experienced as change.

In the 1890's America experienced a rash of "phantom airship" sightings. Mysterious blimps were reported to be terrorizing the west, and even stole cattle from ranchers who shot at the things. These blimp sightings coincided with advances in Europe made by Santos Dumont, and Count Von Zeppilin in building lighter than air dirgibles. And it was on the eve of the Wright Brothers finnally conquering heavier than air flight. So flight as possible technology was "in the air" (no pun intended) in the culture of the time. So folks who saw ball lightning or whatever interpreted what they saw in terms of man made flying machines.

Then the aliens stopped bothering us (or our hysteria about the sky subsided, take your pick) for a while.

But then during the depths of WWII servicemen around the world were plagued by seeing mysterious aircraft that could go super fast, and which were often seen on radar as well as by the eye. They were not our planes, and they werent the enemy's craft, so these annoyances were dubbed "foo fighters" (hense the name of the Nineties' rock band).

Then shortly after the war a private pilot tooling around the skies of Idaho saw a V formation of mysterious "vaguely saucer shaped craft" fly by at incredible speed, and when he reported it the media ran with "flying saucers". And the modern age of UFO's/flying saucers began.

However the guy in that film clip says that the meme of "flying saucers" as vehicles for space aliens actually predated the 1947 idaho sighting and was used in pulp fiction as far back as 1917.



techstepgenr8tion
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01 Nov 2016, 10:07 pm

Heh, I just got another treat from this same interviewer - a Mark Stavish interview last night. I might think about subscribing to this guy's channel.


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