By Eric Vandenbroeck
22 May 2021
Unvarnished overview of the current UFO phenomena
Based on an article
CNN posted
yesterday claiming a mysterious UFO
disappears into the water today, 22 May CNN newsroom continues to air
an ongoing UFO segment with pictured here the latest segment with Chris Cuomo:
As 'developing
tonight' in his latest presentation Chris Cuomo as seen above, reports
that it all started with a CBS’s Sunday Morning and 60
Minutes broadcast stories about UFOs, with Florida Senator Marco
Rubio sternly
intoning about the
importance of treating them as a potential national security concern.
This where CBS’s
David Pogue literally chuckled during his Sunday Morning UFO report, telling viewers we should “live and let live” and
not challenge UFO believers. Ezra
Klein in The New York Times and Gideon
Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker said they would be sad without a UFO
mystery to enjoy, whereby Lewis-Kraus alleged there was good reason for
the U.S. government to get back into the business of hunting flying saucers.
The footage in
question is the same that is known from the Pentagon program that was
created at the behest of former Senator Harry Reid and was run jointly for a
time with Bigelow Aerospace in Las Vegas, whose owner, Robert Bigelow, has long
been on the hunt for extraterrestrials and poltergeists...
NASA Deputy
Administrator Lori Garver and President and founder of Bigelow Aerospace Robert
T. Bigelow in front of the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module:
For UFO believers,
the current promotion via CBS and CNN is the moment they had been waiting for.
UFOs were everywhere, and they were suddenly respectable. With a new
intelligence report on UFOs due to be delivered to Congress in June, even the
U.S. government seemed poised to take UFOs seriously again.
Behind the creamy
pages of high-end magazines and the marble columns of the Capitol, as we shall
see, the media elite and Congress are being played by a small, loosely
connected group of people with bizarre ideas about science. It’s easy to
dismiss UFOs as a fantasy or a fad, but the money, the connections, and the
power wielded by a group of UFO believers, and as appears now also embedded in
the defense industry, bent on supplanting material science with a
pseudoscientific mysticism.
As we will see, the
idea of interplanetary travel flying saucers from Atlantis (an idea that
started what we described in our article the current History Chanel claim
that extraterrestrials have visited Earth for millions of years)
possible initially inspired by the likes of Emanuel
Swedenborg first became popular in esoteric circles influenced by the Blavatskyan Theosophical Society or/and Rudolf Steiner
(known from the present day Waldorf schools) who claimed that "for
the million years up to 10,000 BC in those parts of the world that now
constitute the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean there existed an absolutely unique
culture of people that in body and soul thoroughly differed from humans today.
These people had aircraft which they flew close to the ground ... In those days
the air was much thicker, the water was much thinner; it moved more
artistically and let itself be guided, etc... [ellipses by
Max von Laue].”
Whereby a neo-völkisch group
formed in 1950 variously referred to as the Landig
Circle (Landig Kreis), Vienna
Group (Wien Konzern), and Vienna
Lodge (Wien Lodge) produced (what basically was faked) evidence that
flying saucers were Nazi secret weapons
a theory that evidence by the following three current books still finds
many believers and promoters (with 'secret files referring to what was produced
by the Vienna circle whose members previously belonged to the WWII SS) the
first book on the left was published in March 2021, the second middle one
was published in April 2021 and the third on the right will be published
in Nov. 2021.
The most important
person what the creation of the UFO phenomena concerns is Ray Palmer
("the man who invented flying saucers"), and while there are others
one should add the first person who claimed to have been abducted,
plus two of the most popular early contactees George
Adamski and George Van Tassel the latter who started hosting group
meditation in 1953.
That year, according
to Van Tassel, the occupant of a spaceship from the planet Venus woke him up,
invited him on board his spaceship, and both verbally and telepathically gave
him a technique for rejuvenating the human body. Thus in 1954, Van Tassel and
others began building what they called the "Integratron"
partially upon the research of Nikola Tesla, and Georges Lakhovsky
Van Tassel described the Integratron as being created
to recharge and rejuvenate people's cells, "a time machine for basic
research on rejuvenation, anti-gravity and time travel. Pictured below
the wooden, two-story, hemispherical umbrella (never completed) dome built
by George Van Tassel and his backers starting in 1958:
This while the
publicity surrounding UFO' was increased with the escalation of the Cold War
and strategic concerns related to the development and detection of advanced
Soviet aircraft.
The history of what led Robert Bigelow to convince
Harry Reid
One of the arguments
has been that belief in UFOs (which, as we will see, might have started as a
form of deception) is that it led to the belief that can be described as a form of esoteric religion.
An example of a
person who mixed esoteric ideas while also reporting the first alien abduction
was William Dudley Pelley.
Lying naked on a
marble slab, with two men in white uniforms attending to him, they told William
Dudley Pelley to neither be afraid nor try to see everything in the first
"seven minutes." One of the two white-clad individuals, that
were attending him told Pelley that everyone had lived hundreds of
times before because earth is a classroom where souls learn and move up the
spiritual hierarchy. This hierarchy accounts for human races, which are simply
"great classifications of humanity epitomizing gradations of spiritual
development, starting with the black man and proceeding upward in cycles to the
white."
After reading
Subversive Movements, 1924, Nesta Webster believed the five powers behind the
world conspiracy were Grand Orient Masonry, Theosophy, Pan Germanism,
international finance, and social revolution. Pelley asserted that he received
a clairaudient message that he should create a paramilitary organization.
Heeding this rather dubious inspiration, Pelley established the Silver Legion of America on
January 31, 1932.
In 1933 two
supporters purchased a plot of land to build a world headquarters for the
Silver Legion. The building, however, came to a screeching halt on Dec. 8,
1941, the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when federal agents, who
apparently had been watching the progress of the compound and its activities
with some interest, stormed infrastructure.
