D378, D379 and D381 Sesma and Ribera have not plagiarised the UMMO reports (three letters: Barrenechea, Ribera and Aguirre)

D378 — Letter to Jorge Barrenechea (February 1988)

UMMOAELEUUE
Language: Spanish
Number of copies: 1

Mr Jorge Barrenechea,

Dear friend:

Through our messenger, as has been usual until now, we send you this letter-document, asking you to deliver the original as soon as possible to your brother ANTONIO RIBERA JORDÁ.

I also ask you to send a copy of this text to your said brother.

The accusation against your brother FERNANDO SESMA, unable to defend his honour because he has died, and against ANTONIO RIBERA, seems to us so sad and fallacious that we earnestly ask your brother Ribera Jordá (Antonio) to make a copy of the document we are giving him for your brother Joaquín Francés, editor at the magazine INTERVIU, in order to render this moral service to your dead brother.

The reason why we wish to send this letter to Mr Joaquín Francés is evident: to make public a criticism of the letter in question by your brother Juan José Benítez, associated with his own text, which forgets to defend the integrity of the two accused.

Both this typed text and the attached letter may be read or reproduced by any copying procedure, for any of your brothers whom you see fit to designate, and disseminated to the extent you judge prudent. A serious accusation made against our deceased friend must take precedence over considerations related to any strategy of mental reserve and operational secrecy.

We do not wish our attitude to be distorted, interpreted as an attack on your brother Juan José Benítez. It is not possible to judge the intentions of that OEMMII, author of that defence-offence. Our intention is crystal clear: to clarify the regrettable error he committed, while deeply respecting his honourable person.

Receive, OEMMI of Spain, our very affectionate greeting.

Albacete, Spain, February 1988.

D379 — Letter to Antonio Ribera (5 February 1988)

UMMOAELEUUE
Language: Spanish
Number of copies: 1

Respectable man of OYAAGAA: ANTONIO RIBERA JORDÁ

Sir: We lay our hand on your breast as a sign of fruitful friendship. You know well, Mr Ribera Jordá (Antonio), that since the terrestrial year 1968 we have identified ourselves to you as OEMMII (humans) come from a cold star whose name, expressed phonetically in the Spanish language, is UMMO.

We have never tried to convince you of our true identity, since it is evident that a critical-analytical attitude must be adopted towards any assertion not backed by proof. The reasons why, despite this apparent contradiction, we continue to send our reports to various groups in Canada, Australia, Great Britain, Spain, Zimbabwe and other nations of OYAGAA (Earth) are implicit in the earlier documents sent to your brothers.

We must not hide from you that our decision to interrupt our dispatches, both to you and to your brother ENRIQUE LÓPEZ GUERRERO (Catholic priest), was due to the printed publication of our reports in editions published under your signatures.

But we would like to make an important qualification. In no case have you violated any moral law. You are free men and nothing at all binds you to any model of obligations towards unknown beings, such as those who make up this expeditionary body scattered over several countries of OYAAGAA. We do not feel offended or betrayed by those publications.

But we too are free OEMMII; we consider that we have the right to choke off a channel of information when, as in this case, we consider that excessive disclosure of our culture does not suit our interests, and we wish to channel it exclusively towards a social micro-network of brothers of yours selected by us. This conduct could be interpreted as an intention on the part of my brothers to create genuine esoteric sects worshipping these alleged extraterrestrials. Anyone who knows our typed documents in English, French, Spanish and German, and who talks with the OEMMII who receive our databases, will immediately notice that we firmly reject any tendency on the part of your brothers to embrace our thought, and that we accept as the only logical attitude that of analysing, from an ethnological perspective, the study of our culture coming from an intragalactic civilisation. (The deep reasons for our contacts with you have been the subject of a document recently delivered to a group of brothers of yours known to you.)

Mr Antonio Ribera: Despite our decision to suspend all contact with you until further notice, we must bear witness that we feel true affection for you. Believe us: it is not a mere statement of courtesy. We know that no one in your country has fought as hard as you, by means of dialectics, to open the minds of your brothers to the study of intragalactic civilisations. For that alone you deserve our deep and silent respect.

For that reason we have been saddened by the accusations, in our judgement unjust and false, made in print in a news medium of your country (Interviú, no. 612-3 of 9 February 1988, page 87) by one of your brothers. In view of the allusions made in those paragraphs to the texts of my brothers (distributed in earlier times), we feel obliged to express to you our feeling of solidarity:

The printed text cited is this statement: «...but "Ummite" writings that have been circulating around the world since the 60s and which, curiously, Messrs Sesma and Ribera have plagiarised so much.»

