Book “Ufos And Outer Space Mysteries” (1982) by Jim Oberg – PDF now online

UFO skeptic Jim Oberg has kindly given me permission to upload his book “Ufos And Outer Space Mysteries” (1982).

Until 16 December 2015, a searchable PDF copy of that book can be downloaded from this link on Wetransfer.com. Thereafter, it will be at this permanent link.

Jim kindly gave this permission in response to the posting of my thread on ATS yesterday entitled “Putting many UFO books online - Obtaining permissions (Ambitious thread...)”. We'll see how it goes with getting more permissions.





James Oberg is a member of ATS and many regular visitors to this forum will be familiar with his name and posts.



Those not familiar with James Oberg may wish to have a glance at his website, includes a section on UFOs, which addresses some of the myths about astronaut sightings which regularly crop up on ATS and other online forums. Jim Oberg can also be seen at 3 minutes 45 seconds into the video below:





Even those familiar with James Oberg's posts on ATS may find his book interesting since it explores various issues in more depth than most relevant online discussions.

As one might expect in relation to a UFO book by a skeptic, not all UFO researchers have been fans of the book. Ufologist Greg Sandow wrote in a post on the UFO UpDates email discussion List in 1997 that Jim Oberg's book "is devoted to shooting fish in a barrel -- or in other words to refuting claims that few UFO researchers ever took seriously". However, in fact some of those claims continue to circulate fairly widely on the Internet today.

UFO researcher and author Jerome Clark made similar, but even more blunt, comments in a post on the same List in 1997:

Oberg seems little more than a devoted -- and humorless -- junkcollector. He reads the National Enquirer and scrutinizes the writings of obscure crackpots and hacks, magically transforming ridiculous drivel into "UFO evidence" which he proceeds, with predictable ease, to demolish.

Those comments highlight the difficulties that skeptics have with engaging with UFO cases. Whichever ones they demolish are then said to be the easy cases.

Ironically, James Oberg himself had already commented on this problem in the book that was being criticised:

“UFO experts do not appear to like being put on the spot to be specific, to designate actual individual reports as ‘unsolvable’. This viewpoint would give skeptics the opportunity to narrow their fire and concentrate on cases certified by top UFOlogists as unsolvable. As a leading UFO specialist said in 1975: the UFO evidence is most convincing when, like a bundle of sticks, considered en masse. Of course, his analogy tacitly implies that individual UFO cases, like individual sticks, can be easy to ‘break’; and suggests that the evidence for UFOs will stand up only it is not investigated too closely. While not a very flattering portrait and clearly not what the speaker intended, it may have been right on the money.

Oberg’s comments reflect a view expressed by various skeptics for several decades. For example, during the late 1960s Hynek emphasized to Menzel the desirability of studying all the cases collectively, with the hope of finding relevant patterns of similarity between them. In particular, Hynek objected to the method of treating each case separately and individually. Hynek stated ‘It is clear that each case, taken by itself, like a lone duck in a shooting gallery, can nearly always be shot down by an ad hoc, frequently Menzelian approach’ ”. Menzel commented that he was “honoured to become an adjective. But I simply cannot understand how Hynek feels that the cases can be ‘shot down’ individually but not collectively. Each case is a separate item. It seems highly dangerous to suppose that one can add data from another case, unless one is absolutely sure they concern the same phenomenon”.

(I have previously commented on these issues in my thread in 2008, "Challenges to produce lists of top cases").

In case anyone wants to do more reading about James Oberg and his book, here are a list of references I've previously collated:



I would like to thank James Oberg for agreeing to his book being made available.

I've included a few sample pages from the book below to give a taste of his views.

Awesome! Great idea also.

I've been looking on eBay for a decent price on the Time Life books, "Mysteries of the Unknown". I wish I could find a pdf of the whole set, but I'd rather have the hard copies anyways. Those books were in my elementary/middle school library. I read them all front to back during study hall. They got me interested in Ufology and paranormal.

a reply to: IsaacKoi

Thank you.

I have always enjoyed Jim's posts.