Another at time
famous figure was George Adamski, who initially employed as a maintenance
worker in Yellowstone National Park. Later influence by Theosophy n 1932,
he wrote a short story revolving around spiritual contacts with mysterious,
highly evolved beings with his mention of an alleged Royal Order of Tibet
on p.23. But Adamski's career as a visionary really started when, after having
read his story Lalita (Maud) Johnson invited Adamski to teach at the Little
White Church for the Order of Loving Service, which she established earlier
that year in Laguna Beach, an artists colony on the
California coast. Whereby less than two years after that, still heavily
influenced by Theosophy, The Royal Order of Tibet opens its
‘monastery’ the Temple of Scientific Philosophy in Laguna Beach:
A decade
after he wrote his 1932 story, the same claims would again be presented,
but this time as biographical facts of Adamski’s own life. Other texts from
this involvement with the Royal Order of Tibet were reworked, and (initially an idea that sprang from Spiritualism where it
was called 'spirit guides' the Theosophical Mahatmas
were replaced with aliens. And started the boom for
UFO-related religiosity.
The "Aryan"
appearance of spacemen spotted by Adamski and others might also have helped give
rise to a theory that UfOs represented a secret
weapon of remnants of the Third Reich. A topic taken up by the above mention
both former SS Wilhelm Landig and Rudolf J. Mund (that latter who in 1979 became prior of the Ordo Novi
Templi and claimed to have been the inspiration for Landig's "Götzen gegen Thule. Ein Roman voller Wirklichkeit. 1971 the book which started the Nazi-UFO
craze).
How present-day Ufology actually started
In the 1960s,
famous UFOlogist Jim Moseley made a
pilgrimage to the Wisconsin farm where Ray Palmer ("the man who invented
flying saucers") spent most of his later years. Palmer asked Moseley
rhetorically, “What if I told you it was all a joke?”
From 1945 to 1947,
Ray Palmer initially printed material about a subterranean world inhabited
where demonic creatures traveled about in flying disks and using secret rays
were responsible for most of the ills of Mankind.
But while initially,
the "Shaver Mystery" might also have been of influence, the step to
full-fledged UFO's as flying saucers was indeed made by Ray Palmer who's
Amazing Stories’ August 1946 was the first to depict flying discs. In fact,
Palmer was quick to argue that for several years, he noted, Shaver had
mentioned the Deros' supposed spaceships. Writer John
Keel later championed the idea that Shaver and Palmer had somehow predicted or
presaged the "flying saucer" craze.
It also was in the
first issue of Fate; Palmer published Kenneth Arnold's report of "flying
discs"...
Palmer's cryptic
remark, “What if I told you it was all a joke?” might be understood when we
realize that Kenneth Arnold claims we can safely
say was influenced by the Maury Island UFO Hoax which Ray Palmer had sent Kenneth Arnold out to
investigate. It was this made up UFO sighting promoted by Ray Palmer that
inspired the term “flying saucer,” and shortly
thereafter prompted the 1947 Roswell claim that led to the mystique
surrounding Area 51 whereby
some of you might remember the somewhat startling article in THE HILL
that: the military
'stands ready' and feds warn ufo enthusiasts
against storming area 51.
In his book, Angels
and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination, author Keith Thompson recounts
what happened next: “Within a matter of hours, Arnold’s story, trumpeted by the
evocative phrase ‘flying saucers,’ a creation of anonymous headline writers,
became front-page news throughout the nation.”
When in 1952, rumors
began circling about flying saucers landing in the desert near Paloma. Adamski
went out on an expedition to find them.
Adamski's following
vision of a friendly, laid-back alien race is strikingly different from the
descriptions of the bulbous, bug-eyed alien "greys" that UFO
abductees speak of today. Adamski described Space Brother Orthon as tall, blond, humanoid with tan skin and
brown shoes. Additionally, Adamski said that Orthon left
mysterious symbolic imprints in the ground where he walked.
Adamski immediately
became a major flying saucer celebrity after the release of his 1953 book,
Flying Saucers Have Landed, where he told the story of encountering and
communicating with Orthon, the pilot of a landed
extraterrestrial spaceship.
More importantly for
the later Harry Reed project is the fact that in 1966 J. Allen Hynek, the
astronomer who pioneered the scientific study of UFOs for the Air Force’s
Project Blue Book, told his friend, French UFO researcher Jacques Vallée, his deep dark secret: In terms of his scientific
outlook, he wasn’t a strict materialist; instead, he was guided by his
fascination with mysticism and the occult. Over the next decade, the two men
toyed with the notion that UFOs weren’t alien spaceships at all but, rather,
space poltergeists from another dimension. The two men’s discussions profoundly
impacted a friend with an office near Vallée’s in the
1970s, an ex-Scientologist and physicist named Harold E. “Hal” Puthoff. Puthoff, who studied
psychic phenomena at the Stanford Research Institute, championed debunked
spoon-bender Uri Geller, was also a defense contractor. The intelligence
community recruited him for a bonkers effort to use psychics. To spy
telepathically on the Soviets, later known as “Project
Stargate.” In 1984, one
Stargate “psychic” claimed to travel back in time one million years to commune
with Martians.
Following the sixties, particularly in the USA, was a
manic time for UFO belief.
The time when UFO research became respectable and
thanks to CNN again today?
By 1949, the
Pentagon officially dismissed UFOs as a product of hoaxes, misidentification,
hallucinations, and mass hysteria. To convey this to the public, military
officials worked closely with the Saturday Evening Post on a two-part article that
derided the idea of intergalactic ships whirring through the skies. “It is a
jittery age we live in,” the magazine concluded, “particularly since our
scientists and military spokesmen have started talking about sending rockets to
the moon… it is a small wonder that harassed humans, already suffering from
atomic psychosis, have started seeing saucers and Martians.”
Instead of putting
the matter to rest, as the Pentagon hoped, the article aroused ire and
disquiet. Concerned that its public engagement was feeding into the country’s
“war nerves,” the Pentagon resolved to go silent on UFO commentary.
