The House of Plague

The UN has suggested that the Epstein case may represent a crime against humanity. This is getting a bit of buzz on the UFO circuit, because of obvious similarities with UFO disclosure.

Should it be revealed there have been 80 years of deception and manipulation around the nature of life and our place in the universe, and maybe strategies to suppress technology, would it be a crime, and how should supervising authorities respond? It is a question that might find precedent in Epstein. That's helpful, given how ill-thought out and unprepared the legal territory would be.

There were similar thoughts during the pandemic. Might the politics and legitimacy of institutions under such difficult circumstances mirror an ET contact scenario? This essay, from the era of Covid-19, also looks at problems for SETI and Democracy.

Sadly, for something as possibly uplifting as extraterrestrial contact and the discovery we are not alone, we have to look at the annals of crime and disease for a map. 

On Herodotean Disclosure

A lightning bolt of sorts.

Regarding UFO disclosure, it is interesting that the opening gambit of historiography in the West (in Herodotus I mean) is precisely the word: "apodeixis" or disclosure. This word means the making manifest of something, or showing forth of something! History begins with disclosure. The current impasse in Ufology finds an echo in the past, but at the beginning not the end.

There is a whole nexus of possible ideas here. The absence of a final "apodeixis" by the governments of the world may at root to be a problem in how we are approaching history itself. There is confusion. How we want things to end is in fact how it all should begin. We make a mistake, perhaps, if we expect disclosure at the end of a process. Disclosure should really show an innovative new relation to how things start as a process. That is the Greek example.

Endings versus beginnings. There is something Hegelian about how we await disclosure at the end. Like the way we await a final apocalypse (which would change the categories of existence), we await disclosure. Between the ancient and the modern concepts of history, there is a displacement, such that "apodeixis"/disclosure necessarily makes no sense, and is broken. Disclosure, I have written before, is the detour of politics into religious language, a dis-empowering manoeuvre. It is, it seems, also vexed in a secular sense too. It is a garbled concept in many ways.

Herodotean apodeixis implies that things are not self-evident; an inquiry into things requires some exposition. Perhaps UFO disclosure is a hidden wanting in us to find something primal about the universe. In a world where rights and the right direction of history are seen as self-evident, disclosure is a concept in a kind of identity crisis. It wants UFOs to be a matter of self-evidence too, yet surely it will be the result of deeper work than that? Won't it be - like Herodotus - a new civilization beginning? There is power in the Greek concept that the modern one misses. Let us live as seekers of apodeixis not disclosure.

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.

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.

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.

Justice!

The strange fact about UFO disclosure is that there isn't really much that isn't already public in some way. If you read, you can know. The information is all in the literature. Testimony is a form of disclosure. The phenomenon itself, for example, is in the public domain. People from all walks of life experience the phenomenon and can offer testimony about it. It is not hidden. It is in the wild. What is at stake in disclosure is the reputation of these experiencers, and the cultural context of legitimacy around the subject they bear witness to. There is an issue of inequality between the fringe and the mainstream. We might usefully call it a process of recognition. Clearly the possible exploitation of advanced technology in secret, and not for the public benefit, would be a scandal, but this I would call a matter of justice rather than disclosure. In using the wrong language, we set the cause of truth back. Disclosure? Well, no; something else. Justice and recognition for experiencers now!

A Cosmic Lamentation

This is really a piece of dream logic ... 

My thoughts today run in parallel lines, collapsing as follows:

The Rosetta Stone of the ET phenomenon. What will it look like, what will it be? I do think we are dealing with a fundamental problem of translation. It is not disclosure we need so much as a dictionary, or concordance, a cross-referenced index of the experience. The telepathic communications alleged, why do we assume they are simply in English? 

 

Which reminds me:

 

The Messiah will - according to the Rabbis - translate all the differing ways of man's being into a single fabric with index and schema.

So:

 

Is YHWH the name of man's planetary consciousness, his cosmic consciousness in a local sense? What is the name of the God of the birds, of the fish, of the animals? Is it the same God clothed in different names and aspects? Even further the alien. Who is his God? Is "He" or "She" the same, different, or in different clothes? God creates the whole universe, it is said, but is this not just the functional universe of man's local ways unto himself, a mirror of man's interests? Or is it indeed the whole universe? In Islam God is the sustainer of worlds, plural, a broader conception. Jesus on the other hand is dismissive of birds and animals, and has to be corrected on this, but is not so dismissive of fish. Questions not answers. I do not expect answers. What I would like though is a fractal bible that explains my perplexity.

 

Is the Messiah cosmic? Is his book? We need a copy of his/her notional Fractal Bible (cosmic edition) authored and signed! I sense only this can answer the UFO enigma - because the Messiah is in essence a translator dealing with unity.

Dream over.

The Current Hope

I think, on reading the literature, the reasons are quite clear as to why there has been a UFO cover up over the years. 

Looking at the history of first contact in 47, which was the early days of the cold war, and the radicalization of the cover up in 68, the age of hippies, the problem was very much that our first encounter was with communally minded tripped out plant people. To be encountered and learned from, yes. but shared with the public no. Critical decisions made in 47 and 68 then become embedded and gained their own inertia and self-interest.

