The Growth of the UFO Myth

[Rincewind]

The boy's not exactly a rocket surgeon.

OK - I understand.

It's definitely true...

 

[dudalb]

Abandonderos to be precise!!! (re: Ray Palmer - not the Atom though the Atom was named for the editor...........)

And on TV Ray Palmer/The Atom will be played by Brandon Routh,no less....

 

[AlaskaBushPilot]

Actually, it was Jesse Marcel, Jr., claiming that he had seen alien artifacts on their dining room table and getting some hack UFO writing to cash in on that.

So yeah, I looked up his father and him - very interesting. The father is reprimanded for being a press-seeking fabulist!

So he was there when the real debris was taken to General Ramey's office.

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/what_really_happened_at_roswell/

That's interesting because we've been seeing it all along.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

What's the red rectangle trying to draw our attention to?

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

What's the red rectangle trying to draw our attention to?

ISTR that if you "enhanced" it all to Hell it was a Teletype message that said, "THIS IS NOT THE REAL DEBRIS STOP FOR THAT YOU HAVE TO LOOK IN MY OFFICE AT AREA 51 STOP SIGNED RAMEY".

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

PS. Can anyone else see Jay Leno's face in the piece of alien metal on the floor?

 

[AlaskaBushPilot]

What's the red rectangle trying to draw our attention to?

Not sure, and I kind of have a rule about zooming in beyond the ability of the pixel quality. I just don't bother.

Some of the bigfoot thread followers engage with the 'footers at a level I think beyond what we can get out of it. You can see Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa at these levels.

The true story is really fascinating. I'll bet a lot more people know the fabulist version as opposed to the real one.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

That bloody mortician's assistant, Dennis, has certainly muddied the waters.

 

[catsmate]

So calling some secret airplanes UFO's was a way of covering them up? Seems like that may also be going on with at least some black-triangle UFO's.

I've seen that theory for the Soviet Union also, that the Soviet authorities did that with some tests of a FOBS (Fractional Orbital Bombardment System) nuclear-weapons system: "Soviet Saucers" by James Oberg, The Great Soviet UFO Coverup

There was also the 'glowing orange spheres' that were occasionally seen in the '50s (most notably associated with the Dyatlov Pass incident). Only post-Soviet Union was it discovered that they were due to test launches of the R-7 ('Sapwood') missile system.

 

[HansMustermann]

Interesting how UFO technology always stays just one step ahead of human technology.

I'd say it's even more interesting how the intelligence of aliens takes a nose-dive over time.

- millions of years ago: capable of engineering new sentient life

- 5000 years ago: can only teach humans how to stack big rocks on top of each other, and how to write exclusively via icons and emoticons, like it's 13 year olds on their first smartphone. Which I suppose would also explain the Egyptian obsession with cats

- 20'th century: starts from pointlessly flying around aircraft and nuclear explosions (a spacefaring species could observe from greater distances, unless again they're into it just to take a selfie with a terran bomber) and goes downhill into cutting vaginas and anuses off dead cows, flattening circles into crops, and anal probing inbred hicks

It's like alien Idiocracy, I tell ya.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

I'd say it's even more interesting how the intelligence of aliens takes a nose-dive over time.

- millions of years ago: capable of engineering new sentient life

- 5000 years ago: can only teach humans how to stack big rocks on top of each other, and how to write exclusively via icons and emoticons, like it's 13 year olds on their first smartphone. Which I suppose would also explain the Egyptian obsession with cats

- 20'th century: starts from pointlessly flying around aircraft and nuclear explosions (a spacefaring species could observe from greater distances, unless again they're into it just to take a selfie with a terran bomber) and goes downhill into cutting vaginas and anuses off dead cows, flattening circles into crops, and anal probing inbred hicks

It's like alien Idiocracy, I tell ya.

You are assuming that it is only one type of alien that is visiting. There may be many types with different backgrounds and abilities.

