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Party Bus Service – Reasons to Use a Party Bus for Your Event

Party bus rental service is a great way to have fun during any occasion. Whether it’s a wedding, a graduation, a business meeting or even a stag night, a party bus is a great way to make the day or evening go by in style. There are many advantages of hiring one of these buses for your event. You can have as much fun as you like and your friends and family will never see you without a smile on your face. They are perfect for any type of party, large or small.

No matter what your purpose for hiring a Colorado Springs party bus service, you should do your research first

There are so many companies out there that claim to offer great services, but most of them aren’t up to par. If you take the time to find out a bit about the company and what they offer, then you can make an informed decision. The easiest way to find out information is to look online. There are many websites that specialize in party bus service. Some sites will allow you to book a limousine quickly and easily, while others will let you call or email and see if you are able to get a quote before hiring.

Wedding receptions are a popular reason for people to hire a party bus service. These events offer the chance for you and your guests to get out of the cold and into warm, inviting temperatures. They are also a way to celebrate weddings such as those held in spring or summer, and they can make the day special for anyone who attends. You can find companies in Colorado Springs that offer just about any type of wedding reception you could wish for.

Party bus and limos for prom party night!

Prom parties are another common reason for using party bus Colorado Springs rental. Many high school students like going to prom, but they don’t want to risk getting drunk on the drive home. Most of the time, students can find affordable Colorado Springs airport transportation that allows them to drink at home before the prom. This allows them to have a fun night out while drinking their drinks in peace. If you are having your own prom party and need the transportation, then you can also get one of the many Colorado Springs airport transportation companies to help you along.

Finally, wedding receptions are another reason for party bus rental in colorado springs. The large number of people that attend these events means that some people are going to need transportation to and from the event. If you hire a bus, you will be able to enjoy the reception, and then go back to the party without worrying about missing a plane. Many people who travel to these events in a limousine or in a party bus are used to being the center of attention. They can handle walking through the roads of the airport and everywhere else, but there will still be those who would rather ride around in a party bus.

Bus rental makes it very easy for you to enjoy the beautiful beauty of the area. When you are traveling with a group of friends or family, you can use all of the available services to make sure that everyone has a good time. Limousines can pick you up at the airport and take you around town to different venues, while party buses can give you a ride to different locations. No matter what kind of occasion you are planning, you will find that hiring a professional party bus service is the best way to enjoy the fun.

UFO ABDUCTIONS AND TRANSFORMATIVE EXPERIENCES

Will Bueche of PEER raised some issues about my thoughts on the transforming nature of UFO abduction events in a recent posting. This report serves as a more detailed explanation of my perspective as well as an opportunity to share some additional personal thoughts about my late friend and colleague, John Mack. Dr. Mack, the creator of PEER, is well known in the UFO research world for having a slightly different perspective on the abduction issue than I do. Simply put, I’ve always felt that the abductors—the UFO occupants—had a self-serving goal, which I’ve detailed in several published books, and that their behavior was neither intentionally evil nor benevolent. Throughout our many meetings over the years, it was evident that John Mack preferred to believe that the aliens’ program had a good aspect to it. However, in a less speculative divergence between us, I saw the good changes in the lives of the abductees we both met and worked with as owing purely to human reasons rather than spiritual infusions from the aliens. The people’ personal spiritual resources, the love and support of their families and friends, and the sensitivity and talents of the therapists/investigators they worked with appear to me to be the agencies that bring about their good transformations when taken together.

However, in John Mack’s opinion, the aliens endowed many abductees with a great sense of profound, transpersonal love, as well as a powerful desire to fight for the betterment of our endangered environment. This would be a joyful conclusion if true, balancing the unavoidable pain of abductions, but the evidence is firmly against it. The long-established patterns of UFO abductions clearly reveal that these experiences begin in childhood and continue at irregular intervals throughout decades, yet there is absolutely no evidence that abductees have been more ecologically sensitive throughout their lives than non-abductees. (In fact, I was usually disappointed by how many attendees were heavy smokers or showed evidence of other hazardous substance-abuse disorders at the early support groups I facilitated.) The comprehensive study of the individual’s abduction experiences, often employing hypnosis, and, unfortunately, in some cases, the ideological influence of therapist/investigators, seemed to stimulate ecological sensitivity later on.

