Posted to UFO World
courtesy of the author: Glenn Joyner

Quote: "Well you run and you run, to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking. And racing around, to come up behind you again. The sun is the same, in a relative way, but you're older. And shorter of breath, and one day closer to death."

**Credit: Pink Floyd, Time, The Dark Side of the Moon

Whenever I hear the haunting and beautiful strains of "Time" by Pink Floyd, it takes me back to the first time I heard it as a young teen-ager. It has always been a poignant reminder to me that human beings have a limited time to do what they will on this planet. We press forward constantly trying to grasp that golden ring. Those that do finally get it often find that they�ve spent an entire lifetime pursuing it, and have not got the moments left to them to make something of it.

Strangely enough, this song could also be the theme of many in the enigmatic search for truth and understanding of the phenomenon known as UFO. "We run and we run" trying to find the answers, latching on to ideas and opinions along the way, but the truth is elusive, and often "races around to come up behind us again." The phenomena "is the same in a relative way" as it has always been, spawning far more questions than answers, with every possibility clouded with uncertain messages and meanings. And those of us who have striven to figure out what the phenomenon is have felt the time pass heavily, with no conclusions any closer: "Shorter of breath, and one day closer to death."

I am a Believer... Yes, I believe that there are structured craft that are certainly of non-mundane design and construction flying around our air spaces. And I TEND to believe that some of them MAY be under non-human and intelligent control. But I also proclaim myself to be a Skeptical Believer. No, that is NOT an oxymoron. I'll qualify that statement later on in this dissertation.

Herein, I will state my CURRENT opinions on various aspects of the UFO phenomenon. As you may ascertain from the statement just previous, I do not feel that I, in ANY way, have the answers! My ideas and thoughts, my feelings and suppositions, may lean one way or the other, at times. One thing that I have learned from nearly two decades of the study of this puzzle, is that I don't know what the truth is. I have gleaned all that I could, from as many sources as I possibly could, spent many hours thinking about it, and have come to the understanding that there is no conclusion. So I can honestly say that my point of view is in a constant state of flux. I certainly do have theories and opinions, but they have changed many times over the years.

The UFO phenomenon is simply too complex to deal with from the rigid confines of many scientific methods. Science demands that inquiry and study be undertaken of a subject to reach conclusions about its nature and purpose. But it is such a strange and multi- faceted problem that, in most cases, the researcher is ill- prepared to take on the enormousness of the study. I believe that it will take a cross-section of academia and scientific disciplines to even begin to understand what the enigma really is -- IF we ever do. For there are many considerations to ponder in relation to it: physical, sociological, psychological, historical, empirical, and ethereal.

A UFO sighting is really more of a subjective experience, and cannot be explained under objective terms. For the person who has the sighting, it all becomes suddenly very real, but still relegated by general consensus to the realms of the unreal, the odd, the unbalanced, crazy and unreliable. A UFO sighting can quite easily be a destructive intrusion into an otherwise normal and uneventful life. For it instantly casts doubt upon the person which, in an earnest attempt to simply report the truth of what they have seen, has unwittingly opened the door for ridicule and derision.

MY SIGHTING: A Short Synopsis

In 1979, I witnessed an event that made me a solid "believer" that there are things flying around in our atmosphere that are not of mundane origin or design. Suffice to say that what I saw completely negated what I have always understood as the physical "laws" of flight and maneuverability. There were other certain properties of the event that also lead me to believe that what I saw wasn't of mundane origin. Let's just say that a few facets of the event approached an almost "paranormal" status.

During a weekend camping trip in the southeastern part of Oklahoma, in the Kiamichi Wilderness, a friend and myself were witness to a very prolonged, unusual event. Over the course of the night, we watched three objects, one perfectly round sphere and two of the "classic" saucer shapes, perform some amazing aerobatic movements, the likes of which I have never witnessed before or since.

As the night passed, these objects did not fly away, as is the case with most other accounts that I have read or heard about. Although we had no watches on to keep track of the passage of time, we were quite aware that several hours were involved. During this time, some pretty amazing things occurred around us.