Into this vacuum
stepped a group of citizen crusaders, rank opportunists, and con artists. One
leading voice was retired Marine Corps Major Donald Keyhoe,
who in January of 1950 published a widely circulated article in True Magazine titled, “Flying Saucers are
Real.” UFO sightings were soon taken up by mainstream media’s most iconic and
influential publications. In 1952, Life Magazine published a lengthy article titled, “Have we, visitors, from outer
space?” This was a watershed moment, writes Mark O’Connell in his recent book,
The Close Encounters Man. “When Life spoke, the whole country listened,” he
writes.
Book titles convey
some of the period's mood: Flying Saucers: The Startling Evidence of the
Invasion from Outer Space; Flying Saucers are Hostile; Flying Saucer Invasion;
Target Earth; Flying Saucers—Serious Business; The Real UFO invasion; The
Terror Above Us. The teaser on The Official Guide to UFOs promised, “Exclusive!
First News of America’s Most Terrifying UFO Invasion!” Wilkins’s books return
with arch blurbs asking, “Are they Friendly Visitors from Outer Space or
Invaders Planning Conquest?” and “Is there a cosmic battle plan aimed at
Earth?” The actual content was less dramatic than advertised, but that hardly
mattered. The conviction of urgency transcended the material gathered for
proof.
Throughout the first
half of the decade, Donald Edward Keyhoe, who
in 1956 founded the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena
(NICAP) that next pressed for Congressional hearings on the UFO problem by such
tactics as letter-writing campaigns. The Air Force warned members of Congress
such hearings would only dignify the problem and cause more publicity, thus
adding to the problem. NICAP also published a book called The UFO Evidence
(edited by Richard Hall) and sent copies to members of Congress to put forward
their case that UFOs were, in fact, real and posed a danger to the fabric of
society. The danger included an unprepared public being caught up in widespread
panic if an external danger was suddenly imposed. A sudden confrontation with
extraterrestrials could have disastrous results, they warned. Among them, “catastrophic
results to morale.”
Then there the
writings of Carol E. Lorenzen that were required reading for American UFO buffs
in the sixties. Flying Saucers: The Startling Evidence of the Invasion from
Outer Space (1966) builds on Donald Keyhoe's thesis
that UFOs are engaged in reconnaissance. They are painstakingly mapping the
geographical features of our country and testing our defense capabilities. The
1952 Washington D.C. incidents are regarded as accidental incursions by aliens
mistaking the capitol and White House for military installations.
The Lorenzen's expect they will be setting up bases since the taking
of plants, boulders, and soil samples probably mean they are testing what sort
of agriculture they should establish. The Ubatuba explosion
is regarded as selfdestruction to prevent
superior technology from getting into our hands and revealing its secrets.
There is a bare possibility it was an atomic explosion. “UFOs are powerful
radioactive sources.” The dangers they pose extend to the possibility that our
next war could involve “all nations fighting as brothers against a common foe
from outer space.” (Lorenzen, 1966)
They showcase the
ideas of Dr. Olavo Fontes that UFOs
possessed weapons like heat rays and a device that inhibited the function of petrol
engines. However, they claim priority that the observations UFOs made of cars
and planes in the early years were done to devise these antimachine machines to
disable propulsion systems.
A pattern of
reconnaissance is seen, which suggests to them that aliens plan to release
sleeping drugs into strategic reservoirs and water tanks as a means of bringing
the world to its knees in a matter of hours. They are concerned there are too
many blackouts on our power grids. There are also people disappearing. Is this
the procuring of specimens? Add to this the case of a woman with medical
problems they interpret as radiation effects. No person of conscience can
ignore the UFO problem in the light of all this. The UFO problem has to be
taken out of the hands of the military, who are lulling us into a false sense
of security, and given to an international commission who will handle this
red-hot political problem.
“We are in urgent need
of the acquisition and objective analysis of basic data.” We are facing
potential danger. Maybe they aren’t hostile, but “there is no indication of
friendliness either... The existence of a species of superior beings in the
universe could cause the civilization of Earth to topple.” This urgency “defies
expression.” We must be anxious to relearn the lessons of history; Billy
Mitchell, Maginot, Pearl Harbor, and so on.
Credit must be given
where it is due. The Air Force got it right and told it straight. No material
threat to national security existed. The invasion never took place. Mirarchi’s Pearl Harbor, Riordan’s knockout
attack, Kevhoe’s final operation, Wilkins’
death ceiling blockade, Michel’s Sword of Damocles, NICAP’s danger to the
fabric of society, the Lorenzens’ mass drugging
and the toppling of civilization, Edwards’ imminent Overt Contact, Fawcett’s
disaster beyond imagination, Steiger’s full-scale
annihilation, Hvnek’s Russian Breakthrough, Clark’s
swamp-lurking village-slayers, Palmer’s ongoing titanic war, Fowler’s cultural
disintegration: all were concerns with more basis in fantasy than reality.
The sense of urgency,
the sense that it may be too late, the sense that our existence depended on a
properly conducted investigation was an irrational fear. The Air Force
repeatedly tried to get across the message that UFOlogists were
wrong, but they were in no mood to listen. It is dogma among UFOlogists that the Air Force was incompetent or worse, yet
if that is accepted as a proper, measured evaluation, what word is proper to
describe the body of thought presented by these UFOlogists?
The Air Force did not perform flawlessly in the details, but they had the big
picture in more than sufficient focus to understand it was a nuisance problem
and not one of life and death significance.
The same cannot be
said of UFOlogists. For them, the big picture
keeps changing. In the fifties, they were considerate and peace-loving. In the
sixties, they were a source of danger and death. The seventies were perversely
irrational and a source of hope. In the eighties, they were traumatizing though
they didn’t realize it.
The 1960s also saw
many other flying saucer groups like The Adamski Foundation, Mark-Age. Universaucerian Foundation, Aetherius Society,
World Understanding, Association of Sananda and Sanat Kumara, The Unarius Academy, and Rael are
usually called UFO religions.
Hence the sightings
of 1947 of which Ray Palmer said, “What if I told you it was all a joke?”
quickly spawned major actors, organizations, and schisms that would
dominate the UFO movement for decades.
