When the Isaac/drone thing first broke (has it really been a year already?) I immediately was drawn in by its Fortean "glamour". Oh boy, lots of deeply fascinating intellectual mind candy! It was way beyond laughable Billy Meier hoaxing. It was much more cerebral than Philip Corso cloak and dagger governmental mischief. To the intellectually inclined, it was a bright shiny thing which could not help but catch your eye. It led us to distraction. Yep, I was hooked - initially.
I remember when the first MJ-12 papers came out in the late '80s. I worked with UFO researcher John Andrews at the time. I saw those documents when Bill Moore first started distributing them to a select few researchers. The MJ-12 documents were the equivalent of a smoking gun. If true, they amounted to documented confirmation for Roswell. Dude!
But some time after, I began to have doubts. The papers seemed too good to be true. Andrews had filing cabinets full of similar documents that he acquired through FOIA requests, or from other researchers. These papers were distributed back and forth freely among his compatriots. I was a graphic artist at the time and knew full well how easy it would have been to paste the MJ-12 documents together using bits and pieces of authentic documents: Not difficult at all if you had a couple of old typewriters and piles of those documents lying around, as we did in our office.

Hell, I could have made them myself. And, having been pasted together from authentic documents, any “forensic analyses” would have proven only that parts of them seemed authentic. Besides, they were not documents at all, only images on black and white photo film. There is no self respecting forensic document expert that would have authenticated documents that didn’t exist. Would they?

Well, unless there was money involved….

Then there were the arguments back and forth. The true believers and the debunkers took their partisan sides. The slings and arrows were thick in the sky. But some of the believers were heavy hitters. So predictably, the papers became an integral part of UFO lore. And, by this time, I was convinced that they were bogus as a three dollar bill. I learned a lot from that episode.
Not long after the drone thing broke, I began to whiff the familiar acrid smell of red herring. It was just like the MJ-12 thing 20 years before: People taking sides, believers and non-believers taking pot-shots at each other. Satisfactory answers, nowhere to be found. Here we go again.
I suppose I have always had a marginally Fortean bent to my belief systems. I am not a cynic. I too, want to believe. But I have always had a strong urge to question things, especially authority. Yep, father issues. It was only in recent years that I heard of Charles Fort. And sometime after that happy discovery, I recognized that I had more in common with him than I did with those who are blindly inclined to believe, or debunk, for that matter.
I now consider myself a UFO philosopher. The questions of what is authentic, what isn't, what is truth, what is illusory are important ones to ask. But I now recognize that truth is not a thing that we mere mortals can just reach out and grasp.
In fact, truth is a mirage. It is an intellectual phantasm that we idealistically and naively believe we will find if we just dig deep enough. But, like a kid optimistically digging in the backyard hoping to reach China: it just ain't gonna happen. Truth is little more than an elusive shiny bauble that we tease ourselves with.
Don't get me wrong: I recognize that there is, always, an ultimate truth. But we are highly unlikely to find it studying questionable MJ-12 documents or chasing drones down a bottomless cyber rabbit-hole. In the end, they are nothing more than Fortean meme constructs. They are an intellectual abstraction, free floating ideas that we have breathed life into with our conscious attention. They are seductive cerebral black holes that emit no light. They suck detractors into their spinning vortex as surely as they consume believers. And, like Frankenstein's monster, they fill us with unbidden emotions that will consume us if we allow them to.

Or not.

The beauty of a Fortean meme is that we can toss it aside just as easily as we can be seduced by it. Yesterday it was Britney Spears, three years ago it was Michael Jackson. Just like busses, another one will be along soon: MJ-12, Isaac/drone, what's the difference? Why toss yourself under the wheels of this one?
I felt those tire tracks across my back many years ago. I have made my peace with these pitiful, deceptive excuses for bits of "true" reality. They are little more than shiny sign posts specially designed to lead us on a fool's errand. It is quite easy to avoid the humiliation of those disfiguring tire marks. Take your ball and go home. Refuse to play. Watch the bus go by. I am in no hurry to get where it's going.

Chances are it is probably going nowhere anyway.....