Intelligence and the UFO myth

Copyright 2021, InterAmerica, Inc. 

I mentioned the book pictured a few days ago and it’s a good, informa- tive read.

I’m newly into it and the opening pages are about early (pre-1947) flying saucer accounts.

The 1890s “airship” reportage takes a hit, mostly seen or proven to be hoax-ridden newspaper stories mostly made up to attract readers (and revenue).

My friend Lucius Farish [RIP], along with Jerome Clark, often provided airship stories for magazines.

I have a few of them here and they are reported as if the stories are authentic and Lucius thought some were.

My pal French skeptic and Cognitive Psychologist Gilles Fernandez has also often written demeaningly about the airship craze of the late-1890s.

And while I’ve taken the Farish stance that some of those 1896 and other 1890s accounts seem actual, that view is not taken by the author of the book noted here, Maurizio Vergo, or other sane UFOers,

What supplements that sensible offset to belief in an actual airship wave is not the stories themselves, made up out of whole-cloth by newspaper reporters, but the intelligence of readers who bought the stories,

Human intelligence has always been iffy — and still is: see Facebook for evidence — but American intelligence was, generally at a low-spot, noticed by Tocqueville in his monumental book, Democracy in America (Two Volumes) [1830-1840] and hadn’t improved by the 1890s just hasn’t improved much in 2021.

Newspaper readers took the faux airship sightings as authentic believing that newspapers were as true and reliable as their Bibles. (And we all know how true Biblical renditions are.)

One can extrapolate the mentality of America’s hicks of the 1800s to the hicks of America today. And not just about race or political asininity but almost everything: economics, science, art, music, and, yes, UFOs.

Look at the thinking inside the UFO community. It’s as rife with ignorance as that which suffused the airship fictions of the 1890s and continues with the ET extension for UFOs or Ancient Astronaut delusions of the current day.

Yes, UFOs exist, — Unidentified Flying Objects — not UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena) but the tenor of the explanation that such unidentified things are spaceships from extraterrestrial sources flies in the face of astronomical realities and is just as fanciful as the idea that airships were from Mars (or Venus) in 1896.

Human intelligence has not come much further than that found among primitive humankind, except for a few outstanding persons — .0001 of the human race.

And some of us wonder why we haven’t explained or understood the UFO phenomenon? The answer reaches out and slaps us in the face every day.

RR

http://ufocon.blogspot.com – The UFO Iconoclast(s)