Project Blue Book and the plethora of UFO news
Deep public concern
about UFO sightings in 1966 pressed the Air Force into funding an external
evaluation of Project Blue Book. This work, directed by Edward Condon, an
eminent physicist at the University of Colorado, was completed in 1968 and
concluded that there was no evidence supporting a belief in alien visitation
and that UFO phenomena do not offer a fruitful field for scientific
discoveries. The National Academy of Sciences reviewed Condon's report and
concurred with his conclusions. Project Blue Book was terminated in 1969.
Of more than 12,000
sightings eventually registered by Blue Book, over 90 percent were plausibly
attributed to misidentifications of celestial objects such as Venus, of
human-made objects like weather balloons or artificial satellites, or hoaxes
(Condon 1968: 11). Surely there are errors in attribution, but activists and
skeptics agree that the vast majority of UFO reports indicate nothing
extraordinary.
While valueless for
physical scientists or engineers, these sightings are useful for sociologists,
showing the context in which ET claims occur. For example, UFOs are usually
seen after dark but before midnight, and more often in warm months than winter.
This reflects the times when people are outside looking at the night sky. Many
nations report UFOs, but the United States is the center of activity. Within
the U.S., the geographical distribution of sightings correlates roughly with a
density of non-urban population. Few reports come from urban areas, probably
because city lights obscure the night sky.
The Air Force count
of UFO sightings ceased with Blue Book's demise. Ufologists remedied that loss,
one of whom, Larry Hatch, has for twenty years tabulated sightings worldwide
and posted them in graphical format on the internet. Like Blue Book, Hatch's
unit of analysis is the UFO event, that is, the sighting of one or more
extraordinary objects in the sky, or if on the ground thought capable of
flight, at a particular time and place by one or more observers. His
compilation includes Blue Book; journals, newsletters, and encyclopedias from
UFO organizations; news media; and private catalogs.
By Hatch's count, the
greatest number of sightings for one year occurred in 1952. In March 1952, the
Air Force consolidated its previous UFO inquiries into Project Blue Book,
enlisting intelligence officers at all Air Force facilities to assess and report
saucer sightings. This improvement in data collection may account for increased
sightings in April and May but seems insufficient to explain the dramatic
upturn during the summer.
The news media are
another candidate. The Air Force's invigorated UFO inquiry was the lead-in for
a highly influential story in Life magazine of April 7.9 Titled "Have We
Visitors from Space?" Life's answer was essential "yes." Some
350 newspapers quoted the piece within days of its release. Media attention
rose more sharply in July. The New York Times, for example, averaged only three
UFO articles per month during the spring of 1952 but ran 17 articles in July,
another 37 in August, and then by September nearly dropped the story.
The last three months
of 1957 saw another flap, especially in November. Blue Book attributed many of
these sightings to misidentifications of Venus. No increase in UFO news
articles accompanied this peak, perhaps because journalists were focused on
Sputnik 1, launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, and Sputnik 2 with the
dog Laika on November 3. Headlines were plentiful, inducing people to watch the
skies.
A plethora of UFO
news began in March 1966 with repeated reports by many witnesses of glowing
colored lights in two swampy areas near Ann Arbor, Michigan. Dr. Hynek, the Air
Force consultant, thought these were visual effects of swamp gas or foxfire
from rotting vegetation, producing a phosphorescent glow. Though scientifically
reasonable, this "marsh gas" explanation was derided as a cover-up.
Michigan congressman (later president) Gerald Ford called for a congressional
investigation. House hearings in early April produced more news coverage. The
publicity was a boon to the authors of some twenty-five books on UFOs published
between 1965 and 1968. John Fuller, a columnist with Saturday Review magazine
and a UFO believer, was the major beneficiary, fortuitously publishing two
saucer books in 1966. Sightings rose apace with the publicity, peaking in 1967.
Sightings peaked
again in fall 1973. This flap started in the southern states and might have
gone unmentioned in The New York Times if Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter had not
commented that he once saw a UFO (September 14). In mid-October, the Times
reported that a UFO seen by thousands of South Carolinians turned out to be the
work of an artist who launched the object as an experimental sculpture. About
the same time, two shipyard workers from Mississippi, while fishing on the
Pascagoula River, were nabbed by hideous-looking aliens, taken aboard the spacecraft
for examination, and then released. A local lawyer, acting as the abductees'
agent, sought payment for the Pascagoula story. The men repeatedly appeared on
network television despite the transparency of their hoax. By this time, there
were sightings around the nation.
But in the end, the
project concluded: "No UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the
Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national
security." According to the National Archives fact sheet, the program also
concluded that the "unidentified" sightings were not advanced
technology or extraterrestrial vehicles.
The project was
closed down in 1969 because of its cost, the National Archives said.
The Heaven’s Gate suicides
After 1973 news
reporters ignored UFOs except for a brief but intense return in 1997. There
were two big saucer stories that year. In March, the bodies of 39 members of a
millennial sect called Heaven’s Gate were found at a wealthy estate in
California, victims of a mass suicide intended to remove them from their
earthly bodies so they could join a spaceship lurking behind the Hale-Bopp
comet, then passing near earth. In a lighter vein, many thousands of partiers
gathered at Roswell, New Mexico, on the Fourth of July for the fiftieth
anniversary of the crash of a flying saucer containing alien bodies, not all
dead, that are still held in secret storage by the Air Force.
As we have seen
above, as it relates to Area 51, the seed for the Roswell story was the crash
of a government balloon on a nearby ranch in early July 1947. This was barely a
week into the media frenzy set off by Kenneth Arnold’s “saucer” sighting near
Mount Rainier. The rancher who found the wreckage notified the sheriff, who
contacted Roswell Army Air Field, which picked up the debris. The base’s
zealous public information officer, Lieutenant Walter Haut, wrote a press
release saying that the Army had retrieved the wreckage of one of the rumored
flying discs. The Roswell Daily Record ran the story under the headline, “RAAF
Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.” By the following day,
higher-ups in the Army identified the wreckage as a weather balloon, but that
was not completely true. In 1994 the Air Force revealed that what crashed at
Roswell was a 600-foot long train of weather balloons and radar targets then
tested for Project Mogul, a top-secret attempt to detect sound generated by
Soviet nuclear-bomb tests.
