UFO Pragmatism: Killing The Messenger

You used to laugh about everyone who was hanging out…Now you don’t talk so loud…Now you don’t feel so proud, after having to be scrounging your next meal…
- Dylan

[Chuck Wade Roswell Artifact Update: His material is in the hands of of a company which will prove one way or the other whether it is of earthly origins. The results, no matter what they show, will be presented on my blog UFO Media Matters.]

What’s the number one reason UFOs are a topic on TV all over the globe now?
Is it because of Stanton Friedman? “Bad Astronomy”? MUFON? Richard Dolan? Edgar Mitchell? The “UFO Hunters” show?

The number one reason UFOs are still a topic of news and TV shows is --God love ‘em-- is the UFO witnesses. The UFO witnesses have the power to move us with their courage and their vulnerability
The witnesses have always been the catalyst, the focus of interest in the UFO subject.

Recently, a pilot with decades of experience reported seeing two-mile-long UFOs, and a second commercial aircraft confirmed this astounding sighting. What happened was everyone sat up, the media saw ratings and covered it, and of course, the debunkers trotted out their standard lines and debunked it.

So if that’s what debunkers said about professional pilots, what would happen if a farmer out in his field reported these two-mile-long objects-- maybe even took a cell phone picture of them? Do you think there is a possibility that this person, especially if he received air time, would be attacked inside our UFO research community? Would it be too much of a stretch to say the person’s social and professional status might be brought up, maybe derided, even by our own community?

And there is another matter we need to look at when our ufology community starts to put witnesses in their cross-hairs; the lack of witness empathy.
I think I understand why some UFO researchers who have had their own UFO experiences seem to attack the more sensational strange cases with the same stance and language used by debunkers.

I just have to believe that the researchers’ sightings were quite mundane --maybe like a light that didn’t behave itself, or a craft sighted far away.
I just can’t believe those researchers who find it impossible to imagine certain cases could be true from diverse and strange witness encounters ... have had profound encounters themselves.
I believe unless you personally have the kind of UFO experience that literally rips the fabric of your own belief system, your empathy for more bizarre UFO experiences will, understandably, be lacking.

Unfortunately this attitude has harmed many honest UFO experiencers.

My own case, although a close encounter in nature, was not so bizarre. Stay with me on this. Yes, it was two flying saucers, but they were symbols of something I could understand --superior technology, maybe, something I could get my head around in science. I came into the UFO scene with that mindset.

But when I read a report on Peter Davenport’s NUFORC about some forest rangers seeing a elk being levitated into the craft and the craft actually becoming larger as the animal went inside, I had to come to the conclusion that they were either lying or… I had to rethink what future technology could possible do. Thank God, if you allow yourself to, you can grow.

I just spoke with an individual involved with people I respect in the UFO community but, he said something that made me wonder how much he knew about the history of UFOs and the witnesses who see them. We were talking about the Billy Meiers case.
He was saying he proved, using Photoshop, that Meiers faked a photo. I told he could not claim without the negatives. He replied.

“Billy said the negatives were stolen…how convenient”.

I thought, only a person who had limited knowledge of the history of UFOs in the modern era would assume Meiers was lying.
In my post “UFO Missing Evidence” Parts One and Two, I show how a great deal of UFO evidence has been missing, stolen outright, or the originals “never returned”.
http://ufomedia.blogspot.com/2008/07/missing-ufo-evidence-part-one.html

http://ufomedia.blogspot.com/2008/07/missing-ufo-evidence-part-two.html

Then there’s another consideration: couldn’t ETs steal evidence, too?

Just recently MUFON had a article in their monthly journal pointing out how in Police Officer Lenny Zamora’s famous UFO landing report, (which included small humanoid occupants) photos taken almost right after the event were given to Project Blue Book and were never returned. Project Bluebook’s official explanation that entered into UFO history claimed the photos were foggy from radiation and therefore, no good. But if this is true, those photos are important evidence.

At Gilliland Ranch, debunkers have an evidence problem: too much evidence in the hands of too many witnesses --thousands.

But it does get sticky: part of this locale’s UFO phenomena seems to include telepathic connection. Even this extraordinary phenom is not so rare in the history of ufology and witness experience. Another frequent phenom is the transformation of an individual witness into a kind of guru --like James Gilliland-- who is imparting messages claiming ETs are spiritually advanced.

Gilliland was at first dismissed by the Pragmatic Certainty crowd as being a hoaxer or a New Age nut. But Gilliland’s dismissal by both UFO researchers and debunkers as a hoaxer is pretty damn meaningless now that thousands of human visitors to his ranch over the last few years have themselves seen --and documented with still and video images-- the impossible. Now Gilliland’s attackers have faded away and are hunting better pickin’s.

