Oh boy, and to think that I think of myself as a fair and objective skeptic. Last week we watched the UFO documentary film, “Extraordinary: The Stan Romanek Story” (2013) and I thought it worthy enough to buy his latest book on Kindle. Yeah, sure, a lot of the video looked fake, and the experts that were interviewed to verify his story – you know, those people with PhDs and such - all looked like they were in the second week of an AA recovery program. Still, I wanted to remain open about it. OK, I’ll man up – I wanted to believe, like Mulder on the X-Files.
As said, I bought the book, but even at its Amazon site there were warning signs. For one, I have read a lot of UFO stuff. If this guy was so connected, why hadn’t I heard of him before? For two, the Kindle version was too cheap for a big seller, which proved right – his ranking was not much better than MY books. But people have peddled fake-looking stuff before and have gotten quite a bit of buzz, at least for a while. Whitley Strieber comes to mind (and yes, I bought three of his back in the day). So what was so wrong about this guy?
Romanek said that he had witnessed his first UFO around 2000, and had thought that maybe he was going insane. That sounds true. His girlfriend, later wife, assured him that he wasn’t. Then, he got visitations, abductions, strange marks on his body, a miraculous cure of his knee (this is the one that got me to buy the book. I’m still not sure how that was done, as he showed supporting documents. Faked?), discovered a woman who supposedly had alien children through him (as “Starseed”), and recalled a formula for faster-than-light travel that, we learn, had already been written by a super genius human (which, though, could have been memorized by Romanek). But, besides some really hokey videos of aliens, what in the end made this guy so unbelievable that not even the ‘Want To Believe’ crowd believed?
It was crime. Scummy crime. As the documentary ended, it showed a written statement saying that Stan had been indicted for possession of child porn. It also noted that the FBI has been cited for possibly putting false information on people’s computers, and reminded us that we were all innocent until proven guilty. After all, what could silence a man faster than a criminal prosecution for such scummy behavior? This could certainly be a deep state plot.
So I bought the book anyway, but wondered at the book’s low rating. It nagged, so I looked up Stan the Man to find out what had happened in the court case. The answer came quickly: he had been found guilty, and during the trial had raised speculation that maybe his teen-aged stepson had downloaded the foul pictures. Bad guy. I wished that I had not paid a penny – never mind the seven bucks – for his crummy book. Yick.
Later, I mentioned the sordid story to my son, who is a strong skeptic of the government. He shrugged. What better way to ruin a man’s reputation and his credibility, than to plant child porn on his computer? And more: so what if the guy is a sexual creep? His story could still be true. Cops get information from low-lifes all the time. They double-check, of course, but still, that is often the best or only way available to them to solve a crime. It often works.
They double-check, but it often works. Trust (a little) but verify. As usual, my son had brought a deeper issue to the table: how important is a man’s reputation or character regarding the validity of his information? With UFO’s, most of the best unsolved examples come from cops and Airforce officers who do not have histories of criminal activity or addictions. Yet they are still not believed because of the nature of what they report. But we usually believe a guy talking about more ordinary stuff if he has a good reputation. We will also believe the guy talking about the same stuff who has a bad reputation, as long as it seems to corroborate other evidence, even if it is about a criminal case.
So, in the long run, whether we believe someone or not is as much about the type of information we are receiving as it is about character. If the information concerns something that is ultimately verifiable, we can believe anyone, given certain circumstances; and if it is about something intangible or unprovable, we will not only flatly not accept the word of a creep, but will often only lightly consider the word of someone who is otherwise dependable.
Let’s look at a few: first, Martin Luther King. Because he was considered a social troublemaker, J Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, did something creepy and possibly illegal – he wire-tapped him. In so doing, he found that King liked to be entertained by prostitutes. But they don’t advertise that on MLK day, because what he is famous for was overall right and his courage indisputable. He was, by ordinary moral standards, worse than the average married guy. But he fought bravely for a righteous cause, and so was believed, and now is secularly canonized, if that is possible.
