Tag: science

UFOs
 
In my office, where I sit, are something like 200 books on UFOs and UFO adjacent topics. “Nonfiction” paperbacks from the 1970s make up the bulk of them – the general public was desperate for news of extraterrestrial salvation or destruction in the 70s and various publishers of various measures of repute were desperate to have their money.  I already had a substantial collection, but a few months back stumbled upon a box of them at one of the many thrift stores I frequent in an attempt to build a bulwark of material goods to defend against immaterial existential dread   – fighting a conceptual void with knickknacks, vinyl, and ironic t-shirts.
There were 100 paperbacks in this box and all were to be mine for nine American dollars. My heart raced, my eyes welled, and I lunged toward them in a near panic that some other bookish, weird dad might swipe them from under the brim of my tattered, thrifted baseball cap.
 
I got them home, endured my wife’s rolling eyes, and began to sift through the bounty. Each of them was carefully stamped on the inside cover with the outline of a book enclosing the words “From the Personal Library of Richard D. Moss”. We’ll get to the mysterious Dick Moss next episode, but for now we are concerned with only the books themselves.  There were books covering physical alien spacecraft, aliens themselves, alien abductions, The Bermuda Triangle, Ancient Aliens, Bigfoot, Telepathy, Cattle Mutilation, Crop Circles, Atlantis, Cryptids, and any number of other esoteric topics.  The best title was simply this: UFOs? Yes!
My excitement grew. I began to read.
The general public’s perception of the UFO phenomenon – just called The Phenomenon, by those in the know – is that this is simply a question of visitors to Earth from another planet, an advanced species of humanoid that has evolved independently of us and mastered space travel to the extent that they can traverse vast distances in relatively little time.
This is ignorant and you should all be ashamed of yourselves.
I’ve now read 34 of the books I purchased that day in the space of 4 months, as well as watching countless sketchy documentaries and even sketchier YouTube videos AND 6 and a half seasons of The X-Files and despite my undoubtedly now-shakier-than-ever mental health, I’m here to educate you – the ignorant masses – on the TRUE nature of the phenomenon.
But first, of course, we need to summarize as many of the varying and often conflicting theories as is possible in our short time together.
Let’s start with the one you know, Alien Visitors.
This idea is simple enough.  In a galaxy far, far away live a species of intelligent, diminutive, non-genitaled green or grayish beings with big heads and big eyes who have taken a fancy to the people of earth and their buttholes, apparently.
Maybe because they don’t seem to have their own.
Their saucer-like spaceships are occasionally seen in our skies and once in a while they take someone up in their spaceship to prod at their sphincters, take ova or sperm samples, and maybe relay some vague information about the betterment of mankind, before sending them right back down to earth again.
These “grays”, as they are often called, may or may not have contact with our government. Our government may or may not have access to some of their technologies, possibly reverse engineered from crashed spacecraft.
We’re not sure what they want, but you can bet dollars to donuts that it involves either our eradication or the dawning of a new golden age or just some freaky deaky sex stuff.
The first evidence of these astral beings came in 1947, when a pilot saw some flying discs and a ship crashed in Roswell.
This was how I perceived the phenomenon until just a few months ago.  Now it seems bogus and simplistic. If aliens were to visit us, why hide in the bushes, so to speak, for 75 years?
Is there life on other planets? Probably. And it’s even possible they’ve come here. But it’s not the whole story, I assure you.
Theory number two is now widespread mostly because of a Greek American Fellow who kind of looks like somebody used wood stain on a marshmallow topped with Pauly D’s hair, crammed that marshmallow into a three piece suit, and animated it with electricity.  He’s very likeable.
This is of course, the Ancient Aliens theory.  It builds on the Alien Visitor theory but moves the origin back a few millennia. 
There are two lines of thought here, and which you choose to believe doesn’t much matter.  The first is that life was essentially “seeded” here by extra-terrestrials.  The second is that life already existed on Earth, but man was very primitive until extra-terrestrials landed and gifted him with knowledge and advanced technology, Prometheus style.
This theory posits that extra-terrestrials are essentially the gods people are so hung up on and mentored us into modernity. Ancient alien theorists see the outsider touch in just about everything you’d care to look at, from language, to Sumerian texts, to the pyramids, to cave paintings, to medieval art, to the Bible, to Prince, probably.
This theory is getting much closer to the truth, but it’s not there yet. There’s a childish, Indiana Jones obsession to all of it, which doesn’t make it wrong, necessarily, but doesn’t do much for its credibility.
One thing is for certain, though: Nothing can cure a deep depression like six hours of The History Channel’s Ancient Aliens and a thousand crackers.
Theory number three posits that the space ships are us from the future.
This is fairly self-explanatory and not implausible.
Theory number four attributes all of this rigmarole to the Christian God. Now, I consider myself a true agnostic – about nearly everything.  It’s all POSSIBLE. And there are some manifestations of The Phenomenon that seem biblical, and there are certainly parts of the bible that seem paranormal, but the Old Testament God doesn’t really strike me as a tech guy, know what I’m saying?
Then there’s the flipside argument for Satan. Probably more of a tech guy. I read a book called UFOs: Satanic Terror that made some fairly convincing arguments, but the idea of pinning everything on Satan seems very 80s and not especially probable.
Theory five is to pin this all on psychology, but this happens in two very different ways.
The first is obvious: People who claim to have seen UFOs are mistaken and those who say they’ve made contact are nuts.
Fair enough, but the extent of the sightings, the reliability of some of the witnesses, the consistent details of the account of abduction the physical residue of both are hard to ignore.
The second is more interesting and complex, if not more likely: That The Phenomenon is manifested by our individual and collective psyche, but is no less real or material because of it.
This may be our conscious interacting with some sort of unknown natural phenomenon. Proponents of this idea, including my man Jacques Vallee, cite the occurrence of The Phenomena throughout human history, manifesting itself as something just out of the grasp of whichever stage of human development it is appearing before. To the earliest civilizations it was the gods descending from heaven. When monotheism took hold, it was the miraculous acts of the One True God.  At various times it was elves and faeries and dragons and ghosts and demons. Today it is technology.
This is a very interesting theory, but one who’s main contention is often: We don’t know, we may not be equipped to know, so the best we can do is to document and decipher small pieces.  This makes it slippery and difficult to grasp, let alone explain.
But it feels like it’s onto something.
It seems pretty likely that there is some natural force that we are not yet aware of, or some aspect of the natural world that we’ve not considered.  Whether our personal psychology is a factor is undetermined, but the changing nature of the Phenomenon certainly suggests it.
Which leads into the sixth theory, an aspect of the natural world that has often been theorized, but never proven.
This is the Inter-dimensional theory, which essentially states that there are multiple, parallel universes and occasionally they overlap or bleed into one another. Maybe there are places where the barrier between them is thinner than others. Maybe the inhabitants of another dimension are more advanced than us and have found ways to traverse between their world and others.
Maybe there’s a whole world of Bigfoots that exists right on top of us without either being aware of the other.
Maybe those Bigfoots all get lost sometimes and materialize in the lush woods of the Northwest.
Maybe.
Theory number seven is my own, and though I have little evidence for it, it is absolutely true and can fairly comfortably live in harmony with nearly any of the other theories.
The theory is this:
The world at large is a projection of my subconscious mind and I’ve peopled it with experiences, witnesses, and abductees while denying myself the thing I most desire – affirmation of and contact with The Phenomenon – because of guilty feelings stemming from my troubled relationship with my father.
 
