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There are only two emotions we feels as humans and those are love and fear. Painfully, I admit that we experience fear more than we do love. Just like its counterpart, fear is a catalyst for action and its our inattention to the rise and rule of this emotion that keeps us from our roles as effective leaders.

Fear

We have all experienced it, and to some degree are controlled by it. How do I know this about you? When you were a kid, at some point you probably didn’t like to go in dark rooms or walk down dark streets where scary sounds seemed to come with every step. The feeling you felt then will cause you to reach for the light switch today. Or how about when you asked that special person out on a date and he or she all but laughed in your face and said, “Not on your life.”

Fear. What is it? Some basic definitions could be: reverence or being afraid. But the type of fear that I speak of is referring to the fear of discomfort or pain. Most of us will avoid pain at all costs.

What does this have to do with leadership? Your past experiences, both good and bad, will determine the way you lead. In my 16+ years of leadership experience, I have found that there are at least four common fears that affect even the most seasoned leader. More than likely, at least one of these fears affects you each and every time you relate to a person on a leadership level.

Before, you read these fears, please prepare your mind to read them openly and honestly. This article is not meant to delve deeply into the psychology of each fear, but to share how they influence you as a leader. The fears I see most often in the lives of leaders are:

Rejection

I have never met a person that likes to be rejected. Leaders that have had bad experiences with rejection will guard themselves from being rejected. Most often I see this as the turtle syndrome. The leader is afraid to stick his head out of the shell and take a risk, develop a new program, hire a new employee, or ask someone to take on a certain task. As a leader you have to realize that there are risks involved, and those risks come with rejection. Having an idea rejected is a hard thing to experience, especially if this is one of your fears. As a leader you must stop, look at your options, decide on what to do, and then take action without fear of rejection or failure. If you are unsure of about the methods you’re using then you should become an expert in the subject and this will eliminate that unknown feeling people often face when trying to lead without expert knowledge in the field. It all comes down to having balls, and in this example having them isn’t predicated upon gender.

Loss of Control

This fear is often seen in powerful personality types. This is not to say that the leader is a control freak, but control is a “comfort zone” to this person. The fear of losing control is displayed in a leadership style often called “micromanagement.” In other words, the leader is afraid to delegate responsibilities because if things get out of control he will not be able to take corrective action fast enough. What you must realize is that you are in control of very little. Life is basically out of your control. Managing people with a strong, controlling hand will not allow them to take on new problems nor will it challenge them to make progress in areas where they have never been before. As a business leader you should be providing avenues for your employees to take necessary risks to help the business grow.

Employee Dependence

We all depend on people, from our families, to our doctors, to the garbage collectors that pick up our trash on a regular basis. Employee dependence is a fear that is much deeper than simply depending on someone. The fear comes each day when the leader senses that something may be wrong with his “key” person. The leader then begins to wonder about the loyalty of this person. The leader often begins to ask mental questions like, “What if this person quits? How would I make it without him? What can I do to make sure she is happy in her job? What will my boss do if this person goes over my head with a problem?” On and on the questions go. The grip of this fear is strong, but must be eliminated. As the old saying says, “If you hold on too tight, you’ll crush it.”

Financial challenges

Take a day this week and go to your local bookstore and count how many books are written on financial matters. You will probably find that there are more books on this one subject than any other. Leaders are always facing challenges, but financial fears have a way of gripping like no other. New programs or ventures take capital. Employees needed to expand and grow increases the salary budget. Additional equipment to increase overall efficiency requires funds to be spent. The strength of financial fears often causes the leader to begin accepting the status quo; and will often cause the leader to give up short of the mark.

These are the four fears that I often see in leaders. I encourage you to plan some time in your schedule this week and think through this. If you find that one, or more, of these fears have a grip on your life then allow your mind to reveal the root cause. Finding the root cause today will begin a healing process that will result in you being a better leader tomorrow. Once the root is exposed, pluck it far from your mind. This is most often done through proper education. Think of how fearful you were of water, until you learned how to swim. Or, how fearful you were when you first thought of becoming an entrepreneur, until you learned that not only were you cut out for it, but it’s the only way you could ever be truly happy on your short journey through this life.

