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Lou Minatti wrote:

    Hey, Lou!
    Are you still Lou-minated?

"hbosch" <hbosch@charter.net> wrote in message news:<vvbkh9ebv0c544@corp.supernews.com>...

Howdy Lou.

Hiya, Harry! snip

If you stick around this NG you will be disappointed as
it is even worse than when you posted regularly.
Mostly there are a few of us "spOOks" and skeptics and
the rest are mostly below average intelligence.  Well,
probably even lower than a 38 IQ.

It's very disappointing. Outside of Dr. Dick, who hasn't changed one
iota, I recognize none of the old-time UFO kooks. The "new breed" UFO
kooks appear to be just plain crazy, with low IQs to boot. At least

    Well, when you get down to brass tacks, the typical flying saucer cultist isn't exactly an intellectual giant.  These are people who heard Nutty Nancy Lieder on the Art Bell show, or saw Marshal Applewhite speak, and said, "Gosh, that makes sense to me!  Where do I sign up?" These are people who could be mugged over the telephone.  In my opinion, if they had the mental horsepower for critical thinking, they wouldn't be flying saucer cultists in the first place.  Period.  Full stop.

the Brian Zeiler's and Jean van Gemert's were capable of forming
coherent messages to back up their beliefs. UFOology has fallen on
some pretty hard times!

    Read through the Google archives.  From time to time some of the old favorites still show up.  Wayne Manzo occasionally appears, as does Gary Stollman.  Both of them are, of course, as crazy as a soup sandwich, and both of them are in and out of mental institutions in their respective locations, but they do from time to time chew through the straps on their straitjackets, wriggle through the bars on the window of their respective padded cells, run to a library with Internet access, and post.  H. Ellis Ensle likewise still posts from time to time, and says astonishingly stupid things for which he gets whaled on like a red-headed stepchild.  Robert McElwaine and John F. Winston occasionally post idiotic screed, but not necessarily in the saucer-nut groups (the former seems to post a lot of them to alt.slack , for reasons that are not immediately obvious).

Perhaps the UFOologists who profit from the gullibility of the UFO
believers need to concoct some new scams. They used to come out with
new ones every year or two - crap circles, alien implants, "rods",
mysterious lights over Phoenix. The huxters have been silent for too
long. How many years has it been since the last "alien" scam? Can the
decline of UFOology be traced back to the departure of Art Bell?

    I blame Hollywood.  Without new and original sci-fi TV shows to steal ideas from, the UFO hustlers are left with telling the same old stories borrowed from reruns of "Star Trek" and "The X-Files," plus "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"  They're running out of people who are deeply impressed by material plagiarized from old movies and old TV shows.
    My prediction is that when and if there's another sci-fi TV show or movie that's a huge pop-culture phenomenon like those were, within a few months the UFO hucksters will be selling books ripping it off shamelessly and claiming it's real.