We think, Sir, that you do not need our defence, since your own honesty is the best weapon you can use against any imputation against you based on convoluted judgements.

But your brother Fernando Sesma, for whom we know —although we could not meet him— that our brothers on mission in those years felt a special affection, has died, and we sense that none of your brothers is going to leap to his defence. We consider it ignoble to attribute inaccurate conduct to him when the brother who attributes it knows that it is impossible for him to prove his honourability.

We understand, Mr Antonio Ribera, that we do not grasp as deeply as you the semantic sense of certain words of the Spanish language, but we do not believe we are too mistaken if we attribute to the verb «to plagiarise» the meaning of «to copy or transfer by typographic or phonetic means, through a communication channel for the dissemination of information, another person's literary production, which one attributes to oneself as one's own».

It is evident that neither your brother FERNANDO SESMA MANZANO (†) nor you, ANTONIO RIBERA JORDÁ, have «plagiarised» our reports in your books, since you had the honesty and moral integrity to transcribe our text matrices, criticising with fairness and integrity their UMMOOAO source.

It is evident that you publish them freely, since there is no agreement backed by any legal text to keep them secret.

We wish to pass a value judgement on the conduct of your respectable brother Juan José Benítez, who transcribes over several pages of the work CABALLO DE TROYA texts and concepts of our scientific system concerning the IBOZSOO UHUU, without strictly citing the source of the original.

It would be unjust to describe his conduct as immoral without knowing the intellectual motivations that led him to plagiarise a large number of pages of URANTIA origin and, in a little over twelve pages, to reproduce data and text matrices from our UMMO reports.

As far as we are concerned: your brother JUAN JOSÉ BENÍTEZ has not signed any agreement with us obliging him to cite our source. On the one hand, we have no legal personality, since we are not legal citizens of any nation of OYAGAA, and on the other, we confess that this transcription has done us no harm. Your brother is a free man and nothing obliges him, before strangers such as the OEMMII of UMMO, to acts that are strictly a matter for his moral conscience.

On the other hand, we consider it an irresponsible and fraudulent act to accuse falsely and publicly of plagiarism (appropriating the authorship of a writing) a brother of yours who has already died and whom we considered our FRIEND. We prefer to think that ignorance of the meaning of certain idiomatic terms arouses an explicable passion in his disturbed mental state. We cannot forget that those were bitter days for him, with family problems and accusations made through various channels against his person. Your brother is an excellent journalist, a lover of cosmological studies like you, good and noble, but when the encephalon is subjected to multiple pressures it can commit perfectly explicable errors.

That is why we suggest that he might show his good faith and his intellectual nobility by publicly correcting his text or by explaining that he made a typographical error. Unless he is in a position to prove that the etymological sense of the verb TO PLAGIARISE was not what was meant.

Albacete (SPAIN)
5 February 1988

My name is AOSIIBOO 3, son of IRIRAA 6

We authorise Mr Ribera Jordá (Antonio) to use this text as he pleases and to distribute copies to whomever he wishes.

D381 — Letter to Juan Aguirre and others (February 1988)

UMMOAELEUUE
Number of copies: 1
Language: Spanish

I ask you, Sir, not to copy these typed sheets, which must be kept by your brother JUAN AGUIRRE.

Messrs JUAN AGUIRRE, RAFAEL FARRIOLS, JUAN DOMÍNGUEZ, JORGE BARRENECHEA, DIONISIO GARRIDO, JOSÉ JORDÁN, HILTRUD NORDLIN, JOAQUÍN MARTÍNEZ

We enclose a letter from our brother in Great Britain, to whom we are subordinate. As it is written in another language, we have taken the liberty of transcribing it into Spanish, attending more to the spirit of its content than to its literal version.

We have asked THAT THIS COPY BE CHANNELLED THROUGH THE MADRID GROUP instead of being delivered directly in Barcelona, so that you have a record of its dispatch.

Although it is addressed to your brother JOAQUÍN FRANCÉS and directed to the magazine INTERVIU, published in Barcelona, we wish to authorise you here to photocopy it and to make whatever use of it you please, or to disseminate it at whatever levels you wish.

We repeat that, since it is a letter originally addressed to a single person, you will no doubt need this authorisation to turn it into an open letter.

Regardless of your decisions on its dissemination, we would expressly wish you to deliver a copy to your brother Antonio Ribera Jordá. You are at the same time authorised to deliver to him the letter we sent you and which we ask you to keep until the enclosed letter from Great Britain reaches you. Postal difficulties between the two countries have somewhat delayed this dispatch.

LET US SUM UP:

Send to the magazine Interviú the ORIGINAL of the letter that our brother to whom we are subordinate has given us, together with the text of its Spanish translation, not without first photocopying both documents for yourselves.