What is most
remarkable about the Roswell crash is that it was virtually a non-event for
four decades. I found a mention of Roswell in my perusal of UFO literature
barely before 1990. The exception was a book called The Roswell Incident, but
its absurdities (e.g., President Eisenhower lacked sufficient security
clearance to be told about the downed saucer) gave it little credibility even
among UFO believers. Roswell was reinvigorated in the early 1990s as new books
promoted theories about one or more crashed saucers, recovered bodies, perhaps
a survivor, and of course, a cover-up.
Alleged Alien Abductions
During the mid-1980s,
several sensational books, presented as nonfiction, explicated the phenomenon
of alien abduction, including intrusive medical examinations and the extraction
from unwilling donors of sperm and ova, to be used in fertility experiments.
There were accounts of hybrid fetuses taken from pregnant women and hybrid
children shown briefly to their human mothers but kept by the aliens (Strieber
1987; Hopkins 1981, 1987; Jacobs 1992; Mack 1994). According to this
literature, abduction and hybridization are commonplace, but since the aliens
induce amnesia, contactees are barely aware
of their encounters until memories are restored under hypnosis. The most
commercially successful of these books, leading the New York Times bestseller
list by May 1987, was Communion by Whitney Strieber, a well-known author of
horror fiction, who wrote of his own abduction and traumatic medical
examination by aliens. A movie version of Communion, starring Christopher Walken, followed in 1989, and following that was a wave of
reported abductions.
In 1994, the
abduction phenomenon got an enormous boost from the trade publication of
Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens by Dr. John E. Mack, a long-time
professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and winner of a Pulitzer Prize
in 1977 for a biography of T. E. Lawrence. Mack had been introduced to the
abduction phenomenon in January 1990 by Budd Hopkins, an accomplished artist
and amateur hypnotist who had worked with abductees for over a decade. In 1987
Hopkins had published Intruders, a book on the reality of alien abduction. By
1992, after Intruders was reshaped as a fictional TV movie, the lead character
was a Mack-like psychiatrist (played by Richard Crenna)
working with abductees. Both Mack and Hopkins were consultants on the film.
Dr. Mack provided a
level of credibility that Hopkins or any other UFO believer could not approach.
He provoked a storm of controversy at Harvard, including a Medical School investigation
of his work with abductees. Still, tenure and the spirit of academic freedom
preserved him from serious censure. In the paperback edition of his book, Mack
slightly moderated the sensationalism of the original hardback, stating that he
did not presume that everything abductees told him to be literally true. Still,
he vigorously defended the credibility of abduction experiences until he died
in 2004, struck by a bus in London. It remains puzzling why a physician of
Mack's stature would espouse so implausible a phenomenon. He did have a history
of flirting with dubious practices like Werner Erhard's EST and Stanislav Grof’s "holotropic
breathwork," a technique that allegedly accesses extraordinary states of
consciousness. Whatever his motives, the Harvard professor and the mass media
carried alien abduction a long way from the fabulous tale of Barney and Betty
Hill.
There is no physical
evidence associated with alien visitation or abduction that cannot be explained
in ordinary terms. We have testimony from people like the Hills, who insist
that they personally experienced these events. Most do not suffer severe
psychopathology (Clancy 2005). In the clinical laboratory, when their supposed
abductions are brought to mind, these claimants show physiological signs of
stress consistent with a recall of trauma. Apparently, most of them truly
believe they were kidnapped and sexually molested by extraterrestrials.
The major argument
given to support the reality of alien abduction is that the stories told by
unrelated abductees have a high degree of consistency on specific details. What
are the broad commonalities? Most abduction occurs at night when the abductee
is alone, usually in bed or asleep. Abductees often feel paralyzed while they
are being taken. And abduction stories are generally accepted to be simply a
result of sleep paralysis.
Senator Harry Reid and Robert Bigelow's 2017
revival of the UFO myth
Today, a new set of
crusading actors revive a UFO narrative with all the trappings of America’s
first round of extraterrestrial enchantment. On December 16, 2017, Politico, the New York Times, and The Washington Post published near-simultaneous stories
about an obscure $22 million Pentagon project that officially existed between
2008 and 2012.
All three outlets had
essentially the same story: The Pentagon program was created at the behest of
former Democratic Senator Harry Reid in 2008 and was run jointly for a time
with Bigelow Aerospace in Las Vegas, whose owner, Robert Bigelow, has long
been on the hunt for extraterrestrials and poltergeists.
Politico and the
Washington Post treated the Pentagon program as it appeared to be: A pet
project of a senator that didn’t amount to much, other than “reams of
paperwork”, and did not provide evidence that alien spaceships were buzzing our
skies. Both stories had well-placed sources in the intelligence community that
were skeptical of the program’s purpose and deliverables. Absent any salacious
details; neither story got a wider pickup.
The New York Times,
however, played up dubious tidbits that the Washington Post or Politico either
didn’t find credible or simply didn’t know about, namely that the program had
found “metal alloys and other materials… recovered from unidentified aerial
phenomena,” that got stored in a Bigelow Aerospace warehouse. There is no indication
in the Times story that any of these “materials” were seen firsthand by its
reporters.
The Times also had
something its competitors apparently didn’t: Grainy footage of two Navy F/A-18
fighter jets in 2004 tracking an apparent unknown object “traveling at high
speed and rotating” off the coast of San Diego. The 45-second video and the
Times front-page article went viral.
But there’s more to
the Times story that should’ve given readers pause.
