What has this got to do with Ruppelt, you ask? What has Ruppelt got to do with Roswell? All his working life, Ruppelt was a systems man encased in a very tight system. He did not have a youth worth the name outside the fuselage of a warplane on active service. Though flesh and blood, he was therefore built of all the resonant inferences of such a specialized system. Take a man from such a unique cultural context, and he is a wet sack underfoot. Ruppelt's connection with nukes is implicit. I don't want to reveal much out about my book, but Ruppelt through a chance death or illness might well have come within hours of being chosen to be navigator/bombardier aboard Enola Gay or Bockscar. When a man comes that close to apocalyptic forces, he doesn't need to go to Roswell to know all about Roswell if you know what I mean. Bless him, he was a Warrior amongst the stoutest of American hearts.

 Jan, your almost-sneer at the word "fictions" is not worthy of you. Life and experience are far too complex to consist of fictions on the one hand and facts on the other. One of the reasons why Ufology remains an outsider culture is because of its very primitive intellectual structure. Writers such as Jacques Vallee and George Hansen try to correct this, but still we hear the simple minded cry of "I must get the facts of the situation, and to do this I must de-mystify, get rid of the fantasies". In Philosophy and Art, Literary Criticism, simple-minded debates about "did he imagine it or was it real?" are laughably na=EFve. Ufologists may be baffled by Frank Kauffman and many like him, but literary types would smile at the bafflement.

What we learn from the makeup of characters in major world fiction is that say, Kauffman is between Conrad's Lord Jim and Mann's Auschenbach of Death in Venice. Without such cultural contexts Ufologists are trying to re-invent the wheel in this crude "lets separate the facts from the fiction" effort. This is the blue-collar garage-question approach, and contains the laughable assumption that both personality and experience are made up of bundles of very clever spanners, and all a very clever investigator has to do is find the spanner that is made of marzipan. In other words, get rid of the nutcases and there will stand the shining truth! The older cultures have thrown out such Neanderthal concepts hundreds (if not thousands!) of years ago.

 Fledging Ufology had better start growing up quickly and rid itself of these witless and simplistic industrial contaminations. Frank Kauffman's mind, like every single mind on this planet was a criminal mess, a ghetto, a shanty town, a gipsy camp, and long may consciousness remain so. As such, a single isolated strand of consciousness is not to be trusted for a moment, any more than a single action of a single idea.

Between life and death, we are the carriers of limitless agendas. We can only imagine what alien culture A is necessarily going to be like in this respect, and compared with alien culture B, and so on.

 Contact will entail both surprises and some disappointments, of which linear bourgoise hard-working plain honest dealing will the most unlikely. In order to understand the UFO must cast off every single strand of mechanistic industrial determinism within is. And must demolish almost every single assumption we ever had about the structure of the world and the makeup of what we call personality. Aliens may already be here as huge system-implants, their Dulce "vats" being rather huge interacting web sites in which they lay their eggs.

 Their brain might have evolved to pure media, and be constructed of the kind of living advertisement that looked George Adamski in the eye. Aliens might well be disembodied web-games leading to ever-widening penumbras of uncertainty. All is ambiguity. The highest level of "them" might even be induced metaphor that we incubate and spread like seed-corn through all our systems of reference to make up that Copernican change of paradigm that many people on this List know we are about to experience.  Thus we have to be very careful when we use the words "fiction" and "reality". We can expect certainly that what humanity is about to experience will not be based old-industrial objective work-and-worth based paradigms. We will experience things that we did not expect, recognise, and things we are least capable of dealing with. We should not expect advanced super-extensions of our industrially-oriented WASP selves, but possibly jokes and shows, advertisements and quadrupal takes as alien levels C and G interact with very different alien levels P and Q, again compared with levels S and P, say. Certainly, as with our own colonisation of people, what the "primitive" sees is not what the primitive gets.

 Their software and image and media manipulations of first level A will be out of this world, and they will of course be in a state of decay or war. Certainly they will have internal conflicts. Therefore yes, I can readily believe say that there was a landing at Kirtland AFB, but if there was, I do not think that it would be nearly as real as the nut and bolt folk claim. We might be seeing something as quasi-substantial as their equivalent to a rejected prototype for a graphic toothpaste advertisement, and how real is that, relatively to us? When the redesigns of the toothpaste advertisements of alien level A are combined with the rubbish tips of alien level Q, and combined in turn with the lies, evasions, and disasters of alien level M, the concrete "reality" of the nut-and-bolt view begins to look like a newspaper shredded by a heavy downpour.

