The phenomenon (or phenomena as some of us see it) with the
rubric, UFO, is either a transcendental reality or a quirky mundane reality.
Some infuse UFOs with a theological-like essence while
others suggest that UFOs are a mass psychosis, encumbered by pathologies of
various kinds (social, personal, conspiratorial, et cetera).
UFOs once had a tangibility summed up in the descriptive
phrases flying saucers or flying disks.
But the phenomenon was transmogrified, by a member of the
United States Air Force, into an amorphous phenomenon with the epithet UFO.
The change took flying saucers from the realm of concrete
reality to a reality that is evanescent.
And the phenomenon itself became as it was tagged:
unidentified and intangible.
Was Air Force Captain Ruppelt’s designation calculated and
malicious or, inadvertently, a downgrade of profundity to mundanity, without a
thought of how the mantle, UFO, would affect the phenomenon in essentia?
Flying saucers could be touched, captured (like the
Roswellian “flying disk), examined, and subjected to tangible scrutiny it
seemed.
UFOs, on the other hand, were off-limits at the outset –
“unidentified.”
As the phenomenon as passed into the twilight of fringe
reality it has lost its cachet as a “vehicle” for scientific scrutiny and has
become an incorporeal thing subject to the vicissitudes of conjecture; e.g.
mythology, hallucination, hoax, mental aberrations of diverse kinds, physical
anomaly, and so forth.
And while reality is composed or various layers, UFOs have
fallen to a bottom layer for humanity, replaced by the exigencies of human
needs: survival and pleasure mostly.
Flying saucers were profound in their way. UFOs? A joke for
most of humankind…
RR
