But there is also a lot of hooey amongst and within most (almost all?) UFO accounts, from Kenneth Arnold, Roswell, right up to today.
Martin Kottmeyer, a self-sobriquetted debunker has addressed many of UFO's crème de la crème tales.
Here are two excerpts from his Gauche Encounters: Bad films and the UFO Mythos:
"Beyond the science concerns, the artistry of the ufo phenomenon is archly phoney [sic]. The aliens are a hokey blend of human chauvinisms. Good aliens are always beautiful fair-skinned Aryan race ideals. Bad aliens are a potpourri of horror movie clichés - Men in Black, Big Brains, Big Bugs, mummies, reptoids, spooky eyes. Though the aliens supposedly possess a technology centuries in advance of our own, they often appear to be backward and abysmally stupid. They have yet to discover drugs that wipe out short-term memory; something earthlings have already done. There is a case of an abductee who is captured by a mechanical clamp which looks like a gizmo cooked up by a Buck Rogers fan with Alzheimer's. Battlefield meatball surgeons routinely outperform the super-veterinarians of the ufo phenomenon. The aliens don't even appear to update their equipment. In the Schirmer case, aliens are using computers with reel-to-reel tape. Instead of nano-tech robot probes and hand-held smart scanners, they still use needles, knives, and lumbering lab machines. Instead of gene programmers, they still have to harvest ova and sperm on the sly like gothic body snatchers gathering parts for mad Frankenstein style experiments. Their incompetence extends to having restraints so poor that one specimen, Travis Walton, manages to escape and gain access to a saucer control room.
"The remainder of Betty's nightmares seem to involve distortions of the 1953 alien invasion nightmare classic Invaders from Mars. In her original dream, Betty compares the noses of her captors to that of Jimmy Durante. A glance at the poster to the movie will quickly confirm the mutants in the film have noses that rival Durante's. Betty describes her captors as Mongoloid, itself a mutant genetic form. There are some preliminary tests and then Betty lies down on an examining table. The female abductee in Invaders from Mars also finds herself on an examining table. Needles are placed on various parts of Betty Hill's body including the back of the neck. Some strands of hair are also taken from the back of her neck. In Invaders from Mars, a needle is used to try to implant a device in the back of the neck of the abductee. Betty Hill then sees a needle, longer than any needle she has ever seen before. It is placed into her navel. She experiences great pain. The examiner puts his hands over her eyes, rubs, and the pain stops. In Invaders from Mars the abductee first struggles when placed on the examining table and then a light is shown in her eyes and she calms down, lapsing into unconsciousness. Then a curious image appears on the movie screen. It has an ambiguous character. Correctly interpreted, it is an overhead shot of the alien surgical theatre which reveals some of the architecture of the saucer. Dominant in the image is a large tubular beam or conduit connecting the ceiling to the floor. It bears a marked stylistic similarity to the needle being used in the implanting operation. A confusion is invited. The tubular beam and its plastic sheath takes on the appearance of the hypodermic needle. The lighting of the floor of the saucer gives the illusion of the curvature of an abdomen. The place where floor and conduit meet is tightly surrounded by a circular indentation. It's the navel. This, I believe, is the origin of Betty's bizarre image of the needle in the navel. Either she misperceived it during the watching of the film, probably on black and white TV, or her consciousness spun out the alternate interpretation in constructing the nightmare."
You might find the whole piece online. It's fraught with more insights that resonate with sensible UFO buffs.
And here's a link to other ruminations that enlighten. (Zoam Chomsky should be ecstatic):
http://debunker.com/texts/unpredis.html
A fair reading of Mr. Kottmeyer will correct, I think, any over vivid belief in the UFO tales we have all come to love or loathe.
RR
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