Fear = False Evident Appearing Real   …….Chuch

There are only two emotions we feels as humans and those are love and fear. Painfully, I admit that we experience fear more than we do love. Just like its counterpart, fear is a catalyst for action and its our inattention to the rise and rule of this emotion that keeps us from our roles as effective leaders.

Fear

We have all experienced it, and to some degree are controlled by it. How do I know this about you? When you were a kid, at some point you probably didn’t like to go in dark rooms or walk down dark streets where scary sounds seemed to come with every step. The feeling you felt then will cause you to reach for the light switch today. Or how about when you asked that special person out on a date and he or she all but laughed in your face and said, “Not on your life.”

Fear. What is it? Some basic definitions could be: reverence or being afraid. But the type of fear that I speak of is referring to the fear of discomfort or pain. Most of us will avoid pain at all costs.

What does this have to do with leadership? Your past experiences, both good and bad, will determine the way you lead. In my 16+ years of leadership experience, I have found that there are at least four common fears that affect even the most seasoned leader. More than likely, at least one of these fears affects you each and every time you relate to a person on a leadership level.

Before, you read these fears, please prepare your mind to read them openly and honestly. This article is not meant to delve deeply into the psychology of each fear, but to share how they influence you as a leader. The fears I see most often in the lives of leaders are:

Rejection

I have never met a person that likes to be rejected. Leaders that have had bad experiences with rejection will guard themselves from being rejected. Most often I see this as the turtle syndrome. The leader is afraid to stick his head out of the shell and take a risk, develop a new program, hire a new employee, or ask someone to take on a certain task. As a leader you have to realize that there are risks involved, and those risks come with rejection. Having an idea rejected is a hard thing to experience, especially if this is one of your fears. As a leader you must stop, look at your options, decide on what to do, and then take action without fear of rejection or failure. If you are unsure of about the methods you’re using then you should become an expert in the subject and this will eliminate that unknown feeling people often face when trying to lead without expert knowledge in the field. It all comes down to having balls, and in this example having them isn’t predicated upon gender.

Loss of Control

This fear is often seen in powerful personality types. This is not to say that the leader is a control freak, but control is a “comfort zone” to this person. The fear of losing control is displayed in a leadership style often called “micromanagement.” In other words, the leader is afraid to delegate responsibilities because if things get out of control he will not be able to take corrective action fast enough. What you must realize is that you are in control of very little. Life is basically out of your control. Managing people with a strong, controlling hand will not allow them to take on new problems nor will it challenge them to make progress in areas where they have never been before. As a business leader you should be providing avenues for your employees to take necessary risks to help the business grow.

Employee Dependence

We all depend on people, from our families, to our doctors, to the garbage collectors that pick up our trash on a regular basis. Employee dependence is a fear that is much deeper than simply depending on someone. The fear comes each day when the leader senses that something may be wrong with his “key” person. The leader then begins to wonder about the loyalty of this person. The leader often begins to ask mental questions like, “What if this person quits? How would I make it without him? What can I do to make sure she is happy in her job? What will my boss do if this person goes over my head with a problem?” On and on the questions go. The grip of this fear is strong, but must be eliminated. As the old saying says, “If you hold on too tight, you’ll crush it.”
Financial challenges

Take a day this week and go to your local bookstore and count how many books are written on financial matters. You will probably find that there are more books on this one subject than any other. Leaders are always facing challenges, but financial fears have a way of gripping like no other. New programs or ventures take capital. Employees needed to expand and grow increases the salary budget. Additional equipment to increase overall efficiency requires funds to be spent. The strength of financial fears often causes the leader to begin accepting the status quo; and will often cause the leader to give up short of the mark.

