I Challenge Jonathan Tobin of Commentary Magazine to Debate the Confederate Flag #Tobin #Commentary #Charleston

Jonathan Tobin has written the following screed at Commentary Magazine, about his opposition to the Confederate flag:

"For those who plan to respond, as they always do, to discussions about this topic with emails regurgitating neo-Confederate talking points about the Civil War being a conflict about state’s rights rather than slavery, let me state up front that I’m not buying it and neither is any other serious student of history. The Civil War did hinge in part on constitutional questions but the notion that slavery was incidental to the outbreak of the conflict is simply absurd. Without slavery, there would have been no war. The south seceded because it feared limits on the expansion of slavery would eventually doom the institution. To protect a heritage built on the uncompensated labor of slaves and their vast investment in human “property,” the states that formed the Confederacy waged a bloody war that costs hundreds of thousands of American lives and left the south in ruins. It would take a century for the region to recover completely."

Tobin, you are not a serious student of history.  You are a serious apologist for Northern aggression and are largely ignorant of the history of the Civil War.  If you disagree, then I formally challenge you to debate the issue:  RESOLVED, that the Civil War was not fought to end slavery.  Stop hiding behind your masthead where you can't be held accountable for your error.  I'll give you a few hints of your coming beat down in this article.

1.  Without slavery there would have been no war.  Not true.  Without the Northern invasion, there would have been no war.  Lincoln invaded, not because of slavery, but because if the South left the Union, it would end the North's protective tariffs on foreign goods, substantially damaging the Northern economy.   Lincoln made it clear that slave emancipation was not his goal or his motivation:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.--Letter to Horace Greeley" (August 22, 1862)

2.  The south seceded because it feared limits on the expansion of slavery would eventually doom the institution.  This statement is sheer nonsense.  If the South seceded, it would no longer have access to the new western territories, and no place to expand slavery to.  How do you explain that, genius?  Was the South going to start plantations in the Atlantic Ocean?

3.  To protect a heritage built on the uncompensated labor of slaves and their vast investment in human “property,” the states that formed the Confederacy waged a bloody war that costs hundreds of thousands of American lives and left the south in ruins.   So much is wrong with this statement. I have these points in rebuttal:

a.  Slave labor was not uncompensated.  Slaves were given food, housing, clothing and medical care, even after they became too old to work.  According to Fogel and Engerman's Time on the Cross, The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974), slaves consumed 90% of everything they produced.  

b.  The South's "vast investment in human property" included many millions of dollars paid to Northern slave traders.  The North had no qualms about selling Africans into slavery when it was enriching them, and they continued the slave trade in foreign markets when it was outlawed in the U.S. in 1808.  For every slave Yankees sold to the South, they sold about 20 more to Cuba, Brazil and the West Indies.  The North ended slavery in its states primarily by selling its slaves to the South, not by emancipating them.  Further, slavery continued in states loyal to the North after the Civil War began, in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and West Virginia.  Tell me again, Tobin, about Yankee moral superiority.  

c.  The South waged a defensive war against a ruthless invader that made total war on the Southern population, who burned homes, farms, universities and public buildings to the ground, killed livestock and burned crops, used Confederate prisoners as human shields against artillery, and lobbed shells into downtown Charleston to randomly kill civilians.  But you, Tobin, act as if the South started the war, instead of the other way around.  The shame of the carnage is totally on the backs of the Northern invaders, and those who rationalize their aggression.  There is absolutely NOTHING honorable about the Northern aggression on the South.

Conclusions:

You, Jonathan Tobin, really should read a long essay that deals with the subject thoroughly.  It is "Why the Civil War Was Not About Slavery," by Professor Donald Livingston of Emory University.  I'm sure you'll find it uncomfortable having all of your prized myths exploded before your very eyes.  I am also sure that you will not be able to offer any serious rebuttal.

Let your education begin, Jonathan Tobin, at the following link.

And I'll be waiting to hear from you about that debate.

Note to Confederate Descendants: Don't Back Down on the Confederate Flag #Charleston #Confederate

Note to those who support the Confederate flag: DON'T BACK DOWN.

Don't be tepid or tentative in your support of the flag. Our opposition to Northern cultural bigotry and historical (and hysterical) ignorance must be firm and unflinching. We are right, and they are wrong. View the issue with the moral clarity it deserves.