Maybe he would have been ruined by that info at the time, but under John Kennedy, the information was suppressed. JFK is another big-league sinner who is idolized. It was not known at the time by the American people, but JFK was not only a serial adulterer, but a masher who would make Harvey Weinstein blush. Posthumously, he has been accused of actual rape (but not proven. This is he said/she said evidence only). But all that doesn’t matter today. Presidents DO things, and the results of his presidency, along with his unquestionable bravery in WW11, were genuine and verifiable. A creep in many ways, yes, but the actual physical results of his presidency (along with a manufactured glamor) are what now defines him.
How about Jim Baker, or more spectacularly, that guy who was the head of a mega-church in Colorado? Of the latter, he was a fundamentalist with a wife and five kids who especially ranted against the evils of homosexuality. He was exposed by a male lover as a bisexual who was into orgies and crystal meth. This preacher’s message of (immaterial) spirituality did not matter. He was a creep, a hypocrite, and all of his fruits were poisoned. What he was to deliver was spiritual, and that depended deeply on his own integrity – on his own spirit.
And how about Jesus Christ? Imagine that you are known, or proclaim yourself to be, the direct, one and only Son of God? Now, how perfect do you have to be? You raise the dead, cure the sick, make the blind see, and walk on water, but that is not enough. Because your ultimate mission is spiritual – your kingdom is not of this earth – you have to be absolutely perfect. To the Pharisees, he was not – he ate with gentiles, allowed prostitutes to touch him, and cured (“worked’) on the Sabbath. He was highly imperfect to the Jews of his day. Despite the miracles, they did not believe because the bar was so high. And yet…
And yet we know that his imperfection was his perfection – that he was teaching that the external law was only for the development of the internal law, the law of true morality – the law proclaimed in The Sermon on the Mount.
So, what could Jesus possibly have to do with Stan Romanek and his UFO’s? Like Jesus, Stan spoke of things that cannot, will not, be accepted by society at large. It, the whole UFO phenomena, is like Jesus’s story in that unexplainable things happen, but when an explanation is given, it cannot be believed because it is just too weird, too far-out. And when the messenger is so badly flawed, as with Stan, it is almost a relief – we are allowed to dodge the bullet of the weirdness of our existence another day.
The big difference, though, is that, unlike UFOs, we will not be able to dodge death and its meaning. It is coming. Someday we will have to face up to that impossible weirdness, crazier even than UFOs. It’s then that we might consider ourselves lucky that a man of perfect moral righteousness, and who was also a miracle worker, has given us hope through his life - through his character - for what is impossible but also absolutely certain.
As said, I bought the book, but even at its Amazon site there were warning signs. For one, I have read a lot of UFO stuff. If this guy was so connected, why hadn’t I heard of him before? For two, the Kindle version was too cheap for a big seller, which proved right – his ranking was not much better than MY books. But people have peddled fake-looking stuff before and have gotten quite a bit of buzz, at least for a while. Whitley Strieber comes to mind (and yes, I bought three of his back in the day). So what was so wrong about this guy?
Romanek said that he had witnessed his first UFO around 2000, and had thought that maybe he was going insane. That sounds true. His girlfriend, later wife, assured him that he wasn’t. Then, he got visitations, abductions, strange marks on his body, a miraculous cure of his knee (this is the one that got me to buy the book. I’m still not sure how that was done, as he showed supporting documents. Faked?), discovered a woman who supposedly had alien children through him (as “Starseed”), and recalled a formula for faster-than-light travel that, we learn, had already been written by a super genius human (which, though, could have been memorized by Romanek). But, besides some really hokey videos of aliens, what in the end made this guy so unbelievable that not even the ‘Want To Believe’ crowd believed?
It was crime. Scummy crime. As the documentary ended, it showed a written statement saying that Stan had been indicted for possession of child porn. It also noted that the FBI has been cited for possibly putting false information on people’s computers, and reminded us that we were all innocent until proven guilty. After all, what could silence a man faster than a criminal prosecution for such scummy behavior? This could certainly be a deep state plot.
So I bought the book anyway, but wondered at the book’s low rating. It nagged, so I looked up Stan the Man to find out what had happened in the court case. The answer came quickly: he had been found guilty, and during the trial had raised speculation that maybe his teen-aged stepson had downloaded the foul pictures. Bad guy. I wished that I had not paid a penny – never mind the seven bucks – for his crummy book. Yick.
