Patterns

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
In the ballpark but not directly related to UFOs I happen to listen to a very long Astonishing Legends episode that got my interest.

Ep 234: Mel's Hole Part 1 — Astonishing Legends
Ep 235: Mel's Hole Part 2 — Astonishing Legends

I had it on at work early in the morning over a couple of days. Helps the time pass. Basically this is a Coast to Coast caller Art Bell encountered some years ago. For whatever reason as iconic as it it I never once listened to any C2C. Man finds a weird hole on his property and makes all sorts of claims about it. It's likely a lava tube or something similar.

Thing is, listening to the story it hit me that it's exactly the same thing Elizondo and that crowd have been doing. Leave a tantalizing trail of breadcrumbs for people addicted to breadcrumbs. Pregnant with implication, conspiracy, shadowy operatives, tons of contradictions, lots of gravitas bestowed upon people with certain titles/backgrounds and not one single solitary shred of corroboration. Seems Art was exasperated by all this. No different than The Curse of Oak Island I imagine - sounds like exactly the same process at work except they figured out how to monetize it. That was their purpose. I am asking what Elizondo and Company's purpose is because it sounds like the same stuff to me.

I'm pointing out that there are recognizable patterns at work here as it relates to the paranormal reports we love. For every single 'real' incident regardless of whether it's a ghost, cryptid, UFO there are doubtless several along with it that are products of human behavior. Not necessarily imagination, just the way we behave in groups. This is easily seen when a group of people witness something like a traffic accident - the cop taking the report knows that some people just want to be 'in on it' in some way and may not even be consciously aware of it themselves.

In the personal sighting thread I started to go on about databases and analytics. Probably dry stuff, that MUFON database. Rather than an engineer of some sort or mathematician analyzing it I wonder what a sociologist would have to say about it all.
 
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