Years ago, for example, John Mack told me that he was working with three abductees who had come to him miserable, despondent, and working in uninspired occupations. However, he claimed that after three months of assisting them in exploring their abduction experiences, they had all realized that the aliens intended them to be concerned about environmental issues. He told me that all three of them had resigned their occupations and were now working in jobs that had a significant environmental impact. “But John,” I countered, “who gets the credit if the aliens had them for twenty or thirty years and the three of them were depressed and in dead-end occupations, and you had them for three months and changed their lives for the better?”

The essential difference between John’s and my perspectives on these developments might be summarized as follows: his was a more mystical perspective – some could even call it “religious” in the broad sense – whereas mine was more typically humanistic. I believe that the abductee alterations we seek are brought about by simply human means, rather than by the abductors’ benevolent outside influence. I’ll use a simple analogy to illustrate my argument. Let’s pretend that a small town has two competing hardware stores, one of which is owned by a devoted, conservative Christian and the other by a hardworking Buddhist. The Christian fervently believes that his store is doing better because the Christian God is answering his prayers and assisting him, whereas the Buddhist is well aware that his competitor’s store is doing better for three mundane reasons: it is in a better location, has a larger parking lot, and has a larger stock.

When it should be evident that we are only invoking our belief systems, religious or otherwise, we often opt to attribute both terrible and good fortune to “invisible” outside influences.
Thus, in my case, John Mack preferred to attribute his own success and his clients’ spiritual growth to outside alien intervention, to a “gift from above,” rather than to a combination of his undeniable therapeutic skills and the personalities, spiritual resources, and opportunities of the abductees he worked with.
Another issue undermines the concept that aliens are to blame for these alterations. The omnipresence of alien deception: the systematic blocking of abductees’ memories, the creation of screen memories – false images forced upon innocent subjects in order to hide disturbing aspects of the abductions – and, perhaps worst of all, repeated alien claims that “we are your real parents, you came from the stars, you belong to us,” and so on. All of this should serve as a warning to anyone who believes alien promises, declarations of “deep spiritual love,” or even basic assurances such as “Don’t worry, this won’t hurt.” Despite this, some abductees opt to believe the aliens’ blandishments, a tendency that is likely attributable to our human urge to always believe the best, as well as the aliens’ demonstrated capacity to control human emotion.

Having said that, I believe that a dramatic series of personal encounters, such as intermittent, life-long alien abductions, whether consciously recalled or not, will inevitably cause genuine transformations in any life’s developmental trajectory, and I have written extensively about such transformations.
Anyone who works with abductees, including John Mack, has become aware of the negative consequences of their experiences: PTSD, depression, low self-esteem, elevated distrust scores, and so on. In my over thirty years of working with hundreds of abductees, I’ve witnessed a number of suicide attempts, some of which were successful, as well as a number of emotional breakdowns and hospitalizations, none of which is surprising. However, as I previously indicated, after abductees have began to discuss their experiences with objective therapists/investigators and have begun to engage with other abductees through friendships and support groups, a positive aspect to their experiences frequently emerges. Despite their traumas, many people believe that their lives have been broadened in some ways, that their sense of connectedness with all living things has deepened, and that their respect for our planet’s beauty and fragility has been stirred. But, once again, the essential question is whether these beneficial outcomes are a gift from the aliens or simply a facet of the human spirit’s inherent generosity and resilience when confronted with extraordinary encounters.

It seems self-evident to me that anyone who is temporarily taken from the familiarity and safety of our home planet to an unearthly environment will have an emotionally altering experience. Fortunately, we have a number of reactions to such experiences on file, in which the participants remarked on their improved sympathies for the earth’s beauty and endangered state upon their return to their home planet, and pledged their renewed commitment to environmental causes. Some spoke eloquently on the profound spiritual and intellectual changes that their extraterrestrial encounters had brought about. I’m not talking about abductees from UFOs; I’m talking about NASA astronauts, men and women who have deliberately left the area of Earth, momentarily relinquishing their regular autonomy, and then returned to our beleaguered planet with grief and worry.