It’s simple, really. Per Descartes – who is also a manifestation of my mind – my existence is the only thing I can confirm absolutely, and then, only my consciousness. My body could be an illusion, but if that’s the case, I wish my mind would have thought up something that didn’t involve excrement. That seems like a flaw. Nobody’s perfect, I guess, not even the projector of all reality.
 
I think I probably projected the idea of UFOs to add some magic and mystery into the world I created as I had, of course, conjured religion and religious people – so many of them, another mistake – but I’d failed to conjure any gods. I can’t be sure of why, as the motives of the creator, even if that creator is me, are intrinsically unknowable, unless the creation was made consciously, which it was not.
 
And I know what you’re thinking, theoretical figment of my mind (why didn’t I make MORE of you?): Where did I – THE I – originate, and I’m sorry to tell you that the beginning and end of infinity are almost four times as unknowable as the motives of the unconscious creator.
 
So, I created the idea of The Phenomenon to fill a void of mystery, but that doesn’t explain why I created the desire within myself – if in fact I’m capable of creating my own desires, I haven’t worked that out yet – to experience this mystery firsthand while also denying myself, so far, the opportunity to do so.
 
This is where my father comes in. His name is, believe it or not, Rock. I really outdid myself when projecting that name. He is, like, as I’ve repeatedly mentioned, everything else, a creation of my “self”, whatever that may be, as is the relationship I’m about to self-indulgently describe. I think hearing about someone’s father issues is probably pretty well akin to hearing about their dreams, but this is my world and you are just a figment of my imagination, so you’re going to have to bear with me.
 