Anti-Southern bigotry is possibly one of my biggest triggers.  I wrote about that some time ago, in a previous post from 2010.  In that post I noted that the Civil War was then, and this is now.  I said that I wanted to work with Northerner conservatives in our modern political struggles, and not refight a war of 150 years ago.  However, I noted that the Civil War (better described as The War for Southern Independence) tapped deep emotions in me, and had the power to make me hate.  I stated that I don't like to hate and seek to avoid that emotion whenever possible, because happiness and hate cannot coexist.  This week, however, I feel the negative emotion returning.  

Why?  Because Yankees, liberals and Southerners ignorant of their own history keep re-invading the South.  They buy into the Northern Myth.  Intellectually lazy, they go along with the popular mythology that casts the Confederates into the role of villain.  They dishonor our Confederate ancestors and grossly misrepresent their cause.  Now they want to finish the wishes of General Sherman to exterminate all Southerners completely, by insisting that the Confederate flag be relegated to museums, viewed only as a dishonorable artifact.

"We must show manners to those who find the flag objectionable," they write.  Why is it that we must show manners but they do not?  Why do their feelings count but not ours?  

Arm yourselves with knowledge of Southern history.  I suggest you can do that by reading a previously posted article by Professor Donald Livingston of Emory University, "Why the Civil War Was Not About Slavery."

The Confederate Flag Stays: Deal With It

As a Confederate descendant who is well read on the history of the War for Southern Independence, I revere the Confederate flag.  It is the flag of my country and my ancestors.  In light of the Charleston murders, we are now seeing a lot of liberals and mainstream Republicans calling for the removal of the flag from public display.

Mitt Romney tweeted that the flag should come down.  He tweets

Take down the #ConfederateFlag at the SC Capitol. To many, it is a symbol of racial hatred. Remove it now to honor #Charleston victims.

I answered him with this:

Saber Point ‏@Stogie2  20m20 minutes ago

@MittRomney I regret voting for you Mitt. The flag stays. Take down the flag of Utah, it's a symbol of a false prophet and polygamy.

And of course, there's "Old Gorey" that many associate with invasion of the South, war on women and children, the genocide of the American Indian, the theft of Hawaii from its Queen and its people, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Oh yes, and it flew over Northern slave ships who brought the slaves to America in the first place.

The point is, a flag means different things to different people. We Confederate descendants do not accept Mitt Romney's definition or our flag, nor that of the Daily Kos, Karl Rove, Jeb Bush or any other cultural bigot who wishes to bully us into accepting their skewed view of history and their narrow, superficial and ignorant opinion of what the flag means.

Here are the motivations of the flag haters:

1. Moral vanity. Nothing pleases a liberal more than asserting his alleged moral superiority over someone else. What is an easier way to pose and posture as a great humanitarian, then to further cultural bigotry against the South?

2. To legitimize the Northern Myth, the huge lie that the North invaded the South to free the slaves because they were just so morally righteous and broad minded and enlightened. The truth is that the North hated blacks, wanted them kept out of the new territories, made laws prohibiting their presence, and planned to deport them all back to Africa or elsewhere. They went to war to force the Southern states back into the Union for economic reasons; slavery had nothing or very little to do with it. An independent South would have free trade and open ports, thus ending the Northern tariff on imported goods. A massive relocation of jobs and revenues would quickly flow from the North to the South. This would have created an economic boom in the South, but would have impoverished the North, who depended on the South continuing to pay 80% of the taxes collected by the federal government, and whose dock workers, shipping companies, railroads, textile mills and warehouses would soon find themselves out of work. Yes, this is all well documented in the newspapers of the time. When asked why he would not simply let the South go, Lincoln exclaimed "Let the South go? Who will pay my tariff?"

3. To legitimize the consolidation of the once sovereign states into subordinate entities inferior to and controlled by the federal government. Today this is effectively being accomplished through federal courts, who overturn state laws and legislate from the bench.

4. To legitimize the federal government's "right" to invade the individual states and make war on their citizens, using force to impose its will. We are continually moving in that direction today.  A nationalized police force is in the works.  Once accomplished, all American states will be effectively occupied by the federal government.

Here's why we will never agree:

Taking down the flag would mean acquiescing to bullies who wish to force their viewpoint on us, a viewpoint that is erroneous, insulting, self-serving and false. It would mean replacing our superior knowledge of history with the superficial myths the flag-haters learned from popular media, Hollywood and Northern-biased textbooks. It would also require us to legitimize the slander that our flag represents racial hatred and is thus a dishonorable symbol.  We will not allow knowledge to be replaced with ignorance, or truth with falsehood.  We will never agree to your slander.