These “NASA abductees” serve as a control group, allowing scientists to observe how people respond when they are taken away from their usual surroundings.
They resemble the reactions of people who were unwittingly apprehended and taken away by UFO occupants in certain aspects. So, if one were to ask, “What might the average human think after such an unearthly adventure?” the NASA astronauts provide at least a partial answer: such a space traveler is likely to return more concerned about ecological issues and the endangered state of our planet – not because of alien emotional infusions, but because of human inborn hopes and concerns.

Given all of these considerations, it appears to me that John Mack’s portrayal of aliens as benevolent presenters of spiritual riches and environmental concern to abductees is essentially a question of mystical faith, with no convincing evidence to back it up. Worse, it provides a reassuring alibi for the aliens’ kidnapping of innocent men, women, and children and subjecting them to a succession of coldly horrific treatments that ostensibly benefit the aliens but invariably leave humans with significant emotional scars.

Finally, and perhaps most depressingly, this “benevolent” view of the manipulating aliens ascribes to them spiritual energies that rightfully belong to the wounded, even heroic abductees. I recall having a conversation with the wife of an abductee with whom John had worked extensively a few years earlier. Her spouse, she added, was completely absorbed by his “foreign family,” to the point that she felt discouraged and alienated. I questioned if she believed her husband’s claims of a truly love relationship with his captors, as well as his spiritual growth and environmental sensitivity, were true.

THE PHILIP CORSO PROBLEM

The Intruders Foundation is a non-profit organization committed to the investigation of UFO abductions. However, every now and then, the UFO field as a whole is roiled by dramatic new developments that threaten to influence us all, necessitating IF’s attention. The Paul Hellyer case is one such development, one that many believed would set off a series of events that would lead to the official UFO cover-up being exposed. Paul Hellyer, a former Canadian Minister of Defense, stated in the fall and winter of 2005 that he believes the UFO phenomenon is extraterrestrial in origin and that it reflects the interest of intelligent, non-human species in our planet and its people. This was obviously big news because of Hellyer’s previous position. It was almost as if Robert MacNamara, the former “American Minister of Defense,” had gone to the press to make such a statement. Hellyer was knowledgeable and confident, but the more one knew about his UFO perspective and its history, the more concerned one became.
When Mr. Hellyer’s title was changed to “former Minister of Defense,” I assumed he was providing top-secret, official information regarding UFOs that he had access to during his time in the Ministry. This was not the case, unfortunately. In truth, he had developed his opinion just recently, owing to his study of Colonel Philip Corso’s “The Day After Roswell,” a highly contentious book. We also learnt that Paul Hellyer served as Canada’s Minister of Defense for nearly four decades, and that his new viewpoint on the UFO phenomenon crystallized when he was in his nineties. Now, his age obviously doesn’t preclude his view on this, or anything else for that matter (in the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll be 75 on my next birthday), but his reliance on the infamous Corso book raised a wildly flapping red flag for me.

Hellyer made his acceptance of UFO truth public during a “exopolitics” symposium, which he allegedly chose to attend because Alfred Webre was scheduled to speak. Webre’s belief in some type of Grand Governing Body, made up of all the intelligent beings who reside on the universe’s livable planets, captivated the former Minister, who had read one of his books. Webre argued that the extraterrestrials are upset with the black sheep earthlings’ actions and have placed us in quarantine until we change our ways and become more spiritual. Or at least that’s how the narrative goes, because the sole proof for it comes from a small group of channelers and remote watchers who lean heavily toward standard New Age theology. So the Hellyer saga boils down to this: he read Philip Corso’s and Alfred Webre’s works late in life, accepted them without question, and as a result suffered a quasi-religious conversion. However, problems come for the rest of us when Hellyer appears before the national media – a cynical bunch at best – and references some of the more absurd and indefensible Corso claims as proof of UFO existence. No other proof is required!

