Soft Landing

Here is an interesting piece of local knowledge. It is on a UFO sighting reported to Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence.

This shows that a whole other history is available to us.

Regarding the continuity of UFO sightings over time, I have recently wondered if that is not a cushioning strategy? A sudden appearance of UFO reality might lead us to abandon our past. As it is, a re-investigation and re-reading of history will be possible instead.

Evidence shows this could run as far back - per the ancient alien hypothesis - as antiquity, even prehistory. The phenomenon exists at the periphery of our oversight, to minimise the sense of loss and ontological shock we might experience. Prior history will not be rendered meaningless, but continuous in a new reading.

It would be like the way the Christians reference the Old Testament afresh. The book is not rendered obsolete by the new believers, but re-interpreted and made relevant in a new way. Subtexts are brought to the surface and explained.

In that sense the UFO phenomenon is currently an unread subtext awaiting exposition.

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! 

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.

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.