Journal Issues
	THE ANOMALIST: 8 Spring 2000 An All UFO SPECIAL Issue 192 pages, $9.95 Order now! Home Field Advantage A Commentary by Charles Miller "Over the years, I've gone through several stages in considering the UFO and extraterrestrial inteligence controversies, beginning as an ignoramus, then graduating to a believer, then to a foamer (more in a moment), then to a cautious believer, then to a hardened skeptic, then to a cautious skeptic, and finally to an intermediatist." [full text] From Mermaids to Little Green Men: The Prehistory of the UFO Abduction Phenomenon by Jerry Clark "Does the available evidence sustain the testimony of today's abductees that gray UFO beings were snatching people up decades ago? The evidence is not overwhelming. On the other hand, it is not entirely nonexistent." Roper's Latest Tangle The 1998 Abduction Survey by Peter Brookesmith "What we are not told, and in view of the abductologists' logic we really should be asking, is whether or not any of the 12 people who claimd to have been abducted were among the 20 who answered all five key questions positively, or even among the 48 who answered four of them thus. Ufologists love to hurl accusations of intellectual dishonesty at each other--pots also call kettles black, I hear--but, not being a ufologist, I'll resist that temptation." Breakout of the Fictions: George Adamski's 1959 World Tour by Colin Bennett "Adamski's space-folk are pure Disney-schlock, and their conversations have the mental content of a wrecked supermarket trolley. At times we expect to see a portrait of Doris Day and hear the piped Muzak of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir oozing from the walls. The effect is perfect for that lavish spiritual kitsch which is Theosophy." Reading the Strangeness: Second-Order Anomalies by T. Peter Park "On the night of November 2, 1967, several people unknown to each other who had been drinking beer had very similar close encounters on roads near Ririe, Idaho with "little men" from UFO's trying to forcibly enter their cars. Almost exactly ten years earlier, on November 6, 1957, spacemen from UFO's tried to steal dogs from a boy named Everett in Tennessee and from a man in Everittstown, New Jersey. Are such sets of events mere coincidences--or do they reflect deep patterns with special meanings for their participants, or even for the world at large?" The Best UFO Case Ever? A Review and Update of the Socorro Incident by Patrick Huyghe "Until policeman Lonnie Zamora's sighting made the news in 1964, all other accounts of meetings with the space people came from witnesses of dubious credibility and reputation. And their stories were laughable. Zamora's story was different. He was a policeman, a highly credible witness. So with this case, the widespread feeling--even among UFO believers--that there was something absurd, if not ludicrous, about humanoids, simply crumbled." What's Really Behind the Flying Saucers? A New Twist on Aztec by Karl T. Pflock "Recently, under curious circumstances, I was made privy to an fascinating document about one of the most controversial cases of the Golden Age of Flying Saucers, the so-called Aztec crash of 1949. Until the late seventies, this case was the yardstick, for better or worse, by which ufology measured claims of crashed, retrieved, and secreted-away saucers from outer space. I never had all that much interest in the case until in 1998, when a source, who insists on complete anonymity, showed me a handwritten testament, set down by the key player in this amazing, often amusing, truth-is-stranger-than-fiction episode." Debunkers of Doom? by Martin Kottmeyer "The impression the literature leaves me with is that debunkers, lumped together as a group, have no bias towards apocalyptic thinking. Counter-proofs exist and they are prominent. It would be hard to think of a way to stereotype debunkers that could be more wrong. Or one more right for ufologists and UFO buffs themselves." Backscatter: A Reply by Alexander Mebane to "The Abduction Conundrum"by Greg Sandow " I found Greg Sandow's piece on abduction explanations quite respectable. My only serious criticisms of that effort are, first, that he inconsistently shows some sympathy with the Jungian "endogenous" explanation, and second, that he is so fixated on the venerable but obsolete "extraterrestrial" idea that his peroration deals only with arguments (all called "fallacious") against that explanation. The supernatural alternative (sham "space-visitors") never comes within his purview--and yet that seems to me to be the only hypothesis that still remains viable." About Our Contributors