History, or what is alleged to be history, is a major political weapon. The fight over history will largely influence how current and future generations see the Republic: as a collection of sovereign states with the right to self-govern and even secede, or as consolidation of those states into an increasingly oppressive federal tyranny from which there is no refuge, remedy or escape.

Leave our flag alone.

The Vast Universe

I watched another YouTube video last night.  This one was about the search for E.T., i.e. extraterrestrial life.  One organization heavily involved in this research is SETI, which stands for Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.  SETI does this with huge dish antennae aimed at the stars.  What they are looking for are radio wave patterns that might indicate a transmitter somewhere up there in the blue.  This isn't easy, because space is already very noisy with radio waves, a virtual cacophony of background noise.

The universe is incredibly vast, huge beyond human comprehension.  Many of the stars and constellations we see in the night sky are millions of light years away.  What we are seeing is not how they look today, but how they looked millions of years ago.  We are looking at the past.

If SETI detects transmissions from an intelligent presence somewhere in space, the transmission it receives may have been traveling through space for thousands or even millions of years.  We may prove that "they" (E.T.) are out there, but due to the vast distances between us, we will never have a two-way conversation with them.

This brings up the question of E.T. visitations to earth -- the so-called UFO phenomenon.  If aliens from space have been visiting earth, they would have had to come from far away, traveling hundreds or thousands of light years, to get here.  If our understanding of the laws of physics are accurate, visitors from other star systems would be impossible, due to the distances involved.

This assumption, of course, is based on our current understanding of physics.  Civilizations that are thousands of years more advanced than we may disagree.  Their advanced technology may have found a way to traverse those incredible distances in a much faster way.

By the way, a light year is a measurement of distance.  It is the distance that light travels in one year.  Since light travels at 186,000 miles per second, a light year is 365.25 days x 24 hrs x 60 minutes x 60 seconds = 31,557,600 seconds in a year x 186,000 miles per second = 5,869,713,600,000 miles.

So a light year is a distance of 5.87 trillion miles, rounded off.  Betty and Barney Hill reported that their alien abductors hailed from the star system called Zeta Reticuli, which is 39.17 light years from Earth.  That's only a short hop by universe standards, but still an incomprehensible distance for human beings.  It's 230 trillion miles.

How fast is the speed of light in miles per hour?  It would be calculated as 186,000 x 60 x 60, or 669,600,000 miles per hour.  Even so, if a radio signal were sent out from one side of our galaxy to the other, it would take around 100,000 years to make the trip.

(Damn, I love what you can do with Excel.)

Stoking the Fires of Race Hatred

We have recently had our share of troubles here in the USA.  Blacks burn down Ferguson and Baltimore.  Racial hatred, particularly from blacks to everyone else, is white hot, no pun intended.  Now the church shooting in Charleston has again raised the masses, both black and white, to a fever pitch.

Liberals, leftists, Democrats ruthlessly try to stoke the fires of division.  Without a doubt, the hatreds and resentments of black America are largely a product of the Democratic Party and its job-killing, race baiting policies.  Only if blacks are motivated by hatred, fear and revenge, will they show up at the polls to vote Democrat.  So the Democratic campaign of propaganda must continue, i.e.:  blacks are the incessant victims of virulent white racism, blacks can never get equal treatment in jobs, education or any walk of life, Republicans all hate you if you're black, and whenever you do anything destructive or damaging, it's not your fault.

What American blacks need is the sobering truth, told and retold:  you are the authors of your own lives.  Your failures, lack of life skills, unemployment, high crime rate, dysfunctional families, bad attitudes are all your own fault, nobody else's.  Collectively, you are the biggest screw-ups in America, and the rest of Americans are less safe, less prosperous, less peaceful by your presence.  It's time to stop being the problem child of the American family.  Clean up your act.  Change your rotten, hostile attitudes.  From now on, you will be held accountable for your disastrous life choices, your failures, your dysfunctional communities.  Get your shit together.  Our patience with you grows thinner each day.