These are the four fears that I often see in leaders. I encourage you to plan some time in your schedule this week and think through this. If you find that one, or more, of these fears have a grip on your life then allow your mind to reveal the root cause. Finding the root cause today will begin a healing process that will result in you being a better leader tomorrow. Once the root is exposed, pluck it far from your mind. This is most often done through proper education. Think of how fearful you were of water, until you learned how to swim. Or, how fearful you were when you first thought of becoming an entrepreneur, until you learned that not only were you cut out for it, but it’s the only way you could ever be truly happy on your short journey through this life.

Fear = False Evident Appearing Real   …….Chuch

www.ufo-radio.net Larry King Live on UFO’s from July 2007 with special guests Stanton Friedman, Jesse Marcel Jr, George Norey and others! (Part 6 of 6)

Every one of us at one point or another will look in the mirror and wonder how did we pick up the pounds. That dynamic athletic body we had which made us stand up tall with our heads held high was now being replaced with a protruding group of alien tissue. We didn’t even notice the UFO (unidentified food object) when it landed in our hands and mouth repeatedly and allowed this new growing mechanism to take over. How we use to run without knowing and jump around for nothing because our body was a high energy machine ridding itself of excess energy. In those times before the UFO we could see our feet even if tilted back real far. Today a lot of us can’t see our feet when we bend forward as far as we can without tilting over and falling. It was a slow sneaky process that living with ourselves day to day was hard to notice. We didn’t really see the signs, but they were there. They were definitely there right before our eyes just like our stomachs and bigger thighs are now. We saw only the cake, ice-cream, the second helpings and the get more for your money supersize deals. We relished these times so much they became a daily habit. Most of us had friends who didn’t hesitate to indulge in the daily festivals or invite us to some of theirs. The eat, drink, and be merry crowd was alive and kicking.

Now, looking back on it the only thing that we should be kicking is our own butts. We turned ourselves into human storage facilities not so much unlike those places we use when we are moving and need to put our big old furniture somewhere. The only difference is those places store a host of things and we only store one thing, namely fat.

Fats a good word and a good thing when you are stranded on the side of MT. Everest for a week after getting separated from the expedition party. Most of us are not really going to be involved in any thing of that nature so it would be safe to say we really don’t need an abundance of fat. We need just enough to pad those internal vital organs and a few other essential needs that arrive.

I remember a few of my signals ,tell me if they are recognizable in your memories, for one I noticed my pants starting to fit just a little bit snug so what I started doing was unfastening the top button and letting my belt hold them up. This worked out good and gave my stomach some breathing room. Another thing was after the belt started becoming too small to do this I had to go up a size in them. This again worked for awhile ,then that size started getting to small and I had to repeat the belt move (with a larger belt I might add) and this worked great. All was good in the land until history repeated itself and I had to start a new process over again. This involved bigger belt and larger pants size.

I remember shopping in the store one day and saying to my self, these designers are ripping people off because I know for a fact they are not making these pants sizes what they should be. I know these size 40 pants are really 38. These shirts say xxl but I know for a fact these are xl. The thought that I had actually went from a size 34 to size 40 was too ridiculous for my mind to process

I kind of notice I might had put on a smidgen of weight but I knew it was maybe because the medicine I was taking was making me hold a little extra water and that was the culprit to my beginning– to– expand circumstance. I also told myself that the tiny bit of weight I was putting on would not be hard at all to burn off with a couple of jumping jacks here and there. It was getting a little too hard to be jumping around without any real purpose though so that idea went by the wayside.

One day I took that look in the mirror again-you know that Am I actually a fat boy now –look-and the mirror looked at me right in the eyes and said yes you are. You are actually a fat boy that wears xxl shirts and size 40 pants.

That’s when something, lets call it shame for the heck of it, came into my mind and said I had better do something now to reverse this trend . Weight loss I’m on my way.

I started researching mountains of information to learn how to get in shape. I started cross checking information and throwing out the diet myths that were destroyed and I listed anything that appeared the same in my entire research field. I had one concern that hovered over my spirit and that was I didn’t want to embark on a plan that I couldn’t do for life. I didn’t want to deny myself my favorite love-to-eat foods and I didn’t want to exercise until I got very dizzy and passed out. I needed something where I could still eat my favorite foods and still exercise without busting blood vessels. After trial and error and more research coupled with trial and error I finally had my plan.

