26 May 2016

LANGUAGE LESSONS

Greg Bishop.   It Defies Language: Essays on UFOs and Other Weirdness. Excluded Middle Press, 2016.

Greg Bishop was for a number of years the editor of a journal called Excluded Middle which was one of the more intelligent and literate American UFO magazines. He was also the author of the controversial book Project Beta, reviewed here:
http://mrobsr.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/project-beta-and-paul-bennewitz.html
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This book is a collection of essays or blogs taken from the period roughly 2007-2012 mainly taken from a blog post called UFOMystic, and these will probably not be to the liking of 'believers' and 'skeptics' alike. They are too many and too diverse to attempt a comprehensive review of them all, but well worth reading whether you agree with Bishop or not. His conclusions basically are that there is some sort of “real” phenomena out there involving some kind of consciousness that interacts with us but there is no evidence that this has anything to do with extraterrestrials.

He suggests that our encounter with this “other” is conditioned by our own memories, beliefs, perceptions and culture, that through retelling accounts are transformed often within the space of few minutes, that it is modified by the beliefs of those who investigate it, and even if (as Bishop suspects) there is an “other” behind all of this, 90% of what is experienced is self-created. Of course if you make the leap to the view that the “consciousness” behind all of this is our own, then you have reached the Magonia position. 
  • Peter Rogerson.

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