The atmosphere around us had a "charged" or "electrical" feel to it. I always have trouble describing the tactility, and feel that I've never conveyed the sensation very well. As the objects languished in the sky above us, sudden jerks and pivotal movements would ensue from time to time. At other times, bursts of "something" would pass between one object to another. The closest I can come to a description of this is that the bursts or transmissions seemed to be both gaseous and electrical at once.

Toward the end of this entire event, small balls of light began to appear, seemingly from the three objects. There were LOTS of them, and they moved down and spread out in all directions as they got close to the ground. During this time, pandemonium seemed to have broken out in the woods around us, with lots of movement in the brush, and an obviously agitated forest population. I don't think that any of the animals that are normally docile or sleeping during the night were following their natural instincts at that point in time.

The culmination of the event is the biggest question mark in this entire scenario.... We don't remember it. This is why I said that it had a paranormal feel to it. As the balls of light spread out, going in their different directions, and the woods became active and strange around us, the whole event took on a kind of dreamy sensation. I have discussed this at length with my friend, and we both agree that the air seemed to become heavier around us, movements of things around us, including animals, vegetation, and ourselves, began to seem "wavy" and sluggish. About this time, we also apparently fell asleep. THAT single fact is, by far, the strangest of all. As you could well imagine, we were NOT sitting by calmly while all of this took place. A pretty constant stream of expletives were issuing forth from us, and we were, to say the least, excited. But, somehow, we both apparently fell asleep, and woke up in broad daylight the next day.

I will say, right now, for the record, that I do NOT feel like I was abducted. None of the "screen" memories or other signs reported by alleged abductees have ever surfaced. And MOST of this account was fully, consciously, remembered. We were hypnotically regressed, many years after the fact, but I will get into my feelings on hypnosis at a later point in this narrative.

Okay, I think I saw some eyes rolling out there. No problem, it's to be expected. I'm sure that, were our places switched, I'd be feeling the same way. Until one has an experience of this sort, there's no way to believe in it, really. I know that I couldn't. And that's one of the points that I want to make here. In my opinion, all reports of this type, even my own, should be regarded in a skeptical light. Blind belief is extremely dangerous in this field of study. It can seriously undermine the investigation and examination of these UFO reports.

I am speaking from experience here, friends. After this strange affair took place, I began to voraciously devour any and all material that I could find on the subject of UFOs. And I have to admit that I became overloaded with some very bad information. There's a lot of it out in the media and public sources. I went through about a five year phase of this, before it slowly began to dawn on me that NONE of the information that I was beginning to believe was based, in ANY way, in verifiable, demonstrable, testable fact. NONE of it.

This field is full of subterfuge, innuendo, disinformation, and even outright BULLSHIT. (Excuse my graphic language.) There are regiments of con artists, charlatans, and nutcases out there, ready to feed you as much bogus blather as you can absorb. The unsuspecting folks that these sharks feed on are what I call "Fringies." I define Fringie as one who, usually because of gullibility or naivet�, has adopted the habit of believing, and even living by, some of the most far out, unsubstantiated, and sometimes even ludicrous information out there. I know that some people call these individuals "True Believers," or even "Foaming True Believers," but I prefer the more comfortable (to me) and less harsh term of Fringie.

The possibility of becoming a Fringie is there in all of us. I always considered myself a straight-thinking person, but I found, after a big soul-search and self-examination, that I had been buying into a huge amount of information without having one iota of evidence to base it on. I tried to convince myself that it was true, because, after all, I had seen them with my own eyes. But I had seen what I had seen, and NOTHING about it had indicated, FOR CERTAIN, that it was extraterrestrial, alien, where it was from, or, for sure, WHAT it was. That was the simple fact. So I had to completely reassess how I thought about these enigmatic sightings that are so often reported.

I had to overhaul my approach to the phenomenon. Sure, I had ideas, theories, feelings, evidence that was ONLY good for me (in my sighting in Oklahoma), and a curiosity, maybe even a driving need. But I had nothing concrete. I had no answers, and a million questions. At that point, I determined that only a lucid, skeptical, and straightforward approach to finding those answers was the logical way to go about researching the subject. And THAT is when I finally became what I consider a UFOlogist.