Gilliland has been recorded predicting specific times when the UFO craft will appear. They often do. No matter what you believe about him, he has shown us the beef.

Now that Gilliland can no longer be whipping boy for debunkers and UFO skeptics crying HOAX, the naysayers and witness suppression factions are working overtime to destroy or impinge the character of anyone who comes forward with a sensational UFO report. This is a type of mind control in itself.

UFO researchers claim that this is a service. That if they prove a particular incident could be faked, then it was faked. Why?

Does the human person not count in this? Most witnesses are not getting paid, don’t want their names out there, and maybe the most revealing characteristic the debunkers would have us ignore is that nearly all witnesses seem frightened.
Sadly, out of the gate, these issues are discounted by well-meaning people on the non-ending quest for validity in the scientific world.

One tip…don’t hold your breath for validity among scientists.

I decided to design a test. I highlighted a case on YouTube that no one could prove one way or the other as a certain fake, reason being, the video was not good. The researcher was at a TV station and was allowed to record the incident off a TV screen. If you read some of the comments the debunkers and those who believe and have an experience treat this witness basically the same. They also assume authority, telling us in absolute language how it was done and what it is…according to them.



These are You Tube comments on my channel from what I call The Certainty Crowd:

“This is faked, 1st object appears crossing the yard. Seems to bounce off ground twice. resembles baseball bat. 2nd Object appears 6 minutes later two sticks hinged at the top representing legs. Takes the exact same path as the first object”

4 minutes is set up time for the next dummy. There is definatly 2 dummies (beings) being used here. Pay attention to the route that (angle) the dummies move with relation to the digital readout of the clock. This is definatley faked. I'm not saying the owner of the house did it, somebody was probably playing a trick on him, maybe the next door neighbors. Knowing that he would freak out and call somebody

“Poor quality video. It's a security camera, they are known for lack of quality. What I am talking about is the angle of movement (which is 4 minutes apart) is EXACTLY THE SAME. The digital readout of the clock reads 12: 42: ^ 48 for the first being and 12: 46: ^ 48 for the second being. THE ^ character denotes the position where both being pass the readout of the clock. It is theoretically imposible for two beings to walk the exact same path 4 minutes apart.”


In the second YouTube I posted, you can see that most of the debunking rhetoric was way off base. My reason for doing this was not to prove this particular record of this particular incident was real, rather, it was to prove that this Certainty Principle Crowd are not only full of hot air, they also reflect a tone devoid of compassion.



I ask, has there been credible reports by good witnesses on the following:
UFO craft?
Small creatures associated with these craft?
Abductions?
Mental Contact?

One of three ET photos taken by 8 year old child the parents would no longer cooperate:

Why do we keep actively or passively investing in the culture of UFO witness devaluation? If you believe some or even most of the above elements reported in many UFO reports are possibly true, why automatically assume your objective is to prove the witness wrong?

If you believe rigid thinking doesn’t influence outcome, go to a court of law any day and watch hired scientists --hired guns with charts, graphs, CVs and PhDs-- duke out the evidence on both sides of the question.

Why is it that for sixty years, all of these videos and photographs are suspect, and the witnesses who shot them held in contempt, even though no clear motive for fakery was found except in the rarest handful of cases?

I address these issues because you can see the clash of egos all around us. I think we all have to look at how our egos help and hurt the UFO research community.

I really believe that we have a duty to promote the integrity of most of the witnesses who come forward. They are not Hoaxers.

I know science is what drives us forward, but what I see being practiced today relates not to science, but to a rigid prejudice among researchers, and to a strange need among our own ufology community to control not only the message about UFOs, but to control which messenger is accorded credibility.

Read some of the follow-ups on these cases, do the homework.
Researchers ask yourself some crucial follow up questions before:
1. What it is about a certain case that closes my mind to the possibility it is real?
2 .Do I automatically, because of the nature of the witness report, social status or race begin with the attitude “this is a hoax”
3. Do I try and prove my own hypothesis wrong.
4. Do I attack the witness in a public forum before I have all the facts in.

In the most sensational cases, if we dig we find out that once the notoriety dies down, the witnesses who were so salaciously debunked --the Hills and Travis Watsons out there-- their actions do not in any way reflect the profile of a hoaxer. Many times their, life after the experience, reflects seclusion and bitterness at some of us.

DVD Clip Faces Of ETs
(International UFO Congress; Maussan Presenter)



Joseph Capp
UFO Media Matters
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