The phrase "What we've got here is (a) failure to communicate" is a quotation from the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke, spoken at different points in the movie first by Strother Martin (as the Captain, a prison warden) and later Paul Newman (as Luke, a young prisoner)...
That iconic movie dialogue sums up, for me, the mystery of God, the UFO enigma, and that thing called "ufology."
I have two books, both entitled THE HIDDEN FACE OF GOD:
One by Richard Elliott Friedman [HarperCollins, San Francisco, 1995], originally published as THE DISAPPEARANCE OF GOD
And one by Gerald L. Schroeder [The Free Press (Simon and Schuster, Inc.), NY, 2001]
I'll be presenting material from both at our RRRGroup blog and will link to it - for the few who might be interested -- when I've done that.
For now, I'd like to address the dearth of communication(s) from UFOs and about UFOs.
When one sees a UFO report, old or new, one is struck, or should be, by the lack of substance in that report.
For example, the Ezekiel story (with the elaborate "chariot" made exegetical by Blumrich et al.) in THE HEBREW BIBLE or OLD TESTAMENT[Ezekiel 10: ff], and the taking of Elijah (Elias) by a flying chariot[4 Kings 2] indicate that "visitors" (said to be angels) connected with those strange objects of flight communicated with the prophets who related the stories or who were related about by others.
Some entities communicated with Ezekiel and Elijah.
The communications were somewhat abstruse and certainly otherworldly but there was communication.
In almost all of the strange aerial encounters or visions in the Vallee/Aubeck book, WONDERS IN THE SKY, no one or nothing communicated with those envisioning. (Yes, there were reported conversations by beings piloting the late-19th Century airships, but those conversations or utterances were prosaic and said little or nothing of substance and may have been contrived by the "witnesses" of such sightings or were a contrivance of the newspaper reporters creating the sightings for impressionable readers.)
In the modern UFO era, 1947 onward, alleged flying saucer beings (Adamski, Angelucci, Menger, Fry, et al.) spouted new age theologies or the mental machinations of the contactees themselves. We really don't know, but we can assume that the persons named as contactees - See Nick Redfern's book for a thorough account of the contactee era and "notables" - were just mouthing or reporting what they heard inside their heads or concocted to hoax the public.
With the revered UFO sightings - Arnold, the Trents (McMinnville), the 1952 Washington D.C. intrusions, Socorro, the Reverend Gill (Papua) sighting, the Phoenix Lights, the 2008 Stephenville sightings, the O'Hare airport moment, and others - the UFOs communicated nothing. (Although I like to think the Socorro insignia was meaningful communication of some kind, but still elusive.)
Why the lack of communication? UFOs have been blatant by their appearances. That they remain devoid of communicating has been ascribed by SciFi devotees as a kind of "StarTrek" primary directive: Do not interact with alien life forms or cultures, so as not to disrupt their natural evolution.
That presumes extraterrestrials think as we do, or as SciFi writers do.
Moreover, it assumes that UFOs contain extraterrestrial beings. (I can hear Gilles Fernandez howling.)
My point, if I have one, is that UFOs (or their alleged progenitors) stopped communicating with humans early on, and any guttural utterances, in the accounts cited by Jose Caravaca, are just that, guttural utterances as primitive and meaningless as a dog-bark.
That other paranormal visitations (ghosts, for instance) don't communicate either may be attributed to restrictions of an ethereal kind.
But UFOs? They tend to be physical, or are they?
Let's assume that trace elements and radar returns in some UFO reports are valid. That would indicate a material presence. But no contact by radio or other technical means, ever; none that we have been able to perceive or understand anyway.
What is the import of the silence? That God has remained silent is open to interpretation. God is mute or insane or dead.
UFOs, on the other hand, are often in someone's face, real or tangibly imagined. Why no communication?
(As for the lack of communication in "ufology," I'll leave that for another time.)