I republish below my 1997 review of Colonel Philip J. Corso’s book, “The Day After Roswell,” by co-author William J. Birnes, to present a more complete analysis of Corso’s book and its inherent issues.

So this is what I wrote in IF Bulletin Number 5 nine years ago. I encountered Col. Corso a little time later in San Marino, Italy, and was able to interview him. I was annoyed and irritated by what I saw to be his stonewalling during our videotaped conversation. Despite the fact that he claimed to be aware that his book did not contain the name of anyone who could aid corroborate his claim of saving the planet on his own, he refused to offer the name of any corroborating witness. He said, as though retaining a lofty moral posture, “I never give out a name unless I have that person’s permission.” I pointed out that the climax events he’d written about had occurred 36 years ago; the Cold War had been gone for over a decade; and many of people he claimed to have dealt with, such as General Trudeau, may have died since then. In any event, I added that being recognized as having contributed to the preservation of planet Earth and the very existence of one’s species might be welcomed by some of these people. Despite this, he was adamant. He refused to give any names.

Corso’s seeming absolute acceptance of everything the Russian intelligence agents informed him regarding various American state and military secrets was the subject of one of our discussions. The purportedly verbatim report of a very confidential conversation Harry Truman had with high officials in the White House immediately after the Roswell incident, which I highlighted in my review, was one such example. When I pointed out that his willingness to believe the Russian spy’s detailed narrative made him appear gullible, he claimed that he had been able to “verify” the Russian allegations’ truth with “other sources.” But his late-game defense of what appeared to be extraordinary credulity exposed him to yet another unsettling – and potentially serious – allegation. If he actually trusted the Russians’ detailed descriptions of secret White House talks, his acceptance implied one of two things: either the White House was bugged or there was a Russian mole at the highest level. In either case, he would have known that no American secrets were safe, and it would have been his responsibility to quickly disclose such a security breach. I believe he would have faced court martial or criminal prosecution if he had failed to sound the alarm. Unfortunately, there is no indication that he ever informed anybody about Russia’s frightening capabilities, even after claiming to be a member of the National Security Council (NSC) and frequenting the Oval Office. In retrospect, logic dictates that if we are to acquit the Colonel of indirectly aiding enemy espionage, we must accept the more obvious explanation: that he simply invented the secret Harry Truman conversations, the Russian spies, and the entire elaborate story in order to give his story a little more Rambo-like zing.

I implored Col. Corso to name, or at least describe, some of these rambunctious Russian spies now that the Russian government had opened the KGB files. He declined once more. He claimed he couldn’t recall any names and that the spy “looked exactly like Americans.” He couldn’t recollect any identifying characteristics about them, and he couldn’t recall where he used to meet with them to learn about their latest Oval Office discoveries.

Stanton Friedman, a friend and colleague, is an adept in locating official records and validating – or discrediting – the credentials claimed by UFO researchers. He made the following arguments in response to my questions about Colonel Corso:

I received a letter from the Eisenhower Library confirming that Corso had never served on the National Security Council, despite swearing to it before attorney Peter Gersten.
In response to his claim that he was chief of the army’s Foreign Technology Division in the 1960s, I received a list of people who worked under General Trudeau in the mid-1960s. It was made up of four two-column legal-sized pages. There was an Army Foreign Technology Division, and the roster said that it had two members, with Corso serving as the junior officer [rather than the chief, as he had claimed -BH]. There were dozens of persons working in the US Air Force Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, many of whom were engineers and scientists. In the early 1960s, I paid several trips to the group. Knowing its members, I find it hard to imagine they had wreckage in 1947 and did nothing with it.
Corso was neither a scientist nor an engineer, therefore I’m not sure how he was able to introduce so much modern technology into industry. He would have had no idea what he was talking about. He claimed credit for microcircuits, despite the fact that Jack Kilby received a Nobel Prize in physics for his work on microcircuits in 1959, two years before Corso claimed to have started the clandestine reverse-engineering process.
At this point, it’s safe to state that Corso’s story is a shambles, and Paul Hellyer’s use of it to persuade journalists and the broader public of UFO existence is a doomed, self-destructive endeavor. Regarding the major points raised by Corso, my own position is as follows: The evidence is apparent to me that at least one UFO crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947, and that the wreckage and bodies were recovered. I presume that the process of analyzing and reverse-engineering that one-of-a-kind material would have started almost immediately, and that it is still going on today. It appears that at least some current technology advances are the result of painstaking, methodical reverse-engineering that began more than fifty years ago – work that Philip J. Corso had nothing to do with. I categorically deny his assertion that he was able to “rescue our country, our planet, and our species” almost entirely on his own. On the other hand, there’s no denying that Corso had a massive ego and a vivid imagination, but I tend to blame many of the gung-ho, pot-boiler passages in his book on his co-author, William Birnes, a writer who appears to be more accustomed to such garish style.

