What to make of this mysterious Oswald encounter?

[Lance Payette]

So you don't believe in UFOs? Given your worldview, I'm not surprised. I take it you are unaware of all the released files, including U.S. Navy videos, that prove UFOs exist and cannot be manmade. I take it you are also unaware of all the former military and federal officials who have come forward with information that confirms that UFOs exist and cannot be manmade.

But, of course, since the U.S. Government has not officially publicly acknowledged that UFOs are real and are not manmade, and since all major government agencies continue to deny that UFOs exist, you reflexively assume that UFOs are either manmade or nonexistent.

I dare you to watch two recent documentaries on UFOs, both available on Amazon Prime: The Phenomenon (released in 2020) and The Program (released in 2024).

The Phenomenon
https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0TRGFOHOLA10DORESUTK8QL4K1/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r

The Program
https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0FBQAS5V99JW8KUUR66PBMVGJM/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r

FYI, my wife saw a UFO in the early 1990s in Utah, and I knew a military air traffic controller (ATC) who told me that he and other ATCs tracked UFOs flying at speeds and doing maneuvers that were far beyond the capabilities of our most advanced fighter jets. When I worked in military intelligence, one of our collection planes was buzzed by a UFO for 10-15 minutes. Several friends of mine were on that plane and told me all about it. They were very shaken by the experience.

Oh, poor Michael. You are such a tedious, humorless crank, with your head full of Mormon apologetics, utterly wacky JFKA beliefs and God knows what else, and your knee-jerk assumptions about what everyone else believes. My "worldview." BWAHAHA! Flesh it out for me, willya?

For reasons I don’t need to explain to you, I have been immersed – immersed – in ufology since 1958. I can actually remember Donald Keyhoe’s famed appearance on the Armstrong Circle Theater on January 22, 1958. I was at one time a MUFON state section director and in routine contact with Walt Andrus. I was in attendance at the famed 1989 MUFON conference in Vegas, where all hell broke loose. I knew crazy William Cooper and wacky Wendelle Stevens. I made an offer to George Knapp to fund an investigation of Bab Lazar when Mr. Area 51 first surfaced with his tales of alien craft. I’ve corresponded with distinctly non-wacky Jerome Clark, author of the UFO Encyclopedia. I had dinner two weeks ago with attorney Peter Gersten, who handled the Cash-Landrum case and is one of my closest friends.

There is nothing I don’t know about ufology. NOTHING – no personality, no case, no theory.

More to the point, I had a close-up (50-100 yards) encounter in 1971 in the company of an arch-skeptic who just about wet his knickers. As many such encounters do, it had a puzzling “psychic” component. There is no question in my mind that this was not a military craft or anything else susceptible to a mundane explanation.

I “don’t believe in UFOs,” you say? What is this inane statement even supposed to mean? It’s the sort of nonsensical statement only a crank and complete UFO neophyte like you would make.

There is a UFO phenomenon (or phenomena, as the case may be). No one in his right mind denies this. If someone says “I don’t believe there is a UFO phenomenon,” he’s simply denying reality.

What you mean – just as you mean with all of your JFKA nonsense – is more in the vein of “What? You don’t believe UFOs are ET craft like I do?” Your links, and your enthusiasm for the current UAP "disclosure" mania, tells me you are a rank amateur insofar as the UFO phenomenon is concerned.

No, I don’t believe UFOs are ET craft. Because I know way, way more than you do, I am not wedded to any particular theory of what the phenomenon may be. Few serious ufologists these days think “ET craft” is the explanation. It just doesn't fit the facts. The UFO phenomenon may or may not be “alien” in some sense, but it is far more mysterious than any facile explanation like “ET craft.”

What I saw, close-up, looked like a craft. Do I think it was? No, at least not in any conventional sense of a nuts-and-bolts craft. Moreover, I believe the UFO phenomenon is part-and-parcel of a much broader spectrum of phenomena loosely categorized as "paranormal" or "anomalous" - some of which I have also personally experienced and written about.

Unlike cranks like you, I can live with ambiguity and uncertainty in all areas of my life where ambiguity and uncertainty are inevitable – including the JFKA, the UFO phenomenon, religion and much else. I don’t need some “answer” that I can cling to like Linus' security blanket and use to shout down everyone who disagrees with me.

Thank you for once again making an utter fool of yourself and exposing to the world what a pathetic, insecure crank you are. But you are a hoot in your own way - I'll grant you that. If you had any self-awareness of what a hoot you are, you'd be far more tolerable.

[Michael T. Griffith]

This is curious: Most lone-gunman theorists believe nearly everything the federal government says. However, in the case of the JFK shooting, they reject the conclusions of the last official federal investigation into the assassination, i.e., the two-year investigation done by House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) from 1977 to 1979. They reject the HSCA's conclusions but accept the Warren Commission's (WC's) conclusions, even though the HSCA did a far more thorough investigation than did the WC.

The HSCA concluded that there were two gunmen, that four shots were fired, that one of the shots came from the grassy knoll, that the Odio sisters' account was credible, that Ruby lied about how he entered the police basement to shoot Oswald, that Ruby lied about why he shot Oswald, that someone was moving boxes around in the sixth-floor window shortly after the shooting at a time when Oswald could not have been the one moving the boxes, that Oswald associated with virulent right-wing extremists David Ferrie and Guy Banister, that the first shot was fired at a time when the sixth-floor gunman's view of JFK would have been obstructed by the oak tree on Elm Street, that Howard Brennan's identification of Oswald as the sixth-floor gunman was unreliable (this was a tacit but clear HSCA conclusion), and that two of the shots were fired only 1.66 seconds apart.

Also, we now know that the HSCA staffers who investigated Oswald's activities in Mexico City concluded that someone had impersonated Oswald in Mexico City, and that the Lee Harvey Oswald who called the Soviet Embassy was not the real Oswald.





 

[Lance Payette]

Ya gotta love it, don't you, folks? I absolutely ream Michael a new one and he doesn't even miss a beat! He just shifts merrily to the tired "the HSCA found a conspiracy" meme, which has zero to do with this thread and has to be among the flimsiest of conspiracy memes (love that Dictabelt!). If Michael didn't exist, I'd have to invent him just to make the points he unwittingly makes for me. You, Michael, are a hoot! And your sheer hootness is appreciated, at least by me.

Oh, you did make one mistake: While I would not classify myself as a LN theorist per se, I do in fact largely accept "what the federal government says" about UFOs. I'm not dogmatic about this, but my suspicion is that the federal government is largely clueless about UFOs and that what may appear to be a cover-up is in fact more of an unwillingess to admit to this cluelessness. All the Luna Committee stuff and brouhaha about retrieved craft and alien bodies will, I suspect, prove to be much ado about nothing as it always does. I'd love to be wrong, but history is firmly on my side. Even the true dean of serious ufologists, Jacques Vallee, has made a complete fool of himself with "crashed saucer" tales in recent years, and newcomers like Diana Pasulka (and, of course, Cutie Pie Luna) are credulous dolts.

I do have two words for the UFO phenomenon that I keep pasted firmly inside my hat (or golf visor, as the case may be): DECEPTIVE and MANIPULATIVE. Stanislaw Lem, author of that wonderful novel Solaris (forget the Hollywood movie, watch the Russian version) said his entire point (completely lost on Hollywood) was that if we ever encounter an alien intelligence, we may not even realize we have encountered it and, if we do, may never have the faintest idea what it is up to or why. Bingo. Tarkovsky's Russian movie is faithful to the novel and captures this beautifully.