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Issue # 8 Spring 2001 Welcome to INEXPLICATA! INEXPLICATA is the official journal of the Institute of Hispanic Ufology, an organization dedicated to increasing and promoting information and awareness on UFO and paranormal research in Spain, the Caribbean, Central and South America.
Although
I'm writing these words on the first day of the 21st century and
of the Third Millennium C.E.-- a frosty January morning -- my
mind keeps drifting back to 1976, when I first read the words of
(Sir) Arthur C. Clarke's The Lost Worlds of 2001 (Signet, 1972):
"Between
the first and last decades of the Twentieth Century lay a gulf
greater than the wildest imagination could have conceived. It
was the gulf between gunpowder and nuclear bomb, between
messages tapped in morse code and global television from the
sky, between Queen Victoria, Empress of India, and Kwame Chaka,
Supreme President of the African Federation. But above all, it
was the gulf between the first hundred-foot flight at Kitty
Hawk, and the first billion-mile mission to the moons of
Jupiter..."
Perhaps Sir Arthur's foresight failed him in regard to
the African Federation, but his book's opening paragraph is
perhaps truer than ever. From his vantage point in the awestruck
and iconoclastic Sixties, like a latter-day Nostradamus, Clarke
predicted the next thirty years with a series of hits and
misses: Yes, the newspad employed by his future astronauts would
come about in the shape of PDA's and laptops we use today; his
Space Station One came about in the guise of the smaller Space
Station Alpha; the billion-mile mission to the moons of Jupiter
has been accomplished by the Pioneer, Voyager and Galileo
probes. No, there is no sprawling moonbase on Clavius or a
spaceship Discovery
poised to deliver us to distant Iapetus. But on this first day
of 2001, the promise set forth in his immortal science fiction
masterpiece still beckons bright.
An
analogy can also be found for ufology and paranormal studies:
ten decades separate the Airship Scare of the 1890's and Camille
Flammarion's work on the occult from the Alien Autopsy and
Salvador Freixedo's works on the mystery of interaction with
secretive intelligences. From their vantage point in the 1950s
or 1960s, could Donald Keyhoe, Aime Michel, Waveney Girvan or
Antonio Ribera have predicted the future of their chosen field
of research with better accuracy than Clarke in his? Perhaps,
perhaps not. But as is the case with 2001: A Space Odyssey, the
promise of ufology and high strangeness remain tantalizingly
bright for the century that dawns today.
Scott Corrales
Editor, INEXPLICATA Director, Institute of Hispanic Ufology
Starstrikes:
Calling Cards from the Cosmos? UFO
Crash/Recoveries in Chile Contact:
Talking to the Gods of the New Millennium On
the Trail of the Chupacabras UFOs,
The "Visitor Experience" and Personality
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