My friend Gary Borse is practically normal. He is an ex-cattleman, a successful painter with art hanging in galleries all over Florida and a lifetime supporter of the Tampa Symphony Orchestra. He’s on the air at least once a year supporting WRUF-FM funding drives and was a prominent member of an altruistic group which kept a vital piece of Orange Lake property in the public domain. On the other hand, he claims to be regularly visited by friendly extraterrestrials on his farm in Fairfield, Florida, six minutes from where I live. If I seem a little sulky, it might be because the ETs never visit me.
As this is written in mid-November, Gary is having a fine old time at the Luxor Hotel out in Las Vegas at the UFO-loving Stairway to the Stars clambake, which he calls “the largest CE5 gathering in this country to date.” If you’re wondering, CE5 means Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind, in which there is direct communication between extraterrestrials and humans. (“Hi, Gary, how’s it hangin’?” “Not bad, Xzertex 12, what’s the word from Planet Marvin?” ) The meeting features important speakers like Joan of Angels discussing “Starseed Mission Activation: Your Purpose Revealed,” and Julian Rosser on “Cosmic Spirituality—How To Cooperate With The Gods From Space.” As a bonus, several members of the group will travel out to nearby Area 51 at the peak of the Leonid meteor swarm for a good look. This is the UFO equivalent of getting a free ticket to the Super Bowl and sitting in Taylor Swift’s box.
I would like to believe in friendly ETs, too. Tom Sutton and I spotted a likely candidate one night in front of the Charlatan house on NW Sixth Street in Gainesville; it sped west across the twilight sky and took an abrupt right-angle turn north without even slowing down, and it wasn’t even an LSD weekend. But just when you get all excited, the UFOs fall dormant for awhile and everybody goes back to sleep. The ETs might be swooshing around up there but they never deliver the goods. How hard would it be to drop in for a couple of drinks in a friendly place like the Canyon Tavern in Nederland, Colorado or a morning cuppa at Coffee n’ Cream in Micanopy? Gary would probably smirk and say God never shows up in person either and millions of people believe in him, which is a good point. Or he might invite you out to his place for a personal meet and greet with some of the flyboys. Be forewarned, though, you’re not likely to see anything stupefying unless you already believe, like with Tinker Bell. Everybody knows there’s no question about Tinker Bell, right?
The Government Takes Another Look
A 2019 Gallup poll found that 68% of U.S. respondents believed the government knows “more about UFOs than it is telling us.” In 2023-24, the government is trying to change the narrative “in an attempt to be more transparent and address national security questions.” Good idea. People have a tendency to cast a dubious eye when unidentified flying objects zip past America’s fastest jets as if they’re stuck in caramel and Washington tells them the culprit was a weather balloon or a goose on meth.
The truth of the matter is that the government doesn’t know what the hell UFOs are, just like the rest of us, Gary Borse and company excluded. What they do know is that the things are increasingly showing up near their planes and aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and Air Force weapons bases. It may be just a coincidence, but the UFO phenomenon got going at exactly the same time as the Manhattan Project started fooling with nuclear energy.
Place yourself in a military officer’s shoes. Something out there has clearly illustrated that it can easily find carrier strike groups, which are designed and operated to be hidden in the far oceans, and to find nuclear ballistic missile submarines running almost totally silent deep underwater. Something can penetrate the most securely guarded areas controlled by the U.S. military and obviously possesses technical knowledge vastly superior to ours. For Pentagon planners, this is Armageddon-level stuff and they don’t want to talk about it to people like us.
Let’s try to see it, however, from the other side. If the critters piloting UFOs---possessive of all the technology necessary to cloak their activities---choose to keep popping up in plain sight, there’s only one logical conclusion. For whatever reason, sometimes they want to be seen. Think about that for awhile.