Let me lay it out for you, black folks:
1.  Stay in school until you graduate.
2.  Don't get anyone pregnant until you are old enough to marry them and support them and your child.
3.  Don't commit crime:  don't steal, rob, beat someone or kill anyone.  Keep your record clean.
4.  Stay off drugs.
5.  Accept responsibility whenever you screw up and violate any of the first four items.
6.  STFU about "racism."  Accept the fact that it is your own rotten behavior and attitudes that cause the racial prejudice directed at you.  You are major contributors to so-called racism. You are far from the innocent sheep you pretend to be.  HINT:  take a look at crime statistics by race.  Guess who are the worst offenders?
7.  Get a job.  Learn job skills.  Continually add to those skills with education and training.  Stay off welfare.
8.  Keep your family together, love your kids, teach them the civilizational skills they need to prosper:  education, job training, basic manners, good citizenship, responsible parenthood, racial and religious tolerance, personal responsibility.

It ain't rocket science folks.  Every other ethnic group in the country has long ago figured it out.  Why can't you?

A Note From Roger Glass Re: UFOs and Flying Saucers

Note From Stogie:

I received the following email from Roger Glass, thoroughly rebutting what I didn't say or mean in my article about Flying Saucers.  I specifically exposed certain known fakers of UFO phenomena, discussed their possible motivations, and described some credible tales of alien abductions.   I did not and do not deny the possibility of extraterrestrial visitations to earth.

However, Roger ignored my specific points of discussion and inappropriately launched into a blanket defense of all UFO phonomena. I do not and did not deny the reality of UFO sightings, and did not deal with that in my article at all.  Unidentified Flying Objects exist and are continually being sighted and reported, but how many of them (if any) are alien spaceships?  That has not been determined or proved. (What part of "unidentified" does Roger not understand?)  It is safe to say that most UFOs are weather balloons, planets, stars, kites, planes, helicopters, blimps, birds, weather inversions, swamp gas, northern lights, meteors or optical illusions.  All of Roger's links point to people who saw strange lights or objects in the sky.  Big deal.

I am publishing his thoughts here for anyone who wants to follow Roger's links.

From Roger Glass:

You and your correspondents go round and round on the same old popular culture fluff and chestnuts. Why don't you address the serious evidence?

Cmdr. Edward P. Stafford wrote of his flying saucer incident in the October, 2004 issue of Naval History (not exactly a flying saucer magazine), published by the U.S. Naval Institute (hardly a flying saucer organization). You can find a reproduction of the article here.

The flying saucer account of Cmdr. Stafford is unambiguous - either he was lying, or his air crewmen were lying, or they saw flying saucers. So what sort of man was Cmdr. Stafford?

He served as technical advisor on the Pearl Harbor movie Tora, Tora, Tora. In the wikipedia article on WWII aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, he is cited multiple times in the footnotes, because his bookThe Big E (see what Amazon reviewers have said about it here) is the definitive reference text on this ship. You can go also to Amazon.com and see what readers have written about his other works. One of them (Little Ship, Big War) can even be read for free at openlibrary.org.

Would a man of this caliber concoct a flying saucer tale? Over his long and honorable career, there is no record of any conduct that would cast doubt on the excellent reputation he earned. And except for the one incident, he had nothing to do with UFOs.

As another example, there's Deke Slayton's account of his sighting, as an air force P-51 pilot, beginning at page 49 in his autobiography; there's also a youtube clip of him recalling the experience. He tells his story without embellishment. Major Slayton himself was noncommittal as to his encounter. And rightfully so, given what he thought he saw. Nevertheless, the narrative, taken as a whole, undeniably leans heavily toward the "exotic flying craft of unknown origin" explanation.

And yet additionally, there's the O'Hare Airport sighting.

The Stafford, Slayton, and O'Hare incidents are noted first, because all the necessary information is immediately accessible online, and the Stafford account is particularly compelling.

But these are only three out of thousands of incidents experienced by military and commercial pilots, crews, and radar operators, as reported in mainstream publications big and small. The witnesses recount exotic flying craft performing evolutions beyond the capabilities of known vehicles - instantaneous acceleration from standstill to thousands of mph, 90 degree turns at extreme speed, etc. Many of these encounters involve both close and extended pilot and crew sightings, in combination with radar confirmation.

Of course there's radar malfunction and visual misidentification. But to this extent? At what point do such prosaic explanations stop being reasonable?

Actually, every ten or twenty years or so, some meticulous compiler (Leslie Kean, Richard Hall, Allen Hynek) publishes a new collection of such encounters. And in fact Hynek's book, as can be seen by clicking the above link, is also available for free at openlibrary.org.