I put my plan into use and went from a 260 pound Mt-Everest –stranded–fat–needed guy to a guy who resembles the guy in my college yearbook of 20 years age. At 205 and 6’1 I look and feel a lot better. In fact after I get though writing this I’m going to have some chocolate ice-cream. I can do that because I learned my body and learned how to stay in shape an easy way. If you would like to know what I did I have more information on this subject. I have an e-book with step by step ways to lose fat. No more UFOS for me .

Don Cole F

my third video…hope you all enjoy

CNN with Anderson Cooper – On Friday June 9, 2006: Dan Aykroyd talks about his new documentary focusing on his belief that some UFOs originate from extraterrestrial intelligence. “Dan Aykroyd, Uplugged.” is his new DVD. CNN – Are they here? Persons wanting to report UFO/unexplained phenomena activity should contact a UFO/ unexplained phenomena reporting data collection center, such as Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) (voice: 1-877-979-7444 or e-mail: Reporting@baass.org) “Aliens DO indeed exist. They just know better than to visit a planet that Chuck Norris is on.”

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Whatever might have been thought of Viktor Schauberger in Austria, word of his abilities and the statements contained in his new book, “Our Senseless Toil – the Source of the World Crisis”, evidently reached others ears, including those of Adolf Hitler. At a time when the relations between Austria and Germany were at an all-time low, Viktor Schauberger was summoned to an audience with the Reich Chancellor Hitler, in Berlin. Special papers were arranged and all the documentation carried out within one day. Suddenly Viktor Schauberger left for Berlin and a meeting with Hitler, who greeted him warmly as a fellow countryman, telling him that he had studied all the reports about his work thoroughly and was very impressed with what he had learned.

Thirty minutes had been allocated for the discussions, which Prof. Max Planck had been requested to attend as scientific adviser shortly before he was rudely deposed from his position as Privy Counselor. This exchange of views eventually lasted 11 hours, during which Schauberger explained the destructive action of contemporary technology and its inevitable consequences. He contrasted this with all the processes of natural motion and temperature, of the vital relation between trees, water and soil productivity, indeed all the things he considered had to be thoroughly understood and practiced in order to create a sustainable and viable society.

When Viktor had finished his explanations, Max Planck, who had remained silent, was asked his opinion about Viktor’s natural theories. His response was the remarkable and revealing statement that “Science has nothing to do with Nature”. Pausing for a moment to take in this astonishing admission, Viktor then referred to the proposed four-year plan, the so-called Goering Plan, stating that,

“not only was the time frame far too short, but, if instituted, it would gradually undermine and ultimately destroy Germany’s biological foundations. As a result, the Third Reich would last only ten instead of the boasted 1,000 years.” (Viktor was not far out in his estimate!)

During the earlier part of the discussion, Hitler had been enthusiastic, but he became greatly perturbed at what he had just heard and ordered his technical and economic advisers, Keppler and Wiluhn, to discuss with Schauberger what could be done. Once outside the door, these two men demanded to know how Viktor had got in there in the first place. Angered at their truculently condescending air, he replied “Through the same door I’ve just come out of!” Seeing that his ideas had no hope of acceptance, and leaving them gaping, he returned to his hotel and left for Austria the following morning. Keppler and Wiluhn, however, were to get their revenge later, after the Anschluss on March 13th, 1938.
In 1943, despite his incapacitating war wounds and 58 years of age, Viktor was declared fit for active duty and was inducted into the Waffen-SS, very much under duress. He came under the control of Heinrich Himmler, who forced him into research to develop a new secret weapon. Provided with suitable accommodation at Schloss Schonbrunn, the nearby Mauthausen Concentration Camp to supply the workforce of prisoner engineers, Viktor was threatened with his life if he did not comply with orders and carry out this research. In spite of these threats, however, Viktor put his foot down and demanded from the SS Command the absolute right to select the various engineers he needed. He further demanded that any technicians he chose were to be removed entirely from the camp, fed properly, dressed in normal civilian clothes and billeted in civilian accommodation, otherwise they would be unproductive. As he explained, people who live in fear of their lives and under great emotional stress could work neither consistently nor creatively. Surprisingly the SS agreed and so Viktor selected somewhere between twenty and thirty engineers, craftsmen and tradesman from Mauthausen, to be accommodated in various houses near the plant.

