Where to start? I don’t know about you, but I start with Richard Dolan. And then I go to Mysterious Universe dot org. With so much going on in the UFO world, how would you get a newbie into it? I think this video is about perfect.
One of the great things about Dolan is he is as rational and logical as they come. The natural divide in explaining the unexplained is rational versus irrational. In the Bigfoot and cryptid world they call this “apers” versus “woo,” rational versus irrational respectively. I am not sure if “woo” is a viable or acceptable term for ufology, but I think ufology needs a couple of terms to express the same type of divide. In cryptozoology, the woo can happen pretty fast and that’s probably ok in cryptozoology in my humble opinion. But in ufology I think it’s better when the “woo” creeps in slowly.
To that end, there’s really 2 kinds of “woo.” The kind that has a few facts supporting a hypothesis and the kind that doesn’t have ANY facts supporting a hypothesis. The guys at Mysterious Universe lean on the “separating the wheat from the chaff” metaphor and jovially admit they love to imbibe in “hot chaff.” (Once you get into the paranormal and unexplainable, you’ll probably love your share of hot chaff too. Maybe ufology could borrow MU’s fave metaphor and divide the UFO world into wheaties vs chaffies. I mean Wheaties like the cereal.) I digress. Back to Dolan…
So with Dolan, you get 95% wheat and 5% dabbling in hot chaff. And I’m not sure you can find anyone with a better wheat-dominant wheat/chaff ratio anywhere in the UFO community.
Dolan is exactly the kind of guy you need when you have the likes of the USA government declassifying documents. No one else really breaks it down the way Dolan does and gives you the “straight dope” like Dolan does. For real, vanishingly few have the time and patience to go through declassified-anything on their own, let alone the ability to come away with it with a clear head. But Dolan can and does. Perhaps you have a Zoomer nephew that wants to know what you think about declassified information, well, you owe it to your nephew to be honest and point him to Richard Dolan, lol.
A little website meta here; I, the author, have been into ufology a lot longer than I have been into cryptozoology. In fact, I was a ufology-fan that kind of dismissed cryptozoology as a cross between boring and implausible. And then that changed! In a very big way. Lol, and gnarly. And since this article is talking about Richard Dolan, here’s his take on Bigfoot. I would not have guessed I would be running a website with “Bigfoot” in the domain name. I thought there was far more going on in ufology, that there was far more to talk about in ufology, and that ufology was far more provable than cryptozoology.
As far as provability, nowadays I think cryptozoology is more provable than ufology – starting with Bigfoot. There’s really 2 prongs in Bigfoot provability. 1) You can check out the DNA study. 2) You can risk your life and soul by getting lost in the wilderness in a place like Vancouver Island, British Columbia, the Yukon, or any incredibly remote area people say is a Sasquatch hot spot. Once you’re good and lost, just do a little whistling in the woods at nightfall. Actually, please DON’T do this. And if you do do this, I’m a million percent NOT responsible. But my point is, one can almost assuredly attract a Sasquatch into their life a whole lot more reliably and speedily than a UFO. If you’re somehow the type of person that really craves and needs a terrorizing paranormal experience, cryptozoology appears to be a slam dunk compared to ufology.
I don’t want to let anyone down, so let’s pretend for a second that you’re the type of person that wants to see something weird and unexplainable without feelings of dread and terror. In my opinion you certainly can and there are at least two types of unexplainable things you can see: crop circles and megaliths. Crop circles are a little more difficult because you might have to do some spontaneous traveling. But megalithic structures appear to be easy-peasy as they’re not exactly going anywhere and you have all the time in the world to travel to them.