Showing posts with label Close Encounters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Close Encounters. Show all posts

Saturday, September 23, 2017

UFO Origins: Saucers That Time Forgot & The Outer Limit

There's a companion blog to Blue Blurry Lines, one exclusively focused on the forgotten history, folklore and origins of ufology, The Saucers That Time Forgot.


A five-part series was just completed, at STTF, an examination of "The Outer Limit" by Graham Doar, a science fiction short story from 1949 that deals with an interrupted journey, the test flight of an experimental rocket plane, and features now-familiar UFO case elements, put together for the first time:

A close encounter with a UFO, an alien abduction, missing time, contact with an advanced benevolent extraterrestrial race, telepathic communication, and a dire warning to the Earth about the use of Atomic weapons. At least one adaptation of the story includes the use of hypnotic regression to recover memories of the encounter. It's a prophetic tale of a credible witness of a relatively incredible event, but the colonel in charge chooses not to believe, and there's the strong suggestion that the UFO report will be the subject of a cosmic cover-up.

The series starts with the historical setting of the late 1940s, A-bombs and the arrival of the flying saucers, introduces the story itself, and shows how the tales was further spread through popular culture by being adapted into several radio and television programs, and how it was absorbed into ufology through George Adamski and the Contactees. The finale examines how it was imitated in several movies ranging from The Day the Earth Stood Still to Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space, and even echoed in much more modern films.

The complete collection, linked for your convenience:

Flying Saucers, the Atomic Bomb and Doomsday: The Outer Limit (Part 1 of 5)
The Outer Limit by Graham Doar: The UFO Parable (Part 2 of 5)
Radio, Television & The Outer Limit Legacy (Part 3 of 5)
Ufology & The Outer Limit Legacy (Part 4 of 5)
UFOs, Hollywood & The Outer Limit Legacy (Finale)

Other articles focus on weird, warped, and sometimes fraudulent UFO cases that were newsmakers in their day, but lost through the cracks of time, forgotten- or perhaps even suppressed- by UFO historians.  STTF is written by Curt Collins, with the support of Claude Falkstrom, backed by the input of UFO buffs - and sages - both known and unknown, of this world and perhaps others.

Fight the UFO cover-up. Read each and every installment of The Saucers That Time Forgot.

Friday, June 30, 2017

Dr. J. Allen Hynek: Ufology is a Mess

“Ufology today is in the state I would say chemistry was when chemistry was alchemy,  a mixture of superstition, wild ideas, unproved claims, and yet out of that whole mess, finally the very first class science of chemistry evolved. And I think the same thing is going to happen eventually with Ufology, but right now, it is a mess. 
There’s a fantastic amount of wishful thinking, of desire, of pseudoscience, of pseudo-religion, of cultism, but eventually, I think that will all finally sink to the bottom, and we’ll have out of the whole thing a clear liquid of something we that can really see, and I hope, understand.” 
Dr. J. Allen Hynek in The UFO Experience (documentary, 1983)


The Close Encounters Man

Hynek is back in the news, due to the biography by Mark O'Connell, The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs O'Connell interviewed people who knew and worked with Hynek, and was given unprecedented access to Hynek’s professional files as an astronomer, and the UFO documents and correspondence at the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS). 


It's not exactly a UFO book, but it touches on a lot of the topic's history in telling the story of the man, Josef Allen Hynek. So in that sense, it's a book that' is accessible to non-saucer buffs, and also provides an interesting look UFOs as part a cultural phenomenon, and Hynek's evolving role in making it happen.

More details about the book and the author can be found at this page at The Book Cellar.