Sunday, 11 December 2022

What Are We Waiting For?

Here's an idea.

It is very difficult to square the UFO field. Between the apparent willingness of the visitors to work behind the scenes with advanced contact groups in the US government, and the willy nilly, seemingly random abductions, contact experiences, sightings or appearances and other general strangeness in the wild, aka the public domain, what is the connection or unifying narrative?

Is it that the advanced nature of the visitors means there is no perceivable difference to them between the two groups? Is it a double pronged, inscrutable, strategy? Well, I said, here's an idea. And that idea is that the visitors work both with a government and a demos *in waiting*. Those in the middle - everyone else - represent a middle class way beyond Marx's imaginings.

The interest to me here is the transfer of the idea of "waiting" from the theological sphere to the political one. It may be that contact evinces an impossible politics, one that mirrors the theological predicament, but is not essentially religious. The strangeness of humanity's doubleness - its indecision between the theological and the political - may be something that the visitors actually have no choice but to *encounter*.

It all looks difficult to unify into a coherent narrative, because *humanity* (rather than the phenomenon) is not, in itself, one.

Saturday, 3 December 2022

An Unsettling Dive into the Literature

Doing a bit of digging again. The earliest reference to the idea of "UFO disclosure" I can find is early 1977. In classic form, it is imminent: "Before the year is out, the Government -- perhaps the President -- is expected to make what are described as 'unsettling disclosures' about UFO's" (US News and World Report, Spring 1977). In classic form, it never did manifest. The idea of a UFO conspiracy dates back to at least 1949, of course, with Keyhoe's article in True magazine, "The Flying Saucers are Real" (in December of that year). This cites a cover-up by the Air Force. The actual word disclosure, however, does not seem to be used till much later. There is for example another reference in 1977, in an article from New Realities magazine: "White House UFO Disclosure Soon?", but the word really takes off in 1993 and after, with the foundation of Greer's "Disclosure Project". Now it is just a truism of the discourse. It is interesting though that the earliest instance I can find is an unattributed quotation. Was this idea, which is in origin an ultimately futile idea, seeded deliberately? Like "conspiracy theory" was in the case of the murder of JFK (see "Conspiracy Theory in America" by Professor Lance deHaven-Smith, University of Texas Press, February 2014)? I have looked elsewhere at how the analogue to secular disclosure is, I think it is obvious, the religious concept of revelation or apocalypse (as in the unveiling of what is hidden). Here is a new idea. In the invocation of religious terms, which are specifically not political terms, was there a deliberate and nefarious depoliticising ... strategy ... by the US Government? Apocalypse is in God's hands. Does the US Government equate its control of UFO secrets with god-like power? Waiting for disclosure, the sad game of a manipulated populace. Nothing religious about it.