Before I leave the depressing subject of Philip J. Corso, I’d want to share one more personal anecdote. Maurizio Baiata, an Italian UFO researcher, became acquainted with me during my journey to the conference in San Marino, where I met and interviewed the Colonel. Maurizio struck me as a pleasant and knowledgeable man – and an avid Corso supporter. Of course, Maurizio and I disagreed fully regarding the Colonel’s trustworthiness, but one day Maurizio changed his mind.

THE FAITH-BASED SCIENCE

The literate world is fully aware that there has been a long-running debate concerning the veracity of the UFO phenomenon. On one side, there are thousands of highly qualified pilot-witnesses, high-ranking military personnel, intensely interested scientists, and even an astronaut or two, as well as thousands of highly qualified pilot-witnesses, high-ranking military personnel, intensely interested scientists, and even an astronaut or two. All of them see the hundreds of thousands of global sighting claims as a major scientific issue, and they all demand that science conduct a comprehensive, objective inquiry. A vast number of mainstream scientists are hostile to this position, the majority of whom are not only uninterested in the issue of UFOs, but also badly misinformed about the weight of the evidence. A peculiar amalgam of entities, including official representatives for the US Air Force, Bible Belt Fundamentalist preachers like Pat Robertson, and a small but vocal band of self-described “rationalist” debunkers, are allied with them (who probably look upon their religious brethren as hopelessly superstitious). Clearly, the fight to prevent a scientific research of the UFO phenomenon brings together unusual bedfellows.

When we heard reports of a two-tiered scientific investigation to be conducted at Harvard University by experimental psychologists Richard McNally and Susan Clancy a few years ago, we were intrigued yet suspicious. We were told that Dr. McNally planned to evaluate a group of self-described UFO abductees for the existence of post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. He’d utilize a similar test from years ago as a model, in which a group of Vietnam veterans tape recorded their terrible war experiences and were then objectively tested for indicators of stress as they listened to their taped testimonies played back. Dr. Clancy intended to use a word memorization test to identify a subject’s proclivity for making false memories. Unfortunately, neither McNally nor Clancy intended to investigate UFO abduction stories or evaluate physical evidence. They’d stay in the lab, restricting their mission to allegedly scientific testing of the authenticity of their abductee subjects.

Any hopes I had for Susan Clancy’s objectivity were dashed when I realized that her purported abductee victims would be self-selected early on in the project. She had put advertisements in several newspapers asking for anybody who felt they had been abducted by UFOs to contact her. Because her flawed approach let anyone who claimed to be an abductee inside the laboratory, there was little or no vetting. Clancy accepted nearly everyone who came in off the street and informed her they were abductees, rather than a group whose tales had been vetted and accepted as reliable by expert researchers. Some of her participants’ grounds for believing they were abductees were so flimsy, even silly – a “strange bruise” or a “vague emotion” – that qualified researchers would have turned them away. Dr. Clancy, on the other hand, made them part of the “abductee” group she was studying!

