It's now Saturday, day three of the annual MUFON conerence. I was planning to write up my notes on day two last night, but I ended up spending more time at the bar, and getting to bed far latger than I had planned. So this is getting written up in the morning before I go to the first talk.
Friday was the business day at the annual MUFON conference. It is the day of the state directors' meeting, the board meeting, the members' reception, etc... And this year, I came away from the day with a lot of hope and excitement. MUFON is planning some pretty kewl stuff in the next year-plus.
One of them is the website - the next generation - they are putting into place. It is really user friendly (so I'm told), and has a lot of useful content. But the most important part of it is a component called MUFON Central. It is a revenue-generating subscription section of the site that allows content for research, a discussion forum, and lots of other things like that. I don't remember how much a subscription would cost but it looked to be extremely reasonable. It remided me of the subscriber features of unknowncountry.com, earthfiles.com, etc.
But what is most important is that the revenue it generates will go toward UFO research, the organization's ultimate goal. Research and education, regardless of what form it takes, all required $$$, and so a reasonable fee, with even a tiny percentage of subscription among those who visit the site - and MUFON.com is a very well viewed site - would provide an extremely good tool for funding our research.
Another thing I learned a bit more about is the various set of research programs that MUFON has in the works. Among them is a next set of efforts by the abduction research team. I have been nominally affiliated with them already, which hadn't yet amounted to much. But now, in talking with the leader of the group, it sounds like he has more of a "rapid deployment" model in mind in which experiencers contacting MUFON can be put in touch with resources inclduing MDs, psychologists and hypnotherapists, as well as the MUFON field investigation infrastructure.
As part of this rapid-deployment model, we need to have field investigators, physical and mental health professionals and certified hypnotherapists available in as many regions as possible. This is something I've found to be a crying need, having heaerd from so many experiencers located far and wide. So one little piece of homework for us in the next few months will be to begin putting together the network of hypnotherapists who are available to work with experiencers. I hope to see this mature into a very useful network of workers who can conduct both healing and research with the experiencer phenomenon, and those who are blessed/cursed with it's attention.
That evening, Richard Dolan did a talk on his new book, A.D., After Disclosure. I'm sure I will have a world to say about this later, but in short, his presentation was phenomenal. It was very, very speculative. But in my view it picked up nicely where Michael Lindemann's work left off. I cite Lindemann's work alot in The Cosmic Bridge, where he talks about the variables of contact. He is more focused on contact than on disclosure, but in Dolan's work, he combines the two in a number of speculative ways. Like Lindemann, Dolan is a futurist par excellence.
The one thing I think the disclosure community misses: the depths of the close encounter phenomenon. Having looked into abduction and individual contact experiences a wee bit, my own hypothesis is that both contact and disclosure will occur at the grass roots level, one experiencer at a time. For better or for worse, I believe that knowledge and acceptance of the visitor presence (whatever that really is - I don't think we understand it much at all) eventually will reach a critical mass, and disclosure will occur as the subconscious/metaconscious level. Only at some critical point will it merge into the daylight of human social consciousness.
Dolan had some interesting things to say about the "Breakaway Civilization" - a secret group or invisible empire that exists in parallel to our own, with higher technology, visitor contact, etc. How this would relate to a bottom-up contact/disclosure scenario, I have no idea. Do the two ideas contradict? I don't think so. But this is an area for a whole lot of work in the near future.
I hope to have beaucoup to say about this later. But now, off to day 3...
