Not to belabor the point, but.

First, I want to thank Kandinsky for the link to the "True" magazine issue. I do believe that it is the issue that I remember. (The iPhone Blogger app freezes when I try to post comments, which I tried to do.) I think that there might have been a later issue also examining the UFO enigma. When I get time, I want to read it in detail. My initial impression, just glancing over the material, is that UFOlogy hasn't really evolved much from the 1960s. In fact, I think that it has regressed a bit. Those "True" articles were scary stuff, particularly to a nine-year-old, and the topic was mainstream then. UFOlogy today is highly marginal and mostly boring. Richard Dolan dances around this core problem here and there... he furnishes some compelling research and fascinating stories... and I think that his contribution to the subject has been substantial. But UFOlogy today is, on the whole, boring. (But that's just my opinion.)

Ironically, the disclosure folks--who are generally regarded as the crazies by serious UFOlogists--have one argument that I think is worth thinking about: *If* there is a coverup, by some arm of the American security apparatus, of a substantial amount of UFO data of compelling importance, the United States has ceased to be a democracy, or even a republic. I'm on the fence on this subject.. There is anecdotal evidence that there has been a coverup, but, so far, the "proof" of such has been seriously flawed.

It's intellectually lazy to ascribe anything that we can't parse or analyze to a cabal of conspiracists bent on deceiving us, but this does not necessarily mean that there isn't such a cabal bent on deceiving us.

But, not to belabor the point, during Dolan's last show (or, the one I just got through hearing), a caller asked him what he thought of the "Men In Black" phenomenon. The MIB phenom is pretty much a litmus test of basic UFO belief: Those who emphasize the MIB feature tend to believe that UFOs are not nuts-and-bolts... Instead, they represent something else entirely, perhaps something completely different from what they appear to be. Dolan punted on his answer, saying, I think, that MIB were "strange" before moving on to the next topic.

To me, the MIB subject is actually more fascinating than the UFO that precedes it, and it may offer a window into an essential nature of the phenomenon. There are analogs to other paranormal phenomena--visions of "Jesus," or other angelic-type visitations, are often followed by "dark" entities that try to persuade the witness that the whole sighting was a hallucination. (My recent post of an NDE account describes such an appearance.) My suspicion is that the appearance of dark, menacing, or otherwise non-human entities might represent a core archetype of our reality. Perhaps such displays are triggered by certain behaviors or beliefs and are designed as an automatic enforcement mechanism meant to keep the human animal in his corral. Perhaps they are our consciousness's breakdown of a greater gestalt into a "good versus evil" narrative. While it's quite useful (and generally prudent) to view everything that we see and experience as "real," it's also possible that our experiences are, instead, symbolic--and that the reality that they symbolize is "somewhere else." The UFO is notable, then, not so much for what it appears to be--an extraterrestrial machine--but for an unknown reality that waits to be discovered behind its appearance.