Larry King props up the ETH
On his July 20 broadcast of Larry King Live, the CNN personality featured Robert Hastings, author of “UFOs and Nukes“, along with three retired Air Force personnel claiming that Unidentified Flying Objects had a keen interest in our burgeoning nuclear capacity. Among their claims are that UFOs caused missile malfunctions at Malmstrom Air Force base in 1967, and were even caught on film by Bob Jacobs during the filming of missile tests at Vandenberg Air Force base, but the films were confiscated by the CIA. You can watch a full YouTube version of the video by clicking on our “Video of the Week” link, or see the shorter version on the official CNN site by clicking here.
This isn’t the first time Larry King has used his show as a forum for discussing the UFO phenomenon. In November of 2007, for example, his program focused on the topic with a show entitled “UFOs: Are They for Real?”
(Part 1 of this episode linked here via YouTube)
However, while a part of me wants to applaud King for the courage to discuss UFOs in a public forum, my problem with King’s program, and most other treatments of the UFO phenomenon available on US television and across the width and breadth of the internet, is an extremely narrow focus on the Extra Terrestrial Hypothesis (ETH). Proponents of the ETH generally support the idea that UFOs are physical vehicles piloted, or remotely controlled, by intelligent beings assumed to be from another planet. Read more »

Posted July 29, 2008
Comments(2)
Topic for Discussion: Given the proliferation in recent years of ufo / paranormal / dreamtime imagery in the media (VW’s “Reverse Engineered From UFO’s” ad comes glaringly to mind), do you feel that this is actually changing or affecting the phenomenon itself? Is the mass-media consciousness causing the UFO phenomenon to change the way it interfaces with us?
One of the first lessons of Buddhism, certain kinds of physics, and the courtroom is that people will see what they expect to see.
Perception of UFOs and whatever-they-are that inhabits them has morphed numerous times this century due to the influence of the various forms of media, so that one might well wonder if we are not dealing with shape-shifters here, rather than a concrete
phenomenon. Depictions of alien craft for the first half of this century–in magazines like Thrilling Wonder and Amazing–were primarily rockets, until the famous flying saucer coinage that came about after the Kenneth Arnold sighting. Similarly, the prototypical “grey alien” image did not really appear on the scene, in the public consciousness, until after the release of the movies Invaders From Mars (in which the big headed alien had tentacles, as I recall), and Invasion of the Saucer Men in the early 1950s.
intelligences / consciousnesses extant within the Universe. It is the urge-to-destiny of every lifeform to go beyond the confines of its original evolutionary environs and become a part of the galactic evolutionary process. It is this inevitability for which the human 

















