Ufology’s Academic Mistake(s)

David Rudiak is irked by my approach to the Aztec and Roswell stories.

Let me explain so that even he understands what I’m doing…

Aztec is, for me, a fiction. I tackle it as a fiction.

Roswell has become mythic. One should deal with the 1947 event as a myth, using the academic methodologies for mythology.

George Adamski’s tales are a contrivance (created for reasons not quite clear, but concocted surely). One should treat Adamski and his contacts as part of a self-generated creation.

Many of the UFO accounts provided here and at his blog-site by Jose Antonio Caravaca are delusions, and should be treated with psychological methodologies.

Mr. Rudiak sees Roswell as a substantive 1947 event and treats it forensically, which is admirable, in an odd way.

French UFO skeptic Gilles Fernandez, Lance Moody, and CDA (perhaps) see Roswell as a myth, developed by Stanton Friedman’s 1978 intrusion and developing as a mythos until today (2104).

To deal or treat Roswell as something other than a mythos grates the skeptics.

Treating Aztec as a real event, with real chronologies, data, and facts, when it is a fiction, created by Silas Newton and exacerbated, unknowingly as a real event, by Frank Scully, would be foolish.

To try and obtain factual material for a fictive event or story would be stupid on the face of it.

One can gather supportive materials that underlie a fiction, but to take that supportive material into a realm of reportage and fact would be a nonsensical activity.

Mr. Rudiak doesn’t get what premises my speculation, even though I gave him and readers here a heads up with the two New Yorker excerpts in the posting preceding this one.

I like Mr. Rudiak. I think he has accumulated much about Roswell and UFOs generally that is valuable.

But he isn’t academic in his approach. He misses the nuances of speculation. He’s a tyro when it comes to how writers work, what they are trying to do, what truths they are trying to determine using something other than concrete facts or data.

When I say Aztec derives from Roswell, that seems, to me, to follow from the time-line, the persons involved, and the details that intersect between Aztec and Roswell: downed flying saucers, with bodies and a military cover-up.

Mr. Rudiak wants more. He wants me to concretize a fiction.

I’d like to accommodate him, but his obsession is not mine and I’m not going to chase that dog’s tail, just to assuage his obsession with the ETH.

RR