Ghost+UFO sightings are down.Psychics-in decline.Are we more discerning-or afraid to trust anything?

Convention demands the following declaration: I had not been drinking or taking drugs, I hadn’t dozed off and reawoken, and I wasn’t in a general state of agitation. It was a perfectly normal evening: I had gone to bed and was waiting to fall asleep. Nothing remotely similar has ever happened to me before or since.

Whatever I saw in Manchester was there in front of me — there remains no doubt in my mind about that, even after 32 years — but I have never worked out what it was.

Seeing and believing used to belong together only when they occurred in the mass... René Descartes undertook ‘never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt’. Doubt was the primary basis for the rationalism of the Enlightenment, so the first witness to the miraculous had to be seen to have seen. In the age of electronic mass media, when so much flashes around the world instantaneously, when video clips, in a telling usage, ‘go viral’, there should be no doubt about what is real and what isn’t. Yet the critical mass is no longer critical. There is an air of the semblance, of ‘facticity’, about what we are urged to look at. The very fact that it is shrieking for public attention tends to speak against it.

A couple of years ago, I saw a documentary about the UK’s dwindling UFO sightings....One man had seen a mysterious object in the sky, some time (if memory serves) in the late 1980s. He had drawn a sketch of it soon after. Hearteningly enough, it was identical to mine.

Mr Lee: Do not feel like the Lone Ranger. I spend a lot of time outside and have seen three UFO’s and I’m as sane as Dr. Phil. I was a USAF Comm-Ops Officer with Top Secret Crypto NO-FORN EYES-ONLY CNWDI SIOP, etc, clearances for about 12 years and have flown twin engine jets solo a half dozen times. Those three UFOs were not winged aircraft, balloons, gliders or whatever else men fly. I saw the first just after sundown about 1974 in Callaway Fl near Tyndall AFB. It was about 100 ft wide by about 200 ft long and I guess about 20 ft deep. It was flying about 30 mph about 40 ft above the trees. There were a couple dozen colored lights around the girth and a spotlight on the front and another on the rear, both shining towards a shield shaped pod with a windscreen on the bottom that looked like the “cockpit”. It sounded like a large factory bay with many loud exhaust fans and a big forge that went “woomp-ting” about every six seconds. It looked like an underwater exploratory craft with lots of pipes and conduits visible in the searchlight beams on the bottom. It caused my house lights to blink out about 5 seconds as it went overhead. I saw the second UFO near Appleyard and HWY 20 in Tallahassee about 8AM about 1995. It was the classic small grey winged disk (about 20X10 ft), silver domes top and bottom with a bright white light on the bottom. I watched it slowly wobbled like a gyroscope about 150 away and about 75 ft high over a field for about 3-4 minutes and then it became a bright light and shot off like a bullet 45 degrees upwards and away; in about 5 seconds, I could no longer see it. The third was about 2001 in Capitola Fl at about 5PM and looked like a torpedo 100X15 ft without fins, shiny as a mirror, flying about 75 mph just above the trees. I watched it for about 5 minutes before it was gone.

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