After listening to a few segments of this one I realized early on we were in believerdom territory, with all the old myths of UFO culture being pulled out as validation from the 100's of witnesses to Roswell, alien abduction witness stories based on only a story, and the Military complex suppression of UFO reality.
Interestingly enough I read Adam Gorightly's Afterword to the contactee compendium, A is for Adamski, by himself and Greg Bishop. The closing is called, "The Little Green Man that Refused to Die", and is worth the price of the book on its own for anyone who wants to get a better handle on the mythos of UFO's and how guests like Dennett fall into that category of belief pusher as opposed to critical investigation. He outlines all the familiar patterns of belief and their hucksters quite eloquently
As Clark reminds us the witnessed UFO is what drives this culture and at the heart of that event is a human being with a story. I don't mean to say it's just a story, as evidence of an advanced technology in our skies is the core part of this framework. But guests who simply repeat all the same old crashed UFO retrieval back engineered alien autopsy bunk is the cause of the disreputable fluff that makes UFO's rather unpalatable.
As seen in Gorightly's Afterword these narrarive patterns have always been a part of UFO mythos from the beginning, where belief comes before critical thinking. This is why so much of UFO culture is about a dog chasing its own tail, or tale as it were.
Breaking things down into discussions around what makes a good actual case, severing contactee and abductee narratives from the discussion, may only leave a handful of cases to talk about seriously, along with thousands upon hundreds of thousands of stories. But the facts are the same patterns emerge over and over again within the culture and within the actual credible stories. There is never really enough tangible proof to hold on to properly and some very enticing elements that keep reminding us that the truth about UFO's remains outside the grasp of our faculties.
Perhaps it is too late to unravel UFO culture to disentangle the actual UFO from the fluffy path it has created for itself or maybe it's going to get a lot stranger once American Cosmic comes online. At the heart of the UFO event is pure weirdness and it's unravelling is going to remain a slow slog so long as episodes like this continue to make myth more important than fact.