There is a lot of written Science Fiction with all sorts of reasons why the aliens act as idiotic as they appear to do. One of these is that one type are morons who have taken 100 times as long as the human race to evolve to a level of intelligence capable of space travel.

 

[HansMustermann]

Not sure that explains it. See, there's a reason for expressions like "not a rocket scientist." Stupid people tend to not understand that kind of stuff.

Very low intelligence doesn't just mean being slow at calculating quantum mechanics stuff for a warp drive (although being TOO slow is a handicap by itself), it also means flat out not understanding stuff past a level of complexity. They're not going to come up with a warp drive, just like Bonobos don't come up with an internal combustion engine.

A civilization of 3-stooges class morons, is just not going to invent its way into galactic exploration. Hell, they're not going to even invent a scientific method or the steps in logic and philosophy that led to that. That's stuff that took time and wasn't guaranteed to happen (or at least it didn't happen in all civilizations) even on Earth, because it took some smart people applying a lot of thinking to some very non-obvious stuff.

E.g., it took not just a lot of thinking, but a very specific state organization in Greece, to come up with formal logic. Because it was an answer to the question of how to convince people you're right, and not be out-talked by a fast talking guy, if your life depended on it. Which it did, because their trials were just a matter of who can talk the judges into seeing things his way, and there really were no standards of evidence or even common sense. You could end up with stuff like more people voting that Socrates deserves to die for his offense, than had voted that there was an offense in the first place, just because he epically failed that stage of his talking to them. So how do you convince people that, from presented evidence X and Y, you can't deduce Z, even if that other guy is awesome at stringing fallacies to that effect? Hell, how can you convince them that they can't follow an "X therefore Y", e.g., "offense X, therefore punishment Y", when they just ruled that X is false?

A civilization of complete class-3 morons or worse ain't gonna come up with that, or it won't spread. Even if a unique guy were to be born that can figure that out, he's not going to convince the rest of the morons that that makes sense.

To make a long story short(er), I think the only way such a civilization would have interstellar travel is if they got it from some people who were NOT morons. Either some other alien species entirely built a factory for those morons to build their ships in, for no obvious reason, or, Idiocracy style, they once were actually capable of a lot more thinking.

 

[Didymus]

To make a long story short(er), I think the only way such a civilization would have interstellar travel is if they got it from some people who were NOT morons. Either some other alien species entirely built a factory for those morons to build their ships in, for no obvious reason, or, Idiocracy style, they once were actually capable of a lot more thinking.

I seem to remember an ancient science fiction story about some very bright space-faring aliens who took along some really dumb aliens as pets to entertain them during the journey. When they crashed on Earth the smart aliens all died off, leaving the better-adapted dumb aliens to become our ancestors.
Or am I just thinking of the Golgafrinchans and the B Ark?

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Or the story (sorry can't remember the author) about the alien invader who is picked up by his parents who apologize and drop a huge dollar bill from their space craft as they take him home?

 

[fedupwithCT]

I think that there may be two reasons.

The first is magazine editor Ray Palmer. In the 1940's, he was editor of science-fiction magazine Amazing Stories

The second is the US Air Force's involvement and the coverup conspiracy theory that many UFOlogists came to believe about it.


Finally, UFO contact vs. UFO abduction cases. I think that the accounts of contactees provoked a lot of skepticism because to many people, they seemed too good to be true. UFO abductees' accounts don't have that quality.

There are other reasons closely related to technology that has to be discussed. I remember reading about (though I forget where) the direct correlation between technical innovation and the fear of UFOs. How everything that is associated with the myth is fueled by people's paranoia of such new technologies and innovations from vaccines to computers.

Interesting how UFO technology always stays just one step ahead of human technology.

That being said, at the same time the unprecedented rise and interest in science fiction probably overloaded the sub-conscious of western civilization.

