Rodeghier Tells You What You Need To Know Sse Meeting 2103
I'm going to write about Mark Rodeghier's talk in this entry, and skip the others you see listed above
believe me when I say that this is a mercy on my part [more in brief on that later]. Later I'll try to give some accurate accounting of Roger Nelson's talk on the "EGGS" or the Global Consciousness Project, and Larry Dossey's talk on "distant effects" on bodies/objects. There are several other talks on both the Nelson and the Dossey tapes, and once I listen to them, I'll decide whether it's in our interests to write about any.
As a gesture of full disclosure and explanation of choice, I will say that I was preceded at the convention by two very good UFOlogist friends, Mark Rodeghier [right above] and Eddie Bullard [center]. Mark is laughing at Eddie for a reason that partly explains why I'm going to write about his talk and not Eddie's.
Whereas Mark is a tech-wizard, Eddie's on the opposite end of the spectrum [just as am I]. Eddie couldn't cope with the powerpoint technology and it caused constant hassles, sometimes hilarious
you just couldn't help it
during the talk. The germane thing about this was that it wasted a lot of time and truncated Eddie's talk seriously. Eddie had picked a tricky subject to get clearly across, and that time loss [disastrously] caused him to come across [due to lack of "balance time"] as a full-blown skeptic, which he is not. There's more to it than just that [I tried to talk him out of aspects of the thing beforehand] but that's sufficient to stand as my reason for not covering this, to me, fiasco.
As to the other talks... well, though I like John Alexander, I didn't get anything out of that particular presentation; Huspeni lectured us on "Scientific Method 101" as if veteran UFOlogists had been intellectually asleep all these years; and Hoyer gave a marginally intriguing but deductively cowardly presentation on geometry and the Face on Mars mountain. If you were hip, you'd thank me for not belaboring any of these.
But Rodeghier was different. As always, in my experience, he delivered the goods.
You've seen above that Mark's title was "PATTERN CHANGES IN THE UFO PHENOMENON". His point was that our experience of the phenomenon has been characterized by two great eras of witnessings. The first phase went from c. 1947 to about the transition era of 1980; and the second phase continues from then until today.
Phase One is what we all feel is UFOlogy. Or, if not that, at least "classic UFOlogy". It is disks and cigars and military-like overflights and landings, vehicle stoppings, and occupants in and around their technologies. Craft may be hovering or lightning fast. Radar and military chases are often involved. It is Keyhoe-ian and Blue Book, and for the most part CUFOS, UFOlogy. It seems generally to fit the ETH and since the ETH is an expected result of modern science's world model [i.e. they're "out there" and they're kinda like us, so sooner or later they'll meet up with us], this vision isn't really that uncomfortable in principle.
Phase One tends to cruise along with scattered sightings and then WOOM! a "Wave". These waves usually take a week or two and are fairly localized as to a describable geography. This is what still imprints in our minds as what UFOs are all about.
But, in Mark's analysis, this situation would change. As he, Allen Hynek, and the rest of the CUFOS team sat in the office watching the flow of information pass by, Mark noticed a drop in cases, beginning in the late 1970s and bottoming out in the early 1980s. Early in that period, he had the intuition that something was changing in UFOlogy, and that perhaps we'd seen the last of business-as-usual. His colleagues told him he was nuts. But {he admits that this guess was pretty intuitive and lucky} he was right. The phenomenon of the old-style UFO wave was about to cease. At the convention, he said that in his analysis, the last traditional wave occurred in [mainly] Italy in 1978.
The first major "event" which caused head-shaking at CUFOS, and which signaled the change afoot, was the Hudson {NY} Valley Boomerang(s) outbreak. You can see the telling characteristics of this outbreak above. The thing involve very large objects based on triangular rather than radially symmetric aeronautical plans, moved VERY slow usually, and didn't avoid populations.
All manner of speculations arose as to whether these things had anything to do with core UFO phenomena at all [the prime alternative idea being US military projects] and back then at the transition this was particularly so. In fact Allen Hynek couldn't get most members of his CUFOS team to take the boomerangs seriously, even though HE did. They "just didn't fit".
The CUFOSians, and everyone else, didn't realize that something major was changing in UFOlogy.We were going into what Mark calls Phase Two, or the modern phase.