UFOlogy is a fickle beast. In it's ever-metamorphosing cast of characters, it never runs out of material. But the best UFOlogists are, and this is going to rub a few people the wrong way, skeptics. Any UFOlogist worth his salt IS skeptical. He has to be. For only through a skeptical inquiry can we adequately eliminate all of the "noise." I have to go back to the point made above about the load of nonsense that permeates our subject matter.

A skeptic can get past this noise, where a Fringie simply can not. So you folks quit burning skeptics at the stake out there! We need them, for reasons which must be obvious to those with an investigative nature.

The most serious thing that I can see lacking in UFOlogy is balance. I'll say it again: BALANCE. For every dozen Fringies, there HAS to be a skeptic. It's as simple as that. Without that balance, between believers and skeptics, one side or the other would run itself into a state of oblivion. The skeptics would never believe anything, and the Fringies would believe everything. NOTHING would get done!

Unfortunately, the study of UFOs also attracts Debunkers. They often come under the guise of Skeptics, but they really have a totally different agenda from a real skeptic. They simply DO NOT believe, WILL NOT believe, and attempt to discredit and destroy those who show any type of credibility in the subject. Unlike a real skeptic, who will require evidence, examine it, and try to determine it's credibility, the basic ploy of a Debunker is to attack the information in whatever way he can most effectively crush it, whether he has determined it's authenticity or not. This is often accomplished by an attack on any vulnerable or weak target in the reporter, whether it is UFO-related or not.

My own skepticism manifests itself in my unwillingness to believe any old UFO story that rolls down the pike, at least these days. Some are just obviously fake, and should be exposed as such so they won't muddy up the waters. I, AS a believer, want to find proof of what I believe. You can't find proof with blind belief. Without skeptical inquiry, and the search for evidence, we're spinning our wheels.

But evidence is the biggest problem.....

A Run-Down on the "Evidence"

PHOTOS:
There are PLENTY of photographs out there. Alleged pictures of UFOs abound everywhere on the internet, BBSes, in magazines, and in places you might not even expect. But some have been proven to be hoaxes, and many more, under intense scrutiny, appear to be approaching that same status. Like one of our fellow researchers here in Dallas, Don Teal, said, "the better the photo, the better the chance that it's a hoax." With the surprising advances in technology that we are blessed with today, anyone with a home computer, a bit of imagination, and the will to do it, can produce a real-looking UFO image. Programs like Photo Shop, to name only one, in the hands of an experienced user, can render a quite realistic UFO. Likewise, modern programs have allowed us to examine more closely images that were first thought to be real, and detect subtle manipulations to existing images.

There are a few out there that still do stand up against inspection, but these are few and far between. I'm talking about photos of obviously structured, non-mundane aircraft, of course. Fuzzy shapes, anomalous lights, and out of focus objects of indiscriminate dimension aren't even taken into consideration in this examination, because they really are proof of nothing to begin with.

PHYSICAL TRACES:
Burned spots, circles, radioactivity; all can be attributed, in some respect, to mundane sources, or naturally occurring circumstances. And many of these "traces" have also been proven to be hoaxes. This doesn't mean that I think there are no traces left by these "craft," just that there are none that can be concretely attributed to "them" and them alone. There have been some very strange physical property changes in soil and plant life reported after alleged UFO landings. IF these physical changes are indeed correct, and can be successfully demonstrated to be beyond natural or industrial processes, then we actually do have some physical proof. Proof of this sort might likely be the best evidence available, in the end.

EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY:
The "Quality of the Messenger" definitely comes into play here. There are many, many eyewitness reports out there. They range from very minor and indiscriminate reports to extremely clear and detailed reports. But, unfortunately, none of these can be defined as proof.

A great many of these sightings probably really are simple misidentifications of terrestrial aircraft, meteors, stars, planets, comets, balloons, etc. This is to be expected, and, although usually not made in any attempt to hoax or deceive, these types of reports are still a nuisance to the researcher, when trying to separate the cases to look at.