I stopped speaking with my father some two and a half years ago. He thinks it was about his support for the worst president in United States history, but that’s because he’s a doofus with zero emotional intelligence or imagination.
 
The real reasons, aside from the Trump thing – which is a personality flaw if not a mental disorder and not, as they would have you believe, a mere political opinion – were four incidents, which all occurred around the time that his Trump love became impossible to ignore.
 
1) He told a joke at a family reunion that included the word coon.
2) He posted a ridiculous All Lives Matter video to Facebook, which I patiently explained to him was stupid, and then he got mad about that.
3) I found out that he said to one of his female employees, at work, in front of several people, and in reference to another of his female employees, “Kallie weighs 100 pounds and 20 of that is boobs, when are you going to get a couple of those?”
Take some time to gasp and marvel at that, it’s remarkable in its awfulness.  So many facets of awful.
4) And probably the most definitive. At my son’s second birthday party I made an offhand joke about how often he used to get thrown out of my sporting events when I was young and he DENIED THIS EVER HAPPENED.
 
Now, anyone of the people I’ve conjured who know my imagined father know that his inability to remain calm at sporting events has been a defining aspect of his history.
 
At one of my basketball games in sixth grade he – the coach – yelled at the referee – who couldn’t have been more than 14 – to “fuck off”. To this child’s endless credit, he promptly awarded my father a technical foul.
 
When he coached my baseball team, the players would huddle in the outfield before each game and Peter Paruccinni, our husky, enthusiastic catcher, would motivate our team by saying, let’s win this so Reid doesn’t have to drive home with Rock after a loss.
 
Sometimes he would get kicked out of a game and continue to yell from behind the dugout or in the bleachers.
 
He yelled at first graders for missing ground balls.
 
When he coached my brother’s Babe Ruth Baseball Team he got in trouble for making the two chubbiest kids on the team race each other in front of everyone.
 
He was later BANNED FOR LIFE FROM BABE RUTH BASEBALL – the only person I know of to receive such an honor – for drinking and yelling at a game he had no part in.
 
I could go on. I’m sure he’d dispute all of it, especially the banned for life thing – maybe they just made him quit coaching, but banned for life is how I heard it. But all of these things absolutely happened, without any doubt. To deny this is preposterous, and shows such a lack of personal responsibility, self-knowledge, respect for others, and a basic sense of humor that it boggles the mind and is indicative of the deeper problems within himself that he refuses to reckon with or even acknowledge.
 
Look, I understand that he’s probably embarrassed about all of this.  He yells much less now, though the other three incidents prove that his growth is only tonal. But here is how any sane, decent human being would deal with that: LAUGH ABOUT IT. Maybe chuckle and apologize.  That’s all he needed to do in that moment. That’s it. I wasn’t asking him to beg for forgiveness.  I let go of that shit a long time ago.  It’s just funny to me.
 
Learn to read a fucking room, you’re a grown man!
 
LET IT BE FUNNY!
 
But denying it is not funny. Denying it tells me everything I need to know about who he is as a person, and that is not the type of person that I want in my life or the lives of my sons.  Mostly the latter.
 
I want my sons to grow up to be the kind of people that fuck things up beyond belief and have enough grace to own that and build it into wisdom and to deepen their relationships with themselves and others.
 
Oh, and the last thing he said to me before I said “We’re done” was “Fuck you”.
 
But.
But.
 
He is my Dad. So there’s some guilt. He did help me out financially when I was drowning in alcoholism and depression. He did help me get the job that I have today. He did raise me, even if he was absent and/or inept much of the time.
 
And I appreciate those things, I do.  I love him, in a fashion, I just don’t ever need to see him or speak to him again.
 
People – who are not real, but just a projection of my subconscious, remember – will say that I’ll regret severing my relationship with him someday.  That when he’s gone I’ll wonder about things that he could have told me.
 
But I can assure you that this is not true.  I’ve talked to this man, and he’s very shallow.  There’s nothing there to impart and I’m pretty indifferent to the family history that I haven’t already gleened.
 
But the underlying guilt remains.  He theoretically can’t help the way he intrinsically is, I guess, but he could work on it. Maybe just learn to shut the fuck up, if nothing else sticks. The rub of being a fairly empathetic person is that understanding where someone’s flaws come from makes it difficult to hold them accountable.
 
