The Naïve UFO Witness

You never turned around to see the frowns…On the jugglers and the clowns …When they all did tricks for you. --Dylan

I have witnessed the disgust directed at certain types of witnesses and even at people within the UFO community called “dumb” or “naïve” by others in ufology.

What does it mean to have a lower IQ if you’ve witnessed UFO phenomena?

Does it mean you couldn’t recognize a UFO? Or something that shouldn’t be a UFO? Does it mean you couldn’t possibly be capable of calling a spade a spade? Although an individual might not be the brightest, does that mean he or she isn’t capable of telling the truth?

If you look at the history of UFOs and the UFO witnesses most often exploited by media or government disinfo agents as laughingstocks and jokes --hillbillies, farmers, and farmers’ wives-- those witnesses were right. What this group of marginalized witnesses reported about what the craft or strange lights did actually lined up with what the professionals, scientists, and even pilots reported.

There is very strong evidence something is visiting our planet. It does not present Itself with a straightforward nuts and bolts image all the time.

As we progress, some of the ideas laughed at in the 50s have now been accepted. You couldn’t go to the average paleontologist in the 50s and say some dinosaurs evolved from birds. As for the controversial yet popular physics concept Dark Energy, I don’t remember hearing Dark Energy or Dark Matter mentioned, and I had my Criterion Reflector Telescope and years of subscriptions to Astronomy Magazine, in which I was gobbling up every article. I even remember when Marjorie Fish wrote articles about the Barney and Betty Hill star map. But at that time, cosmologists believed missing matter was just neutrinos and that once neutrinos were measured, cosmologists would be able to account for most the matter required for the formation of the galaxies predicted by that era’s physics. But I don’t ever remember any serious talk by mainstream scientists about an energy that repels gravity. I remember hearing that kind of thing was impossible.

What I’m saying is, some of the people made fun of in the media or ridiculed by professional debunkers and even members of the ufology community, are actually a great resource and should be treated as such. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know you’ve witnessed a UFO craft.

Let’s talk about another group where this class feeling or intellectual elitism is directed: the naïve among us.

Members of this group tend to be involved either in fundamentalist spiritual thinking or they have bought into the idea that critical thinking on any subject is somehow negative, or even that it demonstrates a lack of faith or betrayal of beliefs, and therefore shouldn’t be done.

So why would someone adopt that worldview? I worked with teenagers who bought into extreme religious sects or cults, and for them, it always came down to a feeling of safety and a need to believe in something they felt was concrete [at least to them] and perhaps most importantly, something greater than themselves.

We find a lot of that kind of need in the UFO community. Other groups tend to deal with these naïve folks as a nuisance, rather than as part of a normal human response. When threatened with a possible extreme or deadly unknown like UFOs, or claimed ET contact, some of us will typically seek an explanation that is the most comfortable or the least threatening to our lives.

I know I’ve been angry when someone postulates absolute certainty on UFO/ET motives. Most of us who read extensively in this subject believe there is no evidence for one absolute answer to UFO/ET motives. Yet there are witnesses and researchers advancing the single-motive theory who have worked hard for a minimum of public respect on this subject, only to have this theory reduced to classification as “lunatic fringe”. And I think witnesses and researchers summarily condemned to the fringe are right to be frustrated.

But isn’t it true that many of our own UFO community’s leaders constantly reinforce this, their own version of a kind of absolutism, their own Ultimate Truth? From what I’ve seen, top UFO researchers do not protest about the issue of rejecting any witness out of hand loud enough at the conferences.


Rejecting any theory --or any witness-- out of hand may mean missing important evidence.

I think it’s important to ask how we’re going to handle this message at our conferences.

Like many of you, I get extremely angry when I hear this exclusively spiritual talk about UFOs and the intelligences or forces behind the phenomena. But isn’t it true that some of our nuts and bolts people are just as naïve --call it blindly certain-- about what they believe?

And doesn’t their inaction, based on their own brand of blind certainty, mean missing important ET displays?

How many of our good researchers reject witnesses because they report about communicating with “spiritual” ETs, even when there is supporting evidence something is really happening?

How many of our own good nuts and bolts school UFO researchers went to the Gilliland Ranch to find out what was really happening? At least Above Top Secret went to the Ranch to debunk the phenomena, Gilliland’s claims, and thousands of photos and videos. Yes, ATS failed to debunk, but at least they went there to find out, first-hand.

Of course it may be our most respected ufologists were scared off by the claimed spiritual message and the absolute certainty with which Gilliland espouses that message.

We do not know for certain if ETs do some of this spiritual conditioning intentionally.
If ETs had to appear and communicate with us, a violent species, without completely controlling us, appearing as a kind of loving, spiritual being seems very practical and safe to me.

So how do we handle this? The best way I can think of is to educate ourselves with an honest guide on the subject.

There is no doubt in my mind that we need to address this dogmatic prejudice in our midst that ETs must be inherently of a spiritual, beneficent nature. But the way we have been doing it --just dismissing it and ridiculing the witnesses and researchers who believe it-- doesn’t work.

Ideas, anyone? I’m open to hearing from UFOMM readers how we could best handle this issue in our ufology community.

Joseph Capp
UFO Media Matters
Non-Commercial Blog