And particularly as to Leslie Kean, she was a reporter for the Boston Globe. In 1999 a group of French flag officers and senior scientists issued the COMETA Report, a UFO study concluding that some of them are extraterrestrial vehicles. Among the contributors were four-star General Bernard Norlain, former commander of the French Tactical Air Force and military counselor to the prime minister; General Denis Letty, an air force fighter pilot; and Andre Lebeau, former head of the National Center for Space Studies, the French equivalent of NASA – not to mention a three-star admiral, the national chief of police, and weapons engineers. Considering the credentials of such participants, Ms. Kean thought that the publication of this report would be an earthshaking development. Apparently, not so much.

But she was moved to look into the matter herself. The result was the book already linked above - UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, an exhaustively researched account of some of the best UFO cases. Elsewhere Ms. Kean writes about one of the incidents from her book:

"As an example, Brig. Gen. Jose Periera of Brazil, commander of air force operations until 2005, reports on an 'array of UFOs' observed over his country in 1986. Two pilots chased one of the objects for 30 minutes. Numerous other pilots saw the objects. Radar recorded them. Six jets were scrambled from two Brazilian air force bases to pursue them. Some of the pilots made visual contact corresponding to radar registrations. Both military and commercial pilots were involved. Onboard as well as ground radar systems confirmed the presence of the objects.

“'We have the correlation of independent readings from different sources,' Periera writes. 'These data have nothing to do with human eyes. When, along with the radar, a pilot‘s pair of eyes sees that same thing, and then another pilot‘s, and so on, the incident has real credibility and stands on a solid foundation.'”

Any reasonable and objective person who considers the evidence for flying saucers must conclude that they are real.

"Flying saucers are real. Too many good men have seen them, that don't have hallucinations."Eddie Rickenbacker

Curtis LeMay warns Barry Goldwater to shut up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPFBg1NNUBU

Admiral Lord Hill Norton, former British CNO, doesn't suffer fools

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E_SFwrh8wo

Deke Slaytonhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E_SFwrh8wo

Police from multiple jurisdictions successively track UFOhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhdTs4UnL1g

Sick Freak Murders Nine in Black Charleston Church; Irrational Outpouring of Outrage Ensues

Another freakazoid has murdered people with a gun.  This time the perpetrator is one Dylann Roof, who resembles another mass murderer, Adam Lanza, who shot and killed 26 people in 2012, including 20 children in their classroom.  Come to think of it, he also resembles Jared Loughner, the mass murderer of Arizona.  All of these freaks remind me of the in-bred banjo player of "Deliverance" fame, but only in appearance.  They are nuts, crazy psychopaths -- and they can't even play the banjo.

Roof shot and killed nine parishioners in a Charleston church on June 17, 2015.  His apparent motive was that he hated black people.  The killing has invoked passionate debate, about gun control, the Confederate flag, and the collective guilt of white people for racism.

Now for some points that will prove unwelcome in the frenzied search for culprits in the aftermath of the crime.

1.  White people are less "racist" (I hate that overused word) than black people.  Some black people have been calling for a race war for some time, on Twitter and elsewhere.  Blacks have been shooting cops since Michael Brown was killed in the act of assaulting a white police officer, and expressing hatred of whites and advocating murder of policemen everywhere.

2.  Blacks commit murders and other crimes against whites in far greater proportion than the opposite.  Bad attitudes, racial prejudice and an inability to be held accountable for these things are endemic within the black community.  These facts are bound to increase prejudice against blacks by others, not only by whites, but also by Hispanics, Asians and Jews, who are frequently the victims of black violence and crime.

Colin Flaherty writes in the American Thinker, in an article titled The War on Black People in South Carolina: the First Casualty is Truth:

In Charleston, locals know racial violence is far more widespread than that. Only it is far more likely to be black on white.

And:

A black person is 50 times more likely to assault a white person than the other way around. The black on white rape numbers are even more out of proportion when compared to white on black sexual assault.

And also:

Violent crime in Charleston, like the rest of the country, is a black thing: Black on white violence is wildly out of proportion. The latest killings do not change that. Nor do the efforts of local and national reporters to ignore, deny, condone, excuse, encourage and even lie about it.

3.  The Confederate flag had nothing to do with the crime.  However, the Daily Kos and other leftist sites are calling for the flag to be removed from public display in South Carolina.  Lindsay Graham has defended the flag and stated that it will not come down.  Graham is right.  Confederate descendants, and there are millions of us, love the flag for other than "racist" reasons.  It's not coming down, and those who don't like it can self-copulate.