When they were all assembled, Viktor exhorted them to work as hard as they could, but under no circumstances were they to attempt to escape, otherwise his own life would be forfeit. They set to work with a will, and, while not understanding what Viktor was trying to achieve, they nevertheless carried out his instructions faithfully. Two machines were eventually built, one called a ‘Repulsator’ and the other a ‘Repulsine’, reflecting their forces of recoil. Accurate information about them is difficult to obtain, because after the end of the War all top-secret information was confiscated by the Allies – the Russians, French, English and Americans – and is therefore no longer available to the general public. Let’s run this by again, with particular emphasis on the Repulsine, both the A & B models.

But by the spring of 1945 the war was lost regardless and most of the remaining disc programs were halted. Henri Coanda had been arrested in Paris in 1940 and forced to work on a disc under SS supervision. His design for a lenticular disc that benefited from his own “Coanda effect” was a masterpiece of jet disc design. But because it required 12 JUMO 004 jets to power the huge machine the project never got past the wind tunnel testing phase. Likewise, Andreas Epps independent Omega Diskus which utilized two Pabst ramjets and 8 Argus lift fans was also confined to 1/10th scale model testing.

What happened to these flying machines after the war?

It cannot be excluded that a small series of the Haunebu II might have been built. The several photographs of UFOs that emerged after 1945 with the typical features of these German constructions suggest as much.

Some say that some of them had been sunk into the Austrian Mondsee, others maintain that they were flown to South America or brought there in parts. It is certain though that if the crafts didn’t get to South America, the plans that did allowed for new ones to be built and flown there, for an important part had been used in 1983 in the “Phoenix Project”, the follow-on project of the 1943 “Philadelphia Experiment”. This was a teleportation, materialization and time travel experiment of the U.S. Navy that was more successful than you could imagine in your wildest dreams. There is enough material for another book, but it does not fit too well into our subject here.

In 1938 a German expedition to the ANTARCTIC was made with the aircraft carrier Schwabenland (Swabia). 600,000 km2 of an ice-free area with lakes and mountains were declared German territory, the “NEUSCHWABENLAND” (New Swabia). Whole fleets of submarines of the 21 and 23 series were later headed towards Neuschwabenland.

Today about one hundred German submarines are still unaccounted for, some equipped with the Walter snorkel, a device that allowed them to stay submerged for several weeks, and it can be assumed that they fled to Neuschwabenland with the dismantled flying disks or at least the construction plans. Again it must be assumed that since the test flights had been very successful some so-called flying saucers have flown directly there at the end of the war.

Norbert-Jurgen Ratthofer writes about the whereabouts of the Haunebu developments in his book “Zeitmaschinen” . Time Machines: “The Haunebu I, II and III space gyros and the VRIL I space flying disk had disappeared after May 1945… It is very interesting to note in this context that after its nineteenth test flight, the German Haunebu III is said to have taken off on April 21, 1945, from Neuschwabenland, a vast, officially German territory in the Eastern Antarctic, for an expedition to Mars, about which there is nothing further known…

One year later, in 1946, the many sightings that suddenly occurred in Scandinavia of shining objects of unknown and definitely artificial origin caused a great stir among the Allies in East and West. Again one year later, in 1947, and well into the Fifties, a rising number of shining unknown flying objects, doubtlessly steered by intelligent beings, mostly round, disk- or bell-shaped, sometimes cigar-shaped, so-called UFOs appeared over North America.”

