Almost thou persuadeth me to believe in the ETH

Timothy Good, Coast To Coast, August 30, 2010

Timothy Good is a proponent of the old skool "extra-terrestrial hypothesis" who nevertheless I've always enjoyed listening to. He always *sounds* credible, although I have not done the homework necessary to verify the volumes of information he presents--which, I think, would be required before the serious student of the paranormal invested too much belief in it.

I've learned to filter out the dubious stories and the exopolitical-type buzzwords: "hybrids," "disclosure," "cover-up," which cropped up regularly in Good's interview. Usually, in fact, I stop listening when a researcher drops these words because they have become owned by the exopolitical movement. Still, I won't dismiss outright the notion of hybrids or a cover-up; I just think that the evidence for these things is not as solid as ETH schoolers think it is.

Regarding hybrids, for example. I have always thought the Bill Chalker "Hair Of The Alien" story to be very intriguing. Ingo Swann also mentioned hybrid-type beings in "Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy." It's hard to prove a negative.

Whole swaths of Timothy Good's information is, as he disclaims, over twenty years old, and he is no longer current on exopolitical jive. What remains of his claims are so fantastic as to be unfathomable. The notion, for example, that Vice President Dan Quayle vetted Ringling Brothers to assemble a traveling exhibit of crashed alien paraphernalia. Mr. Good claims to have been invited to oversee this enterprise but could not participate because he could not get a connecting flight in time.

Still--still, there was some stuff he mentioned that I thought significant, and I wished I had the time to delve into. "Everyone," of course, knows that George Adamski was a fraud, but Mr. Good finds him credible on the basis of his alleged meetings with the CIA and one meeting with President Kennedy. Presumably, Adamski's family confirmed these meetings. If, in fact, the meetings can be proven (or disproved), we can finally write Mr. Adamski off. (I do remember hearing an interview with George Adamski's son and concluded that the son was no more credible than his father.)

And significantly, Good mentions the Aztec crash. Forget Roswell--I think that the Aztec "crash," and the vehicle presumably recovered from it, might be the best hope to substantiating the ETH.

While I think that there is a huge paranormal dimension to the UFO experience, I believe that we are probably observing many different phenomena, having different causes. I think that location-based paranormal phenomena (like Gilliland's ranch) might be archetypal in nature--ancient phenomena that seem to follow rigid patterns, while still responding to the unconscious beliefs of the experiencers. We shouldn't assume that "we" have been the only advanced race to inhabit this planet; there might have been others, and they might have left mechanisms at various places around the world that appear, to us, to be conscious, supernatural beings. We also can't rule out the extra-dimensional theories--mostly because they are so handy at explaining a lot of stuff that our current physics can't. And, I still believe, we can't rule out the ETH. After all--it just takes one crashed saucer to prove it.