Enlarge, if you dare!Well, here we are in beautiful New Jersey, and it's so beautiful I can't believe it. Deep green canopy, poignant cut grass, people in shirtsleeves instead of hoodies. Yes, I feel guilty enjoying the spring here without paying the price all winter, but no one has stopped me on the street and asked for my ticket, so I guess I'll just enjoy the moment. Still, to those of you who have endured the cold winter, I salute you.

Now I have to deal with the paper problem. For over twenty-five years we have had a publishing company and we have accumulated hard copies. I've been a writer long before there were computers, and I have lovingly created bound journals. So did Virginia Woolf. I noted long ago that every time she had a bout of despair, she also seemed to have just endured a physical move or relocation. Coincidence? I wonder.

I have packed and unpacked pencils, Sharpies, Post-its, every kind of envelope, my collection of New Yorker covers that I used to use to line envelopes -- it was so nice when I used to write letters to have a pretty envelope as a special treat and the covers were just too pretty to look at and throw away -- and perhaps you can begin to appreciate the extent of the problem here. LP records in their paper sleeves; every drawing my children and now my grandchildren ever made -- find me the parent who can throw them away! That person doesn't exist.

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Such a cool photo from a cool weblog: Mystical Forest. It makes me happy that we're not printing on glossy paper, which always casts harsh reflections when you're trying to read. It just makes me happy in general. Two of my favorite things: red-and-yellow food and our magazine. The Stephenville story.

I have been packing for our semi-annual trek East and I am exhausted. Thousands and thousands of magazines in boxes and bundles, and I moved most of them today. I didn't move them far, but you try lifting the fiftieth box of a hundred issues when you're not fifty any more, and you will know how I feel right now.

I'd write more, but it actually hurts to type!

Just what is the truth about UFOs? Put two ufologists in a room and you'll get a hundred different opinions. And then which one would be right?

What if each opinion was backed up by totally different standards of evidence? Whose standards would be correct? Would the scientist prevail over the psychologist, the historian over the documentarian? And who gets to make the ultimate decision?

Would it be the person with the best internet website? The best book? The best magazine? The best radio show? The best documentary? The best podcast? Where are the standards of judgment and who gets to set those standards?

In a field where the very existence of the thing that's supposed to be studied has been denied by the government, by scientists and engineers paid by the government, and by the government's own military and politicians, how can there be any standards at all?

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click to enlarge!This new space is terrifying to me, and it is also a great, great curiosity. That's because it's not just a website in the old way we used to think of websites ... oh, no my friends, it is not.

It's more of an experiment, in the way that those dried space monkeys in a glass are an experiment. Not that I ever had space monkeys; they were something you bought from the back of a comic book and I never read comic books very much as a kid. Plus, we were poor and I would have had to play sick and stay home from school to ambush the mailman before he got to our house and then I would have had to hide the thing the whole time I tried to enjoy its bubbling magic, and hiding a glass of fomenting monkeys away from my mother in my room was not that easy.

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Hello again! I am so proud of this new blog space and its potential. It will stretch to accommodate all manner of things, I believe. Yes, I believe! Your sightings now have a place to be recorded and to be seen. Other folks can comment on your sightings.

Ditto for your experiences and your letters. No longer will they just pile up in my email folders while I wring my hands and rend my jammies in worry. Now you can read what others have experienced and you can comment and compare notes. Maybe one person's memory will jog another and little by little we'll help to fill in the big picture.

So whenever you can, try to add the location of your sighting or encounter, the date, and any other details that you remember. If you have a camera, so much the better. We've recently run an article by a photography professor, who also happens to be a friend, and he gives many sound recommendations for trying to get the kind of shot that might make a difference. Reprints of past articles are something else that we might try to include here, once we get our furniture arranged and see how things go.

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