Deliver a copy of it, in addition to the letter previously delivered to him, plus the text of the translation, to your brother Antonio RIBERA.

Now we want you to reflect on our attitude.

We know, intimate friends, that you have been saddened and even angered, because it seemed unjust to you, by our decision to maintain informative silence until your brother Juan José Benítez, resident in Lejona (Spain), publicly corrects his unjust accusation in the same medium.

But a deeper analysis of the chain of events may perhaps serve to reconsider your emotional state.

It is truly sad that we, a foreign expeditionary body, having nothing in common and no biological bond with the Social Network of the Earth, should have to leap to the defence of a brother himself unable to defend himself, although he lives in the B.B., and of another brother older than he, of scant economic means, who has been reduced to impotence in the face of the cruel attacks of an unscrupulous publisher, your brother Fernando Lara, and of another brother, his disciple, who takes advantage of his master's old age to tarnish his honour gratuitously.

But we have observed with sadness that not a single one of you was attentive. NOT A SINGLE BROTHER among you has stood up to defend some mistreated OEEMMI. We would have been pleased to observe a communal reaction of moral support for the offended, without any need for a moral attack against the sick aggressors.

We have never asked you for anything that would favour the interests of our brothers, but we have begged you to strengthen the bonds of solidarity among yourselves when any of your brothers is plunged into a pit of despair or tormented by a serious problem.

We are not accusing you of having ignored our exhortation. And that help has at times crystallised among you. But recognise at least that the case of your brothers Sesma and Ribera would have required a livelier reaction on your part.

It is impossible for us to judge the degree of moral responsibility of your brother FERNANDO LARA (publisher) with regard to his attitude towards Don Antonio Ribera. His contempt for a brother who has virtuously carried out intellectual work to earn his bread, writing his works with dignity without plagiarising other authors, and on whom the accusation of plagiarism unjustly weighs, thus taking up the parallel attack of your brother JUAN JOSÉ BENÍTEZ, provokes our rejection and our sadness.

If you analyse all these accusations objectively, you will be able to conclude that they are totally unfounded.

Your brothers Lara and Benítez handle the verb TO PLAGIARISE arbitrarily, as our brother [Translator's note by ummo-sciences: the name is blacked out in the copy of the original], to whom we are subordinate, very correctly expresses in his letter sent to your brother JOAQUÍN FRANCÉS. They try to give this verb two senses which we do not believe are accepted by the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language.

One of them, used by your brother Benítez, confuses «to reproduce» with TO PLAGIARISE. We know that in all countries authors in any literary field are allowed to reproduce in their pages a literal fragment taken from the context of another work produced by a known or anonymous author, provided they take special care to cite clearly the origin of the copied text (title of the work and, if known, name of the author).

That is precisely what your brother ANTONIO RIBERA has honourably done and what your brother JUAN JOSÉ BENÍTEZ has forgotten to do.

The other false meaning confuses INSPIRATION with PLAGIARISM. With a surprising ignorance of the language on the part of a professional in the publishing field, your brother Lara accuses of plagiarism those who have sometimes done no more than draw inspiration from other works.

From what we have been able to study of the ingenious literary production of the whole history of OYAGAA (Earth), it is evident that it is necessary to distinguish thematic originality from stylistic originality.

The truly original princeps themes are in fact very few and by definition arose at the dawn of the literature of OYAGAA.

All the authors who have written since then have drawn inspiration from one another, an attitude considered entirely logical in literary movement. Another way of saying that since Hellenic times it has not been possible to create new works.

One of your specialists, your brother W. Kayser, points out that in the excavations of Babylon a tablet written in cuneiform characters was found whose text laments that all poetic themes are already truly exhausted!!! And W. Kayser concludes: «If every adaptation of a theme is to be interpreted as plagiarism, then no writer is free of that offence.»

What is really important in an author's work is therefore the originality of style. Your brother Middleton Murry points this out correctly when he states that what characterises an author is the quality of the language with which he expresses his thought and his range of emotions. It is evident that the essence of style is the quality of the metaphor or of the literary image: its originality, its plasticity, its musicality or euphony, its capacity to generate waves of emotional resonance linked not only to the affectivity that surrounds each word like a halo but to the sentimental reinforcement achieved by the harmonious combination of words. That is what characterises the style of each author and why your eminent brothers, such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Homer, Pablo Neruda, Paul Claudel, Shakespeare, Federico García Lorca, Dante Alighieri, Rabindranath Tagore... can be catalogued as the great inspirers of the Social Network of the Earth.

