What to make of this mysterious Oswald encounter?

[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.