 When these things in turn are combined yet again with our own culture (built essentially of similar multi-layed advertisements), the idea of analysis based on mechanical ideas of truth and reality becomes a Fortean joke in itself. To add to the confusion, we will surely contact at least some of the amplified elements of what we know we have already in our own society. We will meet strands of half-lost and three-quarter-understood meanings that will combine with abruptly curtailed scandals; advertisements will have lost half their meaning and relevance; jokes will not make sense, conversations and cartoons will have lost their point, and advanced alien concepts of entertainment in particular will be incomprehensible to us as a joke to a German. They will of course have their failures and crooks and criminals if only because all mind-stuff works that way, and not in any clean Pavlovian behaviouristic fashion. 

Add alien saints and the alien mad, alien loners and psychopaths, the superficial and the not-to-bright, the lost and the despairing (and indeed the fools and the jokers and tricksters) as contact components, and we can see that if we expect from "contact" a single isolated thread of old "objective" hard-industrial "meaning" (this being a cultural advertisement in itself), then we are very likely to be disappointed. As colonials in turn, we should expect the very worst, not the best. This is why I think Adamski's experience was significant. Like many contactees, I think he drew his experience as it was, with absurd, plain silly and totally unbelievable elements (such as the return of his photograph negative thrown from a porthole of the UFO!).

 In all liklehood, the blond androgynous sylph from "Venus" was custom-designed as bait for him, and his Christian interpretation was his own subjective component, grafted on to what was probably a structured act in the first place. What we so easily call "reality" is that complex. That this whole story (and many others like it) could have been cleaned up considerably to make it a better act is evidence that what Adamski encountered was in all likelihood part of a laugh-in. Perhaps we may have to somewhat painfully accept such experiences as momentary alien signals rather than electromagnetic pulsations.

 We must expect such hardly complimentary treatment, and not some wizened ET sage come bearing a box full of the secrets of his culture. Yes, we would like the universe to be serious and scientific, a good bourgeois, but I think Adamski met what we fear most: a kind of piss-taking song and dance show rigged just for him, as it might just be rigged for us, and rigged not by one alien cultural level alone. Some very snobbish folk who really aught to know better reject the burger-selling Adamski because they think (rather like Shakespeare, unfortunately) that really significant experiences can only happen to significant folk. Others reject Adamski not because he lacked education or intelligence, but that what he saw and experienced suggests that alien culture might not pay us the compliment of seeing us in a serious light at all. We will have to consider seriously that aliens might well have evolved from strong directions recognisable to us to the whimsical nature of almost disembodied media-stuff. That survival of the fittest might need comic subversion of the major physical survival instincts as described by Darwin is an idea that he might well have been both surprised and fascinated to see.

 But our ego is such that we don't like to be the subjects of jokes. The loincloth folk we colonised we can laugh at, but not ourselves. Aliens are as likely to give us a coherent techno-industrial signal as we are likely to stop our car and give our card to a herd of cows in a field. If we get a sensible signal, then this would certainly presage our destruction. It will be as phony as a silicon tit or the Brentford Polonius. Like Orthon, it will more likely be a trick or treat, or a trap or a joke. Our present Jack meets Jill from abroad ideas will have to go, and we will have to think right out of the box.

 We must consider ideas beyond the beyond and beyond that beyond again. We might meet rehearsals not solidities, actor's improvisations rather than mechanisms, and tissues of disembodied information more than flesh and blood.

 Such a thing as the Kirtland AFB landing will not be any more real than a stage performance can be considered real. I think Adamski met Orthon and I think also that the replacement of beloved science by Orthon's Agent and his team of Creative Management will be one of the most exhilarating disappointments that both Western science and civilisation will have to face. 

Jan, it is midnight in London. I have fed my cats and I have given Mr. Oberg's oil its final touches. You can see it on varnishing day in early February, Bin Laden be willing. And so to bed, making notes on answering Mr Jan Aldrich's other questions at great length some other time. 

Yours affectionately, in triumph and disaster, and compliments of the season to all List Savants.

 Mr Aldrich replied as follows:  After reading your answer, I doubt you are capable of answering anything simply and directly! but even though I bear a Degree from the university of Oxford in English Language and Literature, I am somewhat ashamed to say that I do not know what a fiction is, quite. Pity!

 Project 1947 is a work of art. You are a modern Quixote.

 Thanks, I know who is the patron saint of of lost causes 

 Now don't just sneer at all this as verbal salad (to quote a prominent List member who should have know better it made him sound like an intellectual top of the head yob, which as a  prominent physicist he most patently is not). Whether you like it or not, Jan, you are creating (as indeed are the Moderators of this List) a new form of expression. I have given up reading novels for this glittering mysterium of the Web. Please don't sneer at my long haired words. Have pity for me. I am doomed. I have a touch of the poet. Only a touch, but it has almost ruined my life, as Project 1947 has I guess, probably nearly ruined your own. Being artists, we are both stricken with what Kierkegaard called the sickness unto death.