The graph of cases investigated by the French government group {GEPAN/ SEPRA/ GEIPAN} shows the drop-off in substantial cases fairly dramatically just at the "1980" transition. Hidden under this and several other investigative organizations' graphs is, what is for me, a much more interesting [and sinister?] set of graphs
those for the counts of CE2s and old-fashioned CE3s [occupants with their crafts]. As the example TUFOIC [Tasmanian UFO Investigations Center, one of the solidest long-term public organizations in the world] graph shows, such potentially data-rich cases plummeted towards zero and remained there.
As the third post above says: 90% declines in all databases from responsible investigative organizations worldwide for these sorts of reports. For investigative UFOlogy, this has been disastrous.
No more of this......................................................................
While doing his analysis on all this, somewhat unhappy, story, Mark found one other thing, which I believe is completely new. Whereas before the transition the concentrations of UFO sightings, whether geographically very sharp or somewhat more diffuse, were all over the world in no seeming correlation as to location. Not now. Since the transition, these concentrations of reports appear synchronized over the globe
i.e. if there's a reporting uptick here, then there's also a reporting uptick "there".
............flummoxes me. This phenomenon has always wanted to be very overt to individual witnesses, but cleverly covert to cultural impact and acceptance. Its first phase behavior brilliantly pulled this off, with a lot of help from the intelligence community. Now, however, the phenomenon has "taken away" the evidentiary cases, but seems to be willing to globally synchronize itself
still short of smack-in-your-face overtness. It almost feels as if has accomplished its goal of a level of awareness in the cultures, and is now just dropping stones in the pond to maintain that status quo without risking messing it up.
Mark does not find that the behavior of numbers-reported of CE4s match the UFO phase two pattern. Whereas "regular UFO reports numbers" have never been correlated successfully with social factors, CE4s are wildly so. Make of that whatever you will. My own view is that, while I believe that there are a smallish number of on-board incidents which are investigatively strong, 99% of the claims are not. So I include CE4s in UFOlogy with conservative cautions. I can easily see how Mark finds no correlation with his Phase Two. [He, by the way, is much more positive towards there being "fairly" significant numbers of these things than I am]. Neither of us in in the orbit of Dave Jacobs or Budd Hopkins though.
Mark then asked the big question: why the transition?
A sociologist would jump to the conclusion that it was due to the people investigating. Such an argument could readily be made for CE4s, but this "old-fashioned UFOs" transition had nothing to do with the UFO core investigating community. "We" were more flummoxed by the change than anybody, and took forever to begin to see it even vaguely. "We" were all powered up for "regular" UFOlogy, both intellectually and technically. As Mark reminded us, the UFO community was readier for a scientific globally-cooperative approach in the 1970s and 1980s than anytime in history. The photo above is, by the way, a 1980s photo of Mark [right] with Vicente-Juan Ballester-Olmos, Spain's premier UFO researcher. We were ready in both imagery and expectation for something different than what happened.
The change doesn't seem to originate in witness expectations either. UFOs are still technological disks as far as people are concerned. Seeing flaps composed with extremely large triangular-based plans is not to be expected. Plus, every study of UFO witnesses [except for CE4 witnesses] shows nothing different about them and the average distribution of citizens would show. UFO incident reporters are "normal"... "lucky" maybe, but normal.
One could always say that maybe something more broadly societal has happened. Well, sure
always does. But Mark, himself a sociologist by PhD training, simply challenged everyone to come up with something which actually seemed to be related to this change in UFOs.
What this has left Mark [and myself] with is: the transition has occurred because of the UFO agency itself. He listed three different categories within which one might begin thinking about this.
I'm not going to give any personal theories at this point. Both Mark and I think that it is likely that the change came due to some reason in the third or bottom category listed above. Both of us are suspicious of one troubling fact: the UFO phenomenon stopped giving the UFO investigating community heavily evidential {"physical"} cases, just as the UFO investigative community had powered up to take a bunch of such cases on.................. and, again, make of that what you will.
Unfortunately, you folks will probably never hear Mark Rodeghier give a talk, or meet him personally
Mark is no Media Circuit guy. But, if you get an opportunity: take it. Rare fellow; smart fellow; always delivers the goods.
Light along the path to you all until next time.
Source: alienspress.blogspot.com
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