Starry Starry Night

If you’ve ever listened to Don Maclean’s song Starry Starry Night you could be forgiven for thinking that it was dedicated to the UFO subject.

“Now I understand what you tried to say to me, and how you suffered for your sanity…..”
I have a particular interest in the contactee era of the 50s and 60s and I felt the words to the song were so relevant for the contactees personal mission to educate the world that we are not alone in the universe, in fact, we are far from it.

The contactees probably did suffer deeply for their sanity and felt very alone in their plight. The ostracism, ridicule, sense of abandonment, the huge sense of personal responsibility to pass on a message of such profound importance, the frustration of having experienced something that words could not truly describe, the daunting challenge to bridge the gap to people from where they themselves had been in their previous understanding to where they were now in an expanded state of knowing, the loss of personal standing among friends and family, and the downright heartache from feeling they had sacrificed their lives only to be shunned by those who should have truly wanted to understand what they had to offer, the UFO community.

“They did not listen they did not know how, perhaps they’re listening now.”
It’s true, the UFO community did not listen to the contactees with the necessary willingness to make an accurate assessment of their contacts. If our mindset is closed against a body of information we miss the nuances, the writing between the lines and misunderstand what is left. That’s what is consistently demonstrated by people who deride the contactees. They become the skeptics that they themselves vilify and in turn close an important avenue of research.

“Now I think I know what you tried to say to me”
In researchers defence, it took me years to understand what the contactees spoke back to me from the many books I’ve devoured and studied, and they’re still talking. Opening my mind to their experiences long enough for me to give them a fair hearing was not an easy task. There were times when I threw their books back on the shelf too, purely because I couldn’t be bothered with the whole frustrating, hair pulling, confusing subject. It was time consuming and hard work and I had a life to live. But after a while the same frustration, confusion and ostracism reached out at me through the hundreds of people I interviewed who reported close encounter experiences over the years, and eventually I gained an insight and appreciation of what the contactees went through. That helped me to help others who live similar lives on the rim of society.

“And how you tried to set them free”
The contactees tried very hard to set us free from our closed mindsets and subconscious fears about ET contact. It seemed they were quite successful with the general public who bought their books endlessly, but not so with UFO researchers. The idea that anything or anyone who vaguely resembled a human being coming from outer space seemed utterly absurd to them. They typically followed the “scientific” line that each living organism is a product of their environment so they expected great divergence in anything from other planets. There seemed to be no room in their thinking that we might be descendents of human space-dwelling societies that had left earth millennia ago. This was just a bit over the fence. Yet this type of fixed mindset was what contactees had to face every day from UFO researchers wherever they went.

“They would not listen, they’re not listening still”
Recently I’ve come to appreciate the huge chasm that exists in the UFO community and the taboo area of contactees. Many modern day researchers are as stubborn as they ever were and their minds seem to have rusted shut. I don’t understand it. The contactees are a group of people who offer us information about ET civilizations yet researchers want to close that door good and tight. I can only think that there might just be something in the whole professional debunking scenario after all or else there is a collective mindset that is hell bent on shooting itself in the foot and they have come to call the UFO community home.

“Perhaps they never will……”
Maybe most UFO researchers will never listen to the contactees voices echoing from the past, but maybe not all of them have to. The contactees are dead and gone but the next generation who have the ears to listen, the eyes to see and the heart that answers their call are here now. Perhaps it’s time we did so.