A short time ago, some UFO update aficionados put together the UFO Blog Coalition, Terry Groff one of the founders and master of ceremonies of the UFC put it this way.
The UBC is kind of a one-stop-shop for UFO related blogs.
Instead of having to visit each blog, you can see at a glance
who has new postings and who hasn’t.
Well this is laudable to be sure. Terry set up and executed the thing but (so some say) a number of undesirable elements were introduced to the UBC, things started to go downhill, people got their feathers ruffled with probable results.
Rich Reynolds (one of the co-founders of the UBC) put it this way.
Eventually the UBC diminished in my eyes. It was meant to be like another coalition – one about literature that spurred me to set up the thing in the first place.
Paul Kimball; not a founder but a kind of ground floor guy in the Coalition. writes in part.
I pulled out of the UBC about two weeks ago, because I was no longer comfortable with some of the other members. Everyone is entitled to their beliefs, but with a few notable exceptions (Mac Tonnies, Kyle King, Kevin Randle, Isaac Koi), most of the UBC members represented a faction within ufology with which I have no desire to be associated.
Having said that, however, I had no beef whatsoever with Terry Groff, who had acted as the administrator for the UBC since day one. Yes, the idea had originally been someone else’s, but it was Terry who got the thing off the ground, and then kept it going, day after day (no mean feat, as he had to sort through over two dozen blogs each day).
There was an undesirable element if one adjudges the UBC by how much bickering was going on. It became something of a BBS system, one that had skeptics and believers. It is very typical of that sort of thing to simply not work well. People in the UFO biz can have very divergent and radical opinions, many which cannot be reconciled.
Terry Groff announced that, because of the sniping he’s taking a step back from the day to day editing of the Coalition. He’s not to happy about the sniping either.
I’ve been watching this for some time now. Ever since it was announced on UFO updates (a place I lurk.) Most of the debate seemed above board, if a little spirited. There have been a few exceptions. Alfred Lehmberg adds his prose and saucy commentary. Regan Lee add her bits from time to time. One person posts synopsis of Coast to Coast. A couple of people grace us with their poetry. Most of the time there is very little that I would call interesting commentary.
The coalition (to paraphrase one or two people) was meant as a concordance of UFO researchers. It certainly is not that. Right now there is an odd mixture of research minded individuals and (to be perfectly frank.) people who are not anything of the sort.
This provides a pretty accurate cross section of the UFO biz to be sure but as a showcase for researchers, one to be used as media contacts the coalition leaves much to be desired. I don’t know if this is a problem though. It doesn’t serve the UFO business to represent itself as something that it’s not.
The UFO field is like a state fair or a carnival, there are performing pigs, strange bearded women, dwarves, strongmen, mediums and alien contactees, religious fanatics and purveyors of patent medicine. There are also carnie barkers, by the score. All clamoring for attention making the field a chaotic mass of sight and sounds, but trying to find something significant is like trying to get a good meal on the fairway, after passing by the cotton candy and deep fried Twinkies, what do you have?
Off in an un-swept, filthy corner can be found one or two serious researchers. They are a passionate lot, quietly interviewing people. Keeping statistics and compiling data. Their world doesn’t care about alien species or saucer propulsion systems. All they want is to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the aliens are here. Or that something is flying those dang things.
The rest can take care of itself.
But the sight and noise of the carnival completely drowns these people out, which is a shame. You see, it’s not the performing gorillas or the mentalists, the hucksters, the worlds’ largest horse that’s going to solve the UFO problem. It’s the researchers. The rest of them–they have their answers already, most of them don’t need to question any more. What they need is validation. Validation plus a need for egos to be stroked.
Validation and that’s the key. See, the carnie folk are fearful of their own experiences. They fear fault, fault in their own vision or prejudicial beliefs. They don’t care about research, research could prove them wrong, we can’t have that! In fact many carnie folk are downright hostile to the researchers. Researchers can fail to validate their beliefs and for that they must be punished. They must be driven to the edge of the field so that the carnie folk can have their big party in relative peace, such as it is.
This is exactly opposite of almost every other field of endeavor. The carnies, the cranks, the clowns and the nut-jobs usually don’t get much say at all in the research end of things. Researchers in serious R&D projects don’t tolerate the kind of flotsam and jetsam that washes around the UFO biz. It’s no wonder that the UFO business is more or less in the same state that it was forty or fifty years ago. It cannot progress because the clowns have taken center ring. And the clowns are jealous; they have no intention of giving one iota of ground. The clowns don’t need to find out what is going on. They don’t need to research. They already know!
They know everything.
In this light it’s no surprise that experiments like the UFO Coalition are shaky at best. With all those egos in play, both of the researchers and the carnie folk it’s no wonder that dialog rapidly brakes down. People with axes to grind on both sides begin to go at each other with gusto. It’s a pattern that’s repeated itself many times, from UseNet to the JREF.
It all comes down to communications. How and why we communicate and the methods we use. To some; abuse and belittlement, logical fallacies and insult are the pinnacle their communication style. Others have different opinions of wha’s proper and what is not. Until these two worlds can calmly regard each other, realizing that they are both after the same things will the field begin cleaning itself of the last several decades of clutter and waste.
