UFOs are things….not human created projections but things!
While UFOs are evaporating into the ether, what they’ve been and what they are is more than creations of the human psyche.
How they’re perceived may be affected by human observation, in the quantum sense, but that doesn’t mean they’re not tangible artifacts.
(Neutrinos are “tangible artifacts” albeit of an immaterial kind.)
This goes to Platonic Forms, as we’ve noted here earlier.
The problem, as we see it, and hope to get more than a few to understand, is that the UFO mystery consists of phenomena; that is, UFOs are many things, not just nuts-and-bolts craft (which they have been in some instances), nor just ephemeral images, created by the psychic aberrations of man (or woman).
UFOs run a gamut of possibilities, and are not limited to the various explanations extant for them.
Stanton Friedman’s flying saucers exist.
Jacques Vallee’s amorphous, demonic (?) messengers exist also. (There are too many written references to them to invalidate the possibility.)
Secret military aircraft and weird atmospheric conditions account for many UFO sightings surely.
But beside all the mundane or even esoteric explanations lie a core enigmatic phenomenon that wipes away all the other phenomena, and it’s that phenomenon which ufologists (a term that really needs to be dispensed with) must address.
Jung’s psychic projections as an explanation is valid for some UFO accounts, accounts that, when validated, can be discarded.
Those accounts are the province of psychiatry, not ufological science.
Friedman’s “saucers” intrigue, more than most UFO explanations, and provide titillation for SciFi advocates, and should provoke science to check into the extraterrestrial possibility.
But as we’ve noted here, many times, science isn’t about to recapitulate and take on the UFO conundrum. It has always been and remains a scientific bête noire.
So where do we go from here?
Newbies to the UFO phenomenon must (and will we hope) pursue, without obsession, the core elements of UFO sightings that have been ignored or passed over by former and present ufologists.
And new sightings, of which there are a dearth, should be investigated with methodologies that have never been part of the present ufological arsenal.
UFOs are not created by mankind. They come from elsewhere, space or time, as Friedman posits or Goldberg suggests.
Some UFOs have been mistaken observations of Skyhook balloons and/or prototypical military aircraft.
And a few UFO accounts ring from meteorological phenomena that is so infrequent as to invite misperception.
But aside from these prosaic explanations, there is a residue of something strange and wondrous, in a poetic sense, or an ominous sense.
It’s nothing to get worked up about, in light of the world’s woes perhaps, but as a quasi-profound curiosity, UFOs should be investigated or researched by those who have the time and wherewithal to do so.
Those who’ve spent sixty unproductive years trying to fathom the UFO riddle should step aside, and let a new crowd of UFO devotees take over.
They won’t of course, but some will force them to, but the sheer power of new insight(s) and hypotheses that have substance.
We can barely wait for the UFO new-age….whatever it’s called.