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ttaarraass Joined: 27 Oct 2002 Total posts: 1635 Location: Cambridge Gender: Male |
 Posted: 13-08-2012 00:10 Post subject: BUFORA conference - Sept 22-23 |
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Anyone going to the BUFORA 50th Anniversary conference in September? Looks like it'll be good:
| Quote: | https://www.bufora.org.uk/content/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=119&Itemid=93
Saturday 22nd & Sunday 23rd September 2012
SATURDAY:
Lionel Beer: Anecdotes and Conspiracy
Heather Dixon: UFOs - Developing an understanding of the Reality behind the Myths.
John Spencer: Political, Cultural & Social influences of UFOs.
Jenny Randles (via live video link): 3 cases that changed BUFORA
Lionel Fanthorpe: Behind all the Anomalous reports
Clas Svahn: Ghost Rockets
SUNDAY:
Lionel Beer - Opening Introduction:
Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos: The FOTOCAT Database: A tool for the present and the future
John Hanson: Rendlesham: More UFOs and anomalies
Richard Conway: Our way to the stars (L.E.N.R. and demonstrations)
Geoff Falla: Vehicle Interference Cases
Tony Eccles: Amnamnesis project
Dave Newton: Fascination of UFOs
Ross Hemsworth: Rendlesham Forest New experiences & views
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Think you'd certainly get your money's worth out of the £40 ticket price if you're into ufology. Also: Lionel Fanthorpe! |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17933 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 25-09-2012 14:41 Post subject: |
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Article in BBC News Magazine online.
| Quote: | UFO hunters: They are still watching
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19702652
By Jon Kelly
BBC News Magazine
10 things readers think should be in a history of the world
A group of British UFO-watchers is celebrating 50 years of searching for spacecraft in the sky. What keeps them looking for extra-terrestrial life?
There are no windows in the functional-looking basement hall beneath a north London hotel. But everyone gathered here is gazing to the heavens.
Figuratively speaking, that is.
The annual conference of the British UFO Research Association (Bufora), is a gathering of enthusiasts for unexplained aerial phenomena that might, they speculate, be evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence.
Dozens of them have travelled from around the UK to be here. They listen to guest speakers patiently and attentively. Many carefully take notes during lectures on such topics as "Ghost Rockets", "Political, Cultural and Social Influences of UFOs" and "Behind All The Anomalous Reports".
Ufology - as its followers like to term it - is a subculture with its own lexicography - greys, contactees, close encounters.
Bufora delegates browse UFO titles at a bookstall
The ufologists also have their own recurring motifs - abductions, government cover-ups - and a distinctive visual aesthetic which looks like a sort of blend of the retro-futurist and the New Age.
At a bookstall, delegates browse titles like The Real Men in Black by Nick Redfern, Reflections of a UFO Investigator by Kevin Randle and The Occult Significance of UFOs by Douglas Baker.
The predominant demographic is older men. But somewhere between a quarter and a third of Bufora attendees look under 30 and a similar proportion are female.
Bufora styles its approach as "scientifically factual", distancing itself from the more esoteric and mystical wings of the movement, such as the Raelians, who believe the Earth was created by an alien race called the Elohim, and followers of David Icke, who teaches that the human race was bred by reptilians from the constellation Draco.
Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote
Close Encounters of the Third Kind caused a membership surge”
Matt Lyons
Instead, Bufora devotes its efforts to fact-checking unexplained sightings. The group says that 95% of the 500-plus sightings reported to its National Investigations Committee each year can be explained rationally. And the rest - well, they aren't ruling anything out. Not aliens, anyway.
This logic, and indeed the very notion of an empirically rigorous UFO-spotter, is guaranteed to provoke snorts of derision from sceptics who regard ufology as a blend of pseudo-science, conspiracy theory and mystical hokum.
Certainly, speakers may stress the importance of maintaining an evidence-based approach and not letting one's beliefs colour judgements.
But the questions from the floor tend to concern whether they think a spacecraft landed at Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk in 1980 or if they believe the American government is covering something up at Area 51 in Nevada. No-one demurs when the TV presenter Lionel Fanthorpe tells the audience that the "major possibilities" for explaining strange things in the sky include parallel universes, extra-terrestrial life and "psychic phenomena".
But even opponents would have to concede that the ufological world view has seeped into the mainstream. A study for National Geographic magazine in June found that 36% of Americans said they believed in UFOs and one in 10 claimed they had spotted one. Almost 80% thought the government had concealed information on the subject from the public.
Nonetheless, the last decade has seen a succession of news reports foretelling a crisis in ufology.
Continue reading the main story
Is it a bird, is it a plane?
Numerous UFO sightings in the UK were published by the National Archives in 2012, but UFO-spotting is nothing new, with many cases being recorded in different countries:
1946 - Polish-born American George Adamski claimed to have seen a large cigar-shaped "mother ship"
1947 - reports of an object crashing near Roswell, New Mexico was thought to be an extra-terrestrial spacecraft. The US army countered that debris recovered belonged to a weather balloon
1980 - The Rendlesham Forest incident, when lights and a craft were reportedly seen in the forest in Suffolk near RAF Woodbridge
The folding of the long-established UFO Magazine in 2004 and the Ministry of Defence's decision to close its UFO desk in 2009 led several mainstream commentators to conclude that the phenomenon was a distinctively 20th Century one, unique to an era of Cold War paranoia, space race-fuelled technological optimism and pop culture references to aliens and extra-terrestrials.