Do Gorillas Exist? (from Garrett Graff, Politico)
Western scientists have only known about the existence of gorillas, our closest living relative, for about 150 years; before 1847, reports of their sightings were dismissed as stories of a mythical creature akin to a yeti or a unicorn. The first dinosaur was discovered and identified in 1824, and it’s effectively only been in our lifetimes that we’ve come to recognize they were wiped out in an asteroid collision and that many dinosaurs were feathered. Giant squids existed as a myth for thousands of years, traceable to Aristotle and ancient Greece, until a French ship actually caught one in 1861, and it wasn’t until 2004 that biologists actually spotted one in its natural habitat. My high school geology teacher, Mr. McGraw, would remind us that the theory of plate tectonics---now widely understood as the way the entire Earth moves---wasn’t even proven when he, himself was a student. We still know less about the bottom of the ocean than we do the surface of the moon. “There is a tendency in 20th century science to forget there will be a 21st-century science,” J. Allen Hynek, one of the world’s most influential astronomers and ufologists said, “and, indeed, a 30th century science, from which vantage points our knowledge of the universe may appear quite different.”
Close Encounters Of The Motoring Kind
Charlotte Cripps, who writes for the Independent in the United Kingdom, is not surprised about the ongoing foofaraw over Unidentified Flying Objects. “I should say not,” she averred. “One of them almost landed on my car. It happened one afternoon in the late 1990s as she was heading back toward London on a prominent motorway. “My mum was driving me and my dad back from lunch at a family friend’s house in the countryside when suddenly we saw this enormous bright light engulf us. It was terrifying. I was sitting in the back of the car as my mum swerved into the hard shoulder. It all happened so quickly.”
At the time, Cripps thought the offender might be a plane landing on the highway, but there was no noise. “Just this huge bright white circular-shaped light in front of us, then we were underneath it. It seemed so massive. For all I knew, it could almost have been a football field size.”
The massive object vanished as fast as it appeared. The terrified travelers pulled themselves together and drove home. “I couldn’t tell you how many other cars were around at the time, I was blinded by the light,” claimed the columnist. “Critics can say it wasn’t a UFO but I’m not trying to convince anyone of their existence, I’m just stating what happened to me. At least I wasn’t alone or I might have thought I was going mad.”
Charlotte Cripps never reported her UFO encounter to anyone. What good would it do? According to retired Major David Grusch, an ex-intelligence official with the U.S. Department of Defense who appeared before the House committee investigating sightings, 95% of them go unreported in the United States due to witnesses’ fear of ridicule or other repercussions. U.S. Navy veteran fighter pilot Commander David Fravor, also testifying at the hearing, witnessed the famous 2004 encounter with “a Tic Tac-shaped object that moved erratically, like a ping-pong ball.” He described it as “perfectly white, smooth and had no windows,” like the one which just missed Cripps and her parents.
Major Grusch also testified that the U.S, is concealing a longstanding program that retrieves and reverse-engineers unidentified flying objects. “I was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UFO crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering program to which I was denied access,” he stated. Asked whether the U.S. government had information about extraterrestrial life, Grusch said the U.S. has been aware of “non-human” activity since the 1930s. The Pentagon protested that this was all false and that if he still worked for them Major David would be sent to his room with no dinner.
Charlotte Cripps says she’s not an advocate for UFOs but she wouldn’t be surprised to learn there might be other life in the galaxy. “I’m always bumping into someone who has seen them,” she claims. “What this shows is that seeing UFOs has become such a common thing nobody even reports it any more. It certainly doesn’t scare me in the slightest. It’s like AI---who’s to say if we have aliens here they won’t be as likely to save us from self-destruction rather than threaten our existence?”
Who, indeed?
A Statement From Gary Borse
“I’ve had over one hundred people out to my place who have had their lives changed by finding out anyone can have an ET experience if they desire it. I’ve had dozens of life-changers in my driveway sitting out asking extraterrestrials to visit and communicate. Originally, I just wanted to see ONE before I died and now I’m involved with people working to disclose the truth to the public, which has been so brainwashed into looking the other way it’s tough to get them to look up. They just don’t want to see this is real. Everybody lives in Fantasyland. The Pentagon has been keeping the public comatose on this for eight decades. It’s curious that people don’t trust the government about anything else but they trust them to tell you there’s noone in the universe but you. Come over to my place and see for yourself.”
Are you ready for some footfalls?
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| Borse Interplanetary Helipad in Fairfield, Florida. What self-respecting alien wouldn't want to drop in? |
That’s all, folks….
