🚀 go-pugleaf

In Message-ID: <521@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU>, Randell Jesup says:

>A bibliography does not truth make.

My point was that far too many opinions are rendered with far too little
knowledge of the literature of a subject.  The "truth" about UFOs will be
determined by the scholarly-scientific-media establishment.  The trouble is
the establishment has yet to objectively study the phenomenon.  Like you, I
believe that the surest route to correct notions about consensus reality is
the path of reason, currently embodied in science, scholarship, courts of
law, and the best of investigative journalism.  Like you, I am aware that in
the rational approach to human experience, and especially in science, new
ideas can cause reinterpretation of old "facts" and the *recognition* of new
"facts".  My drift here is that exactly what "facts" are possible in ufology
has a lot to do with your metaphysics.  Naive scientific realism easily
leads to fanatic skepticism, which we see in CSICOPers, whereas other
metaphysical views lead to less rigid views of what are facts and what
aren't.  The philosophers Langer and Cassirer showed me early in my
intellectual life that perceptual "reality" itself is a *construction* of
the symbolizing activity of human consciousness itself.  This leads us to
the conclusion that all cultures may not participate in the "same"
perceptual world that 20th century educated Americans do.  And, sure enough,
this is just what anthropologists find when they study other cultures.
"Reality" is not cut and dried.  But it is not random and arbitrary either.
So, for me, when some UFO percipient says he observed a hovering, anomalous
object emit a solid beam of light that *snaked along the ground*, I don't
automatically assume he is lying, misapprehending, or is crazy as CSICOPers
do because of their metaphysical bent.  My metaphysics is flexible enough to
allow me to try to see if their whole story hangs together, to see if it may
have a logic of its own.  Then I may look for points of contact with the
current scientific-scholarly-media understanding of Reality.  And isn't this
only what that understanding is -- a *current* understanding?

.  

>Has no one ever heard of Occam's Razor?  Statements like (paraphrased)
>"they released lots 

Yes, try *over 10,000 pages*, and increasing weekly, including a number of
lawsuits against the government too, some succeeding, some not.

>of UFO documents that were de-classified"

> (probably
>Air force blue book stuff, 

This kind of speculation is exactly what I am decrying.  None of the FOIA
released documents come from the Blue Book files.  Blue Book files were
declassified shortly after 1969 when Project Blue Book was closed.  The
files are now in the Modern Military Branch of the National Archives.
Please tread lightly when you haven't read the literature!

>classified more or less by default back then)
>"therefor we'll probably soon see the existence of alien bodies on ice
>confirmed" sound an awful lot like believing truth is what one wants it to
>be.  It sounds like you've made up your mind (at least subconsciously) that
>UFOs exist, and you're searching desperately for things to back up your
>beliefs 

I am not searching desperately for UFO evidence to back up my prior beliefs.
More than ten years ago, intellectual curiosity caused me to read the first
two books on UFOs that happened to come through my hands in the course of my
work as a librarian.  As it happens, I became intrigued and continued to
eventually make a thorough survey of the literature so that I now have an
informed opinion.  The preponderance of evidence leads me to conclude that
some UFOs are flying saucers *whatever these turn out to be upon adequate
investigation by the scientific-scholarly-media establishment whenever they
finally wake up.*

Thanks for your response.


Keith Rowell


-- 

-Keith Rowell, Tektronix, Wilsonville, OR   keithr@tekecs.TEK.COM
{ucbvax,decvax,uw-beaver,hplabs,ihnp4,allegra}!tektronix!tekecs!keithr