Anyone knowledgeable with the phenomenon knows that few abductees will come out to talk about their experiences in public or to submit to any form of “testing” by persons or groups they don’t know and trust. Doing so would put you at risk of being mocked, which could jeopardize your career. Because they stand to lose the most, the more highly credentialed abductees are the most unwilling to volunteer as test subjects. Neither the NASA research scientist nor the NASA engineer, nor the many psychiatrists, psychologists, police officers, and military personnel who have reported abduction experiences to me over the years, would ever participate in what could easily turn out to be sensationalist and incompetently conducted tests of some kind. My second issue, in addition to the study’s fundamental fault, was that neither Clancy, whom I had met twice, nor McNally made any attempt to contact Dr. David Jacobs or me. They were both well aware that after decades of working with literally hundreds of abductees, the two of us had amassed vast amounts of data. We were never consulted on any issues, and our assistance in vetting test volunteers was never requested. In retrospect, Dr. Jacobs and I could have easily prevented the two testers, who were unaware of the intricate nature of the actual research, from making many of the glaring errors that have severely harmed their work.

McNally’s test for symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder yielded substantial results. Hearing their filmed tales replayed, those reporting abductions had nearly the same strongly emotional reactions as Vietnam vets hearing the records of their harrowing battle experiences. But, as we quickly learned from McNally’s analysis of the test results, the devil was in his interpretation of the data, not the details themselves. Since we “know” that UFO abductions do not exist, he declared that all of his subjects’ accounts must be false memories. And because they registered equally as strongly as “genuine” memories, the test showed that “fake” memories can be just as traumatic as “true” ones, he stated. This classic example of “heads I win, tails you lose” circular reasoning exemplifies dogma triumphing over science. Unfortunately, as astronomer J. Allen Hynek put it, scientists don’t always perform science. In effect, McNally appeared to be stating that even if his own test results corroborate the horrific reality of the abduction phenomenon, that fact means nothing since UFO ABDUCTIONS JUST DO NOT EXIST, and that he will make his test results fit his premise somehow, someway! McNally’s ideological interpretation of the test results, which is a clear example of “faith-based science,” is just as dogmatic as creationists’ wilful denigration of evolution, regardless of what the fossil records reveal.

Susan Clancy’s word memorization test as a sign of false memories is significantly more flimsy than McNally’s test for posttraumatic stress disorder. (This isn’t the place to delve into its technical flaws; instead, I’ll just repeat what I’ve already said about its fatal flaw: the reliance on an unvetted, self-selected sample.) In a subsequent publication, I’ll go over the details of her work.) Instead, the issue I’d like to explore is her use of a rather easy word memorization methodology to substantiate her claim that a subject’s clearly unpleasant recollections are untrue. Clancy claimed flatly in an early press interview that she expected everyone would accept the premise that all abduction experiences were hallucinations because “everyone” knew UFO abductions didn’t exist. This, she seemed to believe, was absolute truth – and yet another example of irrational, faith-based science. So, at the commencement of their investigation, neither she nor McNally planned to even mention the possibility that UFO abductions had occurred, much less to actively investigate that possibility. Their shared worldview believed that such encounters were, ipso facto, fake memories, a thesis in which the two appear to believe as fiercely as the Pope believes in the immaculate birth.

Another illustration comes to mind. Imagine an equal number of women who have claimed rape experiences and are now being tested by a couple of experimental psychologists instead of a group of abductees. The psychiatrists indicate right away that they don’t believe any of these ladies were raped and are continuing on that basis. As a result, their goal isn’t to verify the women’s allegations, but to figure out how to prove their “tendencies to fantasize and generate false memories.” Because the testers “know” in advance that these rape memories are false, there is no need for a police investigation into the alleged rape accounts – no physical or medical evidence, no visits to alleged crime scenes, no interviews with potential witnesses, and no checks on the rape victims’ reputations. In other words, nothing will be done to support the truth of their experiences. Of course, this is an awful, even brutal thought, but it’s similar to the Clancy-McNally approach toward UFO abductees.