There was even speculation that the effect was partly down to 9/11. With a new and definitely real enemy to focus on, the uncommitted would be less drawn to ufology, the theory went.
But still the ufologists gather, longing to discover more about these strange sightings in the sky.
"[The movie] Close Encounters of the Third Kind caused a membership surge for us, as did ET and then the X Files," smiles Bufora chairman Matt Lyons, a cheerful 45-year-old music teacher from Kent.
While unexplained celestial happenings have been witnessed throughout history, UFO-spotting as a popular phenomenon took off after US airman Kenneth Arnold reported sighting nine disc-shaped objects while airborne in 1947. Five years later, George Adamski attracted huge publicity after claiming that he had met Nordic-looking aliens who warned him about the dangers of nuclear war.
Against this backdrop, Bufora was founded in September 1962 as an amalgamation of various regional groups.
Mainstream scientists were not yet embarrassed to be associated with UFOs, recalls retired civil servant and veteran UFO-watcher Lionel Beer. The Duke of Edinburgh was even claimed as a subscriber to Flying Saucer Review. At Bufora's inaugural meeting, in west London's Kensington Central Library, it was "standing room only", Beer wistfully remembers.
Arguably the high point of ufology's influence on British political life came when the House of Lords earnestly debated the subject in January 1979.
By this time, however, sky-watching had taken a darker turn. In the believer's worldview, aliens had been the wise, benevolent secular angels of Adamski's depiction.
But by the end of the 1970s belief was growing in a huge government cover-up at Roswell, Nevada - a plot that, coincidently, began to be speculated about soon after the Watergate scandal shattered public faith in politicians.
Indeed, it's possible to see postwar Western social history reflected through the prism of UFO belief - from early optimism about technological advance through Cold War fears of attacks from above, via 1960s counterculture and the later cynicism that would find its zenith with the X Files.
For this reason, even sceptics like Dr David Clarke of Sheffield Hallam University - who successfully campaigned for the MoD to release its UFO-related files - believe the phenomenon is nonetheless worth studying as a powerful example of 20th Century folklore and mythology.
"Of course, it's pseudo-science," he says. "But people have always looked in the sky and seen things that were odd or puzzling. Before aliens, it was angels, ghosts and spirits.
"What it tells us is that, as human beings, we need to find explanations and believe in something bigger than ourselves."
Not that all non-believers entirely reject life in the ufology world.
Writer and film-maker Mark Pilkington - whose book about the subculture, Mirage Men, forms the basis of a forthcoming documentary - has fond memories of his early days in the UFO community before he abandoned its core tenets.
"If you get into it and take it seriously, you have to learn about physics, chemistry, meteorology and so on," he says.
"It can give you a really good grounding in reality, ironically."
Even the sceptics, it seems, are staring at the stars. |
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| rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 21365 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
| Posted: 26-09-2013 09:11 Post subject: |
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Time for another conference!
Do you believe in little green men? UFO conference touches down in Truro
2:10pm Wednesday 25th September 2013 in News .
Organisers of the 17th annual UFO conference in Cornwall are asking people to open their minds. Organised by the Cornwall UFO Research Group, the event on Saturday, October 12 will be held at Truro College.
Established in 1995 the Cornwall UFO Research Group (C.U.F.O.R.G) hosts the longest running annual conference on UFOs and associated phenomena in the South West The conference will feature four of the most prominent UFO authorities and speakers from around the globe. Discussing the latest topics in their field each will let the audience have their say with Q&A sessions on the speakers talks.
This year speakers include Jo Ann Richards, who claims her husband, Mark Richards, and his father, Ellis Loyd Richards, were involved with top-level military intelligence operations since World War II. Adding : "Many of these operations included on-world and off-world contact and battles with various alien species." 
Jo Ann Richards will discuss the "Exeter Interstellar Treaty Conference that occurred in June 1961", saying that similar conferences still take place. And that attendees can "learn about the non-human species in attendance and the treaty drafted. Enjoy the stories of the friendships that developed between a unique group of children – humans and non-humans – as reported by Capt Mark Richards.
Keynote speaker Nigel Mortimer will talk about his UFO investigations for over 30years, since his own "close encounter" in Yorkshire in 1980.
Nigel was the founder of the independent UFO network (IUN) and says he had a very close UFO encounter which "enabled him to establish psychic communication through channeling with a Celestial Being called Sharlek".
Since then, over the past thirty-three years, he has been guided along a life journey into the realms of the unknown.
Speaker Lucy Pringle, a founder member of the Centre for Crop Circle Studies and an international authority on the subject, will talk on physiological and psychological effects reported by people after visiting or being in the vicinity of a crop formation.
Simon's Stidever talk will focus on the demise of Atlantis, and how the “blue-prints” of life were magnetically recorded onto Mica before they were lost to mankind into the great depths of the ocean. In this talk we will hear an "extraordinary story of an ordinary man from Exeter, initiated and appointed as a Guardian of the blue prints of life.
Organisers say with limited spaces for the event people need to book ASAP to avoid disappointment.
Tickets are priced £19.50 in advance or £22.50 on the door, with doors open from 9.00am to 6pm. first speaker 9.50am
A spokesman said: "With more UFO and paranormal activity taking place in Cornwall than anywhere else in the UK the 17th Annual CUFORG conference is set to be out of this world."
http://www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/news/10696839.Do_you_believe_in_little_green_men__UFO_conference_touches_down_in_Truro/?ref=mr
..but I may give it a miss! |
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