I keep seeing the same things as I peruse around the Internet. Religiosity rearing it’s ugly head. It is in politics (in a country that pretends to separate church and state, ) It’s in our literature, our media and it’s in Ufology.
“In Ufology!?” they scream, “why that’s blasphemy! Shut up you Psycho-Skeptic! You gotta die!”
Essentially, UFO fanatics are delivering the same message that the radical Christian/Islamic/Jewish fundies do ,” convert or die damn you!!” There is little or no difference between a jilted UFO fanatic and a religious fanatic (jilted or not.) UFO fanatics use the same methods; they use the same language to achieve the same goals. Crush your enemies, see them driven before you ! Silence all dissent or argument and drive away any who dare suggest that their precious beliefs are in reality so-much crap. Use ANY means necessary to control how people think, cry victim if need be.
Now, on the one hand I have no problem with beliefs, people have a right to believe in whatever they like. People even have a right to preach their beliefs in public so long as they do it in a fair way. Fair means, if I encounter you preaching, I have right to challenge you if you are doing so in a public place (like the Internet.) That’s only fair right?
I or someone else should have equal time to air their beliefs or opinions in the same way that other people do. Just because someone has a passionate belief in say, that they were abducted by aliens does not give them the right to say who can or cannot comment. (They have a right to dump comments in their own publications but they don’t have a right to attempt to silence people outside of that. ) They do not have the right to silence someone who does not share that belief. No more than I have the right to try and silence a believer. Free speech is free speech, yours is important and so is mine!
We all have a right to voice our opinions. We all must work to protect those rights, even if it’s the rights of people we don’t necessarily agree with. Once *some* people in Ufology realize this basic tenant of free expression they will be able to take those first steps into the mainstream of human thought. They will be taking a step away from religious zealotry.
Otherwise Ufology will remain in the silly-season backwaters, it will remain on the edges or society, staring inward and arguing among itself, Ufologest ponder subjects that would delight a medieval-ere religious scholar. However as a field, Ufology is no longer making real progress.
To sum up, progress in the field of Ufology will never happen so long as free expression is discouraged. Progress will never be made while debate is squashed. This is true both for skeptics and non-skeptics. No one has the right to tell another that they may not speak, (so long as a person steers clear of libel, but that’s not what I’m talking about, is it?)
And if some of you think that real progress has been made in Ufology, I urge you to read J. Mosley and Karl Pflock’s book, Shockingly Close to the Truth.
This book is stark evidence that Ufology hasn’t changed, it hasn’t changed for a very long time. It’s still the same old crap, the same stories, the same lies and the same old characters. It’s high time for Ufology as a field to stop playing around and do some work for a change. It’s high time that Ufologests top telling each other tall tales across the campfires and figure out what’s really going on.
This means, “researchers” must stop writing fantastic books that have only a thin vernier of respectability, stop appearing on lurid TV shows spewing about how you were abducted by space brothers (who preformed dubious sexual operations on you, hardly the behavior of benign space brothers at all.) This means they need to stop falling for every hoax and every nutball with a fun story. This means they need to become a bit skeptical of the non-evidence that abounds in Ufology.
I’m not saying they can’t do these things, I’m saying they should not and try to couch their beliefs and desires as fact.
It’s high time to stop being fanatical about this stuff, take a step back and look at how it appears to the outside world. It is truly shocking, it was shocking in Mosley’s book and it is still shocking today. Shocking how close to today’s truth it is! Shocking how people refuse to look at their own history and thereby make the same mistakes over and over again.