keithr@tekecs.TEK.COM (Keith Rowell) (03/17/88)
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