The text goes on to say that as a rule these objects were unlike the German developments. I beg to differ. Good photographic material proves that the Haunebu II version especially had been sighted very often since 1945. If you have wrestled with what is available in the UFO world for ten years as I have, that in a significantly high percentage of the cases where personal contacts with the people from the so-called UFOs was made, these were with especially beautiful Aryan types, blond and blue-eyed and that they either spoke fluent German or another language with a German accent (for insiders I would refer to the Adamski case of 1952, the Cedric Allingham case of 1954 and the Howard Menger case of 1956).

Read more http://www.makeahistory.com

For years ufologists have marveled at accounts of the Green Fireball Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) in Mexico.

Here’s a taster of what can be found in official reports. At exactly midnight on September 18, 1954, my telephone rang. It was Jim Phalen, a friend of mine from the Long Beach Press-Telegram, and he had a “good flying saucer report,” hot off the wires. He read it to me. The lead line was: With thousands of people tonight witnessing a huge fireball, which light up the dark New Mexico skies.”

The story went on to tell about how a “blinding green” fireball the size of a full moon had silently streaked southeast across Colorado and northern New Mexico at eight-forty that night. Thousands of people had seen the fireball. It had passed right over a crowded football stadium at Santa Fe, New Mexico, and people in Denver said it “turned night into day.” The crew of a TWA airliner flying into Albuquerque from Amarillo, Texas, saw it. Every police and newspaper switchboard in the two-state area was jammed with calls.

One of the calls was from a man inquiring if anything unusual had happened recently. Heaving an audible sigh of relief after being told about the strange fireball he said, “Thanks – I was afraid I’d gotten some bad bourbon.” And he hung up.

Dr. Lincoln La Paz, world-famous authority on meteorites and head of the University of New Mexico’s Institute of Meteoritics, apparently took the occurrence calmly. The wire story said he had told a reporter that he would plot its course, try to determine where it landed, and go out and try to find it. “But,” he said, “I don’t expect to find anything.”

When Jim Phalen had read the rest of the report he asked, “What was it?”

“It sounds to me like the green fireballs are back,” I answered.

“What the devil are green fireballs?” asked Jim.

What the devil are green fireballs? I’d like to know. So would a lot of other people.

The green fireballs streaked into UFO history late in November 1948, when people around Albuquerque, New Mexico, began to report seeing mysterious “green flares” at night. The first reports mentioned only a “green streak in the sky,” low on the horizon. From the description the Air Force Intelligence people at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque and the Project Sign people at ATIC wrote the objects off as flares.

But as days passed the reports got better. For instance the report at 9:27 P.M. on December 5 by Captain Goede flying an Air Force C-47 at 18,000 feet 10 miles east of Albuquerque. Suddenly the crew, were startled by a green ball of fire flashing across the sky ahead of them. It looked something like a huge meteor except that it was a bright green color and it didn’t arch downward, as meteors usually do.

After conferring quickly the crew agreed to report the incident, especially as they had seen an similar object twenty-two minutes earlier near Las Vegas, New Mexico.

The captain of Pioneer Airlines Flight 63 called Kirtland Tower a few minutes after the incident. At 9:35 P.M. he had also seen a green ball of fire just east of Las Vegas, New Mexico. As they watched, the object seemed to approach their airplane head on, changing color from orange red to green. As it became bigger and bigger, the captain said, he thought sure it was going to collide with them so he tracked the DC-3 up in a tight turn. As the green ball of fire got abreast of them it began to fall toward the ground, getting dimmer and dimmer until it disappeared. But it took them only a split second to realize that whatever they saw was too low and had too flat a trajectory to be a meteor. He was on his way to Albuquerque and would make a full report when he landed.

With additional reported sightings being phoned in from all over northern New Mexico. By morning a full-fledged investigation was under way. No matter what these green fireballs were, the military was getting a little edgy.

Since the green fireballs bore some resemblance to meteors or meteorites, the Kirtland intelligence officers called in specialist Dr. Lincoln La Paz.