One of the story's
authors was Leslie Kean, a journalist with a long-standing interest in UFOs and
the paranormal, who published a book in 2010 titled UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and
Government Officials Go on the Record. At the time, activists in the UFO
community were coalescing around the goal of obtaining official “disclosure”
about extraterrestrial sightings. This entailed finding current military and
aviation whistleblowers to come forward and share the secrets they knew about
UFOs — or in the case of Kean’s book, tell of the strange flying objects they
had seen or learned about in the course of their jobs. In numerous articles in the Huffington Post over the past
decade, Kean has discussed her participation in several nonprofit groups in
UFOs and the “disclosure” movement.
On Oct 10, 2017, Kean
published a tantalizing article on the Huffington Post’s contributor platform.
(The platform, now closed, allowed people to post their own writing to the
site). “Something extraordinary is about to be revealed,” she wrote. “Former
high-level officials and scientists with deep black experience who have always
remained in the shadows” were preparing to dish “inside knowledge” of UFOs.
Kean described a
group of “government insiders” who came together as part of a new for-profit
company called To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA). Members
included Hal Puthoff, a theoretical physicist
and former Scientologist who directed the infamous “psychic spy” program for
the CIA and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) in the 1970s and 1980s, and Chris
Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence during
the Clinton and George W. Bush Administrations.
Of note, the founding
of TTSA was set in motion by Tom DeLonge, a former guitarist for Blink-182
who has long nursed a very public obsession with UFOs. Another key
player was a former military intelligence officer named Luis Elizondo, who at
the launch of TTSA publicly announced that an “aerospace threat identification
program” he had recently overseen at the Pentagon had convinced him the UFO “phenomena
was indeed real.”
The Times, encouraged by Kean, took a serious look at Elizondo and his
claims. Other prominent outlets, it turned out, were doing so, too. Two months
later, the Times, Politico, and Washington Post stories hit. But it was the
Times piece that reverberated across the media landscape.
ABC News called the
Times story and video footage a “bombshell.” MSNBC, in one of its numerous segments on the
story, described news of the government’s UFO program as a
“remarkable admission by the Pentagon” as a “result of reporting by the New York
Times.” Every major television network rolled the video. “You can laugh if you
want,” news anchor Bret Baier said on Fox, “but a lot of people are taking this
revelation seriously.” Elizondo, who would become a media darling over the
months to come, said on CNN: “My personal belief is there is very
compelling evidence we may not be alone.”
Amidst the media
frenzy, few prominent outlets bothered to look closely at the juicy particulars
of the Times piece or at the UFO video that left many awestruck. Notable
exceptions included Scientific American, which was deeply skeptical about those metal chunks being stored
in a Bigelow warehouse, and New York magazine, which, in a damning critique by writer Jeff Wise, faulted the Times story
for “selective omissions” and for “making portentous assertions out of
context.” Wise wrote that such techniques “are great for exciting an audience,
but they’re better suited to Ancient Aliens,” the aforementioned History
Channel series, “than the pages of the New York Times.”
These criticisms
hardly registered, though. If anything, the juggernaut grew after Elizondo and
TTSA in 2018 rolled out more intriguing videos, obtained from the Pentagon, of
supposed UFOs under pursuit by military jets. It launched another news cycle,
once again with few skeptical voices in the media.
Meanwhile, TTSA
raised over $2 million from investors. The company’s all-stars, particularly
Elizondo, continue to generate media coverage. As the Washington Post noted last May in a news story: “UFOs are suddenly a
serious story.
As Neil deGrasse
Tyson put it rather well: What the UFO community puts forth as evidence is weak
on a level that, in any scientific circle, would be kicked out of the lab room.
The basis of this argument boils down to the foundations of the scientific
method. Eyewitness testimony is nowhere near enough evidence to support a claim
as fantastical as alien visitors. He added: I am not saying didn't see it - I'm simply saying you cannot
present that as evidence for something you want all of us to believe.
The alleged evidence
Luis Elizondo mentioned is a video shown here and can also be seen on
Tom DeLonge's website, along with his
commentary. The video is discussed here: Plus, over on Metabunk, Mick West
makes a good case that these images show distant jets. In fact, they
seem quite similar to the "Groundbreaking UFO video" that
Leslie Kean (one of the authors of the New York Times UFO article) obtained
from Chile's UFO investigations group early this year, quite conclusively shown to have been a distant jet aircraft
whose position had been misjudged.
Or as a recent
article stated: "The media" loves this UFO expert who says he worked
for an obscure pentagon program, did he?
Even today, People
who claim to see UFOs are typically adamant about what they witnessed, though
most space experts are unconvinced. “No serious astronomer gives any credence
to any of these stories,” astrophysicist Martin Rees notably said in 2012. He’s right. UFO reports can be
attributed to commercial or military jets, weather balloons, an odd cloud
formation, a comet, or Venus (under certain atmospheric conditions). The planet
can appear as a fast-moving, bright halo). Some intrepid photographers have even confused insects flying around a camera lens
for alien aircraft.
As we have thus
seen, Bigelow leveraged his friendship with Democratic Nevada Senator Harry Reid, who thought Bigelow to be “brilliant” and received
tens of thousands in campaign donations from him. Reid and two other senators
moved to expand the Skinwalker Ranch investigation into a fully-funded
government program, despite the Pentagon’s complete lack of interest in UFOs or
space spooks, mandating that the military research “aerial threats” at
the cost of $22 million over five years. Bigelow, the only bidder, received the
contract to research these “threats.”
The only public
accounting of the program’s research was a list of its theoretical papers on
stargates, wormholes, and other sci-fi topics that “invisible college” members
like Puthoff obsessed over, as well as a proprietary
494-page 2009 “ten-month
report” from Bigelow’s team
in which Puthoff, Vallée,
and others wrote about UFOs, “interdimensional phenomena” at Skinwalker Ranch.
Alleged technology aliens implanted in a UFO abductee. Pentagon officials
quickly concluded that releasing such an absurd report “would be a disaster,”
as one unnamed
official told The
New Yorker. Eventually, Team Space Ghost developed bizarre mythology,
imagining that an organized cabal in the Pentagon actively suppressed UFO work
because it feared UFOs were demons and that researching them might provoke
Satan.
