Kirk signs!

There are all kinds of book promoters in various costumes handing out caps and t-shirts, posters and book bags, and lots and lots of sample copies. For independent booksellers from small towns around the country, it's a chance to meet the publishers and authors face to face.

For the buyers at the huge chains, and there are fewer and fewer of them, it's one-stop shopping for an entire catalog of titles for a year. For agents and studio scouts, it's a bargain basement of literary and theatrical rights.

And for authors who manage to get in, it's a carnival. I was there this year on behalf of my publisher Tor/Forge, part of Macmillan, to sign copies of Worker in the Light with George Noory and to promote our new book coming out next year, Journey to the Light.

As serendipity would have it, right across the aisle from me a long line began to form at the St. Martin's Press table. St. Martin’s is one of the sister publishing units inside Macmillan. "Who's going to be there?"

In his interview Eisenmann talked about the sect that Jesus belonged to, the Zadokites, an extreme fundamentalist group who sought to unite the kingdom of Israel under its leadership even by committing violence against their fellow Jews. In explaining the motivation of this sect, and indeed, motivations of extreme fundamentalist sects in general, Eisenmann said that this group believed that it carried with them the holy spirit.

And in carrying with them the holy spirit, they believed that they had to be completely pure and to purify those with whom they came in contact. These were the zealots. And in the ensuing centuries zealotry flourished among all types of religious groups and continues to this very day right before our eyes.

But zealotry is not confined to religion. It crops up in politics and in all types of belief systems, even in the great nonscience of ufology. Here is a perfect example of the foolishness of zealotry because in ufology not only is there no real science, there are actually no real UFOs because those who have them are certainly not going to hand them out to those who don't. So the zealots run around screaming at anyone who doesn't adhere to their nonbelief systems.

Enlarge, if you dare!

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.

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!

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?

click to enlarge!

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.

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.

... nobody discloses anything.

Corso said it and he was right: "The government never had to cover up anything about UFOs because the UFO community covered it up for them." He was right. The UFO community is probably the only place where everyone runs around demanding disclosure but when a hot piece of UFO information turns up, the person who has it doesn't disclose it. Right now, if everyone got together and shared every piece of sharable information, we'd probably have a stockpile of UFO data we could chew over. But that will never happen, and I can make that assertion first hand.