4.  Dylann Roof's crime is not a factor of his political leanings.  Whether he is a Democrat or a Republican is irrelevant.  The little punk is nuts, crazy and insane.  Insanity is not a political persuasion.  Rabid political partisans on either side should stop trying to make political hay out of the tragedy.

5.  There are many good black people who have thrown their lot in with the forces of tolerance and civilization.  Many blacks in the South identify with the Confederate flag and are aware that the Northern Myth (of fighting the Civil War to free the slaves) is a lie of Biblical proportions. The criticisms in this post are not directed towards them.  Every man and woman is an individual, to be judged on his or her own merits alone.

6.  We will not give up our guns, and become helpless against a central government that seeks greater and greater control over our lives and liberties, as well as defenseless against violent criminals.  It is a shame that insane people periodically murder innocents with guns, and solutions must be sought to alleviate this.  However, such tragedies will have to be endured until solutions are found that do not remove guns from law-abiding citizens.

That's the way I see it anyhow.

Flying Saucers: the Need to Believe; Why People Fake It

I'm interested in all sorts of things, UFO's being one of them.  However, I am a skeptic on the subject, possessed of an open mind but not a gullible one.

For almost seventy years now we have been reading and hearing about strange spacecraft and weird-looking aliens, traversing our skies, landing in our fields, and even capturing people for medical tests.  I remember as a child, circa 1952, seeing a Clovis, New Mexico newspaper with the headline, "Don't Worry, Saucer Men Fear Us Too."  There was a picture of a flying saucer at the top of the page.  I remember being astounded by this news, and very confused by it.  Even as a child, I knew that there was "true stuff" and "make-believe," and now the two were merging.  I felt very uncomfortable with this.  Fantasy and fact were now seemingly interchangeable.  Even then, however, I was not totally convinced.  Somewhere in my psyche I felt this tug of doubt.  I would believe it when I saw it for myself.

Half-Way Credible Stories of Alien Abductions

I again felt this cognitive dissonance, of fact vs fiction, belief butting up hard against skepticism, when in 1961 the Betty and Barney Hill story broke.  The Hills were a married couple who were returning from a motor trip.  When they arrived home, they noticed the time of their arrival was all wrong.  They were somehow missing several hours of time, for which they had no memory.  They sought the help of a psychiatrist.  He hypnotically regressed the Hills to remember the missing time period.

The Hills both recalled being stopped on the road by strange looking humanoids who took them aboard a spacecraft to medically examine them.  Barney expressed great terror and anxiety during his hypnotically induced recollection -- even screaming -- he wasn't faking.  The psychiatrist was convinced that the Hills truly believed these recollections to be true; however, that alone does not prove them scientifically.  There could be another explanation, as yet undiscovered.

Nevertheless, the Hill story remains, in my mind, one of the most believable tales of alien abduction on record. Their story is in book form as "The Interrupted Journey."  I have read it more than once.

The second abduction story that holds any credibility for me is "Fire In The Sky," the story of a woodman, Travis Walton.  His abduction allegedly occurred in Arizona in 1975, when his work crew sighted a hovering saucer in a forest.  Walton left his group's pickup to approach the craft, and was zapped by some kind of energy beam.  His fellow woodmen workers high-tailed it out of there, leaving Walton to his fate.  When they later returned to the scene, Walton was nowhere to be found.  Organized search parties scoured the woods but found no trace of Walton.

Walton claims he was examined by the extraterrestrials and released five days later.  Five of these men who were with Walton later passed a lie-detector test, with one inconclusive, about what they had witnessed.  Some time later, all seven passed lie detector tests.

Walton writes:

I looked past the upper edge of the device. I could see the blurry figures of the doctors, leaning over me with their white masks and caps. They were wearing unusual, orange-colored surgical gowns. I could not make out their faces clearly.
Abruptly my vision cleared. The sudden horror of what I saw rocked me as I realized that I was definitely not in a hospital.
I was looking squarely into the face of a horrible creature! It looked steadily back at me with huge, luminous brown eyes the size of quarters.

