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. 

Book Review

This is an engaging book. It is a classic for the psychedelicists, recounting an expedition into the rainforest in search of novel hallucinogens, but it also touches on Ufology. It is in this volume that McKenna first develops his theory that hallucinogenic mushrooms may be understood as a seeded alien technology. Their longevity as a feature of life on Earth makes them a vehicle for interstellar contact suited to evolutionary timescales.

It is not as daft as it sounds. Jung after all considered the UFO to be an archetype of the soul. In particular he saw the saucer, in its roundedness, as a symbol of wholeness that compensated for man's broken psyche in the age of war and destructive technology.

Insofar as the mushroom opens up an archive of hidden subjective knowledge, it may - McKenna argues - also open us up to the UFO as an ultimate transcendental object to be found at the end of time. Dependent on the social maturity of the subject experiencing the hallucinogen, knowledge may be revealed by the mushroom. Where the shaman finds community medicine, future man may find the blueprint for stellar travel, itself - following Jung - a form of medicine for contemporary man.

Like I say, the book is engaging and stimulating.

Jung - A Letter

A letter from Carl Jung has been brought to my attention. In it, he acknowledges - but slightly regrets - the literal reality of the UFO. Regrets, because the psychological dimension is so rich in itself! This of course makes the UFO strange. Not all machines have such psychological counterparts to the same degree I suggest. I mean, we do not fret too much the psychology of the Fridge. Not until Roland Barthes anyway. It's a nice letter worth knowing.

A Manifesto for Experiencers

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

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?