Whose Weirdness Is It, Anyway? by Greg Bishop
Posted April 14, 2008 
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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?
Researcher Roundtable: Whose Weirdness Is It, Anyway?
By Greg Bishop
One of the first lessons of Buddhism, certain kinds of physics, and the courtroom is that people will see what they expect to see. Robert Anton Wilson gives the example of a university law or psych class (I can’t recall which) where someone runs in unexpectedly during the lecture and tries to stab one of the students. A great majority of the witnesses will swear that the criminal used a knife until the professor brings him back with a banana held in an upraised hand. This error in perception more or less applies as well to things that we haven’t seen or experienced yet.
Not to labor the point too much, but Wilson also recalled in an interview that there was a UFO case he had heard of in which one of the witnesses recalled a longish-shaped UFO landing, while the other said it was nothing but a school-bus going by. Although some may argue about “abduction screen memories” and the like, it is more likely that these people saw some “whatsit,” some “x,” and filled in the details later. Jenny Randles introduced the term “Oz Factor” many years ago to describe the indescribable events and atmosphere that surround a UFO or Fortean event. Part of this phenomenon is the inability of the participants to recall any details or just as likely, the entire episode. The reasons may lie with the cause of the event, be it intelligent or not, but the fault may also lie within ourselves. Read more »
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 