UPDATE:  I must add one more credible alien abduction story to my short list.  That would be the Allagash Abduction, which occurred in 1976.  I just read the book, "The Allagash Abductions" by Raymond E. Fowler.  The incident involved four fishermen/campers in the Allagash wilderness (on the east coast) who were allegedly abducted right out of their canoe by an alien spacecraft, then subjected to the usual medical examination.  The aliens are described as taking skin scrapings, blood and semen samples, as well as hair, urine and feces.  All four men were hypnotically regressed separately, and all related the same story and set of facts.  All passed lie detector tests.  Their abductors were the usual suspects, skinny, short humanoids with big heads and large, oval eyes.  Their faces resembled those of insects, e.g. ants.

The abduction stories that hold any credibility for me are those that
1.  Involve witnesses or multiple abductees, who can corroborate the story of the others;
2.  Involve abductees who can be hypnotically regressed to remember details of the experience;
3.  Involve abductees who successfully pass lie detector tests;
4.  Involve credible abductees and/or witnesses of good character with no history of fraud, trickery, mental illness or delusions.

There is other evidence of strange phenomena that holds little credibility for me.  The tired old story of Roswell, New Mexico, for instance.  Big Foot.  Area 51.  The Loch Ness Monster.  Crop circles.  Chupacabras.  Fairies.  A million YouTube videos of blurry things in the sky.  Rubber aliens on operating tables. Yawn.  There are many credulous fools who will believe any sort of nonsense.  As for me, I demand my nonsense be more sophisticated than that.

Famous Fakers:  How and Why They Do It

Lately I have been fighting boredom by poking around UFO stories on the Internet and YouTube.  I have become aware of several apparent fakers.  Two of the most egregious are described below.  

Stan Romanek.  One is Stan Romanek.  I read his book "Messages," and he claims he has been monitored, studied, mentored and guarded by space aliens from a very early age.  For some reason, space aliens are just enchanted with this guy.  They visit him at home.  They write him letters and call him "Star Seed."  They follow him to a fireworks display on the Fourth of July.  They sneak inside his house and snap pics of themselves with his digital camera.  They peek in his front window at night, and are videotaped by a camera Stan set up for other purposes (check it out on YouTube). These "aliens" are just cleverly-made puppets.  Reading or watching Romanek's stuff, my bullshit detector goes off the scale. 

Billy Meier.  Billy Meier is a citizen of Switzerland.  In the late 1970's he made quite a splash by showing stunning pictures of (alleged) alien spacecraft around the area of his home, as well as some videos and audio recordings of the eerie sounds made by the spacecraft.

I watched a pro-Meiers documentary from 1978, wherein Meiers was interviewed about his claimed friendship with space aliens from the Pleieades star system.  His photos and videos are impressive, in that they were made at a time before Photoshop and CGI were available to fake such things.  The documentary shows his photos, videos and audios being subjected to 1978 technical, scientific analysis, with the verdict that they are authentic, not manipulated, not obviously fake.  He is given a kind of simplified lie-detector test which he passes.  

Some years later, various debunkers showed how Meier's photos and videos could be convincingly reproduced with models, held aloft with fishing line, using Bonsai trees as background to make the models look much bigger.  The weird sounds in Meier's recordings of the space ships was only the whining of the fishing line, producing an acoustic effect in the wind, with the model UFO's acting as natural amplifiers.  

Sorry Billy.  I call Bullshit.

The "spacecraft" at left is the Type 4 craft identified and photographed by Billy Meier.  Something about it always bothered me.  It was those metal teeth sticking up around the circular edge.  There was something downright industrial about them. 

Then I remembered.  Years ago I worked in a chemical company.  We shipped samples of product in 5 gallon metal drums.  The lids had these metallic teeth, for use with a crimping tool, to secure the lids to the drums.  Some hubcaps from automobiles also have similar teeth, to hold them in place.   The metal teeth on Meier's saucer appear to be an industrial drum lid turned upside down, either that or a hubcap.  Upon thinking about it, I think it is probably the latter.  Somewhere in Switzerland, a 1951 Packard is missing a hubcap.

Meier was caught earlier using a trash can lid for his "wedding cake" saucer.  He forgot to disguise the lid's handle.

Why Do Fakers Fake It?

I'm not a psychiatrist, but it seems to me that fakers do it for the following reasons:

1.  To feel special and important.  If a highly advanced civilization from outer space considers me to be the spokesmen for humankind, well then, I must be vastly superior mentally and morally to all you other slugs.  Billy Meier, for instance, claims to have been given important forecasts for the future, prophecies which must be heeded if mankind is to survive.  He thus has used his UFO shtick to elevate himself to the level of a prophet, seer or sage, a savior of mankind. 

