My Summer Lair Chapter #170: Have You Ever Looked Up At The Night Sky And Seen An Unidentified Flying Object?
A powerful moment during his Inside the Actors Studio appearance in 2006; Dave Chappelle said: “The worst thing to call somebody is crazy, it’s dismissive. “I don’t understand this person, so they’re crazy,” That’s bullshit. These people are not crazy, they’re strong people. Maybe the environment is a little sick.”
Dave Chappelle is right: “The worst thing to call somebody is crazy, it’s dismissive.” Welcome science writer Sarah Scoles to My Summer Lair; her book is They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers. Indeed: a non-fiction scientific book on UFO culture.
I dig books and documentaries like this: curious, questioning and searching for truths. There’s no value in being right and certainty is foolishness. On page 8 she writes:
“Nestled among the unhinged conspiracy theorists and those who believe every UFO report like it’s biblical resided people I could identify with: logical, dedicated, skeptical. Many of them didn’t necessarily “believe” in UFOs at all, and most didn’t take the extraterrestrial connotation for granted. Nevertheless, in their spare time—between litigating court cases or teaching middle-schoolers or running planetariums—they scoured declassified government documents, Wayback-Machined old webpages, interviewed witnesses, and wrote up self-aware analyses of their findings. I undertook this project because I wanted to understand why these people spent so much time on a phenomenon that they weren’t even sure was a phenomenon—at least not one beyond the human brain.”
Absolutely fascinating. Our conversation convers the recent American government revelations, the distinction between aliens and UFO culture and Blink 182 front man Tom DeLonge who recently won an award for UFO Researcher Of The Year. Ummm yup.
Sarah Scoles @ W • T • F
Host & Photography Sammy Younan
Recorded: Monday October 5, 2020 at 4:00 pm
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