True, he said, the description of the fireballs was similar to that of meteorites. In order to prove the green fireballs were meteorites, it would be necessary to plot the point at which they would strike the earth.

After considering many sightings they finally plotted where they should have struck the earth and searched the area but found nothing. They went back over the area time and time again

It has long been suspected that Nazi leaders had more than a passing interesting in the occult and UFOs. UFO investigators now believe there was a connection between the UFO phenomenon and the Third Reich. Could the technology that grew into our modern day space program have been passed to the Germans by aliens, as some believe, and then confiscated by the US government after the end of World War II? Now, our team will travel to Germany and Poland to investigate bizarre alien links that go back hundreds of years.

A 2001 survey of 183 college students at a regional university in North Carolina found that nearly one in four reported having a unidentified flying object (UFO)-like experience or anomalous light sighting of some kind (Dewan 2006). This finding was relatively comparable to similar studies undertaken over the past several decades.1 Additional follow-up interviews were conducted with students willing to discuss their experiences further and with other individuals reporting similar experiences from around the country. Because such tantalizing data necessitate a more holistic approach to analysis, the use of folklore theory, the experience-centered approach of David Hufford, and insights from cognitive anthropology suggest that UFO accounts may be understood more fruitfully to be based on real, unusual experiences that instigate a complex interaction between the event, existing cultural traditions, and mental schemas. Accounts of anomalous light experiences are best categorized as a particular type of personal experience narrative, the memorate. A detailed case study of interviews conducted with three members of a single family illustrates the integration of these three theoretical perspectives in the analysis of narratives, concluding that personal experiences play a major role in the development and maintenance of the UFO phenomenon.

Whereas much of the past research focused on the study of anomalous lights as a whole, my study particularly emphasizes aerial anomalies generally included within the realm of the UFO phenomenon, in part because of its exceptional growth and popularity in American culture during the past fifty years. The UFO domain has grown to include, for example, animal mutilations, crop circles, mysterious figures known commonly as “men in black” (or MIB), alien abductions, and speculations concerning varying degrees of government conspiracy. For the purposes of this article, UFOs themselves are placed within the more straightforward category of anomalous lights while concurrently understood to exist as part of a broader social movement.

Culture, Perception, and Anomalous Experience

Although the interaction of belief and experience is certainly complex, the incorporation of cognitive anthropology enriches a folkloric analysis of this issue. In doing so, the extent to which culture holds dominion over individual perceptions of experience must be addressed. A central issue involved in the study of extraordinary experiences relates to the question of how they are perceived, reported, and interpreted in a cultural sense. Cognitive anthropology maintains that recollections of past memories are not mental copies of stored originals. Rather, they are schematized, mental reconstructions of past events that are reassembled in particular circumstances for particular purposes . As Robert Schrauf has found, the cognitive analysis of autobiographical memories reveals several key elements: “[R]ecollection of the personal past is (1) essentially a reconstruction of the past, (2) prompted by a person’s affective states and ongoing beliefs and goals, and (3) constituted by the sociocultural world of the rememberer”

During an experience, a process of revision in light of the person’s beliefs and expectations occurs immediately, if not simultaneously with the experience. Once the memory is encoded, subsequent recalling acts as a reconstruction that involves the affective (emotional) states and social circumstances (e.g., campfire story) of the rememberer. Furthermore, sociocultural factors shape one’s expectations about reality, and what one remembers directly depends on one’s expectations. Although Schrauf’s study examines autobiographical memory across a long span of time and is not directly applied to single, specific memories of events, the ability to apply this approach to specific memories appears to be implied. There is also no discussion in Schrauf’s work of whether different types of experiences are recalled differently. For example, how is the recall of a particularly traumatic or exciting event fundamentally different from a more mundane, yet equally significant, memory? Linda Garro has argued that individuals tend to remember specific events that have some emotional impact on them. Despite this fact, whether one is recalling an encounter with Bigfoot in Yosemite National Park or Mr. Miller in the town grocery store, it remains understood that both memories are, in reality, social reconstructions.