And the denial goes on . . .

It seems since men wrote their first books, there was mention - of others among us. Some of the stories - of demons, of angels, of half-human creatures, or more recently, of UFOs and the entities associated with them - seem obviously made up to illustrate a point or sometimes, simply to tell a wild tale. But other stories are harder to categorize, for example the mention of Ezekiel and the wheel in the Bible.

I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north--an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The center of the fire looked like glowing metal - Ezekiel 1:4

This is one of those stories that is plainly odd and out of place in the context of the Bible. Obviously, someone thought this story was so important that it needed to be preserved in a widely-read book, whether it fit with the overall purpose of the book or not.

Reports continued through history. Some sort of extraordinary event occurred in the skies over Nürnberg, Germany, on April 14, 1561 (see image above), as documented in a woodcut made five years later. Witnesses claimed to have seen all manner of odd objects in the sky, and this in an era when the only things that commonly flew through the sky were birds and insects.

Before the "flying saucer" reports of 1947, Allied and Axis technical intelligence specialists were trying to make sense out of reports of "Foo Fighters" that manifested as balls of apparent pure energy or - metallic disks (report of the Robertson Panel) - that accompanied, outmaneuvered, and sometimes even passed through the aircraft of both sides over the skies of Nazi Germany and the Pacific Ocean during the Second World War. Both sides suspected the other had deployed a new secret weapon. Today, any unknown phenomena encountered by military aircrew is likely immediately classified as a potential threat to national security. We have the Foo Fighter reports only because a systematic system of official denial had not yet begun.

A report by the Air Force in 1947 that it had recovered a crashed "flying disk" near Roswell, New Mexico, was quickly retracted. The government's unfortunate handling of whatever occurred at Roswell has spawned conspiracy theories for decades. The government then made a clumsy public show of interest in the phenomenon for a couple of decades before sponsoring a disinformation exercise called Project Blue Book.

The phenomena, however, continued to manifest. Reports poured in every year from practically every corner of the world concerning odd aerial phenomena and even encounters with entities of every description. These reports spawned large groups of believers with varied ideas of what the phenomena was and equally large groups of deniers, whose logic in far too many cases was just as specious as that of believers who claimed to know the "secret" of the phenomena.

Because of the government's official disinterest in the phenomena, the western press, ever the enthusiastic cheerleaders for power centers of any kind, engaged in decades of ridicule and satire aimed at both the idea of the phenomena and those who claimed to have encountered it. The ad-naseum repeated meme of this reporting was that this is really all nonsense and nothing to worry our pretty little heads about. At times, politicians and the press colluded in a kind of grotesque spectacle meant to defuse blatant "flaps", such as a press conference called in Phoenix with city employees dressed in alien get-ups in order to distract public attention from the odd lights repeatedly observed over the city in 1997.

The problem with the press and the debunkers is that neither have anything to say. Once one seriously surveys the literature, it is very plain that *something* very odd is going on, if only because of the sheafs of reports about the phenomena that have been submitted by thousands of earnest people whose careers often require keen powers of observation or accurate reporting of events -- take your pick from pilots, Royal Air Force air marshals, physicists, law enforcement personnel and so forth. All the denial in the world won't bury this, although it may make insecure individuals feel better about themselves.

Of late, more sinister directions have been taken with the phenomena. Apparently, there are people who are, or are posing as, intelligence personnel on UFO discussion boards. It is known that the U.S. armed forces considered the phenomena a sort of object lesson in the creation of entire belief systems that could be used to destabilize other nations or to demoralize their populations. In these days of widespread conflict, I would hope our intelligence operatives have more useful activities to pursue than playing mind-games with UFO enthusiasts.

The cynical manipulation of public interest in the phenomenon is perhaps the most infuriating aspect of it all. Instead of publicly funded and supervised projects to try to get real answers, the public has been lied to and manipulated to serve dubious purposes. Thousands of witnesses have felt shamed by the treatment they received for daring to report an encounter with the unknown, and likely thousands of others have declined to make a report because of the media's mania for discrediting anyone who reports odd or unusual events. What the phenomena ultimately is may never be satisfactorily answered; but, once again, the public has been propagandized by an establishment that apparently knows no other way of addressing reports or events that challenge the common view of how things are.