I could endlessly list the reasons he is this way:
 
The time in which he was raised, having a fairly distant father who was slow with praise to say the least, dreams of sporting glory that never came to fruition, a failed marriage to someone he was deeply incompatible with, emotionally and intellectually difficult kids that don’t share his interests, sexual inadequacy, guilt, the Red State norms that push middle aged, middle class bankers to abhorrent political opinions, unconfronted general existential panic, an inferiority complex, clinical narcissism, body issues.
 
I get it. I feel some of it in myself. But I can’t excuse it.
 
And then, on top of all of this, there’s the generational aspect.  He is a boomer, and as we continue to learn, boomers (no, not all boomers) are the worst generation on record.   The most self-righteous, self-entitled, ideologically stubborn. I also think I understand why this is.
 
The three generations prior to the boomers had a relatively noble, tragic fate that they couldn’t opt out of, specifically two World Wars and the Great Depression.  And the generations prior to that were so engaged in simple survival that there wasn’t time for any kind of individuality.  That was reserved for the rich.
 
So along come the boomers, the product of generations of hard times, and suddenly there is this world of recreation and free time and relative economic ease, but nothing to really latch onto, aside from an unjust war and a civil rights movement that was fairly distant to most and opposed by many, many others, some more actively than others.
 
The thing you hear boomers talk about more than anything else is that they were basically sent outside in the morning and came back home for dinner. It must have been like Lord of the Flies out there.
 
Back to my father as an example.  His grandfather was a German Russian immigrant – came over here alone – and a drunk. Met a woman and had some kids, then fell off a train while hitching a ride from one side of town to the next – presumably drunk – and hurt his back. Could no longer work.  So my Grandpa quit school in eighth grade and got a job.  Then he became a marine.  Almost got to Korea, but not quite. Came back and got a job in a meat packing plant and stayed there until he retired. Did pretty well, actually. Had a family. This was not a man that was equipped for emotional vulnerability or showing love, but he was equipped to provide a comfortable, untroubled life for his own family.
 
So my father and his brothers are sent outside, to figure things out for themselves, like their parents had done, but fully unstructured. What should have substituted the structure of hardship and necessity – love and support – wasn’t there. Couldn’t be there, really, except in extraordinary circumstances.
 
And all of this resulted in an entire generation that came to rely on three things, primarily, to provide them with what they couldn’t get at home: Religion, sports, and a warped bootstraps mentality.
 
From religion they got hierarchy, from sports they got clapping – the validation they couldn’t get at home, and from their false bootstrap narrative – which doesn’t factor in the actual, tangible struggle of their parents to claw their way to a life where only a gentle tug of the bootstraps would do the trick, and even then aided by their whiteness – they became insufferable. They took the self-reliance doctrine that their parents fucking earned and applied it to themselves because they FELT like they earned it, even though they hadn’t.
 
They haven’t been able to shake any of these things, which is understandable, but kind of abhorrent.
 
The generations before them adapted to war, poverty, electricity, cars, separation from the land – massive shifts. I’m sure they were unbearable to be around too, but the difference is this: They had reason to be AND they didn’t have the resources to pull themselves away from that.  The boomers do! It’s all there, everything, all the time – free time, means, and information – if they were willing to get over themselves and adapt.
 
But they don’t.  He doesn’t.
 
It’s like Homer’s line from The Simpsons: Well, excuse me for having massive flaws that I refuse to work on!
 
I won’t excuse it.
 
So my decision remains firm, but he still haunts my dreams and this splinter in my emotional paw has undoubtedly prevented me from allowing myself to experience UFOs and the deeper mysteries of The Phenomenon
 
But maybe there’s still time. That’s the beauty of my undoubtedly true theory. Maybe there’s still time to conjure peace and oneness with the ethereal. Maybe I can conjure it for you too. There’s still time, maybe.
 
Alan Watts talks about the necessity of imagining who you WANT god to be.  Well, according to my theory, I AM GOD, which is both convenient and an obstacle.  Maybe I’m too close to be a truly self-reflective, self-idealizing god with control of its manifestations. Maybe my Dad will always be my Dad and I’ll always be me and I’ll always feel a little bad about it and The Phenomenon will always be something I read about in musty old paperbacks.
 
That’s probably okay too, but I’m going to keep reaching for oneness and contact and absolute knowledge and resolution because what else can you do? An idle, uninterested god would be a real sack of shit, unworthy of contact with the ethereal, unfit to board a spaceship, even in his own mind.
 
The end