The program’s funding
ran out in 2012. But its supporters have continued to labor tirelessly to push
its ideas into the mainstream. Ex-official Luis Elizondo says he continued the
program’s work through a different office before leaving the Pentagon for
reality TV. (The Pentagon denies
Elizondo’s account and
insists he had no “assigned responsibilities” for the program.) Despite
claiming to believe UFOs were an imminent national security threat, he didn’t
take his concerns to national security journalists or Congress. He joined up
with Puthoff and Team Space Ghost at their new entertainment company, To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, styled
TTSA.
How they succeeded in manipulating the media
They were not master manipulators.
But they succeeded in manipulating the media anyway. As seen
above, joining forces with fading rock
star Tom DeLonge of
Blink-182. DeLonge reached out to former Obama White House counselor John
Podesta in 2016 for help meeting with investigative journalist and paranormal
enthusiast Leslie Kean or “somebody else more elevated than her” to help
promote his UFO entertainment ventures.
In many ways, Kean
was the perfect vehicle for a UFO story. She knew everyone involved. In 2002,
Kean joined the Sci-Fi Channel and Podesta to sue the government to release UFO
information. A regular at UFO researcher gatherings, Kean had been the
last romantic partner of Budd Hopkins. They were together when she published a
credulous book on military UFO sightings in 2010 with a foreword by Podesta.
(Hopkins died in 2011.) She later joined UFO DATA, a UFO research organization,
where she met a scion of the Mellon family, Christopher K. Mellon, a former defense
official, and Senate
staffer. Mellon had been briefed on Project Stargate when in office and
professed love of UFOs. He became an investor in TTSA, staffed by Bigelow
veterans like Puthoff. When Elizondo brought his
story to TTSA, Mellon knew whom to call.
The TTSA team met
with Kean on October 4, 2017, and she gushed over
them in
the Huffington Post six days later. The Huffington Post was
exactly the kind of second-tier pop culture media like Rolling
Stone, Politico, and Joe Rogan’s podcast that TTSA courted at first,
lacking connections at more elite publications. That’s when dumb luck hit. As
seen above, Kean had an idea.
After the meeting,
Kean contacted retired New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal, whom
she knew because of their shared connections in the alien abduction world.
Blumenthal was working on a biography of John Mack, a colleague of Hopkins also
funded by Bigelow. Blumenthal called the Times and convinced the
paper to run the story, and it was a good
story, that a
billionaire had scored himself a personal military UFO research program. But
Blumenthal and Kean framed the story as one of military interest in
UFOs, not Bigelow’s, thus shaping media and congressional perceptions of the
program.
Kean and Blumenthal’s
first Times UFO story ran on December 17, 2017, on page one.
Blumenthal had given TTSA something the “invisible college” had tried and
failed to gain for years, elite respectability. Major media now ran countless
stories, citing the Times as an excuse, with little mention of space
ghosts or anything that might make the program seem unserious. This lent it
more credibility. TTSA used Mellon’s connections to meet with Senate staffers
primed by the Times coverage. Senators, including Mark Warner and
Marco Rubio, radicalized by media coverage and lobbying from Mellon’s
team, subsequently requested briefings from the Pentagon, allegedly to
understand what they were reading in the news. Mellon praised Rubio
for using last year’s Intelligence Authorization Act to require that the
military and intelligence agencies produce a report about UFOs. “It further
legitimizes the issue,” Mellon said. It could also create a rush for new defense
contracts.
By this spring, the
imminent report, and prodding from Mellon and Kean, prompted another round of
uncritical media coverage. Kean and Elizondo were profiled in the
aforementioned credulous New Yorker article tied to the
congressional report Mellon had lobbied for. Within days, Elizondo and Mellon,
who left TTSA for their own unnamed new national security UFO venture, were
everywhere in the media, from 60 Minutes to CNN, reinforcing the
Pentagon and UFO threat narrative skeptics did not recognize.
The threat narrative
was a brilliant bit of framing, turning a story of poltergeist hunters battling
a cabal of demon-believers into a national security issue. But this influence
campaign masks the deeper transformation its advocates want to bring about: Puthoff and his colleagues seek to delegitimize material
science in favor of a magical, neo-medieval view of reality founded on spirit,
or, in their terms, security issue. But this influence campaign masks the
deeper transformation its advocates want to bring about: Puthoff
and his colleagues seek to delegitimize material science in favor of a magical,
neo-medieval view of reality founded on spirit, or, in their terms, “consciousness” and psychic powers. Elizondo still speaks
of demon cabals,
otherworldly beings, and UFOs operating beyond human perception, just not
on 60 Minutes. UFOs, newly relevant as a security threat, are only the
vanguard of a larger effort to undo the failure of Stargate and elevate spirit
over matter. It’s bad science and dangerous as government policy, the kind of
magical thinking that leads to lunacy and disaster.
CBS’s David Pogue
literally chuckled during his Sunday Morning UFO report, telling viewers we should “live and let live” and
not challenge UFO believers. Klein and Lewis-Kraus said they would be sad
without a UFO mystery to enjoy. HBO Max announced a valorizing biopic about
Kean,
Elizondo, and Mellon.
So long as a compliant media plays along with the “fun” of UFOs, the clumsy
effort to use them to break down modern science continues unabated. And Bigelow
is prepared: Blumenthal recently gave him a lavish New
York Times profile to
launch his new think tank for “consciousness science” and afterlife studies.
Bigelow appointed Hal Puthoff, members of the
“invisible college,” and Leslie Kean.
From esotericism to alleged Science
So far the story is
clear when we follow the footsteps of Ufology we see how it has evolved from
esoteric and borderline religious ideas all the way into the hallways of
Washington DC.
Looking at the
history of these ideas, we have a good idea of what will happen, and we shouldn’t
let enthusiasts of space ghosts have the run of Washington to steer money and
policy in the direction they want. If they insist UFOs are a national security
threat, then the national media must take them at their word. No more chuckles.
No more rhapsodies about mystery. We must hold Team Space Poltergeist to the
levels of skepticism, seriousness, and scrutiny it pretends to demand.
