Roswell debris goes missing in the mail and Socially Constructed Ignorance

Remember a few posts back when I mentioned that a geologist had found some interesting debris in the Roswell dirt?  Tests suggested that it was not from this earth, but nobody will believe that until it is independently confirmed, right?  So the geologist sent some debris to a nearby university to start that process.

Only the debris never arrived.

The packaging did, but it was empty.  The debris -- gone.

You can read about it at Kevin Randles blog.

I have a couple of points to make that aren't about the missing debris.  Of course it went missing -- the geologist put it in the mail.

My focus is on the mindset evident in KRs post, and in the geologist's attitude prior to losing his samples.

The attitude is, "I don't believe in all that hooey."  Notice how Randles starts his post with just this attitude:

I have never been a big fan of the paranoia that runs through the UFO field. I don’t believe Men in Black are stalking UFO witnesses or investigators. I don’t believe that black helicopters routinely inspect witnesses and investigators. I just don’t buy into all the paranoia that runs so deep.

You have to beware of that attitude because it is constructed and maintained by the media.  It is not an attitude born from experience -- in fact, it's an attitude that denies experience.  And it also is an attitude that serves the interests of those who would wish to hide something from you.

It isn't paranoid to consider the experience of others when making decisions about how to safeguard what ought to have been considered crucial and precious evidence -- it is prudent.

I mean, once you had found something in the Roswell desert that looked even remotely like it might support the stories of a crashed UFO, the logical next step in thought should have been -- if this is what it might be, then the government has gone to great lengths to hide that fact for a long time.

From there, one need not be paranoid to take precautions.

The mindset evident in Randles' post does the work of any clandestine organization seeking to hide information about Roswell for them.  Which is why that mindset exists in the first place.

The fact is, we don't know much about anything.  We don't know what UFOs are -- whether they are aliens, psychological aberrations, natural energy forms, tricks of perception -- we have no idea.  And we also have no idea what the stories about Men in Black represent.  To pretend that we do know does not make us smart or cool or with the "in crowd" (which is what such a construction would be calculated to trigger in us) it actually makes us willing shills.

Randles says, "I don’t know how any governmental agency, if a governmental agency was involved, could have pulled this off. It is one of those mysteries that dot the landscape."

It doesn't take very much imagination to figure out how such a thing could have been done.  It also doesn't take a paranoiac to think some three lettered government agency or another might have done it, indeed, surely would have done it if they thought they needed to protect something (they usually cite "National Security" but who really knows what they are protecting?).

There's ignorance -- we all share that.  There's the willful ignorance of the hardcore believer or skeptic --  we should all shun that.  And then there is the socially constructed ignorance such as Randles exhibits in his post.  We must all beware that.