Ufological Speculation

The current issue of The New Yorker magazine [7/21/14], in Briefly Noted [Page 81] has this about writers who’ve written books, one about Freud and one about The Beat Generation.

In the paragraph about Becoming Freud by Adam Phillips (Yale), is this:

“Talking [Freud’s] admonishments about writing biographies, Phillips, a psychoanalyst himself,  attempts ‘a Freudian life of the young Freud.” The result is anti-biography. Phillips eschews scene setting, character sketches, and chronology, in favor of a string of musings on the first fifty or so years of Freud’s life.”

And this from the notation of American Smoke by Iain Sinclair (Faber) “ … the result is beguiling, full of sparkling prose and odd, unexpected detours … his trip is mostly a journey of the imagination.” [Italics mine]

This is what writers do. The conjure up the truth from associations and connections that spur their imaginations, causing a fictive work that approaches truth often more truthfully than a factual rendition of data and information that is gathered from disparate and controversial sources.

Great writing – Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Joyce, et al. – is a product of imaginative speculation that harbors truths that facts often miss.

David Rudiak gathers facts and tries to allow those facts to bespeak truths that aren’t exactly there but seem to be – his Ramey speculations, for example. (His Ramey thesis is interesting and imaginative but shorn of proof. However, had he allowed his views to be speculative rather than a presentation of reality, his observations would have been more readily accepted by UFO cognoscenti.)

David bludgeons his followers with a treasure trove of information, but while less is more, for him, more is more and he provides a cascade of information that doesn’t gel in the imagination of his readers.

David writes, a lot, but he isn’t a writer.

He now is taking me to task for my speculative views on Bernerd Ray, Silas Newton, Roswell, and Aztec, pressing for proofs and “facts” that are just not available at this late date.

I’m left to speculate on what may be a truth that I imagine – Silas Newton was presented some photos of a Roswell incident that Bernerd Ray had captured on film; Silas Newton taking the story as a ploy for nefarious activity, creating an Aztec scenario, that he got Frank Scully, a writer/reporter, to see as an actual account – Skully’s imaginative faculties filling in the blanks that Newton’s tale were fraught with, and so we have Behind the Flying Saucers.

Speculation can get one in trouble sometimes and particularly when it comes to criminal investigations, if one isn’t careful.

But in ufology or cosmology or anything else, imaginative speculation is a doorway to truths, as Einstein found out as well as and, in particular, quantum physicists who discovered that when dealing with the evanescent aspects of quantum mechanics.

Theoretical physicists are prime examples of speculative thinkers (and writers).

One has to take what exists in the way of information and mold it to portray a truth that they see as possible – not true perhaps, in the factual sense, but true in another way: encompassing possibilities that could be real.

David Rudiak did this with his Ramey hypothesis, but his presentation is hammered too hard, causing readers of his foray to shy away. Mr. Rudiak is proselytizing, on behalf of his bias, that extraterrestrials exist, fly in UFOs or saucers, and crashed near Roswell in 1947.

It’s an acceptable view – to me.

But when I conjecture that Bernerd Ray and Silas Newton were in contact (or more), derived from their similar professions, locale, and circumstantial employment situation, Mr. Rudiak questions my speculation, as do Frank Warren and Scott Ramsey, all of whom think Aztec happened as Frank Scully told it.

But Aztec did not happen as Frank Scully had it. He was, unknown to him at the time, regurgitating the Roswell tale as reconfigured by Silas Newton (for the reasons I have enumerated earlier here).

David Rudiak can’t accept my speculation which has more grist than the vague blotches in his enlarged Ramey memo.

That’s okay with me. After all, as French UFO skeptic Gilles Fernandez often remind us, “That’s ufology.”

UFOs and its pseudo-science are too silly or ephemeral to get worked up about.

Even the so-called Roswell slides are nothing to get worked up about: they will end up proving nothing, except that someone took photos of a strange thing, in an unknown place, at an unknown time.

But speculative writing about UFOs and its mimesis will continue here, and elsewhere I hope. It’s entertaining, and I would hope approaches truths that facts can’t emulate.

RR