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.