PsychoDramas in the Mainstream

Now furthermore, there IS a certain type of mindset that craves attention. These personalities are the ones that are the most dangerous to this field of study. There have been some really credible-sounding reports made by individuals that have simply created the entire event. Reports of this sort, once they get into the UFOlogy mainstream, cause tremendous amounts of time and effort to be uselessly expended, as investigators study and try to verify these cases.

The most insidious of all is the so-called "investigator" which fabricates or embellishes a story simply for monetary and status gain. These are the real weasels in this field; those who know enough about the data and the history of UFOlogy to manipulate their reports in a way that induces honest interest by others.

Which brings us to another facet of the darker side of the issue, the psychospies and their disinformation. What the heck is a psychospy? Glad you asked! To answer that, I'll give you a prime example of this critter.

Some of you that have followed the history of UFOlogy are probably familiar with Bill Moore. He has worn many hats, teacher, biker, mechanic, UFO investigator, author, (and this is the one that qualifies him for psychospy), disinformer. This latter came as quite a surprise to many of us in UFOlogy. Moore had been in the UFOlogical theater for many years, had co- authored a book on Roswell with Charles Berlitz, among other published works, and, along with his one-time partner, Jaime Shandera, opened up the infamous Pandora's Box known as MJ-12. So it came as a real bombshell to many of us when Moore got up in front of a large gathering of UFO academia in Nevada a few years back and announced, rather matter of factly, that he had been a key player in the appalling manipulation and eventual drive to imbalance of a co-researcher, Paul Bennewitz. Moore revealed that he had been recruited for just this purpose, by spooks in the covert community.

Hypnotic Regression: A Dangerous Game

Once again, I'm probably going to go against the grain with some of you readers out there. Remember that this is my OPINION, and who says that I'm an authority anyway? I have absolutely no education, other than self-education, in the field of psychology, therapy, or psychiatric disorders. So I could be blowing smoke here, and I invite any of you that can straighten me out to do so, with not a hint of animosity or ill feelings on my part.

I am aware that the use of hypnosis has become a very common "tool" in UFO research in the last two decades. In fact, the first person that I encountered who actually believed my own UFO sighting insisted that I must seek out a hypnotist. I didn't do it. Actually, it wasn't until eleven years later that I was regressed.

Before laying out my negative feelings about the use of hypnosis in UFOlogy, I'll first explain how my own experience with it went. That session was NOT the origin of my misgivings on the subject, incidentally.

I wasn't even thinking about hypnosis, regression, or UFOs, for that matter, when I met the gentleman who eventually did the regression. I was attending a Christmas party at my father's local Shriner's lodge meeting, actually. They had planned to have Santa Claus come out and deliver presents to the children of members' families that were out-patients of the Dallas Scottish Rite Hospital, and since my son was indeed one of those, I had taken him.

During the course of the festivities, I was introduced to a very amiable gentleman, whose name I will not use here, because, first, I do not have his permission, and second, because he is not involved in this field and has no desire to be so. It came out, in conversation, that he was a certified hypnotist. He had spent his working career as a fireman, then as the fire marshal, of one of the suburbs of Dallas. After his retirement from active duty, he went back to school, to continue what he'd always intended to do anyway. His first love during his academic years had been psychology, but he had fallen into fire-fighting, and the rest was history. After finishing his education, he had obtained specialized training in hypnosis. For about fifteen years, before I had met him, he had been a specialist with the local police and fire departments, utilizing his hypnosis skills in helping witnesses remember details on criminal and arson cases.

I'll leave the rest of the details of how I convinced him to regress my friend and I out here, since it is not relevant, but I will tell you that he agreed with some reservations, knowing absolutely nothing about UFOs, aliens, or anything of that nature.

