So it was, indeed, a fun UFO weekend. I listened to a few podcasts, did a lot of UFO-related web surfing, and spent some time on Simeon Hein’s Youtube Channel. After watching an hour of his videos, I’m comfortable saying that Simeon strikes me as an ENFP personality type, and ENFPs are often found in journalism (journalism being the role he’s naturally playing in the community).

By the way, the thing I like most about ENFPs in journalism is that they value the story and are willing to just listen for long periods of time. This lets the rest of us into the research with what I’d call “minimal filtering based on subjective informational construct”. Speaking of ENFPs as a group of course, their subjective filtering would tend to circle around relationship-values, so in areas like UFO research which are fairly devoid of human relationship drama, this saves us information guys a lot of time in having to weed out “here’s my own grand idea and personal agenda” from “here’s what people are actually reporting.”

In between videos I reflected on the psychology of it all: What are the implications, what can be done, what theories can be tested. And, can other models be applied or developed; if so, how, and to what end? After all, us NTs love to think of ways to “address and adjust the system” when we observe unwanted, human-psychology-based, emergent effects. As an ENTP friend once said to me regarding a sticky human problem, “we can solve it with software.”

I also did a bunch of ham radio hobbyist stuff, and coordinated with a friend to set up a WebSDR server for our local area. If you haven’t used a WebSDR before, let me just warn you: It can be really fun AND you can get into a UFOs, crypto, & Black Ops area of this hobby pretty quickly. The SIGIDWIKI.com HF database has been very helpful to me in identifying what I’m hearing in the past. And also, sometimes it’s nice to just sit back and listen to a couple of ham radio operators chat about this or that.

Finally, I also made a personal record, a low-power simplex wide-band FM contact of 15 miles, using my Yaesu FT-65 handheld transceiver, a speaker mic, and a 42 inch telescoping whip antenna. Longer distances than this are definitely possible, but it was a lot of fun for a casual on-air chat with a new friend. Where I live it’s also helpful; in this case the friend let me know about a wildfire (it turned out to be a controlled burn in this case) that was approaching his area, which is the kind of information which in an emergency can buy you valuable time.

In between ham radio and UFOs—I never fill you guys in on this stuff, but: I watched my three beautiful children play and swim in a creek, catching tadpoles and finding heart-shaped rocks. My wife and I shared an absolute monster of a chocolate ice cream cone at a local burger joint, and I played almost an hour and a half of ping pong with an ESFP friend who’s a medical doctor; we exchanged theory and discussed experiences and I don’t think I’ve ever kept a rally going so long in my life (not the full hour and a half, but really consistently long rallies while we talked about all kinds of things at the same time). At one point I had to ask him: “Do you think our keeping this ball in play for so long could be something psychological?” Certainly there’s a lot of cognitive similarity to consider in this opposite-type, similar functions-balance relationship.

While at UFO-play, I also reflected on the fact that a lot of this hobby is just pure, speculative fun, and it can be just as healthy as any other hobby or sport. Along those lines, I imagined myself throwing a UFO party and thought I’d talk to some friends and try to get something scheduled. This is just personal health-level stuff—it’s about taking care of yourself.

But having been out of the action for a while, I was surprised to hear someone in the UFO research community nearly echoing my own psychology-based coverup theory, be it somewhat less dramatic than the usual coverup theory.

I happened to be listening to a Phenomenon Radio podcast interview with Black Vault’s John Greenwald, and John spoke to this directly.

The real meat of John’s findings starts at about 35 minutes in when he says the following:

“…not only is there a UFO coverup, but they [government / miltary] simply have no idea what they are. They really don’t.”

And…

“…I think the national security threat is not only the existence of the phenomena […] but more than anything else, that they may just end up being clueless.”

Wow. To me, this is also perhaps the most frustrating and concerning part of what I’m learning so far, if you remember what Colonel Halt, USAF said himself — “I think this is beyond us. So quit worrying about it.” This perception and accompanying shallow judgment is a maddening echo of the overall military psychology.

John and I may differ a little bit in that John seems to think that the motive for the coverup is “we don’t understand it, therefore let’s keep this under wraps,” while I tend to think the prevailing psychology effectively transforms information of this kind into the proverbial water off a duck’s back: Lack of applicable perception tools (intuition zone of conceptual awareness) leads to a shallow judgment process, which leads to the information effectively being discarded as “likely worth nothing to us or even worse if pursued institutionally” and tremendously undervalued.

I do also see a “heads up” risk as perceived by the ISTJ organizational psychology. That is, in an ISTJ organization, you keep your head down. If you start talking about the unknown, this creates chaos and attention. Attention is the last thing you want; to be seen as an attention-seeker generally runs counter to the organizational values except in cases involving institutionally-approved attention-seeking; the war-hero general, etc. But going “heads up” regarding UFOs—that’s crazy. You just don’t know what they are, and you don’t know what will happen to you if you raise the topic. So your psychology effectively blocks it.

But coming back to John’s conclusion—where he and I both really seem to synchronize: “they may just end up being clueless.” That’s the disaster, right there.

It’s the kind of thinking which is not just an offense against our NT theorist values, blocking out potentially helpful information because of a fear that it’s “beyond us;” it’s also an existential threat to our world.

It may seem to be dramatically oversimplifying things to say that “ISTJ-style organizational values are subverting human progress” but such an abstract viewpoint does seem to promise some leverage in this case. It could also potentially help define new approaches to the problem of coverups, detecting them, freeing important information, and let’s not forget the big one: Advancing human progress, technology, and awareness.

[While we’re at it, spare some good thoughts for our ISTJ friends who are actually keeping the government running. Every weakness comes with an accompanying set of huge strengths…]

Filed in: Openness /49/ | Therapeutic Practice /144/ | Interests /111/