Blind Men

This article is interesting and important. According to it, ongoing UFO secrecy and current American Defense policy are now in major contradiction. Because we are reaching now into space militarily.

Quote "If substantiated, the claims raise stark questions about whether America’s ability to maintain awareness in orbit - the foundation of its space superiority - has been compromised by a secretive mechanism of its own making". End quote.

In particular Golden Dome may turn out to be no more than puffery. Blind from the beginning. The question is really "who rules?". Our public defense systems or the UFO and its hidden guardians in power?

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.

Another Lamentation

Ufology is strange. On the one hand official denial, then the occasional leak from those doing the denying.

I think it is a bit of a flypaper strategy. Feed a drop to the fans doing the research, keeping them happy but at a low level, and control the narrative at both ends.

We are never experiencing the phenomenon pure, or in a spirit of public inquiry, but always as a government construct, always as a veil rather than the full reveal.

Puritans running a token strip club or speakeasy, watching the customers come and go. One official channel even had the acronym TTS AAS. You figure it out!

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.

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.

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.

Patchy Evidence?

It is a strange feature of the black budget that elaborate mission patches are designed even for projects that are not openly acknowledged. A selection of these is catalogued and discussed in a book by the artist Trevor Paglen (I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me, Melville House Publishing). There is a nice essay at The New York Times discussing the book, and an article at The Space Review focusing on the special subset of black ops missions in space.

Now an Australian journalist, Ross Coulthart has joined the obscure patch trail, by offering up an image of a patch he alleges covers the reverse engineering program of a captured UFO at Area 51 (pictured above). The number sequence seen, 11001001, is associated - strangely - with an episode of Star Trek. One in which technology is shared between aliens and humans. Because it is Season 1 Episode 15, people are seeing the number of Element 115, which in Bob Lazar's famous testimony is the material which powers the said UFO.

Other readings are possible; the lightning may indicate electronic warfare, and the binary code the role of digital technology within that. The binary code reduces to 201 in decimal, and the fact there is an EW unit called the 201st Expeditionary Military Intelligence Brigade may close the case, but I think we should note that the date of the Roswell crash was indeed - cue music - a dark and stormy night. So the rabbit hole is there to follow should one wish. And lightning is sometimes just lightning.

Disappearing Act

The Mirror has a nice article about the video being discussed on reddit this week, which allegedly shows the missing flight MH370 disappearing into a portal (after being chased by a fleet of UFOs). In the video's favour, it has been determined that the cloud cover matches satellite imagery for weather on the day; on the other hand, counting against, a frame in the video has been shown to match a VFX template of a generic explosion, although debunking that - in turn - there is some indication that the VFX template was tampered with. The strangest bit though is that this video is nine years old. Why has it come to attention now?

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.

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.