Later, I mentioned the sordid story to my son, who is a strong skeptic of the government. He shrugged. What better way to ruin a man’s reputation and his credibility, than to plant child porn on his computer? And more: so what if the guy is a sexual creep? His story could still be true. Cops get information from low-lifes all the time. They double-check, of course, but still, that is often the best or only way available to them to solve a crime. It often works.
They double-check, but it often works. Trust (a little) but verify. As usual, my son had brought a deeper issue to the table: how important is a man’s reputation or character regarding the validity of his information? With UFO’s, most of the best unsolved examples come from cops and Airforce officers who do not have histories of criminal activity or addictions. Yet they are still not believed because of the nature of what they report. But we usually believe a guy talking about more ordinary stuff if he has a good reputation. We will also believe the guy talking about the same stuff who has a bad reputation, as long as it seems to corroborate other evidence, even if it is about a criminal case.
So, in the long run, whether we believe someone or not is as much about the type of information we are receiving as it is about character. If the information concerns something that is ultimately verifiable, we can believe anyone, given certain circumstances; and if it is about something intangible or unprovable, we will not only flatly not accept the word of a creep, but will often only lightly consider the word of someone who is otherwise dependable.
Let’s look at a few: first, Martin Luther King. Because he was considered a social troublemaker, J Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, did something creepy and possibly illegal – he wire-tapped him. In so doing, he found that King liked to be entertained by prostitutes. But they don’t advertise that on MLK day, because what he is famous for was overall right and his courage indisputable. He was, by ordinary moral standards, worse than the average married guy. But he fought bravely for a righteous cause, and so was believed, and now is secularly canonized, if that is possible.
Maybe he would have been ruined by that info at the time, but under John Kennedy, the information was suppressed. JFK is another big-league sinner who is idolized. It was not known at the time by the American people, but JFK was not only a serial adulterer, but a masher who would make Harvey Weinstein blush. Posthumously, he has been accused of actual rape (but not proven. This is he said/she said evidence only). But all that doesn’t matter today. Presidents DO things, and the results of his presidency, along with his unquestionable bravery in WW11, were genuine and verifiable. A creep in many ways, yes, but the actual physical results of his presidency (along with a manufactured glamor) are what now defines him.
How about Jim Baker, or more spectacularly, that guy who was the head of a mega-church in Colorado? Of the latter, he was a fundamentalist with a wife and five kids who especially ranted against the evils of homosexuality. He was exposed by a male lover as a bisexual who was into orgies and crystal meth. This preacher’s message of (immaterial) spirituality did not matter. He was a creep, a hypocrite, and all of his fruits were poisoned. What he was to deliver was spiritual, and that depended deeply on his own integrity – on his own spirit.
And how about Jesus Christ? Imagine that you are known, or proclaim yourself to be, the direct, one and only Son of God? Now, how perfect do you have to be? You raise the dead, cure the sick, make the blind see, and walk on water, but that is not enough. Because your ultimate mission is spiritual – your kingdom is not of this earth – you have to be absolutely perfect. To the Pharisees, he was not – he ate with gentiles, allowed prostitutes to touch him, and cured (“worked’) on the Sabbath. He was highly imperfect to the Jews of his day. Despite the miracles, they did not believe because the bar was so high. And yet…
And yet we know that his imperfection was his perfection – that he was teaching that the external law was only for the development of the internal law, the law of true morality – the law proclaimed in The Sermon on the Mount.
So, what could Jesus possibly have to do with Stan Romanek and his UFO’s? Like Jesus, Stan spoke of things that cannot, will not, be accepted by society at large. It, the whole UFO phenomena, is like Jesus’s story in that unexplainable things happen, but when an explanation is given, it cannot be believed because it is just too weird, too far-out. And when the messenger is so badly flawed, as with Stan, it is almost a relief – we are allowed to dodge the bullet of the weirdness of our existence another day.
The big difference, though, is that, unlike UFOs, we will not be able to dodge death and its meaning. It is coming. Someday we will have to face up to that impossible weirdness, crazier even than UFOs. It’s then that we might consider ourselves lucky that a man of perfect moral righteousness, and who was also a miracle worker, has given us hope through his life - through his character - for what is impossible but also absolutely certain.
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