Democracy and the UFO

I made this meme for my Facebook and I thought I would discuss it here too.

The fact UFO activists are intimidated, co-opted, fed disinformation, and generally controlled and suppressed and not left alone, well - it is as if they were political activists, and that suggests something.

The UFO situation must be radical in some way (for good or bad we don't know). If it were just change neutral, a damp squib, there would not be all the effort that we discern. Everything is a clue in that sense, and that is what makes the UFO an interesting puzzle. The key to ufology might be that another world is possible - here, on Earth - and that other world is frightening to power in some way.

I guess the ultimate deception could be that there is nothing to the UFO at all, and it is just made to look like there is, but I personally think that is an over-reading, a stretch too far. I mean, even such a move as that might be political - to distract the social demographic attracted to UFOs from pursuing other political interests. In that respect, it is notable that a demographic study of witnesses and contactees showed an even spread in terms of ethnicity, gender, political affiliation, and religious identity. So there is just not much there there to provide a particular angle for power. This argues against the manipulation being to distract a particular demographic.

Unless it is precisely that. The Star-Trekky vibe of the UFO demographic implies a world without division or strife. Maybe that very potential is feared if it were to organise. Just a reading, just speculation, but pulling the plug on UFO studies in 1969 - one year after 1968 - seems significant. It stalled an incipient global movement that was a) not just American and b) focused on a unifying mystery rather than a conflict-based model of divide and rule. There was also of course the hippyish open-mindedness associated with UFOs to worry about too.

Things may not look related but insofar as we are being divided and ruled, so long as globalism = Americanism, and so long as conflict remains our model for history and progress, there is a UFO connection to everything, and it is political. They would not suppress this subject so much if it were not so important!

All one can do is speculate. But I stick to two sayings always: if there is a conspiracy, it is man-made and therefore readable. Everything is a clue. We must keep puzzling away, and demanding a more open debate, for whatever change is feared by those who manipulate the field should be entirely in the public domain, and there for all to discuss and weigh, equally, and in a spirit of mutual encounter. That is, if we want UFOs to be an object of democracy not tyranny.

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.

Alien Invasion! and Another Political Story

The wife of the Chilean President has described protesters in her country as being like an invasion by aliens from space (story in Spanish). This provoked an anthropological group to seek personal stories and experiences of the protest, under the banner "Alien Chronicles":

The protests have adopted the meme, and are becoming known as Octubre alienígena, perhaps in reference to the October revolution in Russia.

Meanwhile protesters in the USA gathered at Area 51 to seek the release of information on UFOs and ETs (story in English). The memes are similar and one wonders what the connection is and whether there could be a hidden, imaginary, solidarity between the two events.

In the Chilean case the alien serves as a metaphor for the disempowered seeking power. In Nevada it is a story of people seeking truth and uncovering lies, but: it is the same system that both lies and disempowers. The one protest may move in an inner direction, towards the secret, and the other in an outer direction, towards external change, but the guiding light is the same. The alien needs recognition.

What is the connection between the properly alien and earthly, political, "alienation" anyway, in any case? A strange solidarity between what is hidden and what is suppressed, repressed, the discourse of the Other, the alien? I do not know the answer, but these disconnected events draw together as well as apart in a Platonic motion.

If some people's human, economic, and political interest can be seen as so other to those in power as to be extraterrestrial, surely it is time to ask where we stand regarding exopolitics generally, and whether UFOlogy is a luxury issue any longer, and not instead - the very essence!