The sessions were conducted at my home, with both my friend and I being taken under separately. Another person, a good friend of ours, was present, to monitor the sessions. The hypnotist explained to him that he was going to take us back to the time of the sighting, but was not going to press any given specific. He said that persons in a hypnotic state would willingly tell the truth about direct questions, and that probing further on certain levels could create a conflict in the subconscious, leading to the process known as confabulation. This, he warned, was a desire by the regressee to answer continued, pointed questions, even if no further information was to be gleaned. At this point, the answers become manufactured. He did avoid that, I'm very relieved to say. What we got out of the session was pretty much what we had always remembered, only with a much sharper memory of what had occurred. And the incident ended with the same result: we both became exceedingly sleepy and didn't remember anything past that point.

Now, that is not the kind of session that you would read about in any of the UFO abductee books that fill the shelves of the bookstores. And I really am glad! I will explain why... Having read just about every one of those books, I am horrified at the casual way in which the subject is approached. The people who are doing the regressions are not always qualified to BE doing it, to begin with. Our regressor had spent years studying and honing his skills. He was university-trained, he had followed strict guidelines of conduct during the sessions, and, listen folks, this is the MOST IMPORTANT PART... He had a background in medical procedure, from his paramedic days during his career as a fireman and fire marshal. He recognized the changes in respiration, pulse, and urgency during our sessions. And he reacted accordingly. I can honestly tell you that during the original sighting, I was frightened as hell. I relived every bit of it during the hypnosis session. My blood pressure and temperature shot up during the session, and when he observed this, he took the steps to safely back me out of it.

In the books by Budd Hopkins, John Mack, David Jacobs, and a handful of other "abduction authors," I have become increasingly alarmed at the way the sessions have been handled. In many of these books, one can thumb through them finding entry after entry, where very leading questions are asked, to get the principals to describe their alleged encounters.

Now please understand that I am not necessarily accusing these folks of doing this with any kind of malice or intent to mislead. As a matter of fact, I've met David Jacobs, and I actually like the guy. I�ve likewise attended talks by Budd Hopkins. I'm not of an opinion that they are doing this in an attempt to consciously subvert the sessions, but it sure appears to be happening.

And all of the "hypnosis crowd" use basically the same approach. To me, it's an open inducement to confabulation. My feeling is that, once a session like that has taken place, the witness is basically no good to the study of the phenomenon. According to many sources that I have referred to, once the confabulation has been made, it becomes an integrated part of the experience, absolutely real to the regressee. So the real experience, assuming that these experiences ARE real, becomes muddled and mixed up, contaminating the actual memory. In my OPINION, once that has happened you can forget using that witness as a case study in any way. Their testimony is no longer valid. And, more important, if something that never really happened is inserted into that person's mind, then you have tampered with their very existence, perhaps undermining some very important mechanisms that may be working in the subconscious. This, to me, is the scariest part of the entire scenario.

A Few Final Thoughts

So it's a tough row to hoe for UFOlogy, eh? With the noise level being so high, covert agencies possibly playing head games with UFOlogy, and our own penchant for shooting ourselves in the foot, it's going to take some unobstructed rumination from all of us.

Have I sounded too gloomy, in my assessment of the UFOlogical "State of the Union?" That wasn't my intent, if so. I merely wanted to point out that there is some baggage that goes along with an interest in the study of UFOs. The disbelief, ridicule, confusion, and conflicting attitudes that come with an interest in the subject can be disheartening. But once one gets past all that, and educates oneself in the very real depth and history of the subject, it certainly is worth it.

Some UFOs could be the manifestations of psychological aberrations, I am relatively sure. Some could be an over-zealous desire to "see one of them!"

ALL UFOs might even be an elaborately designed and executed ploy, perpetrated by factions unknown, suspected or unsuspected. That, if it is an indication of someone playing mind games with we, the general population, is one of the most unnerving scenarios of all. For if this is indeed the truth, it indicates that we are dupes held in low regard by those that would carry out such an insidious operation. Woe be to the future, if our human rights are being violated to such an extent.

But until some sort of answer is forthcoming, those of us that call ourselves UFOlogists will just have to keep running like the rabbits that we are, in the overall scheme of things.

QUOTE: "Run, rabbit run. Dig that hole; forget the sun. And when at last your work is done, don't sit down, it's time to dig another one..."

**CREDIT: Pink Floyd, Time, The Dark Side of the Moon

Thanks for your attention.

Glenn Joyner