By Mike Jamieson
A rise in recent years of the United States military (and with militaries elsewhere) experiencing encounters with UAPs has assured that this subject has begun it's escape from a toxic atmosphere polluted with the stifling and toxic "gasses" of ridicule and denial. It's very interesting to watch this now unfold. Recent polling by CBS News and then Pew both reveal that 51% of Americans feel some UFOs represent the presence of ET visitors, a jump from the 33% in a 2019 Gallup poll.
Concurrent with the news that began emerging in late December 2017, there has been a perceptible rise in #enduapsecrecy activism on what is now widely known as #ufotwitter. All along there, a consensus has developed on a cautious approach where the "woo-woo" of high strangeness and the oz factor, and cases of close encounters of the third and fourth kind, are bypassed and ignored when trying to lobby the press and others to address this subject. That of course is a sensible approach meant to skillfully draw in serious attention from influential public sectors.
This type of caution among students of UAPs, concerning close encounters with NHI associated with advanced technology beyond ours, are shuffled off to a small hidden room to be quietly examined, has a history which I will note key points from.
I was recently able to gauge in a limited way perspectives concerning this with an online poll for UFOTwitter, 32 voting.
Poll question: "Why do ufologists avoid CE3 cases (in general)?"
- Protect reputation: 21.9%
- Cases not credible: 18.8%
- Harms Ufology credibility: 37.5%
- Other (explain): 21.9%
Responses in comments included some explanations:
"I love them. I'm not saying every single one of these reports is legit but I refuse to believe that zero of them are."
"I think the CE3 cases are the most important to the world today! We NEED to listen to them!"
"Andreasson, Walton, Pascagoula, and many others, but as it's always said--NO EVIDENCE. Well, if you can provide evidence that you are a hot dog a week ago without planning it, let me know."
"Because they go through life wearing blinders."
"We don't ignore them. There just aren't many credible cases."
"Hard to determine what to make of them."
Donald Keyhoe in his 1953 book "Flying Saucers From Outer Space" said he dismissed a letter sent to him from experiencers, a nurse and a salesman traveling a desert road recounted being abducted by "spacemen" because he saw that as an example of the "effect of certain news stories published since 1947". [1]
Donald Keyhoe was associated with, and an early leader of the National Investigations Committee of Aerial Phenomena (NICAP). In 1964 they published a large-volumed book edited by Richard Hall, "The UFO Evidence".
Ufological historian Jerome Clark describes the CE3 content in that book:
"The issue of UFO Occupants was left to a terse, unenthusiastic discussion confined to a handful of paragraphs on two of Evidence's concluding pages. NICAP devoted much of the discussion to contactee charlatans, while acknowledging that some witnesses to 'landings' in which entities were seen but not communicated with seemed sincere. 'Some landings and near landing cases are more plausible than others', it acknowledged, then added, 'some may eventually prove to be honest mistakes of some kind'. In any case, under existing circumstances 'objective investigation' of such cases was 'nearly impossible'." [2]
NICAP was not the first of the large civilian UFO investigations group to be formed. A couple, deeply interested in astronomy, first started out compiling UFO-related news clippings, but with the help of friends and others with similar interests, they soon developed into an international network of field investigators and academic consultants. Coral and Jim Lorenzen founded the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) in the early 1950s a few years ahead of NICAP.
While Keyhoe during the early decades of Ufology wrote popular books focusing on sighting cases and evident coverup policies of the Air Force and CIA, the Lorenzens wrote books focusing on their investigations (and newspaper reports and other sources) revealing people having experiences of seeing "UFO Occupants" associated with landed craft and even in some cases interacting with them. The UFO Phenomenon, as I absorbed books from both Keyhoe and the Lorenzens, seemed less "faceless" in the Lorenzen works.
By 1976 when "Encounters With UFO Occupants" by Coral and Jim Lorenzen was published, developing cases were seemingly offering a deeper look into the activities of "UFO occupants": "We cannot state that we have all the answers now, but among the cases currently pending investigation is some interesting new material which should cast considerable light on some very perplexing aspects." They describe the preparations for that case, and then they note the cases of Betty and Barney Hill, Antonio Villas Boas (which they nervously sat on for a few years) and a few others suggestive of an agenda involving creative projects using our genetic material.
After NY artist named Budd Hopkins heard a Long Island grocer-friend out concerning missing time and abduction in an area park and had published "Missing Time" in 1980 that perception of an agenda would grow.
Several individuals today have engaged in archiving UFO material and data resources. That will help enable inevitable broader-scaled examinations by journalists, academics, and policy makers when they finally shift focus from sighting cases and coverup issues to what is much more illuminating about the UFO subject: the testimony of many ordinary people experiencing encounters with NHI.
Despite the current cautious approach advocated by many UFO activists to not emphasize drawing the attention of influential public sectors to CE3 and 4 cases, there are those trying to steer eyes to these cases now, including figures like Richard Dolan and Grant Cameron who in prior times were focused exclusively on government coverup issues.
And, then there is Danny Sheehan. This veteran of many constitutional battles in court and the front lines of social activism asserted this in a panel discussion at the end of May 2021:
"So that what we got to do is we got to find out, what it is that they're up to. How many of them are there? What type of coordination do they have among themselves? Are any of them more rogue than the others? Are there good ones and not so good ones? We need to find this out."
This strategic caution won't hold at some point soon, I suspect. As this is written (July 2021), one of the leaders of the project lobbying journalistic attention tweeted: "More power to the experiencers. Just can't use them as front runners yet."
Notes 1 and 2:. Jerome Clark article in volume 1 of UFO Encyclopedia 2018