Those Space Mummies!

There is a bit of a fuss going on around some "space mummies" presented to the Mexican Congress the other day. I thought I would share some links to help navigate this complex, unfolding, subject.

September 13th

Typical articles of the breaking news variety appeared in the New York Times and New York Post. What is interesting is how quickly the story was picked up, given the reticence in publishing stories about David Grusch.

Maussan's previous form as a hoaxer - the notorious "Roswell slide" fiasco - had been covered well by The Guardian newspaper in 2017. It is surprising this previous escapade did not urge more caution from the press in picking up the current story.

September 14th

A typical rant about Maussan promptly came from a fellow Mexican ufologist. It is well argued and reasonable, and an early piece of debunking of the current hoo-ha, was also quick to appear from ufologist Tony Bragalia. Maybe too quickly? An intriguing qualification of said debunking was soon offered by the same author.

September 15th

Whitley Strieber, he of abduction fame, then gives us his "scoop" on the true story of the mummies. The research that Strieber is citing/interviewing has its own website.

The upshot? The mummies are a genuine mystery, but the idea that they are simply "alien" is either premature/too simple, or outright, plain, false. Maussan operates in my opinion on the basis of this grey area, and exaggerates for financial gain. Is there a net benefit, or net detriment? That is an issue for politics and useless conversation.

Exploiting a Conundrum

The idea that there is a UFO conspiracy is long and continuous. Donald Keyhoe's article "The Flying Saucers are Real" appears in the December 1949 issue of True magazine and cites an ongoing cover-up by the US Air Force. This is a theme treated again, and more fully, in Keyhoe's later book "The Flying Saucer Conspiracy" (1956). Given that the term flying saucer becomes common only after 1947, it seems that conspiracy and this subject are pretty much co-terminal beliefs.

Insofar as a conspiracy is a political act, this would seem to set up as its corollary a strictly political problem requiring political answers, so it intrigues me that the word most associated with this challenge is 'disclosure', a word that I would argue recalls the religious realm of revelation and apocalypse (as in all cases the idea is the same: an unveiling of what is hidden). Given the knotty aporia in human understanding known as the political-theological problem, the use of a religious-spectrum term in a political context is I think at best unfortunate, and at worst suspicious.

A bit of history: the specific word 'disclosure' does not seem to be used until much later than the original description of a conspiracy. The earliest appearance of this term that I can find in fact is from early 1977. In classic form, the disclosure is imminent, quote: "Before the year is out, the Government -- perhaps the President -- is expected to make what are described as 'unsettling disclosures' about UFO's" (from US News and World Report, Spring 1977). There is another reference in 1977 too, in an article from New Realities magazine, titled "White House UFO Disclosure Soon?"; again we may note the presumed imminence associated with the word.

It is interesting that the earliest instance I can find is an unattributed quotation. Like the idea of "the first casualty of war is truth", disclosure seems always already to exist in quotation marks, and never to exist in an actual document. It is in origin an ultimately futile idea - always promising but never actually appearing (very much like the apocalypse and a last revelation in religion!). Similarities occur to me between this term and the phrase 'conspiracy theory'. There is evidence the latter was deliberately popularised by the CIA to derail political questioning of the JFK assassination (see "Conspiracy Theory in America" by Professor Lance deHaven-Smith, University of Texas Press, February 2014).

So here is a new idea. In the invocation of a religious-spectrum term, which is specifically not a political term, was there a similarly deliberate and nefarious depoliticising strategy by the US Government around UFOs? The reduction of those who would campaign to expose conspiratorial crimes to mere theorists, the imbrication of simple claims to truth and justice, holding the power-players to account, with useless religious terminology - both would render away the political dimension to any movement for UFO truth.

A Patch Better Perhaps

The above patch, from the private collection of Trevor Paglen, is perhaps a better candidate regarding a possible UFO connection. It has not been published (it is not in Paglen's book on this topic, for example) but it did float about for a while on the artist's old web-page, with a call there for any information regarding it to be forwarded to the artist (this is how it came to my attention). It can be found online today with a bit of "enlightened" google searching still.

Why is it a better candidate? Here one needs to reference something that is a bit of a rebus in UFO circles - namely the nexus of ideas around the alleged sightings of a black triangle UFO. Some people are of the opinion that this object is a reverse engineered human artefact, possibly code-named the TR3A (alternatively, through the years, the TR3B), and also known as the "Black Manta". The patch clearly shows a black manta ray, with wording emphasising its triangular shape! The full meaning of the design is as ever obscure - but the synchronicity between UFO lore and the existence of this patch is, to say the least, and in my opinion, very compelling indeed. It is, I think, a smoking gun.