 No, I don't think my life is ruined. I am sorry, I am not an artist but rather a philistine.

 I imagine future crimes. Has he stolen a car? No, your honour, he has been imagining things. Twenty years in the slammer! The attempt to annihilate certain kinds of mental activity is not that they are false or unreal, but that partial forms of imagining might just come about. It is the oldest single aspect of human culture that survives still in its primordial form. The Friedman/Randle dialogue is about the casing out of impurities: the visionaries, the social failures, the liars and fantasists, the con men, all these things to be replaced by "real science" who will clean up the farm and get rid of the falsehoods and freaks in the ghetto and their "wrong answers" from their "failed culture". The kind of high-school condescension as regards what Mom told them about the Other Side of Town is found in Donna Kossey's otherwise excellent book, Kooks. For the record, like Mr. Velez, I have had a UFO experience, and know that I lost some time. But unlike Mr Velez, I have no recollection of abduction at all.

 Hey, I've lost a lot of time reading these ramblings, also, In fact, I hereby apply for a refund!

 What has this got to do with Ruppelt, you ask? What has Ruppelt got to do with Roswell? All his working life, Ruppelt was a systems man encased in a very tight system. He did not have a youth worth the name outside the fuselage of a warplane on active service. Though flesh and blood, he was therefore built of all the resonant inferences of such a specialized system.

Take a man from such a unique cultural context, and he is a wet sack underfoot. Ruppelt's connection with nukes is implicit. I don't want to reveal much out about my book, but Ruppelt through a chance death or illness might well have come within hours of being chosen to be navigator/bombardier aboard Enola Gay or Bockscar. When a man comes that close to apocalyptic forces, he doesn't need to go to Roswell to know all about Roswell if you know what I mean. Bless him, he was a Warrior amongst the stoutest of American hearts. No, I don't know what you mean which is exactly why I asked the questions.

We must expect such hardly complimentary treatment, and not some wizened ET sage come bearing a box full of the secrets of his culture. Yes, we would like the universe to be serious and scientific, a good bourgeois, but I think Adamski met what we fear most: a kind of piss-taking song and dance show rigged just for him, as it might just be rigged for us, and rigged not by one alien cultural level alone. Some very snobbish folk who really aught to know better reject the burger-selling Adamski because they think (rather like Shakespeare, unfortunately) that really significant experiences can only happen to significant folk. Others reject Adamski not because he lacked education or intelligence, but that what he saw and experienced suggests that alien culture might not pay us the compliment of seeing us in a serious light at all. We will have to consider seriously that aliens might well have evolved from strong directions recognisable to us to the whimsical nature of almost disembodied media-stuff. That survival of the fittest might need comic subversion of the major physical survival instincts as described by Darwin is an idea that he might well have been both surprised and fascinated to see My, my, I think Adamski made up a space opera setting to replay his wisdom of ancient Tibet, nothing more nothing less. Jan, it is midnight in London. I have fed my cats and I have given Mr. Oberg's oil its final touches. You can see it on varnishing day in early February, Bin Laden be willing. And so to bed, making notes on answering Mr Jan Aldrich's other questions at great length some other time.

 Please don't bother, life is far to short. I have other more important things to do, like clean the lint out of belly button.Sorry, I tripped over you and woke you from your sleep, please go back to dreams your demented dreams.

Yours affectionately, in triumph and disaster, and compliments of the season to all List Savants. Colin 

 There is something to be said about being separated from the Mother Country after all! Jan Aldrich

 To which Bruce Macabbee replied:

 I admire Colin's way with words. The use of language in my own two books is a poor comparison to the language useage, the erudite allusions to literature, etc., which flow volubly from Colin's typewriter, er, computer, uh, keyboard (there, that encompasses both!).

 Mr Bennett replies to Jan Aldrich:

 Sorry the longer thoughts and the longer sentences appear to have defeated you so easily. Keep on piling up the documents and the statistics. The ledger clerks and the archive animals need  them badly. They are as good an excuse for non-thinking as any, and make the whole amusing house of cards a little higher.

 I'll give your site a visit on those rare occasions whenever I  want a date, a time, a place, or a fact. I'm surprised at you, I am. Even the Brentford Polonius has revealed a sense of humour of late, and says my work is erotic. It obviously has not worked in your case. Don't worry, there are plenty of alternative commercial treatments in the press if you look carefully in the back pages. They will even cure your sourpuss manic-depressive lack of all humour, for which Listers will be most grateful. If this is what facts do to folk such as you, I'd rather watch old street-cleaning training films in a darkened room on a bad day in Brentford. Loosen up, for the sake of both our endangered nations, please! Keep smiling (if you ever smile at all), keep on writing the telephone numbers, and long may your web animal graze!