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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WayneLigon" data-source="post: 1522529" data-attributes="member: 3649">I'll be 42 end of this June. I went through my big UFO/Cryptozoology period when I was about 10-15.  There are probably hundreds of websites you could visit to better aquaint yourself with the current 'paradigm' concerning abductions, etc; I don't have a lot since as an offshoot of both my childhood fascination and RPGs, I tend to look at sites that link RPGs to various cult activity, 'Satanic Panic', repressed memories, and similar subjects.  Some basics: Oh, yes, there are people that think that 'the truth' about Roswell has been uncovered - the tales vary but the government either (1) recovered bodies at the crash site (2) recovered and dissected said bodies (3) recovered 'saucer' parts enough to replicate the fundamentals of alien reactionless space drives (these are suppossed to be the source of the lights you used to be able to see out at Groom Lake) (4) recovered tech and bodies, traded bodies back to aliens for more tech.  'Ufo' sightings begin in their current form as early as the late 1800's. (Though you always get references to the 'wheels of fire' described by Ezekiel in the Bible). There were a rash of 'phantom airship' sightings, including the very first 'saucer' description and the first description of a cattle mutilation. (Cattle Mutilations are a BIG part of UFO lore). See the book 'Weird Wild West' for more such tales, including Indians claiming to have hunted dinosaur-like creatures.  <a href="http://www.qtm.net/~geibdan/a1999/hills/" target="_blank">Barney and Betty Hill -</a> the first reported 'abduction/tested' story. This was the seed for many, many stories to follow and set the basic pattern: aliens land, take people, experiment on them or take samples, the people are returned sans memory of the event, memory begins to return often as form of nightmares. The major branch-off for this is the 'implant' story, where aliens implant tracking or transmission chips (Remember Scully finding her own chip?) What becomes interesting is how various forms of 'conspiracy theory' feed off of each other, producing looping paths that intersect back with the original lore and either strengthen it or create an entirely new diverging pathway.  An example of this are the Men In Black. Almost since the beginning of UFO abduction stories, there have been stories about Men In Black. The story usually goes like this: Encounter occurs. MiB's show up within hours or days to 'convince' the people that they saw nothing, or that everything has been explained. Early accounts of the MiB's strongly suggest that the MiB's themselves are either humanoid aliens, tools of the aliens, or some kind of machine. Not long after this, the 70's come along and you get MiB's identified as from 'some governmental agency', typically the FBI or the (I think then still top secret) NSA (Thus the joke that the acronym stands for 'No Such Agency').  That then ties in aliens with governmental conspiracies of a larger sort: you can devote your life just to hunting down all the strictly mundane conspiracies, including the Freemasons, the Templars, The Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission (Names sound familiar from Steve Jackson's Illuminati game? They should <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> ), FEMA (in it's role as potential shadow government and tacit approver of new concentration camps for American citizens), the HAARP array, blah blah blah.  Every now and then, you get a 'new paradigm' come out. Crop Circles are one; no-one before the Ninties had ever heard of a crop circle. Now you have 'cerealogists' (I swear, I am not making this up) who study the things despite the substancial claim made by the people who suppossedly hoaxed the whole thing.  Probably the UFO case I'm most familiar with are the sightings at Bentwaters AFB; a friend of mine was stationed there at the time, and she knew some of the principals involved; she swears they encountered something damned unusual out in those woods.  Probably as one of the better depictions of a recent 'crash' would be the Sci-Fi channel's depiction of the Kecksburg, Pennsylvania incident in 1965.</blockquote>

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