For the most part, I'm a skeptic too, but as I've had a fairly close encounter experience, I remain open to the possibilities.

Penetrations from Ingo Swann is the book I would love to download.. and read of course. Any chance we can expect that gem to be available in the near future?

Bit off topic but...Oberg believer in the Warren Commision Report is a bit of a downer...

Anyways, thx and congratulations for your first approval.

originally posted by: zatara
Penetrations from Ingo Swann is the book I would love to download.. and read of course. Any chance we can expect that gem to be available in the near future?

Well, if permission is obtained from his heirs (or other copyright holder), I'd be happy to upload a searchable PDF copy.

Anyone know Swann's family?

(If I had the time, I'd search for an obituary or two for Swann and see if it names any heirs).

I'd be happy to have further discussion of any attempts to obtain permission for that book - or any other UFO book - in the thread I've started about seeking permissions to upload books.

originally posted by: zatara....
Bit off topic but...Oberg believer in the Warren Commision Report is a bit of a downer...

To add to the pile of wet blankets, I've looked very closely at the KAL-007 airliner shootdown by the USSR and decided it really was an accidentally off-course airliner nobody spotted until the Russians -- trigger-happy over deliberate US Navy boundary penetrations earlier that year -- decided it was a spy plane and shot it down just after it emerged from Soviet airspace SW of Sakhalin Island.

Even worse -- I've walked through the reconstructed Flight 800 airliner at NTSB HQ and seen the clear physical evidence it was destroyed by an internal explosion in the center fuel tank.

If you're interested, you can also see and hear Mr. Oberg on the Science Channel's Secret Space Escapes.

Jim is an active member of this community here on ATS. And I believe his participation adds a certain amount of validity to the, sometimes, serious nature of our dialogue regarding UFOs.

From what I can tell from reading Jim's posts over the years, a "sympathetic skeptic" is a perfect description for his approach. Some so-called skeptics would just roll their eyes and completely dismiss you when you open your mouth about ET spacecraft. I think Jim is genuinely interested in what people have to say. And if we ever get incontrovertible physical evidence of UFOs, I think he would be the first to admit it.

Not to mention the fact that anyone who accepts the affirmative evidence for the Kensington Rune Stone can't be all bad.

On the other hand, if you say something stupid about NASA, prepare to be verbally eviscerated.


-dex

originally posted by: JimOberg

originally posted by: zatara....
Bit off topic but...Oberg believer in the Warren Commision Report is a bit of a downer...

To add to the pile of wet blankets, I've looked very closely at the KAL-007 airliner shootdown by the USSR and decided it really was an accidentally off-course airliner nobody spotted until the Russians -- trigger-happy over deliberate US Navy boundary penetrations earlier that year -- decided it was a spy plane and shot it down just after it emerged from Soviet airspace SW of Sakhalin Island.

Even worse -- I've walked through the reconstructed Flight 800 airliner at NTSB HQ and seen the clear physical evidence it was destroyed by an internal explosion in the center fuel tank.

You obviously never saw the video that CNN showed only once before it was scrubbed away and denied, right after the downing of flight 800, of clear footage of a streaking shoulder fired missile which brought it down.
After that happened, anyone who went on the air and mentioned that footage was disregarded as crazy.
The only consistency I have ever observed you do Jim, is to mimic and parrot whatever the official explanation of anything is.
You would be much more successful at debunking if you were just a wee bit smarter. Preaching to the Choir is your best alternative.

a reply to: NoCorruptionAllowed

Actually, I used to be quite an avid believer in many Ufo tales, but since coming on ATS, I have become a lot more critical and skeptical. The insightful analysis put forth by certain members, including Jim Oberg, is what has helped me look at the phenomena in a much more objective fashion.

Hardly the choir at all.

originally posted by: cuckooold
a reply to: NoCorruptionAllowed

Actually, I used to be quite an avid believer in many Ufo tales, but since coming on ATS, I have become a lot more critical and skeptical. The insightful analysis put forth by certain members, including Jim Oberg, is what has helped me look at the phenomena in a much more objective fashion.

