UFOs Reframing the Debate, edited by Robbie Graham

An important new book, available now

Available now in paperback on Amazon and Kindle!

“Robbie Graham's UFO anthology reframes the UFO from facile tabloid fare into its real challenge—how to interpret strange experiences offering hints of an Underlying Fundamental Ontology. To tackle such a difficult and at times bewildering task, a deep multidisciplinary dive is required. And that's exactly what you'll find in this thoughtful and stimulating book.”

      —Dean Radin, Ph.D.
      Chief Scientist, Institute of Noetic Sciences
      Author of Supernormal

“Robbie Graham has assembled a set of essays with very subversive insights into the nature of UFO phenomena. If you intend to seriously study UFOs, you must read this book.”

     —George P. Hansen
     Author of The Trickster and the Paranormal

I am immensely proud to be a part of this important work. I wrote a whole chapter and I only mentioned owls once!

THE CONTRIBUTORS: 

   MJ Banias

   Greg Bishop

   Robert Brandsteatter

   Jack Brewer

   Mike Clelland

   Curt Collins

   Joshua Cutchin

   Lorin Cutts

   Susan Demeter-St. Clair

   Smiles Lewis

   Red Pill Junkie

   Chris Rutkowski

   Ryan Sprague

  foreword by Diana Pasulka

   ________________________________________________

MUFON update

One week after Jan Harzan's tepid statement on the MUFON website, John Ventre has been removed as State Director for Pennsylvania. For some context on this post, see HERE.

______________________________________________

follow up information

Facebook posting from author Lon Strickler, from Fri May 26 2017
______________________________________________

Public Statement from Race Hobbs, Program Director of the KGRA Digital Broadcasting Station:

As of 9am CST this morning, with a heavy heart, I have made the decision, after 10 years of service to the organization of MUFON, I have tendered my resignation...

It is my intent to express my appreciation and admiration for the MUFON organization, and for the fine people involved; many of whom I have truly cherished working alongside over the years.

However, it is my feeling that MUFON leadership has shown a lack of proactive engagement regarding a recent incident involving Pennsylvania State Director John Ventre, and his personal views as expressed via social media. Ventre’s sentiments do not, and cannot be allowed to be misconstrued as representative of this organization, due to a fundamental lack of action on part of its leaders.

This is my sole reason for choosing to leave MUFON, and I remain indebted for the experience and opportunities I have been afforded during my period of membership. Race Hobbs

NOTE: MUFON UFO Radio has been removed from the KGRA Roster and they have just been notified.

______________________________________________ 

Public relations nightmare at MUFON

NOTE: several addendums added at the end of this post: 

I need to chime in about this whole MUFON mess. For anyone out there who hasn’t followed the fiasco on social media, here is a brief run down.

On May 14 Lon Strickler, from the website Phantoms and Monsters, posted a screen-grab on Facebook. This is a weird racist rant by senior MUFON member John Ventre. (below) It is my understanding that this is not a stand alone statement, but is part of a long pattern of similar pronouncements by Ventre.

Please read this. Click on image for a HI-rez view

That posting lead to a flood of comments as well as a lot of other postings across the net. My sense is that pretty much everybody within this small pool of folks who take the UFO issue seriously had a similar reaction. There was a lot of anger in what was being posted.

On May 18th, Jan Harzan, the executive director at MUFON, put out an official statement on the MUFON website. It is linked HERE, and should be read. I feel Harzan was apathetic in his response. There were at least 23 comments posted below his statement. Nearly all expressing emotions from disappointment to outright disgust.

Roger Marsh, as the communications director at MUFON, wrote this in the comment thread:

Everyone in and out of MUFON feels the same pain. This is embarrassing. No one is defending Mr. Ventre. His words are appalling.

On May 24, all the comments were deleted and any option to respond was closed.

Here are two blog posts, both should be read. One from Regan Lee at The Orange Orb. The other from Lorin Cutts at High Strangeness. I consider both of these bloggers friends and comrades.

This morning (May 24) Nick Redfern posted this on his Facebook page:

Some of you may have seen all the controversy surrounding MUFON this past week or thereabouts. As a result of all this outrageous crap, I have told MUFON that I will no longer be writing my monthly column for their magazine, and I have severed ties with them. Period.