Note how some pointed out the differences between the ever changing shape and shocking adaptive UFOs over the years. UFOs (if they were real) couldn't have changed that drastically through decades. Why would they? Just to compensate for new HUMAN technologies? Come on now. If you look back at the reports from before Rosewell you'll see there is less technology and less of a consensus in those reports. Most just describe the strange object and they nearly all don't have an abduction story attached to them. After Rosewell things changed drastically Especially after the first so-called abduction story hit the papers. Then, all of them followed the same pattern!

These aliens have to be pretty stupid to allow that to happen! So if it's not aliens, what it is? A very interesting psychological ripple effect that has yet to be studied in depth.

 

[Beerina]

I'd say it's even more interesting how the intelligence of aliens takes a nose-dive over time.

- millions of years ago: capable of engineering new sentient life

- 5000 years ago: can only teach humans how to stack big rocks on top of each other, and how to write exclusively via icons and emoticons, like it's 13 year olds on their first smartphone. Which I suppose would also explain the Egyptian obsession with cats

- 20'th century: starts from pointlessly flying around aircraft and nuclear explosions (a spacefaring species could observe from greater distances, unless again they're into it just to take a selfie with a terran bomber) and goes downhill into cutting vaginas and anuses off dead cows, flattening circles into crops, and anal probing inbred hicks
It's like alien Idiocracy, I tell ya.

 

[HansMustermann]

Or the story (sorry can't remember the author) about the alien invader who is picked up by his parents who apologize and drop a huge dollar bill from their space craft as they take him home?

Well, minus the dollar bill, it does remind me of Trelane, the self-styled "squire of Gothos", from ST TOS: The Squire Of Gothos episode. Which turns out to be pretty much a baby Q, and is finally taken home by his parents, while throwing the stereotypical "I never get to do anything fun!" child tantrum.

 

[SezMe]

There are other reasons closely related to technology that has to be discussed. I remember reading about (though I forget where) the direct correlation between technical innovation and the fear of UFOs. How everything that is associated with the myth is fueled by people's paranoia of such new technologies and innovations from vaccines to computers.

There are too many confounding factors that allow a correlation with technological innovation to have much meaning. For example, what immediately came to my mind was the Cold War which, by itself, was a large driving force for technological innovation. The overheated scare of the Red Menace^TM helped in the paranoia department.

One factor in the USA not mentioned yet was Art Bell's Coast-to-Coast broadcasts. The guy gave huge blocks of time to nutbars promoting things like remote-viewing, moon artifacts (Hoagland) and others. (He also entertained the notion of bigfoot). I really don't know how much influence he had in keeping the meme going. I'd guess that Noory doesn't have the same following or impact.

 

[fedupwithCT]

There are too many confounding factors that allow a correlation with technological innovation to have much meaning. For example, what immediately came to my mind was the Cold War which, by itself, was a large driving force for technological innovation. The overheated scare of the Red Menace^TM helped in the paranoia department.

One factor in the USA not mentioned yet was Art Bell's Coast-to-Coast broadcasts. The guy gave huge blocks of time to nutbars promoting things like remote-viewing, moon artifacts (Hoagland) and others. (He also entertained the notion of bigfoot). I really don't know how much influence he had in keeping the meme going. I'd guess that Noory doesn't have the same following or impact.

I heard a pretty compelling argument that alien abduction scenarios were directly related to rise in successful surgeries and other medical operations. People's subconscious may have feared going on a metal slab surrounded by needles and "alien-like" medical equipment. So a dream or a "hypnosis" session would re-awaken those fears.

Why talk about Art Bell in past tense. The guy is still around and hugely popular especially in rural areas of the country.

 

[SezMe]

Why talk about Art Bell in past tense. The guy is still around and hugely popular especially in rural areas of the country.

He is! Wow. News to me. Noory still does Coast-to-Coast, right? I thought Art moved to SE Asia and to a new phase in his life. I guess I'll go look to see if Wiki has more current info.