— arrives at one of the most portentous moments in human evolution. Primary author Dr. Michael Swords knows this. He has no expectations of success, among either popular audiences or in academic circles.At a forbidding 580 pages, UFOs and Government is essentially dead on arrival. And not necessarily because people don’t read anymore, but perhaps because they can’t stick with it. A recent Newsweek cover story broke the bad news.
Next year, for the first time, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders will list “Internet Addiction Disorder” as the new frontier in digital culture. Memory degradation, heightened anxiety, compulsive behaviors, eroding attention spans — the expanding litany of fallout from our addiction to the virtual world can now be quantified as it lights up pleasure receptors on brain maps, a scenario one researcher likens to “electronic cocaine.” Chinese studies are identifying a “shrinkage of 10 to 20 percent in the area of the brain responsible for processing of speech, memory, motor control, emotion, sensory and other information.”
From this woozy milieu, we pan for whatever particles of clarity the UFO phenomenon may present, amid CGI and the rumors and the chat rooms reinforcing paranoia and “skepticism” and the full range of dreck in between. Yet, all are rooted in a sequence of events that emerged more than 60 years ago, from the wreckage of World War II, when the United States and the world at large were caught flat-footed by a mystery that endures today.
Swords, who taught the history of science technology at Western Michigan University and is an emeritus professor of environmental studies, has drilled deep into the vein of primary sources and — along with eight co-authors and contributors — produced an authoritative look at the high-level disarray, inter-agency tensions, and the military’s improvisational attempts at information management even as honest scientists struggled to give them the truth.
The broad strokes are familiar: Projects Sign, Grudge and Blue Book, the game-changing 1952 wave, the subsequent CIA Robertson Panel, the Condon Committee travesty, etc. What separates this accounting from its predecessors are the details harvested from obscure archived material and FOIAs, all of them channeled into a cogent narrative arc that reads like an epic tragedy.
Even for co-author Robert Powell, the Mutual UFO Network’s science director whose radar reconstruction of the 2008 Stephenville UFO has been greeted by four years of Air Force silence, the book was a revelation. “It seemed like there was something on every page I’d never heard of before,” says Powell, the first reader on Swords’ manuscript.
But there are no interactive features here, no click-on links or little green men or Illuminati agents in the shadows to sex things up. Even the minefield of Roswell is given short shrift, but only because “government documents related to this case are conspicuously absent or of dubious authenticity,” Swords writes, “and this text is concerned only with a well documented historical narrative.”
What Swords does document, with formidable indexing, bibliography and appendix, are crimes not only against the scientific method, but against intellect as well. But in revisiting those flashpoints with entirely justified incredulity and indignation, Swords concentrates not so much on the baffling events as on the organizational reaction to them.
“I wanted to write something foundational, but I knew that was not going to occur by focusing exclusively on the phenomenon itself,” Swords says from Kalamazoo. “You have to use something about its impact on human beings, history in the traditional sense, how do human beings cope with whatever it is you’re writing about.”
UFOs and Government belongs on those history shelves. Few will read it. But De Void will linger here for the next few posts. Because as Harry Truman once said, “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” Outside a small circle of UFO scholar-geeks, this book offers a fresh glimpse into the largely forgotten world that put us in the vacuum that cripples us today.
Continue Reading . . .
See Also:
PROJECT SIGN UFO REPORT | 'Flying Triangle' Reported Over Vicksburg, Mississippi | 3-22-1949
Project Grudge: Report On Incident 17
By J. Allen Hynek - Primary Witness - Kenneth Arnold
More Veterans Challenge Blue Book
UFO NEWS | VIDEO | New Animation of Radar Data Shows Stephenville UFO Heading Toward President Bush’s Ranch
Radar Reports Verifying Stephenville UFO Forces Military Flip-Flop
Radar Reports Confirm Eye Witness Accounts of Stephenville UFO!
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Very interesting article, not only the information about the book, but also about how the Internet can affect people. I would just like to reflect on that. I still read, but unlike pre-internet I will often choose intyernet over book, though when I do read I read intensely amnd make notes, and will also use these notes for further research online---so rather than making study superficial, it deepens it for me.
ReplyDeleteWhat I love about the Internt that you cannot get from a book IS the interactive modes--so for example, if I am reading about a person, finding images of him, and videos of him deepens my experience of the person far more than just reading about hir or reading them. For many years pre-getting online I had read very many books by Alan Watts, and loved his way of using words, but when I eventually got to hear, and see him this so much gave me a deeper feel of his communications!
So it is not that the INTERNET is at fault so much, but the way some people use it that causes them to lose track with reality, like the dude mentioned in the article. It is like anything---ANYthing can be abused, even food, and drinking water.