2.  To get attention, praise and acclaim.  I notice that many of these UFO fakers are not particularly impressive in their real lives.  Not much accomplishment:  no higher degrees, no high paying jobs.  They weren't heroes of the grid iron or the battlefield.  They aren't great-looking sex symbols by any means.  They were largely invisible to society prior to their "visitations."  Now, however, they are famous, at least somewhat.

3.  To make money.  Money can be made by selling books and pamphlets to the UFO community, as well as through speaking fees and public appearances.

Another Case:  Pier Fortunato Zanfretta; closing thoughts.  I am currently reading about another "abductee" from the same time as Billy Meiers, an Italian citizen named Pier Fortunato Zanfretta.  I started reading this book because of the hype that it was the most perfect abductee case on record, solid, unassailable.  I'll reserve judgment for the end, but my BS Detector needle is starting to quiver.  Zanfretta has been abducted four times by the same group of tall, green monsters.  It is he, a security guard, that they want to carry information to earthling leaders for them.  This, in spite of his reluctance and strong protests.  He only wants to be left alone.  The aliens give him a special device for communicating with them, and ask him to give it to Dr. Hynek, the famous UFO researcher with Project Blue Book. But the surly Zanfretta throws the device at the wall, breaking it.  Still, the aliens refuse to see anyone other than Zanfretta, even though a team of scientists have asked Zanfretta to recommend them as substitutes.

Suspicious.  However, there is evidence in Zanfretta's favor.  He is hypnotically regressed, like Betty and Barney Hill, to remember his abductions.  His descriptions are consistent and non-contradictory.  He expresses great fear under hypnosis, as he relives the incidents.  Further, when found immediately after his first encounter with the aliens, very large footprints are found around his car at the scene (the aliens are about 12 feet tall), as well as a large circular imprint in the grass, perhaps the outline of the spacecraft.  There is other physical evidence and eye witnesses who also saw UFO's in the area.  Okay, I'll keep reading.  Maybe the aliens are just dumb-asses, preferring as their contact a security guard to learned scientists.

We'll see.

Update:  I finished the Zanfretta book.  The conclusion was disappointing, and I count myself with the disbelievers of this story.  After several hypnotic regressions, the hypnotist notices that Zanfretta no longer responds to hypnotic suggestions or commands.  Some people cannot be hypnotized.  Was Zanfretta faking hypnosis the whole time?

Other disturbing facts:  the aliens promise to give Zanfertta a new communication device (described as a metal pyramid encased in a glass ball), to replace the one he smashed.  However, this is never accomplished.  The aliens also promise to reveal themselves to the scientists working with Zanfretta, but they never do.  The story just peters out and dies.  Later psychological examinations of Zanfretta indicate that he may be prone to delusions.  Like all stories of dubious authenticity, no one except the abductee ever sees the aliens, their ship, or any other physical proof of their existence.

This article has been updated and edited since its first publication.

Nike of Samothrace: a Photoshop Reconstruction of Winged Victory #samothrace, #Nike #WingedVictory #Photoshop

Nike was the Greek goddess of victory.  In 1863, archaeologists found a shattered statue of Nike on the Greek island of Samothrace.  It was carted back to the Louvre Museum where it was reassembled.  The head, arms and the right wing were missing.  A reverse plaster cast was made of the left wing and attached as the right wing to give an idea of what the statue originally looked like.  In 1948, the right hand was found, missing all but one finger and the thumb.  It too is displayed in the Louvre.

The statue was constructed around 150 - 250 BC, and was originally displayed on a marble base, made in the shape of a ship's prow.  It is believed that the figure was constructed to celebrate some long-forgotten Naval victory.  The name of the very talented artist has also been lost to history.

A couple of years back I attempted a Photoshop reconstruction, and received comments from several people who have viewed the statue in the Louvre.  Based on their comments and suggestions, I updated and improved my reconstruction.  It is below, showing the statue as it now exists, and what it might have looked like when new.  I based my reconstruction on various other statues of Nike.  She is holding a laurel wreath, symbol of victory.

Egyptian Fantasy: LOOK MA! ART! (#photoshop #sphinx #egypt)

One of the neat things about Photoshop is that you can reuse your creations to make new ones.

I did this Photoshop art this morning just for fun.