This video got me to cogitating.  It's the long version, so you need to get past the squirming stage where you wonder why they are filming the planet Venus to get to the good part.  Don't miss the mothership at the end.

Back in the Stone Age (the mid-20^th century), the only way you could learn the latest news on outré topics like UFOs, lake monsters and poltergeists was to find books about them.  This wasn’t easy if you weren’t in a major population center, and even then, there wasn’t that much available.  In those distant days, my great travel delight was hitting the local bookstores¹ to see what rare treasures might turn up, If books weren’t enough, there were also a few pulpy magazines like Fate, for a more regular dose of whacky, but the first-person stories of “I married a Venusian” and “The Devil Lives in My Basement” rather tainted the less sensational ones.    

In the Dark Ages (the late-20^th century), around the time I learned how to program a VCR so that I could record Sightings², I splurged on two sets of what you might call paranormal encyclopedias.  The first was Time-Life’s multiple-volume (very multiple), glossily illustrated (very illustrated) Mysteries of the Unknown, which showed up month after month for what seemed like years³. My other set arrived in one frighteningly heavy box, as the Brits who put it out were not in favor of dilly-dallying. It had a lot of pictures, too, but it was comprehensive enough to sate even my usually insatiable appetite for the strange. I stopped haunting bookstores around this time.  I still find these books useful, although Mysteries of the Unknown is a little light on the printed word and heavy on the full-page photos, and Mysteries of Mind, Space, and Time leaps frenetically about from Rosicrucians to Roswell in no clear order.  I have a bad feeling they are the last of their kind – who would publish such things today?  There would be no point. 

These days, printed material is so dated by the time it reaches you.  But there’s no need to wait, with the Blessed Internet.  Case in point, that video:  On January 28, allegedly, a UFO buzzed Jerusalem.  On January 31, I in my extreme backwater half a world away stumbled upon it at the scifi blog i09.⁴    In the week or so since, discussion of the event has raged in the internest, although I doubt if it has hit any mainstream media (I don’t classify Fox news as mainstream, no matter what). 

The only problem is, it may be a hoax, and even if it isn’t, it might as well be.  Another video immediately popped up, pretending to be the same incident from a different vantage point.  This one was more clearly ridiculous, being a still photo with the UFO superimposed on it, and a background of noisy American tourists saying stupid stuff in funny accents. So immediately, it all looks ridiculous, because it’s impossible to believe from the start, because – well, giant motherships dropping balls of light onto the Dome of the Rock?  Yeah, right.  It probably didn’t help that days before, something similar over Utah was also Youtubed.⁵  If the videos are “real,” then they, whoever they are, may not be here, but they seem to be in the neighboring dimension by crikey.  Or, of course, it’s all a hoax.

 But for at least one minute, it was pretty thrilling.  At last! I could imagine seeing what all those people jabbering about the Arizona lights might have seen, in that awesome triangular (?) mothership.

The world of paranormal investigation should have benefited immensely from the technological developments of the last thirty years - satellite television, digital cameras, personal computers, and any number of shiny gadgets to measure the unmeasureable.  It has, in a way.  The spread of cable networks allowed the fringe to invade the entertainment landscape semi-big-time.  Ghost hunters now thunder around all over the place, joined in slightly smaller numbers by monsterquesters and UFO pursuers.  On-line, enthusiasm for the paranormal has created a vast underworld of chat rooms and forums, suspect videos and audio recordings, and podcasts of invisible talking heads discussing it all.  If you’ve got a more immediate problem, one site offers a list of over a thousand paranormal groups⁶ eager to help you.  Presumably they are all out to find that ultimate piece of evidence that will prove, once and for all, that ghosts/UFOs/Bigfoot/thunderbirds/crop circles are REAL.   

Now that we can capture weirdness with all these fabulous instruments, and disseminate information instantly, and paranormal nuts are now not considered nearly as nutty as they used to be because it’s become apparent there are a lot more of us than was previously thought (okay, so this is arguable), you would think we’d be on the verge of a break-though to understanding something, anything about the paranormal.  The evolution of the cell phone into an audio/video recording device with global linkage should have made it a snap to capture such evidence anywhere it turns up, instantly, but what we’ve ended up with is all those dubious Youtube clips and a gazillion photos of illuminated dust.   The internet, in its incessant, high-speed exchange of information, should have made it possible for intelligent discussions and reasonable dialogues about strange events.  Instead, it’s mostly people whacking other people over the head with individual axes felt to need grinding. 

So that ultimate breakthough for all those unsolved mysteries - yeah, no.  Not happening.  Probably won’t ever.  The paranormal declines to be captured.  So either it’s all a hoax, imagined, mass hysteria, or… we’re just not operating on the same playing field.  We are Flatland squares being taunted by Spaceland spheres.  All those paranormal groups might as well fold up their cell phones and go pursue something more attainable, like giant squid.

Footnotes:

1. Once I got past the puzzle of where they were shelved in an unfamiliar shop, that is.  Before “New Age” became an umbrella term for everything weird, you never knew where the UFO books and regional ghost stories were going to be lurking.  They might be sitting on the astrology shelf, or they might be hiding in more respectable topics like astronomy and history. 

2.  NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries only dabbled in the paranormal.  Sightings  syndicated fringe stuff, shown on local channels at odd hours, and way past my bedtime in my area. No one watched this stuff back then except a few nuts.  The subsequent explosion in paranormal television shows continues to astound me.

3.   A guy from Time-Life called me up one Saturday afternoon, wanting to know how I was enjoying my set of Mysteries of the Unknown so far.  They’d been coming at a steady pace of one every six weeks or so for over a year.  I said I liked them fine, but I was a little worried.  When were they going to stop coming, because the expenditure was getting a little over the top?  “Ah,” he drawled, from somewhere in Oklahoma by the sounds of him (this was before outsourcing!)  “That’s one of those mysteries of the unknown.”  Mysteries of the Unknown topped out at a stunning 33 volumes.  The other mysteries encyclopedia packed at least twice as much reading material into a mere 26.  Time-Life has always loved its photos. 

4.  Who could have ever guessed that the apocalypse would be live-blogged, by the way?  Because it will be, unless the great big Electromagnetic Pulse happens first. 

5.  If the UFOers really are responsible, and not J.J. Abrams flunkies,  I’m hoping for views from Rome and Mecca and Amritsar, because - Apocalypse!

6.  The mind boggles.  It's like the spiritualist craze of the 19th century.  I know there are over a thousand because I gave up counting at that point. It should be noted, however, that many of these groups are splinters of their original organizations.  It’s fun to read the names and speculate about the bad blood between, say Southwest Delaware Paranormal Investigations and Southwest Delaware Paranormal Inquiries.