My Love Letter to Ufology
UFO over New Mexico. Digital art by Birdie.
Hi. I’m Birdie.
Fifty years ago, I experienced something I still can’t explain. It started a life-long obsession with Unidentified Flying Objects, beings from other worlds, and all the weird and wondrous phenomena that seem to travel with such things.
Unless you lived through it, you could never begin to understand what being into UFOs was like in the 70s, 80s, 90s. I miss it sometimes – waiting by the mailbox for Fate Magazine, for OMNI, for strange pamphlets advertised in in the back of Popular Mechanics, asking the librarian to get every possible paranormal title covering cryptids to saucers from interlibrary loan.
The Internet didn’t yet exist as we know it, and information moved slowly – from sighting to hope-filed MUFON investigator, to mimeographed, stapled newsletter. You might not hear of a spectacular case for long months, even years. In the days before VCRs, days way before streaming, I thumbed through the dog-eared TV Guide, circling shows like In Search Of, That’s Incredible, and Unsolved Mysteries, praying my schedule would allow me to sit in front of our flickering cabinet TV.
Back then you waited. You devoured. You wondered. You waited some more.
I remember attending lectures in after-hours college classrooms, in hotel meeting spaces that smelled of mold and cigarette ash. An older man in an ill-fitted polyester suit or an eager-eyed pimply boy would fiddle with a persnickety overhead projector, eventually filling a lopsided screen with sighting details, grainy photographs of flying disks, filling our heads with stories of withered grass landing traces, terrified Midwestern farmers, odd men in black suits whose grasp of human behavior seemed tenuous at best. The speakers always had autographed books to sell, and we lined up, cash in hand, to purchase self-published breadcrumbs.
I loved it. Every minute of it – the sporadic drip of information, the late nights laying on a chaise lounge in our backyard watching fireflies dance with stars, dreaming of the day I could finally tell my friends I Told You So when the President of the United States revealed that we were not alone. I’m almost 60 years old and it still hasn’t happened.
Spending slow decades immersed in a subject changes you.
I look back and remember the ebb and flow of Big Ideas: contactees building geometric structures in the desert to call down the ships, the nuts-and-bolts crowd measuring soil samples and charting the position of Venus, the experiencer’s night terror illuminated by blue beam, the rise of consciousness studies after the Stargate remote viewing program was declassified. I look back and see how every theme is a layer of the same sedimentary rock: a distinct hue, a contrasting texture. You can pick up the rock and examine it from any angle, but if you remove layers, a boulder becomes mere pebble; perhaps more easily studied and understood but missing essential mass.
Long-timers know this, know that everything new reflects something almost forgotten.
In the week between Christmas and New Year’s, 1972, my sister and I spent evenings playing with Santa’s gifts: Lone Ranger and Tonto dolls. Lone Ranger rode upon a molded plastic Silver, six-shooter in his hand. Tonto sported a vest and headband woven with tiny beads. One night we placed the dolls on the floor in an ambush tableau. A stuffed Tony the Tiger and a teddy bear played evil-doer. We played in our bedroom, upstairs, as snow silently fell outside. A steel-blue light shined through the snow, through the window, into the room, illuminating the western scene in a swirling, fractal pattern.
My sister and I sat across from each other, not moving, not speaking, as the dolls began to spin above the floor. I saw something hovering outside from the corner of my left eye. Something big, dull, curved. The air in the room smelled like a lightning storm. The hair on my arms rolled to attention. I don’t remember what happened next. My sister doesn’t remember much – she was younger than I – and only ever called the event “The night the dolls danced.”
This trip through a rabbit hole, and others that followed later, drove my passion, kept me reading, listening to late-night AM radio, spending every vacation at workshops and conferences. Fifty years of as much exposure to the subject as any obsessed civilian, and I likely have as many answers as someone much newer to the field. But fifty years brings perspective, deep strange knowledge, and the ability to see overarching patterns that some may miss.
Today you can inject the latest information into constantly activated mental veins. I receive phone notifications when my favorite follows tweet breaking news about the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office’s latest shenanigans, when Eric Davis so much as farts. The community is no longer representative of 250 people, excited and sweaty, notebooks in hand, tickets bought months earlier, packed into a Pensacola motel, waiting to see Stanton Friedman explain why the rational person should come to the certain conclusion that UFOs Are Real.
The community has exploded, has embraced people from diverse cultures to discuss the finer points of disclosure, Lou Elizondo’s cryptic comments, dubious fashion choices by some Ufologists, and to question whether a construction company owner in North Carolina has a spiritual connection with enigmatic orbs.
I love the harmony and the cacophony, and if I listen closely, I can hear the melody because I’ve heard it many thousands of times over the past decades.
Welcome to No Rivets.
