Form: Research
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 07:58:19 -0500
Subject:: Where Have All the Close Encounter II's Gone?


Mike Swords:
My opinions on the (relative) disappearance of CE2 (relatively information-rich) cases at the end of the 1970’s are a) simple (“they did”) and b) not proven.  Because of the latter, I’d like to list the steps that led to the former (See link below).

Fran Ridge:
I can't begin to remember when it was that I called the Current Encounter list's attention to something I had noticed while doing my database work for the MADAR Project. It had to have been somewhere in the neighborhood of about ten years ago. I had noticed a significant reduction in good close encounters and even good distant encounters and I made the remark that it looked like ET had pulled up their stakes and left. I remember the response, however, and I'm still not sure what the response indicated. Whether it was my reference to ET, or whether it was my reference to the apparent lack of good UFO reports, but I was called on the carpet <grin>. I do remember my trying to clarify my suspicians, if this was a real issue. I compared the UFO wave and interest over the last half dozen decades to the situation we all have experienced vividly in Iraq. In both instances I believe that something caused an outside party to increase surveillance, then  an increased presence with  nearby carriers, then an invasion, which ended with a small security force being left behind. But, my research turned up something more ominous, even though non proven and based on limited data:  UFO activity had gone from many years of semi-overt actions, to something possibly more covert. My MADAR study report is linked below.

Mark Rodeghier:
Ominous, very ominous, man. But seriously, a couple of other points. At about the same time that close encounter cases were diminishing, the common shape of UFOs changed into the now familiar boomerang or v-shaped object. This shape is now so ubiquitous--although UFOs with this shape were certainly seen in earlier years--that if the UFO phenomenon rose into prominence today, its iconic shape would not be a disk, but a boomerang. Second, and related to this, how many cases are there with daylight sightings of the standard-model giant boomerang (as opposed to small ones--under 30 feet or so)? The answer is: almost none. So, in the current era, the most dramatic and hard to misperceive UFOs, the ones that look and behave like solid objects, the reality of which is thus hard to deny, don't appear during the day now. This is unlike good ol' disks, which appeared quite frequently in the daylight, as evidenced by your stats and others. So more to ponder. I don't have any explanations for these changes but I do have the suspicion that these changes aren't a) generated by the witnesses, or b) random.

Jean Waskiewicz:
I  reread Swords' letter that came with all the graphs and he references a lot of different catalogs. They are all on the Project1947 site. (See below)