what
it is/that it is not
Ken
Weaver Abduction Series: Eternal Return Variation 3]
Okay,
there are all of these UFO images and reports of sightings. What are we to do with the lack of hard, material evidence?
Skeptical scientists want to know. I
have found nearly all UFO skeptics—those folks Robert Anton Wilson
consistently calls Fundamentalist Materialists—to be cranky and curmudgeonly
and the ones with axes to grind, and this includes the author of Contact, Carl
Sagan. It must be exceedingly
difficult to catapult decades of “hard” scientific labor.
“Believers” have done it. Believers
are thought to be cranks, but Skeptics are the humorless, cranky ones, and here
I am specifically targeting skeptical UFO Researcher and “scientist” Phillip
Klass and feminist Elaine Showalter. In an interview that is part of Nova
On-Line’s “Kidnapped By UFOs? Exploring the Alien Abduction
Phenomenon,” Klass attempts to refute alien existence with “humor”: “Maybe they're mischievous Irish leprechauns;
maybe they're the mischievous elves of Santa Claus; maybe they are agents of the
devil—now I don't believe in any of these. But I have not spent 30 years
investigating whether the leprechauns exist.” Klass addresses the overwhelming
similarity of reports and descriptions of aliens by nitpicking over occasional
differences—again with his less than convincing humor:
If
that is similarity, then I suppose that somebody would say that Dolly Parton and
I are quite similar. We both have one head, two eyes, one mouth, two ears, four
fingers and a thumb on each hand. Similarity is like beauty, is in the eyes of
the beholder. So if an extraterrestrial saw me standing alongside Dolly Parton,
the extraterrestrial might say that I and Dolly Parton are similar. But I think
the average human would say that we're quite different.11
Elaine Showalter in her book Hystories : Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media sees alien abduction along with five other “psychogenic syndromes of the 1990s: chronic fatigue, Gulf War syndrome, multiple personality disorder, recovered memory of sexual abuse, satanic ritual abuse, and alien abduction a cultural symptom of anxiety and stress.” Despite a culturally rich and well-researched book, in the end Jodi Dean argues that the UFO/alien abduction phenomenon is some sort of postmodern myth reflecting end of the millennia anxiety about cyberspace and its digital/virtual undermining of truth—as if “truth” was ever given or available