There is little I can add that hasn’t been said already. Racism and sexism have no place in an organization like MUFON. John Ventre is entitled to his beliefs, but I feel it’s unacceptable in his very public role at that organization. What happens when a black woman sees a UFO in Pennsylvania and calls MUFON for help?

Beyond all the stuff about racist comments within an organization run by old white men, here are my two complaints about MUFON.

One. 
MUFON is collecting sighting reports. and these are investigated by dedicated members. I am assuming that many of these are very good reports. These are then sent to MUFON where they are put in a filing cabinet and locked away. All the information collected for the last 48 years has been vacuumed up into a black hole—never to be seen again. Their data is neither shared or available. I don’t see them making any meaningful contribution to the subject of UFOs.

I feel that MUFON is not living up to its mission statement or stated goals.

Here is the mission statement of MUFON:

"The Scientific Study of UFOs for the Benefit of Humanity"

MUFON's stated Goals:

I. Investigate UFO sightings and collect the data in the MUFON Database for use by researchers worldwide.

II. Promote research on UFOs to discover the true nature of the phenomenon, with an eye towards scientific breakthroughs, and improving life on our planet.

III. Educate the public on the UFO phenomenon and its potential impact on society.

Two.
MUFON has, for the most part, ignored the abduction phenomenon. At best they are tepid. At worse they have dismissed the abduction reports with contempt. This has changed a bit in the last few years, but I see nothing emerging from MUFON to tell me they are dealing with abduction experiences seriously. I know and respect Kathleen Marden. She is noted as “Director of Experiencer Research” on the MUFON website. She is doing excellent work on her own, and I feel strongly that she is trying hard to create something more up-to-date and meaningful within MUFON. (see addendum below)

I had to grit my teeth writing this post. I wanted to say more, but I felt it was important not to feed the fires of emotion. Here is my three word summation of this post: MUFON is irrelevant.

_________________________________________

I have done audio interviews with five of the people mentioned in this article. 

Regan Lee  

Lorin Cutts

Kathleen Marden

Nick Redfern 

Lon Strickler interviews me on the Phantoms and Monsters podcast. 

Also of note:

I spoke with Jan Harzan on the phone shortly after he took on the role of Executive Director at MUFON. I just emailed him and he replied with his number so I called him. We spoke for about a half hour and he seemed happy to talk with me. He confirmed a few things to me in this conversation. Those are listed as points one and two above.


I have also spoken and corresponded with Roger Marsh, and I like him enormously. He is doing important work in his journalistic postings of UFO reports. These are archived on the Open Minds site.

_________________________________________

Addendum below added later the same day as the above post:

I contacted Kathleen Marden shortly after this essay was posted. She clarified her role at MUFON. She heads a 15 member team within that organization. She assures me that the people she is working with "take ET contact/ abduction very seriously and assist up to 100 experiencers a month in finding the help they have requested." I talked with her at length in the autumn of 2014, and she spoke plainly about her goals and challenges within MUFON. Hearing this two and a half years later is heartening. This is precisely the kind of change that I have been hoping to see at MUFON. Kathleen is dedicated to both this very challenging issue, and I am certain she will be sharing her findings. 

_________________________________________

Addendum: Statement from Kathleen Marden from Friday May 26, 2017

The public voiced their disapproval of the racist comments voiced by one of its high profile members and MUFON took action. Jan Harzan, MUFON's Executive Director has announced that "MUFON does not condone racial discrimination in any form and has always provided equal opportunity to all regardless of race, religion, sex, age or national origin and will proudly continue to do so." The offender has been removed from his position of power and will no longer have a public voice as a representative for MUFON. I can now proudly continue in my role as MUFON's Director of Experiencer Research knowing that racism will not be tolerated by MUFON. Congratulations MUFON for making the right decision.

______________________________________ 

Statement from Jan Harzan, Executive Director at MUFON

__________________________________________

Facebook posting from May 26, 2017 

Sadly, it seems that nobody was fired. Just that there was a change in his title. It is my understanding that Mr. Ventre has long been involved with organizing the conferences. Thank you Lon for sharing this.

__________________________________________

Rune Soup and 42 Minutes / recommended interviews

Gordon White of Rune Soup

I was honored to take part in two very good audio interviews, both are now up on line.

Douglas Bolles hosts a Sync Book Podcast

The first was with Gordon White from RUNE SOUP, the other was with Douglas Bolles from 42 MINUTES. These are two of the smartest, most insightful researchers in this field. Both are digging in areas that well below the waterline. Gordon's book Star Ships is amazing. It's a powerful experience to be asked questions that allow me to wrestle with these more challenging avenues of thought.

