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Why The Old Guard Can't See? Dr. Michael Salla has been having ongoing discussions with the old guard UFOlogists over their faith based approach to the investigation of UFO's. (-: http://www.exopolitics.org/Exo-Comment- 28.htm It is my opinion the methods and methodologies used by old guard investigators are not so much flawed as they are specific to the collection and analysis of superficial data only. The old guard have faith that their superficial collection and analysis will ultimately one day solve the UFO/ET mystery. They have become so attached and emotionally invested in their outdated methods and models over time that they no longer can think clearly and rationally. This is not only a problem in our field but in all disciplines as well. As people age their emotions and thinking become fixed into static habitual patterns that are not able to adapt to incorporate new evidence as it become available. The new valuable evidence is either ignored completely as hogwash or heavily discounted Let me give an example. I was raised in a family of early Ecologists. My father when he was a boy used to hang around and was mentored by taxonomists and collectors at the Chicago Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois. During the depression he had to quit college and was lucky to find a job working for the Field Museum collecting small mammals in the Smokey Mountains. Later he came south and was mentored by Herb Stoddard who was a close friend of Aldo Leopold sometimes called the father of Ecology. Because my father was young he quickly grasped the principles of Ecology from Herb and other scientific friends. Herb himself was a collector and naturalist turned ecologist and lived on the plantation next to my family and was like a grandfather to me. My father told me years later that try as he may, he could not convince his taxonomist mentors that ecology was a new science. The taxonomists would say, "Show us a relationship it does not exist. If we can't touch it with our fingers, see it with our eyes or hear it with our ears it does not exist." The old guard taxonomists and collectors were important in their day because before ecology could develop plant and animal species had to be collected and given names. Then the early ecologists could study the dynamics of how these species interact within each other to create habitats and ecosystems. Were the taxonomist’s methods and models wrong? No, they were not wrong but limited in scope and were not applicable to the larger field of ecology. Because their thinking and emotions had become fixed they could not adapt their methods and models to a ever-changing perception of reality. They failed to understand that there were other tools in the tool chest that could be used to solve ecological problems. As far as I know it was only the collectors that became ecologists. The emerging field of exopolitics is similar to the field of ecology in that both emerged out of older more established fields. It is also similar in that it is the young who can better grasp the basics of the new emerging fields when mentored by a few older "mavericks", as my father used to call them. These heretics, which means free thinker in Greek, broke free of the fixed herd mentality of the old established paradigm. Lucky for us today, the heretics are not burned at stake but they still are ridiculed and disparaged by the old guard and their work suppressed. 165