The nature of UFO technology is apparently also very strange, according to the testimony, with people entering the pilot chamber for a few minutes, and emerging five days later for example, reality effects as well such as preternatural calmness reported, and a sense of the sacred and taboo, so disclosing this in 47? Our trajectory as a secularising scientific species - largely good - would have been shaken. Think how important science is today to global governance.

 

As we reach peak science though I wonder if the arguments weaken? Science is gradually bringing us closer to the acceptance of life elsewhere, in incremental progress on Mars for example, and the refinement of telescopes making detection easier and more likely. A Harvard Professor (Loeb) can go UFO mad in 2022, and no feathers are ruffled, not as they were when Mack, another Harvard Professor, did so back in 1994. Change has come. Arguments with communists and hippies are not what they were, if they are there at all. That is almost a joke.

 

Science and politics, not religion, have been the phobia driving the cover up - but progress has come. The chains get looser. I am optimistic that big UFO news in the window 2030-2035, now being floated in interested corners, some perhaps covertly governmental, is starting to look highly credible. We shall see. We must live to see.

Magic Numbers

I post this in the spirit of pareidolia or a crossword.

The Pentagon UAP assessment released yesterday is 9 pages long.

Apparently it was only a week ago that it was reported by the NYT to be *125 pages* long. An insider then said this was cut down to *78 pages* (source: Earthfiles). The numbers are strange. That is -47, then -69 pages, right? 1947 and 1969 are significant dates in the UFO community. That seems like a strange coincidence.

Are we meant to look closer at the number 9?

The number of reports considered in the assessment is 144, a number with well known occult significance. That seems too perfect. 144 is, of course, numerologically 9, the number of pages in the actual report. We can say that the 144 reports reduce to 9 pages, specifically *by means of a numerological relationship*. Curiously, the letters MAJIC give 13 1 10 9 3 numerologically. These add to 36 or, again, 9.

Does the assessment then reduce, via 47 and 69, to MAJIC?

Another number in the assessment is that of the 144 reports 21 were anomalous. Strangely the equation phi(x)=144 has 21 solutions.

Does that spell phix, or rather "fix"?

 

The assessment document can be read here, and the official response to it here.

Disclosure: The Natural Apocalypse

The whole key to how we live may lie in the UFO question, but nobody cares, nobody notices. As to why nobody cares, that is an intriguing question in the realm of the Meta-.

 

If healthcare was run by Al Capone and a criminal gang, people would show concern. If welfare was run by a criminal gang, people would show concern. In a way they are, and people do. Let us say the Earth *has* been met by alien intelligence (there is in Greer's words an embarrassment of riches when it comes to evidence of that). All official information regarding this issue, however, is controlled by a criminal gang, if the Wilson leak is true for example, or by compartmentalized confusion, if only the official situation is the case. 

 

So: We are in reality a Type 2 civilization, but "Al Capone" (or Mr Magoo) keeps us living in a civilization that is Type 1. Unlike health and welfare, no-one bats an eyelid. There is only one published essay in a peer-reviewed journal as to why this situation might subsist. 

 

The whole thing sits as a silent scandal. 

 

Not only is there general scepticism and disinterest in UFOs, it seems to be impossible to persuade anyone who is not already persuaded that there should be. That is to say, *there is a general rhetorical failure in UFOlogy that seems to be essential*. That is interesting. Being the type of person to be persuaded or not seems to be a natural selector (based on innate predisposition), rather than one subject to the artifice of rhetoric and reason. The absence of rhetoric argues for nature being the issue. It may even be that disclosure will depend on the slow process of evolution by natural selection rather than any political means. If disclosure is a natural process, we might have to wait billions of years.

On the other hand, if - as Leo Strauss says - political philosophy is first philosophy (that ontology is understood through politics), then when we say that the UFO deception constitutes the political frame as a crime and a lie, then an error is made to determine the political realm *essentially*, as if *by nature*. It all begins to look like the problem of original sin. We begin to see how the political frame of disclosure can be squared with the theological claim of apocalypse and another world being possible. In Hebrew this other world is called Olam Ha-Ba, or the future world. It is the world of redemption; in Christian eschatology, it is the Kingdom. 

 

If the state of affairs in the UFO question seems, in constructing politics as a variant of sin and false consciousness, to be written by the same hand as theology, then disclosure would seem to be a natural variant of revelation and the ultimate negation of sin in apocalypse. If disclosure depends on natural selection, it would also apparently depend on *election*. That is quite interesting too.

There is of course no real need for secrecy, and the phenomenon should be the domain of civilian rather than paranoid military and private agencies. There is no need for secrecy and militarization because the phenomenon is common to all nations, transcends all known science, and in that sense is a universal problem common to all. The drive to exploit these technologies is the mistake, and any defence technology fetish, for example, is a part of the problem. It is only insofar as this universal commons seems to be impossible for us that the type of equation drawn above applies. The Enlightenment - at this horizon - sheds no light.

 

The UFO question is really a complex *political and spiritual* problem, not a scientific one, which is strange, if the problem is just "natural".