Randomness, randomness, randomness is the order of the day today.

So, random ramblings and links.

CNN is reporting that Microsoft has announced they are giving a limited number of American consumers a limited opportunity to obtain cheap upgrade copies of Windows 7. After that date American consumers will have to pay full price for the OS that Vista should have been. As per usual, there will be a slight price break for those upgrading from the previous OS, and it looks as though they are extending this pricebreak to those who decided not to downgrade from the perfectly usable XP to the broken Vista. However holdouts using older versions of Microsofts Windows OS will need to pony up a little extra for the full version. Unless of course they are in Europe where, in order to comply with anti-monopoly statutes, Microsoft will provide browser free versions of the full software for the upgrade price.

Thanks for screwing your countrymen over during a recession Bill! We appreciate that! I mean, first you let us have Vista before its ready (at a princely sum, natch…) and now you’re gonna let us subsidize the bonus cash your losing for being forced to provide Europeans upgrades at a fair price. Thanks AGAIN! Capitalism rocks!

In other news, Michael Jackson may or may not be dead. TMZ (a source nearly as reliable as Vista is stable) has been reporting the King of Pop passed away last night after suffering a heart attack. Other news outlets refuse to confirm his death, but seem to have no problem leading off with headlines that read “Jackson Dead: according to unverified reports”.

We here at Anomaly won’t believe he is dead until we see the death certificate in news sources with just a touch more legitimacy than TMZ. But if it turns out reports are true, we are expecting a trend where Jackson death deniers claim he wanted to escape fame for obscurity, a la the King of Rock, and faked his death to that end. We’ll also expect reports of Jackson sightings to start pouring in from Las Vegas before the end of the month, (hopefully sharing fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches with the other King.)

*Update, CNN has confirmed that Jackson has indeed passed away. Our thoughts are with his family and children at this time.

Time now to go home, pull out the vinyl, put on “Off the Wall” and try to forget the controversies of the last two decades while the sheer unadulterated talent washes over us.

Respectability. Reputation. Legitimacy.

For those researching strange phenomenon, establishing and maintaining a good reputation, a measure of respect, and the legitimacy of their studies is always an uphill battle. Mainstream journalist and pundits usually scoff, when they bother to pay attention at all. Hoaxers and scam artists garner big notice in the press. But researchers who are respected in their particular cloistered field, and who have called a hoax a hoax from the outset, are relegated to a footnote in the mainstream news reports. That is, they are relegated to a footnote if they are lucky enough to be noticed at all.

In the world of conspiracy theory, ufology, cryptozoology, and fringe science, your damned when you speak out, and damned when you don’t.

So, given all of this, what does respectability even mean to these fields? Enthusiasm and interest ebbs and flows, as it does for anything, and people choose to construct a world-view that best suits them. If that means that all bigfoot reports are hoaxes so that they aren’t afraid to go into the woods at night, or that ghosts are real because nothing else explains the creepy feeling they get in the third floor guest room where Uncle Jim died, then that is what people choose to believe.

With incidents like the recent pseudocide of 9-11 Truther Ace Baker, blogged on here by SMiles Lewis, and the Georgia bigfoot body hoax pulled off by a police officer and former prison guard (professions comprised of individuals normally accepted as paramounts of honesty and respectability) in August of last year, it seems valid that we pause and ask ourselves some questions.

How important is reputation in these fields? Jacques Vallee is educated, well written and spoken, not prone to jumping to conclusions, and yet he would be lumped in with the “saucer nuts” by most mainstream journalists. The same could be said for hominid researchers such as Jeff Meldrum, who like Vallee has an academic reputation to maintain outside of his personal studies.  Yet while the Meldrums and Vallees of this world suffer under the derision and constant scrutiny of colleagues and the media, or keep their private pursuits to themselves; known hucksters and hoaxers like Tom Biscardi continue to benefit from the flippant attitude toward the subjects and lack of background research undertaken by various local media outlets. Biscardi is a known and proven hoaxer, yet he can pull into any small town and have the cameras on his crew in a matter of hours.

Perhaps, as guest blogger Oliver Hallen muses in the post below concerning UFO reports by police officers in the UK, respect and reputation are concepts as culturally and contextually loaded, and therefore as ephemeral, as the UFOs and beasties we endeavor to understand.

(The views expressed by Oliver Hallen are his own and do not reflect the opinions or views of AnomalyMagazine.com, its editorial staff, or myself. — Jeremy D. Wells)

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The British government has released their “first batch” of UFO files at ufos.nationalarchives.gov.uk, as part of a four year program to make the files available to the public.

Also available at the national archives UFO site are videocasts and podcasts from Nick Pope and Dr. David Clarke, respectively, as well as older, already released UFO files, in PDF format (available for download at “a small fee”, according to the site, although all but those available under the UFO Files from the 1970s link are listed at £0.00, and the various PDFs available under UFO Files from the 1970s are either free or £3.50 per document).