Hardly the choir at all.

Yeah, the Choir I meant isn't ATS members, since a majority that I know of here, do believe that ET is around. But that is because many of them have actually seen them, or seen the ships.
And to Jim, I wasn't trying to be insulting, but that is the problem with dishonesty and outright lying by our government. Lying and dishonesty will cause great anger from many people when they know someone is lying, or misrepresenting a strange report.
Usually, the Choir I meant are those who have NEVER seen a real flying disk close enough to know it wasn't a trick of the eye, and have seen them utilize not fully understood physics, like mass cancelling technology, which is the only way G forces can be bypassed so that a pilot inside won't become squashed when producing 43 G's which is what one case was calculated to have produced, if in fact it was subject to gravity.

Those who demand proof and usually ridicule the most are those who have never seen one, and so naturally, they are skeptical. Anyone would be. I have also learned a great deal about the subject from many here because of that skepticism, it is a good trainer for how to eliminate the mundane from a case before latching on to something more exotic.

People speak about Menzel, who was a very respected teacher, professor, and who was a great debunker. What people didn't know at the time was that he also was a CIA hired dis-info agent charged with debunking UFO cases.

And government has a pattern of using front men like that who people respect and believe to be very credible, so when they lower the boom on some case, people believe them not only because of their standing in the community, but also because they are very educated and are real smart in figuring out believable ways to make people see a report as bunk. rather than something truly unknown. The best way is usually the most simplistic, like saying the pilot who disappeared over lake Michigan was only chasing Venus, instead of some object like a flying saucer. His wife was given 3 different reasons by three different military representatives, who didn't compare notes before making the claim of what happened.

I can always tell when someone is misrepresenting a UFO case by how they integrate dishonesty into their explanation for what it was that was seen. This is because they have a critical task of making the strange become the mundane, and so they are putting forth an effort to do that, but they are not representing the truth, and so because of that, their explanations have great big holes in them when they don't allow for the facts of what is already known about a UFO report.

And the harder they try to explain a case away, the bigger the flaws become in their reasoning they want everyone else to see and understand.

A good rule of thumb before believing a known UFO skeptic, is if he/she has ever seen a flying disk, or something like that, and how good was the sighting, and if any so called impossible feats were done by the unknown object. I think it is fair to say that usually, the professional debunker will have not seen one before, and so becomes fully subject to a history of social conditioning.

That social conditioning can usually only be broken or shattered when a person sees a very good display by a saucer or object they have never believed even existed.
There was a case with an airlines pilot who wrote an article in some paper or mag, On November 14th 1956, a major UFO incident occurred over the state of Alabama. Capt. W.J. Hull, veteran Capital Airlines pilot was a UFO skeptic. He had written an article entitled, "The Obituary of The Flying Saucers,"
And then he saw something while in flight. They thought it was a meteor, which lots of pilots have seen, but this one suddenly stopped in place in front of their plane. It soon zipped to and fro doing impossible to believe maneuvers. After a good show it took off and was gone.

This just to point out that some of the most outspoken and credible people in the past have been hard nosed debunkers, but this was because they had never before seen one, and before seeing one personally, it is easy to believe what the debunker says about them simply because it sounds crazy to believe in something that can do the things that these things can do. And to publicly speak about them still today is and can be career ending and life ruining.

So before believing a debunker, it is helpful to learn about the normal things that are a part of reports like elementary or better knowledge of physics and astronomy and whatever else helps one to understand the mundane first, then the exotic second. And things in science history are only impossible until they are not. That part helps with understanding a credible enough case of the impossible, when it is believed to be a true unknown, then knowing something about theoretical physics helps to put the so called impossible, into the realm of the possible.

And more important, has the debunker or outspoken skeptic ever seen a real UFO that performed insane maneuvers far surpassing all known man made things?

Usually the answer will be NO. If yes, then they usually won't be spending all their free time rubbishing every report of the impossible. Just like the pilot above who thought the very idea of a flying saucer was the subject of insane people, until one performed a special show of the impossible right before his eyes.