Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Categorised and easily referenced

One of the most ordinary things we do in our lives is to take things we know and order them into a fashion which makes them well categorised and easily referenced. Unfortunately, it is probably the best and worst thing we ever do with regard to the UFO phenomenon.

The reason I say this is because every single incident is unique and often subjective in the remarks of a witness. Yet, the best way to file these incidents is to refer to them under a summary name of sorts. I guess that's okay, but it can lead to missing the important details that indeed set it apart from all others.

Allen Hendry wrote in his publication 'UFO Handbook' (1979, Doubleday) that if ants were to notice cars , trucks and buses as strange objects that flashed past a far away vantage point in an infrequent fashion, they would probably have the same problem. According to us humans, not all cars are the same; in fact, that's almost like swearing to some fanatics! As for trucks, well, I'm not sure what ants would make of them, but even we notice the difference as stark.

Yet, observers who did not know what they were would begin to categorise as we do.
Most of the works I consider to be standout cases are referred to as a Night light or a close encounter of the 1st, 2nd or 3rd kind, or maybe something else.

Keith Basterfield extended a catalogue early this century in order to summarise the vast amount of cases we were uncovering for public viewing from the National Archives. To this day, I still believe this to be the best of its type. The reason is that the opening line describes more detail than a single phrase. For I am human in my research methods and I will be looking for something logical to follow as to where I can or indeed will find certain cases. But they will not be so easily categorised, referenced or called by just a singular phrase.



1 comment:

  1. Sadly, or coincidentally, depending on your perspective...this weekend I edited Keith's Australian abduction catalogue and converted it to a pdf file for my poorly categorised catalogue of archived UFO-related stuff.

    Categories, references and phrases are a mountain to climb on the assumption that the going gets easier downhill. I tend to find that whatever the system, or lack thereof, it all stays equally baffling and complicated!

    ReplyDelete

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