UFO Con #2

Second day of UFO CON Santa Clara.

First, a correction: Today I got a better look at the “aura” camera and talked to the owner a bit about how it worked. It’s called the AuraCam 600/Coggins Camera, (http://www.auraphoto.com/products/auracam.shtml?close) and it’s not based on Kirlian principles after all. It uses a conventional “instant” print analog camera, mounted inside a large box, and two, hand-sized boxes with electrodes on the top, to create a double exposure on the film. The first exposure is of the subject, then a mirror flips down over the camera lens that directs the camera’s gaze onto a white screen, inside the box. Then the electronics “paint” the aura on the screen with LEDs. The subject places her hands on the electrodes and the biofeedback is used to generate the auraic image. Exactly how that’s done is a secret, but I’m told that the image is calibrated to match what psychics see. Who knows what that actually means, but it’s not impossible that the image is related to the person’s physical and/or psychological state, and thus could be used as a quick, non-invasive, diagnostic or monitoring tool.

I signed up for this conference mostly to market myself to the “experiencer” (abductee, contactee) community, as a therapist, and what I found there surprised me. What I expected to see, was a few relatively serious researchers mixed with some spiritual people of different kinds, leavened with some wild-eyed fanatics with views too far out for me to entertain. (I guess everyone has their limits.) What I got was a large number of people asking questions. Isn’t that odd. It’s not what I was told to expect, by all the news casts, TV shows and movies the include UFO types, but there it is. Many, perhaps most, had interesting stories to tell, some of them very far out, but they almost always ended in questions: What really happened? Why did it happen? What does it mean? Why me? And in a surprising number of cases: How can I make it stop?! Interestingly, the speakers that acted like they had the answer or answers, were the ones that attracted the most, we’ll call it, skepticism. The U.S. political system could learn a lot from this group, where wildly different and contradictory points of view are politely tolerated, with none of the posturing and overheated rhetoric that seems to enter any public discussion these days.

What I saw was a group of disparate people, from all walks of life, from military contractors to Ph.D.s to house wives to spiritualists, all drawn together, or maybe pushed together, by common experiences and by a society that refuses to recognize their problems are real, and, effectively, spits on them for having them. A very common theme I heard was “I was as hard core an unbeliever as you can find, until…” And, you must realize that, this must be just the tip of the iceberg. For every person who speaks up, how many hundreds that keep quiet and say nothing. Like the LGBT community, not too long ago, where you absolutely had to keep quiet and pretend to be straight. (Under penalty of death, in some cases, even today) The UFO community faces enormous pressure from every direction to shut up and go away. I find it fascinating, and amusing, that it’s much more academically respectable to research demons and spirt possessions than UFOs. I can’t help but wonder if any of the hard-core disbelievers have questioned why it is so important to insist that everything related to UFOs must be complete crap. I can only infer that, like the preacher some years ago that predicted the downfall of western civilization if gay marriage was allowed, these people are certain of some horrible catastrophe, if any portion of the UFO phenomenon turns out to have any factual basis.

It seems to me that the UFO community is slowly grown and gaining political power. Sort of like the gay community, they are beginning to organize, flex their collective muscles and slowly, haltingly, starting to insist on recognition and acknowledgement of the blatant and unquestioned discrimination they receive from every quarter. The movement is still just starting to find it’s legs, but it is growing. And they have a real advantage over the LGBT community, because they don’t have to overcome the deep-seated, hatred and fear that weighs the LGBTs. So, the tipping point could come much faster than anyone expects as the UFO community sweeps up the vast numbers of people with beliefs or experiences that are marginalized by our society. Brace yourself, my friend, as every movie and every TV show that deals with UFO and paranormal themes makes it just a little more normal to have “experiences.” I hope to live for the day when UFO deniers are as ridiculed in the popular press as the climate-change deniers are today.