High Strangeness: Spurned!

Thursday, June 20, 2013


When you work in the UFO game, you get used to sarcasm, disrespect and abuse from people who don't get it. What I'm not getting used to is sarcasm, disrespect and abuse from people inside the UFO game.

Not that it's happened much, but this week, while working on my book about Dr. J. Allen Hynek, it happened. One of my resources suggested that I make contact with one of his colleagues, and request an interview. This colleague, my source told me, had spent a lot of time working with Dr. Hynek as part of the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), so he would be a fantastic person to interview for the book.

I emailed him the other day, gushing with excitement, and politely requested an interview. I even offered to let his read a sample chapter of the book, so that he could judge the quality of my work before agreeing. Pretty huge of me, right?

So the next day he replies to me with this:

"I am already quite aware of the quality of your work: http://www.milwaukeemag.com/article/12232011-CloseEncounters"

Huh? Did I just get slammed? I reread the note--which didn't take up much of my day, because it's so flipping short--and realized that, yes, I'd been slammed.

But slammed over what?? The link he sent is to a video I took of a legitimate double UFO sighting that I was involved in a year and a half ago. And it's real. It's the real thing! So, he seems to be slamming me for one of the least slammable things I've ever posted as part of my UFO work!

I don't get that at all. If he didn't like me because I slammed the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure or Sirius or the Atacama Humanoid or the general silliness that I encounter on a daily basis in the UFO world, that would make a little more sense. But my video of an honest-to-God mass UFO sighting that I took part in? It boggles the mind.

Still not believing that he had really just slammed me for something so boneheaded, I emailed the guy back and said something like, "Yeah, that was quite a night! Two UFOs in a row!" thinking he might respond to something completely innocuous.


Finally, late last night, I wrote to him again, saying, "I take it that your response to my interview request is no?" and I still have not heard back from him.

Ever feel like the whole world is against you? Like, everybody you know might gather in a field to spell out a gigantic "NO" and then hire a helicopter or maybe a more cost-effective option like a balloon and take an aerial picture of it and then wave it in your face? That's how this guy has made me feel.
So, I'm taking that as a no.

It's really a shame. Now I will probably never know what insights he could have given me into Dr. Hynek, and my book will that much the poorer for it. But I'm not going to drop the price or anything. Because the book is still going to be pretty fucking good.

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