Conclusion
The May 17e reporting
on CNN and the 60 Minutes segment of Sunday, May 16, 2021 (available on YouTube), was no doubt for many people a startling revelation
that the US Government has admitted that UFOs are “real” and the military is
investigating them. But for many, it was a walk down memory lane, a recap of
the curious events of (as suggested above).
The segment opens
with an interview with Luis Elizondo, the former head of the above
mentioned $22 million program instigated by Senator Harry Reid called
AATIP: the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Ostensibly this
was created to study possible future developments in aerospace. Elizondo claims
the program was actually created to study UFOs (or, as they prefer to call them
now, UAPs, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.) Put out to tender in 2008, the
budget was awarded to (pictured below) Robert Bigelow, a paranormal enthusiast.
Elizondo opens with
the startling claim that “the Government has already stated for the record that
[UFOs] are real.” Startling, that is, until you remember that “UFO” does not
necessarily mean alien visitors, but rather something unidentified in the sky,
something about which the observer lacks sufficient information to identify.
Obviously, the government would admit such things are “real.” A mylar balloon
floating into the range of a Navy jet’s camera is “real”, but the U in UFO and
UAP does not mean extraterrestrial, or even necessarily an aerial technology
beyond any known physics and aerodynamics.
Elizondo then goes on
to describe craft exhibiting startling technologies, the ability to accelerate
at a physics-defying 600g, reaching speeds of 17,000 mph in the atmosphere, or
even through water. These are things that the government very much
has not admitted are real.
We then are shown a
series of familiar videos as evidence of this amazing technology, all of which
have been in the public domain for some time (over a decade in one case) and
all of which have been analyzed by several people, and found to almost
certainly not represent objects exhibiting incredible abilities, and instead
more likely signify very ordinary human technology.
First, we see “Go
Fast”, a video presented as showing an incredibly fast craft skimming low over
the ocean. But if you do the very simple trigonometry invited by the numbers on
screen, it turns out to be something far above the surface and
moving at a speed that matches the wind at that altitude, making it almost
certainly just a balloon. Yet the 60 Minutes host, the highly
respected journalist Bill Whitaker, repeats Elizondo’s baseless claim that it’s
“fast moving.”
Next we see a more
recent video, the green flashing triangle. Initially very impressive, it shows
a triangular shaped object moving across the sky, filmed with a night vision
device from a Navy ship. But then you notice the flashing light that perfectly matches
the pattern of blinking lights on a commercial plane like a Boeing 737. A
little research reveals that some night-vision devices have a triangular
aperture (the analysis at Metabunk). When the device is slightly out of focus then a
plane flying overhead looks exactly like this flying triangle. The case was
effectively closed when other triangles in the scene were identified as stars.
Yet we are told “the Pentagon admits it doesn’t know what in the world it is.”
It’s pretty obvious what it is once you match the UAP blinking triangle to that
of commercial airliners.
In fact, the only thing
the Pentagon has admitted is that the videos are “real,” in that they were
taken by US Navy personnel (and not, therefore, fake CGI-generated videos or
whatever), and that they were included in studies by the UAP task force,
meaning they were at least unidentified at one point.
We are then shown two
other videos. “FLIR1” is claimed to show physics-defying acceleration, but
careful study has shown that the supposed sudden moves are actually the result
of the camera moving or changing mode. “GIMBAL” shows an impressive looking
flying saucer, but again the reality seems more mundane, an infrared glare of a
distant plane and a rotating gimbal mechanism explain both the rotating saucer
shape, and why it was named “gimbal” in the first place.
Later we hear about
the 2004 USS Nimitz aircraft carrier incident, which gave us the
FLIR1 video. Two pilots, David Fravor and Alex
Dietrich, repeat a story they (mostly Fravor) have
been telling for over a decade. Lauded as the greatest UFO encounter of all
time, it has remarkably little in terms of actual evidence. The one blurry
video has been consistently misinterpreted (including by Fravor)
as showing rapid motion. There are accounts of unusual radar returns showing
rapid motion, but unfortunately there’s no solid evidence for these, and the
account has changed somewhat since it first appeared in a bizarre short
science-fiction story written by the chief radar operator in 2008.
Dietrich and Fravor describe an encounter and short dog-fight with a
“Tic-Tac” shaped craft. This is perhaps the most compelling story, and one
that’s difficult to explain. But their accounts don’t exactly line up, and I
suspect that they saw the same thing, but both had different illusions of
motion based on parallax. Unfortunately, the passage of time might mean we will
never know what they saw.
We then meet
Elizondo’s partner in this enterprise, Christopher Mellon, former Deputy
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. Mellon seemingly shares
Elizondo’s suspicion that we are being visited by some kind of non-human
entity, and in 2017 worked with him to secure the release of the videos, which they
then gave to the New York Times for a piece of well-timed publicity
for their then employer, the To The Stars Academy, founded by rock star Tom
DeLonge.
The 60
Minutes segment is capped by Senator Marco Rubio, who has somehow become
embroiled in the UAP saga, presenting himself as the voice of reason, just
trying to get the military to look into “this.”
But the military is
not ignoring things that fly into their airspace just because they can’t
identify them. Procedures exist for reporting and investigating such things,
not the least of which being that incursion into sensitive airspace would be
aggressively intercepted. And the supposed rationale for AATIP (exploiting UFO
technology) has already been covered by a variety of Foreign Material Exploitation
Program, likely with vastly higher budgets.
Ultimately this story
has gone on for far too long because the wall of military secrecy allows
rampant speculation and claims based on supposed classified knowledge. The
unwillingness of the military to clear this up is perhaps understandable, as
they have more important things to do. But it’s becoming a big story now, with
large segments of the public thinking that there’s something to these accounts
and these videos, and it’s a short path from “unidentified” to
“extraterrestrial” or “foreign assets”. I do not have great expectations for
the story going away, but I wish that someone high up will eventually say
enough is enough, and explain exactly what is going on, what these videos show,
and what the military really thinks about UFOs.
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