Confusing the issue, perhaps, is the existence of an acknowledged, but unrealised, concept plane the X-44 MANTA (Lockheed Martin, 2000). It seems unlikely to me that an unrealised concept would earn a related mission patch, and Wikipedia in any case gives the code-name for this project as being "Project Have Manta" and not "Black Manta", but some would say Occam's razor applies (blah, blah - does it always?) and the patch should simply be associated with the X-44. Without more information from those in the know this comes down to a matter of ideology and taste. I do see more than a red herring here - proof rather that the alleged Black Manta is real, triangular, and the likely source of all those sightings!

I do have other, more esoteric, observations on the meaning of this patch, and I may follow up on that here later, but for now - I think - a puff of smoke, a smoking gun, and dead red herrings will do.

Patchy Evidence?

It is a strange feature of the black budget that elaborate mission patches are designed even for projects that are not openly acknowledged. A selection of these is catalogued and discussed in a book by the artist Trevor Paglen (I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me, Melville House Publishing). There is a nice essay at The New York Times discussing the book, and an article at The Space Review focusing on the special subset of black ops missions in space.

Now an Australian journalist, Ross Coulthart has joined the obscure patch trail, by offering up an image of a patch he alleges covers the reverse engineering program of a captured UFO at Area 51 (pictured above). The number sequence seen, 11001001, is associated - strangely - with an episode of Star Trek. One in which technology is shared between aliens and humans. Because it is Season 1 Episode 15, people are seeing the number of Element 115, which in Bob Lazar's famous testimony is the material which powers the said UFO.

Other readings are possible; the lightning may indicate electronic warfare, and the binary code the role of digital technology within that. The binary code reduces to 201 in decimal, and the fact there is an EW unit called the 201st Expeditionary Military Intelligence Brigade may close the case, but I think we should note that the date of the Roswell crash was indeed - cue music - a dark and stormy night. So the rabbit hole is there to follow should one wish. And lightning is sometimes just lightning.

Disappearing Act

The Mirror has a nice article about the video being discussed on reddit this week, which allegedly shows the missing flight MH370 disappearing into a portal (after being chased by a fleet of UFOs). In the video's favour, it has been determined that the cloud cover matches satellite imagery for weather on the day; on the other hand, counting against, a frame in the video has been shown to match a VFX template of a generic explosion, although debunking that - in turn - there is some indication that the VFX template was tampered with. The strangest bit though is that this video is nine years old. Why has it come to attention now?

A note on Grusch

This story recalls testimony from Strieber's book Majestic. Majestic is a very strange book, but the fact it may be being read and believed by people with security clearances would not be the same as actual disclosure. Interesting, but not the same. So are we just getting a rehash of tales that circulate in the community or is this the real deal? Not clear. I guess the bit that is different is this is all being shared with Congress and the MSM rather than those who haunt the obscurer corners of secondhand bookshops.

How long is a piece of string?

Thinking of the recent teacup-tornado around disclosure (starting here), I feel it is worth noting the relative timescales involved in the birth of Christianity and the UFO phenomenon.
 

From the birth of Christ it is approximately 70 years till the formation of the earliest canonical texts (Wikipedia dates the Gospel of Mark to around 65 -70 AD). Before then Christianity would have been a matter of hearsay and word of mouth, an obscure doctrine of the disorganised few. It takes 70 years for the Gospel of Mark to change that. If Jesus's ministry is c 27-30 AD then the end of the apostolic era and beginning of the anti-Nicene age in c 100 AD is also a matter of 70 - 73 years (again Wikipedia helps me) and the Gospel of Mark a matter of 40 years.

We are now 76 years since Roswell. Maybe we will indeed see the beginnings of disorganised hearsay and cult literature yielding to canonization and something more official. Perhaps it is simply the case that, in a first contact scenario, 70 odd years just ain't that long. Will an early outlier book like Corso's (published in 1997, so 50 years on from year zero) come to resemble the mythical lost book of Q; all the oral testimony and flim flam become forgotten and subsumed by a usurping official narrative?
 

Key point: 70 years is nothing. These are early days, but the early days are also where the battle is really on as to what things actually mean, what the takeaway should be.