Clancy conducted no research into any of her subjects’ abduction stories, including no queries into supporting witnesses, travels to purported locales, searches for physical evidence, or interviews with friends and family members, as I previously said. Everything she performed, according to her word memorization test and personal interviews, took place in the lab, despite her apparent lack of knowledge of the literature, history, or complexity of the UFO phenomenon. When one of the guests on “Larry King Live” recently exhibited a blow-up of the world-famous Trent UFO photographs from McMinnville, Oregon, possibly the best-known UFO photos in existence, I, along with Clancy and several others, appeared. They first appeared in “Life” magazine in 1950, and have since been reprinted hundreds of times in a variety of periodicals. Furthermore, an investigator for the skeptical Condon Committee described the McMinnville photo case as follows: “This is one of the few UFO reports in which all factors investigated, geometric, psychological, and physical, appear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disc-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and clearly artificial, flew within sight of two witnesses.” Dr. Bruce Maccabee, an optical physicist, has thoroughly studied this issue, flying to McMinneville and interviewing the Trents, their relatives, and neighbors.

PROGNOSTICATIONS

We’re all used to being told when the UFOs will land, or when the world will end, or when the so-called “disclosure” will occur, or even when time will end. We’ve lived through Hale-Bopp and the ship full of reptilians lurking behind it, the dread of Y2K mayhem, and last year’s warning by a real Ph.D. of the government’s impending admission of UFO fact, none of which, of course, came true. The popular worry-date these days is 2012, also known as “the end of time.”

Take my word for it: don’t be concerned, and don’t congregate on the crests of the hills. Give your earthly possessions to me if you’re going to give them away. We’ll see you all in 2013, but in the meantime, check out the quotation below.

Evelyn Waugh was born in the year 2012.

Evelyn Waugh, a British writer, was one of the best comedic novels of the twentieth century, and one of my personal favorites. He was best known for his creations of elderly upper-class boobies, many of whom were members of the peerage, and one of them appears in “Black Mischief,” a 1932 novel I’m rediscovering after fifty years. It’s set in Azania, a fictional island kingdom off the coast of Africa, where Sir Samson Courteney, an exceedingly useless member of the Foreign Ministry, has been assigned as ambassador due to his incompetence and the misguided notion that he won’t get into trouble in this little, weird principality. On the day the mail boat comes, Waugh paints a heartbreaking and hilarious portrait of the British legation. Bored bureaucrats rip off the covers of months-old periodicals and newspapers, read each other’s personal letters, and toss all official Foreign Ministry dispatches into the trash, where they are burnt unread.

Sir Samson, on the other hand, receives a letter that fascinates him. He reads it loudly and adds, “Good luck.” “Make nine copies of this letter and send them to nine separate people…” He exclaims, “What an extraordinary concept!” “‘An American commander in France started the letter. If you break the chain, you’ll have bad luck, but if you pass it on, you’ll have good luck. One woman lost her spouse, while another gained a fortune at roulette – simply by doing it or not doing it…you know, I should never have considered it conceivable…” Meanwhile, everyone else goes on with their lives until Sir Samson receives yet another unsolicited letter. “Another most unusual thing, my darling,” he adds to his wife. Take a look at this. Everything revolves around the Great Pyramid. It’s all a cosmic allegory, you see. The “Displacement factor” has a role. Listen.” “The total lengths of the two tribulation chapters are precisely 153 Pyramid inches – 153 being the number emblematic of the elect in our Lord’s mystical enactment of the draught of 153 fishes,” he reads to his wife and the assembled staff. “I say, I’ve got to get into this.” It sounds terrifyingly intriguing! I’m not sure who sends these items to me. Whoever it is, they’re very decent.”

The crew continues to gossip and devour old newspapers, but the credulous old ambassador continues to read. “There appears to be a Triple Veil of Ancient Egyptian Prophecy chamber inside the Pyramid…the east wall of the Antichamber depicts Truce in Chaos…” Over the old boy’s continuing reading, a more general discussion about many fashion publications takes place. “…Four limestone blocks depicting 1936’s ultimate hardships…”

1936!

Now, I’m not implying that those preoccupied with 2012 are as gullible and foggy-headed as Sir Samson Courteney was in 1936. I’m not requiring it; rather, I’m recommending it. 2012 will pass in the same way that 1936 did.