  Rune Soup and 42 Minutes linked here  

Both interviews are recommended, as are their entire catalog of other podcasts.

__________________________________________________

Below is a comment posted below the Rune Soup podcast. Seems someone is having exactly the experiences that I've been trying to make some sense of.

um freaky timing for this interview because I was hearing an owl hooting this past sunday afternoon and saw a ufo while it was happening. The ufo and hooting both ceased at the same time. I tried to take pictures of the ufo but it was so sunny I could not see if I was focused on it, too much glare. I got nuthin. Then I looked for the owl but never found it. I have not heard or seen an owl in the daytime in 25 years. It was most definitely an owl hooting, it was a sound I was more familiar with as a child where I grew up than where I live now. I learned how to call owls during some nature class as a kid and I used to go out in the woods and call and sometimes one would fly close.I have never felt that owls or ufos are signifying the presence of death so much as the presence of a reality that is not my known reality. I have never experienced owl hooting and a ufo sighting at the same time. It was really weird but I do love weird so it made my day. It just felt like a reminder that the world I am walking around in is not the whole picture.

yippee for this timely interview with Mike Clelland, it feels like my sunday afternoon just had an addendum.

This comment came from someone with whom I'd had some previously correspondence—and she shared the most wonderful owl dream! I even did a post about her funny dream HERE.

__________________________________________________

The visionary paintings of Shawn Thornton

self portrait, Shawn Thorton

All throughout my early adulthood, I struggled from the mental and physical effects of a slow growing tumor in my brain, the symptoms of which were repeatedly misdiagnosed by my doctors as purely psychological in origin, and it ultimately took over half a decade to get a proper diagnosis and treatment to shrink the tumor. I suffered immeasurably during this period from having repeatedly undergone a host of treatments meant to treat the symptoms of mental illness, and paradoxically, from a mental illness that ultimately could not be contained. The tumor was in the very center of my brain, in a small, mysterious organ at the top of the spinal column, the pineal gland. I didn’t have any prior reason to consider the actual material existence of the pineal before this. 

During his time at art school, Shawn Thornton unknowingly developed cancer of the pineal gland. As his condition progressed his art transformed into something awash in mythology and symbolism. His portfolio is astonishing. More HERE, and HERE.

click on image for a HI-Rez view

I suffered from a slow growing cancer in my pineal gland while I attended art school and during subsequent years while my paintings developed with an underlined mythology that alluded directly to the pineal years before I even know of its existence.

click on image for a HI-Rez view

Painting, for me, is largely an attempt to decrypt the mechanisms of illness through a disciplined medium. I feel, on some deep internal level, that through my painting practice I’m engaged in a psychic process to illuminate the intricate vessels and cogs of an insidious physic current that stems, in part, from having had a serious illness, and all the subtle and profound ways I was altered by this experience.

click on image for a HI-Rez view

  ____________________________________________

Robbie Graham is Re-Framing the Debate

exploring the complex issues of UFOs 

Imagine you are at a UFO convention, and you start a conversation with someone. They tell you their ideas and experiences, and it paints a nice clear picture of just what is going on with the big messy UFO mystery. After that, you talk to someone else, and they tell you about thier ideas and experiences, but everything they say is at odds with what the first person said. Yet, they are both very convincing and their analysis is intriguing. The same thing happens with the third conversation, and the forth.

This is how it plays out, everybody has differing ideas. Some opinions are in alignment and others are wildy divergent. It can be maddening, but this is how it is.

This book is a powerful collection of contrasting essays. Each chapter is a different exploration of the same subject. I am proud to be one of the contributors. The book is titled UFOs Re-framing the Debate.

These writers are not form the mainstream of UFO research. They are instead the the outlying thinkers in this field. Some are the young guns, and others are the voices crying in the wilderness.

     Also...  
Robbie Graham has compiled these stories, and also played the role of *my editor. I was grateful for his keen guidance. He ended up nixing a long section of my essay, and it was a good decision. What I wrote was good and I plan on adding that unused segment here on the blog. It is about the discouraging issues of UFO Disclosure.

     And this too... 
Get Robbie's other book too! I want to start up my podcast again just to talk with Robbie about SILVER SCREEN SAUCERS. I love this book!

__________________________________________