Flipping through an old issue of the International UFO Reporter, I came upon a scathing review of the 1996 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, by superstar astronomer Carl Sagan (1934-1996). The author of the review was my old UFOlogical friend Jerome Clark. I need to … [Read more...]
“Strange Country” – The Human Face of the UFO
When filmmaker Sean Kotz emailed five months ago, asking for my cooperation with his project “Strange Country,” I was excited. It was to be a documentary, he explained, on the UFO sightings of 1987-88 in Wythe County, Virginia. I’d heard about these sightings not long before; I had shared a panel … [Read more...]
A UFOlogy for the 21st Century
Here’s a proposition—a UFOlogical proposition. UFOs are a human phenomenon. A UFO sighting, therefore, is not bounded by the sky in which it’s appeared, or seems to have appeared. The observer—better, experiencer—is a part of the sighting. So is everyone who believes in that sighting. So is … [Read more...]
“Scenario”: The Aliens Arrive …
Full disclosure: I'm not a great fan of poetry. There are those poems, often read long ago, that have embedded themselves in my mind, whose rhythms come to me at the oddest times. They're a motley lot. Some of them, like Chesterton's "Lepanto" or Browning's "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," I … [Read more...]
The Philadelphia Experiment and Joe Gould
Once there was a man called Carl Allen, otherwise known as Carlos Allende, who had within him a secret. (Don’t we all?) From that secret, as yet undiscovered, Carl Allen created a myth called “the Philadelphia Experiment” which reverberates within our culture to this day. He died in 1994, … [Read more...]