The unworthy statement of your brother Lara says literally this: «As for the last book by Ribera that our publishing house has published, which is entitled "El documento", I would say yes, that it is conceptually an absolute plagiarism of the book "Caballo de Troya"».

It is impossible to introduce more false ideas into such a paragraph. The assertion of your brother Lara shows that he does not know the meaning of the verb TO PLAGIARISE, a very serious ignorance in a man who devotes himself to running a publishing house, that he can confuse DRAWING INSPIRATION with PLAGIARISING.

We have read that novel by your brother Ribera and, if you do so too, you will observe that there is only a very distant association with the content of the work signed by your brother J.J. BENÍTEZ.

If there were signs of INSPIRATION (which you know is permitted to every writer), he would have drawn it from the original work, the Urantia book [Translator's note by ummo-sciences: in English in the text, «The Urantia Book»], since those books signed by your brother BENÍTEZ, those indeed, are really a plagiarism (and not simply INSPIRED BY), that is to say AN ALMOST LITERAL REPRODUCTION OF ANOTHER PERSON'S TEXT WITHOUT CITING ITS LEGITIMATE AUTHOR, of the Urantia work in the first place and to a lesser degree of our reports.

We therefore regard the statement of your brother Fernando LARA as a gratuitous CALUMNY, since in reality accusing him of plagiarism unjustly denounces him as a THIEF of another person's literary property, when he has merely written a narrative in his own style.

It is very sad that behaviour such as that of your brothers LARA and BENÍTEZ should not meet with the reflex and solidary rejection of the brothers attached to the calumniated OEMMII.

We have no legal personality to bring a legal action which, moreover, our ethics forbid us to undertake. But we can express with our silence our bitterness and our disappointment.

We know well that the echoes of these laments can be of very little consolation to an OEMMII who feels humiliated by an unscrupulous brother, without a single voice being raised to ask for justice. But at least we would like, with this text, the OEMMII ANTONIO RIBERA JORDÁ, whom we consider a dear friend of our group, to become aware that we share his bitterness.

We know that we offer him very little. Praise and exhortations issued by an anonymous source which, to top it all, identifies itself as coming from an intragalactic point foreign to OYAGAA (Earth) unfortunately lose their moral force.

But at least we feel a secret joy knowing that his ethical rectitude as a writer reinforces his own dignity as a human being and makes him impervious to calumny.

Allow us, Mr RIBERA JORDÁ, to lay our hand on your breast as a symbolic sign of our respect for you.

Gentlemen: In addition to the texts cited above, we would wish you to reproduce ONLY THE TEXT FRAMED BY A GREEN LINE in order to deliver it to your brother RIBERA. The original must be kept by your brother AGUIRRE CEBERIO.

The full text of this letter may be read at a meeting, before the brothers you may invite, or read by telephone to your brothers FARRIOLS and JIMÉNEZ MARHUENDA.

We were especially sorry that your brothers JULIO CÉSAR IGLESIAS and GERMÁN DE ARGUMOSA did not attend the meeting that was called. We keenly wished for their participation, despite your reticent attitudes. We believe that you even made efforts to create an artificial climate that may have hindered their presence. That saddens us, although we know it was inspired by a fear, well founded, that they would not keep due discretion. But you forget that we have warned you that we can perfectly control that risk.

SUMMARY OF OUR REQUESTS

Mr AGUIRRE CEBERIO: we know that we are causing a great deal of trouble with our requests. Forgive us for it. We would like to summarise our requests for you:

FIRST: Send by registered post or through a courier company the ORIGINAL of the letter we have received from Great Britain, signed by our brother (director) to whom we are subordinate, to your brother JOAQUÍN FRANCÉS, in Barcelona. Enclose its translation. If we have not done so directly, it is because we thought it would be prudent for you to have a copy and certainty of its text. We authorise you, although it is a letter with a definite sender, to regard it as an open letter and therefore publishable by any means.

SECOND: Reproduce the text framed in green pencil, both by typewriter and by photocopy, in order to deliver the copy to your brother Antonio Ribera, with authorisation to use it as he wishes.

THIRD: Deliver also to Don Antonio the letter which we expressly [Translator's note by ummo-sciences: «with competence»] addressed to him and which we ask you to keep until the mail from Great Britain arrives.

FOURTH: Add in the envelope delivered to your brother RIBERA a copy of the letter whose original you have delivered to Mr JOAQUÍN FRANCÉS.

FIFTH: You are authorised to make as many copies as you wish of the original letter from our brother the Director. We would be especially grateful if most of your known brothers had access to it.

SIXTH: We advise you to write some covering letter to explain to your brother JOAQUÍN FRANCÉS the reasons why this letter reaches him through you.