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Your Paracast Newsletter — December 5, 2021


Gene Steinberg

Forum Super Hero
Staff member
The Paracast Newsletter
December 5, 2021
www.theparacast.com

Explore Strange Creature Sightings that Include Dinosaus and Other Phenomena with Author John LeMay, from Roswell, NM, on The Paracast!

The Paracast is heard Sundays from 3:00 AM until 6:00 AM Central Time on the GCN Radio Network and affiliates around the USA, the Boost Radio Network, the IRN Internet Radio Network, and online across the globe via download and on-demand streaming.

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This Week's Episode: Gene and special guest cohost Tim Swartz present, direct from Roswell, New Mexico, paranormal author John LeMay. He has written over 30 books on Southwest history, cryptozoology, Ufology, and cinema history. His best known books include Tall Tales and Half Truths of Billy the Kid, a collection of far-out folklore on the famed desperado; and Jaws Unmade: The Lost Sequels, Prequels, Remakes and Rip-Offs; one of many other books about lost/unmade films by the author. He is also the co-author of the well-received The Real Cowboys and Aliens series with Ufologist Noe Torres, which spotlights UFO sightings from the Old West and early day America. In a similar vein, he is the creator of the Cowboys & Saurians series, which focuses on remnant dinosaurs and cryptids reported in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

After The Paracast — Available exclusively for Paracast+ subscribers on December 5: A pop culture episode, in which Roswell, New Mexico's John LeMay joins Gene and special guest cohost Tim Swartz to talk about popular genre films, which include Godzilla, a character that originally appeared in a black and white Japanese film in 1954. They cover the various iterations of the character over the years, including meetups with King Kong and other creatures. And did you know there was a failed attempt once to pit Godzilla against a giant version of the Frankenstein monster? Also discussed is Edgar Rice Burroughs Pellucidar series, which featured battles playing out between humans and dinosaurs within the Hollow Earth. LeMay has written over 30 books on Southwest history, cryptozoology, Ufology, and cinema history, which include genre sci-fi and fantasy.

Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: https://www.theparacast.com/forum/. Visit our new online shop for great branded merchandise at: https://www.theparacast.shop/, and check out our new YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheOfficialParacastChannel

Of Fake News and Cultural Memes and UFOs
By Gene Steinberg

There’s a lot of talk these days about alleged “fake news.” But by and large, that was mainly a scheme employed by a certain politician to discredit news outlets that he regarded as publishing negative stories about him. It wasn’t about facts, just about convincing people to distrust the media. Well, unless they were nice to him.

But I’m not about to engage in a political war of words about what is true and what isn’t in today’s news reports. It’s more about how the mainstream press has behaved over the years in covering various stories, including those about our favorite paranormal topics.

And it’s more than just being dismissive towards the witnesses of a UFO, Bigfoot or some other anomaly. It’as about making up stuff out of whole cloth.

In the 19th century, there was something called “yellow journalism,” mostly about spinning a story in order to gain political points or boost circulation — or a combination of the two.

At a time when we actually had lots of newspapers that were in heavy competition for circulation and ads, the publishers and editors were sometimes not above sensationalizing a story, (including adding made-up facts) to grab the readers’ attention.

So in the late 19th century, there was fierce competition between the New York World, owned by Joseph Pulitzer — yes that Joseph Pulitzer! — and the New York Journal, owned by William Randolph Hearst.

Sometimes sensational stories had unexpected consequences, or perhaps the publishers didn’t care while they laughed their way to their banks to inflate their accounts. So it’s said that the Spanish-American war was very much fueled by fake news in both the World and the Journal.

The moniker of yellow journalism has also been used as a vehicle to discredit some of the reports of flying dirigible-shaped airships in the latter part of that century. So it is said that editors would manufacture these stories in a bid to attract attention, but there does appear to be a number of reports from that era that not only seem serious, but defy rational explanation.

Again, assuming they are true. Indeed, during the famous 1896-97 airship wave, there were suggestions that most of the claims were due to pranks, publicity stunts, circulation-boosting gimmicks or just outright hallucinations. The apparent tongue-in-cheek tone of various newspaper stories about these sightings seemed to indicate they weren’t meant to be taken seriously.

Then again, it’s not as if that’s anything new. Putting a sarcastic slant on a UFO story is not exclusive to the late 19th century. Over the decades, reports of anomalies have often treated the topic less-than-seriously. The tired “little green men” trope is still being used by some who write about the subject, even though there are few serious creature reports that would actually fit that category.

Now in some of those airship sightings, the craft would land, and its pilot, evidently human, would tell the witness that they are testing this brand new technology, and that the world would know of it real soon now.

Only that never seemed to happen.

Author J. Allan Danelek, in his 2009 book, “The Great Airship of 1897,” did pose a theory that there was a genuine airship prototype being test flown in California and later in the Midwest.

Danelek theorized that some unknown wealthy investor from San Francisco had been financing their construction. All well and good, but the experiments allegedly failed to deliver a dependable aircraft, and were abandoned.

While it does make sense that prototype airships were being tested by various inventors in those days, it’s hard to connect specific sightings to identifiable inventions.

At the same time, it has not been uncommon for UFO sightings to appear to represent a future potential.

Airship sightings preceded the actual development of real dirigibles and other flying craft. The first so-called flying saucers arrived en masse at a time where humans were beginning their own rudimentary tests of rocket ships.

But notice that, aside from actual UFO sightings and such sci-fi films as “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “Earth Versus the Flying Saucers,” “Independence Day” and others, our own tests of saucer-shaped aircraft haven’t fared so well.

We are still sending people into space with rocket ships that, externally at least, don’t look all that different from the craft that were first flown in the World War II era.

So if ET wants us to know that saucers represent the best configuration for speedy travel through the atmosphere, we haven’t quite learned that lesson yet.

Or perhaps we are still seeing UFOs in accordance with a cultural meme established more than 70 years ago. What this means is that perhaps, just perhaps, we are not actually seeing them in their true form. We are, perhaps unconsciously, altering the shape to fit our expectations. That said, there are also reports of cigar-shaped objects that certainly resemble the technology employed in terrestrial space flights.

It is good to see the U.S. government and more scientists begin to take UFOs seriously. Perhaps it does mean that matters of shapes, technology and other considerations will be seriously examined.

But if there is a cultural aspect to the UFO mystery, meaning we aren’t — or can’t — see the source behind the phenomenon in its true form, is there even a chance that the search for physical objects will truly succeed?

Even if there are physical objects behind it all, is it possible that the crews piloting them are using their advanced technology to camouflage their true appearance? Why would they do that anyway? To engage in psychological games with humans? Or is it possible that their true appearance is so alien to us that we are just doing our best to make sense of it all?

But if that’s really the case, how will any of these ongoing investigations establish such facts? How will we deal with it?

Or does the force behind the UFOs, having its own unknown alien motives, plan to just change things up if we get too close to the truth?

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