Is Jerome Clark Humpty Dumpty In Disguise?

There are countless different excuses for UFOs. For example, I enjoy those alternative civilization theories as suggested by Tim Good or Ed Gerhman and/or countless others which run along the lines of they’re either here now and living in the Antarctic or the hollow earth or in a massive spaceship hidden up there, or they were here ages before us, and so on. The detail doesn’t actually matter; the point is in the principle. Why do people go there as opposed to the ETH? Do they run into a personal brick wall with regards to long distance space travel? Is it because the concept of life on another planet somewhere else is too strange and yet the idea of another civilization living parallel to us or having lived here before and vanishing without leaving any evidence whatsoever seems, to them, to make more sense?

Who knows? I do not subscribe to any of these theories in any of their variations although I have no particular objection to them. People are entitled to believe what they want and you can’t truly reject anything in this game simply because you just don’t know - you can never tell. I’m still recovering from the shock of reading this from our current Bette noir, Mr. Jerome Clark. I was so taken a back

http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/updates/2006/nov/m30-002.shtml

that I knocked my bedside lamp over in a panic and spilled a drink all over my bed sheets. More stains to get Biddy all worked up! At first I thought this posting was quite remarkable in that there was much I could learn from it for alas, my way of dealing with something or someone I consider negative is to respond aggressively. Clark appeared to have achieved much the same affect as I would, arguably more so, by an admirably slimy and understatedly silent, bigoted diatribe.

Yet it is so narrowly focussed (towards the ETH despite his cautious qualifications in the past), and so close minded that it becomes an unintentionally self parodying satire. The most eloquent and articulate means I can summon to describe it is; it’s a fucking joke. Even allowing for all the silliness about Creighton and Keel, the fact is, the Man from Can, however much he might waffle on about it, does not and cannot know for sure that Keelian thoughts on demonology are wrong. He can only have an opinion and to dismiss other trains of thought as aggressively as he does, based not on the logic of his own reasoning but on the metal stability of the person he is attacking is, frankly, stupid and ignorant.

Eventually I woke up and realised that in fact Clark’s approach is no different from mine; it's just couched in another way and is much more disingenuous. His was a blatant and vicious personal attack on Bob Shell who, it must be admitted, is always fully deserving of such behvior. But then Clark had the chutzpah to come back afterwards and allege that it was no such thing. Perhaps yet again I am wrong about him and this is some subtle satire of us all where fundamentally he is treating us all as idiots as he jinxes and twists and turns this way and that, dragging us emotionally all over the place. That I could go for and I would like.

Or perhaps it simply means the man in a pompous burke. After all, he has birthdays and he doesn’t help us.