Hello world.....
I haven't written for quite a few weeks for a number of reasons. One of them is that my personal life has been - shall we say - entertaining at best. In the next few months, hopefully we will see the dust settle, and hopefully, Explore with Hypnosis and The Cosmic Bridge can get back to business. But what a last couple of months it has been. I won't go into the gory details save to say that my personal life has turned upside down as my marriage of 30 years is coming to an end. I hope that for all, this becomes a new beginning. For in this world there are no endings; there are only beginnings.
And I'm not the only one who has had a rough few months. I try and avoid the national news as much as possible but it's hard to avoid the rancor and divisiveness that we have seen on the national scene. This has echoed through my own life on social media and in private conversation. As most of you know, I have very definite views on the current state of the executive branch of our government (how's that for a euphemism) - while a few others I have been in conversation with have some diametrically opposing views. This has made for some interesting exchanges over blogs, e-mail, Facebook, etc. And in spite of my desire to be a healer and a peacemaker, I have often found myself drawn in to the fray as much as anyone else. It reminds me of just how easily one can get caught up in the emotions of the moment - especially when principals are involved that are fundamental to one's world view. But enough of that, at least for now...
The other bit of rancor I have seen in the last week or so has been in the realm of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network. In the last week or two, some very good people have left the organization for a variety of reasons. But the biggest reason is their anger at some very poorly worded and in my view, ill thought out postings by a member who is (or was) highly placed in the organization. My understanding (and hope) is that he has now been relieved of those positions - at least I hope so.
On the plus side, this has shown me that there is a powerful force for good, for reasonableness and for justice in the cyber world, and within the UFO-research community. Yet it also shows me that one little remark can send an organization into crisis. So many were outraged by these racist comments that several key MUFON members quit, while others threatened to do so. Yet this tells me that while most MUFON members are here to seek greater understanding of the UFO phenomenon, they also have a powerful sense of justice.
Unfortunately, on the negative side, this controversy has eaten up a lot of the emotional bandwidth of many of the members. Time, energy and resources that might normally have been applied to investigations or other productive pursuits have been instead focused on cleaning our organization's dirty laundry. It has cost us a lot of time, talent and money - not to mention the continuing participation of some key members who would otherwise be involved in aggressive research into the UFO phenomenon.
At the last MUFON conference, I heard some excellent reports of projects in the works: projects by the ERT, the STAR team, etc. Most encouraging, at least to me, has been the rising of at least two potential electronic UFO detection and tracking technologies. One of them, the UFOTOG2 project run by Mark D'Antonio, et.al., seems to offer great promise as a technological assistance to get some hard data about the UFO phenomenon in our back yards. I look forward to our state team being one of the early groups to deploy this system when it is ready.
But then the excrement hit the fan. As I was travelling for that several days, I had been largely away from my e-mail for a while. I was surprised to suddenly hear some key notables in the MUFON field organization, in the experiencer research world, etc. all threatening to resign. Indeed some of those I most respect in the MUFON world have departed. Reading only a little bit more brought home the reason why this was so. And I can't say as I blame them. Yet one more thing comes to mind - because something is wrong with an apple in the bushel, do we need to throw the whole bushel out? Another cliche is that we need to avoid "throwing the baby out with the bathwater."
MUFON is in the process of doing some excellent work. Sure there are issues, but so far, I believe they are surmountable. Sure we've had some turkeys say some things that have given us a big PR black eye. Things don't always work as they should. But each time, we've weathered the storm and perhaps even come out of it a better organization. To me, the key point is that we need to keep our eyes on the prize. MUFON is in business, as its mission statement states, for "The scientific study of UFOs for the benefit of humanity". So let's keep our eyes on the prize, quit the quibbling, set aside the egos, and get back to work.
