UFO Alignment

Thinking about how difficult it was for the world of the church and politics to handle Galileo's insights, I think we have to be realistic about similar difficulties confronting us when it comes to UFO truth. Who knows how challenging to the current organisation of life the revelations might be? How vexatious and disputed?

The cliched example is free energy. If fossil fuel and energy poverty could be switched off overnight, how destabilising would that be to vested interests yes, but also to geopolitics, the balance of power, and ordinary life too? The revelations might be more unsettling even than that. What if materialism itself is false, or our understanding of the afterlife? Science would falter and many political ideologies that depend on a materialist view. Maybe the church would see an opportunity for temporary ascendance; but if Christ was an alien what then? Would there be a final adjudication between Judaism and Islam?

We need, I feel, to get away from a good and evil view of truth vs the conspiracy and think more in terms of strategy. What is the insider's strategy (which might in part be benign) and what is ours on the outside (which might in part be malign)? Can those two strategies ever meet? And how? Let us think in terms of a UFO alignment rather than of disclosure simply. An alignment where the different interests can come together.

Let us as seekers of truth also think more about how the world could prepare for startling ideas. Ideas that might dismantle such oppositions as right and left, even of hierarchy and up and down, are not to be handled lightly and need thought. Let us show willing to make the task of disclosure easier, by becoming aligned philosophers, poets, and artists! 

A Manifesto for Experiencers

 A wonderful manifesto in the Global Policy Journal. It speaks for me and I urge you to read it.

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.

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!

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.

Digging into an Idea

One of the stranger and more intriguing UFO documents out there, I think this is one of the earliest references to alien invasion as part of a global conspiracy:

The S1 Memo.

 

Preceded by biological warfare and population control, the date given is 2030. Curiously Strieber's site has just started promoting the idea that some kind of visitor contact/intervention will occur around 2034; he has also started sharing ideas of population collapse. There is an ufologist known to be a CIA asset, but no-one has ever determined who.

 

The attribution of this alien invasion idea to Werner von Braun in the 70s actually comes later through the testimony of Carol Rosin, maybe as early as 2001, but in the public domain nearer 2013 as far as I can tell. This document however is dated 1999. So I think the idea begins here. 

 

Well, this all came up in a conversation recently, so I thought the paper trail was worth posting, seeing as it presented itself to me today so serendipitously.

 

OK, digging deeper we find a reference in 1952 to the potential use of UFOs as a psychological weapon by the US, and fears that the US should configure responses to the Soviets figuring out the same (the memo is from Scientific Intelligence to the CIA, October 1952) - however no mention is made of a false flag alien invasion *specifically*:

 

The 1952 Chadwell Memo.

 

Project Bluebeam as an idea dates earlier too, to 1994, but the conspiracy there is the false projection in the sky of an antichrist figure. No alien invasion originally:

 

On conspiracist Serge Monast.

 

The idea of nefarious intent by the US Govt re ET enters the literature with Bill Cooper in 1991 and the X-Files in 93. ET abduction literature has its own history (1966 - Fuller, 1987 - Strieber, 1994 - John E Mack) - but the bad faith nexus of govt/ET does not really enter this until Strieber in 2011).

 

So overall the idea of a false flag alien invasion would seem to be a syncretism in conspiracy theory. Finding full expression in Greer 2013, it would seem to evolve the 1952 idea of horizontal false flags *between* the Soviets and the USA into a global vertical action by elites against the people (as per Cooper 1991 and Monast 1994); with Rosin's testimony on Von Braun in 2001-2013 crystallising Greer's opinion in 2013 (as per a general negative trend Cooper to Strieber 1991 -2011). The 1999 memo to Cooper is therefore an interesting outlier to the seeming development of the meme via that route.

 

Context (that I do not give here) shows that the outlier may or may not be disinformation from an exposed bad faith actor called Richard Doty. Ugh.

 

Summary: it turns out to be all quite interesting. The theory of a future false flag alien invasion seems to be a syncretism of various other conspiracy theories (i.e. a merging and evolution of earlier theories) but there is an outlier reference in 1999 that seems to come out of the blue - complicating that is the 1999 source may or may not be a person called Richard Doty, who has been fully exposed in recent years as a disinfo agent from Air Force Intelligence. So I would say the syncretism argues against its truth, and the 1999 letter argues 50/50 for its truth. This is the best I can do to approach this in a scholarly way. So there it is. Verdict: a 1 in 4 chance that the alien false flag invasion thing is a thing.     

THe Highly Strange Human Spectrum

 

Here is a good article on the alien abduction phenomenon by Ralph Blumental of the New York Times:

The Cultural Rise of the Abduction Experience.

It raises an interesting opposition.

 

On the one hand, there is government slow-footing on research into lights in the sky, with the ET hypothesis and so-called disclosure receding ever infinitely into the distance; on the other hand clear testimony from the wider public of ongoing "highly strange" interactions with seemingly alien entities. It is an odd, unsquared, circle. 

 

The phenomenon would seem to manifest in a spectrum, with government a distorting lens on what is patently inexplicably there, the individual seemingly a more open receptacle to what is outrageously anomalous. Governments just don't like to do strange do they? As for the people, hey, the strange is just common knowledge, common experience. Hell, government itself is strange sometimes! 

 

Is the UFO revolutionary technology - pun intended - that hopes we see that? That government is an inefficient filter for a true phenomenology?

 

Why the insurgent folklore?

SETI or the search for SETI?

 

There has been a minor kerfuffle around SETI, the possible detection of a signal from an Earth like planet orbiting Kepler-438:

The Sky Eye Telescope and the Alien Signal that Wasn't

I notice that the time between the breaking of the story and the nixing of the story is again the magic 3 days that just happen to correspond to NSA data capacity in Utah regarding capture of the internet. It is as if they are sweeping the world for data about chat about SETI rather than the actual sky for ETI. I always make this observation about stories that fit a 3 day cycle too neatly. Charlie Hebdo was another.

My test for any conspiracy theory is "is it what I would do?". I have to say that if I was an intelligence agency with the tech to record global internet chatter for 3 days, I *would* occasionally send up a flare to illuminate conversations and networks of interest. In this regard Muslims and SETI afficionados would seem to be in the same boat.

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".

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!