Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Disclosure and its Discontents

 Well, another ‘disclosure event’ has come and gone. I haven’t really been keeping track of how many there have been, but it seems as long as I've been paying attention to the UFO phenomena people have been making remarkable predictions of upcoming disclosures that have yet to come to pass. 


I do remember that expectation was running very high in the mid-90s, and UFOs were everywhere in the media, but...nothing. I wasn’t plugged into the pre-Internet UFO community per se, but I know there were a number of predictions (made by people like Jeanne Dixon and Phyllis Schlemmer) that some kind of massive UFO landing was due in the late 70s and nothing came of that either, obviously.

Anyone who approaches the UFO phenomena with an open mind comes to realize that whatever it is, it’s a much deeper, much, much older and much more prevalent reality than what the mainstream media- at least in certain western nations- would ever have us believe. 

It’s only natural then to assume that people in government are aware of it, have access to greater knowledge about it than you or I, and are intentionally keeping it all from us. But there's also the possibility that the government knows about the phenomenon but also knows there's nothing it can do about it, which some of the evidence speaks to as well. And governments generally don't like to admit their impotence in the face of a superior power.

Disclosure advocates generally argue that the authorities are deeply worried that present social arrangements will be devastated through knowledge of - or contact with - an advanced ET culture. But all of this assumes that there’s some benefit from disclosing any knowledge of ETs to begin with. 

If in fact some transnational elite has been in contact with alien beings, there's no real advantage in letting the rest of us in on it. The same way any number of projects, alliances and arrangements are kept secret from the public. Secrecy is power, always.

Of course, there's also the ‘staged contact’ theory popular in conspiracy circles. The theory has it that some elite cabal is going to make things so unbearable- war, famine, plague, etc- that people will be desperate for a savior. Once humankind is on its knees, NASA and Hollywood will provide Earth's salvation in the form of prefab UFOs and actors dressed up as ET's.

Aside from the fabled Project Blue Beam trope, one of the foremost proponents of this theory is Dave Emory, who also pushes the 'Underground Reich' theory. That one goes that Nazi honcho Martin Bormann fled to South America and set up a whole Nazi government in exile that's been pulling all of the strings for the past 60 years while the rest of the world watches helplessly. According to Emory, UFOs are real but are just advanced Nazi antigravity-based aircraft. 

The problem with Emory's theory is that UFOs have been well-documented for thousands of years and have been photographed since cameras were invented. Flying saucers didn't just emerge from some German assembly line in 1945.

The problem with the staged UFO invasion/contact theory is that far too many people would think it was in fact staged. Folks these days are a pretty jaded, cynical lot, and Emory's citations of marginal (and often defunct) UFO cults don't point to any groundswell of messianic expectation. 

And given the untold trillions of dollars being spent to indoctrinate the entire developing world into militant fundamentalist religions, billions of people would automatically believe any extraterrestrial beings to be demons or fallen angels or space liberals or whatever else their religious leaders are training them to fear and hate, anyway. 

Beliefs which Hollywood is all too ready to corroborate with things like V and The Fourth Kind. Given where all the money is going these days, any kind of 'Blue Beam' event would much sooner be a staged 'Second Coming' or 'Rapture' than a UFO invasion.

For those in the secular community, there are legions of media skeptoids ready to ridicule and marginalize anyone who believes UFOs are anything but swamp gas and air balloons. So it’s safe to say pretty much everyone in the media and religious communities seem to be working at cross purposes with any UFO conditioning agenda.

Again, I confess I’m not an expert on UFOs- my interest is their place in the overall memestream, pop culture in particular. But from what I’ve seen - the photos and the footage you never see in the mainstream media- I don’t get the feeling that A., they’re necessarily extra-terrestrial as we understand the term, and B., they have any interest in revealing themselves on any kind of mass scale at all.

Now, I’m going to throw in all of the usual caveats here- it could all be some giant, millennia-old misunderstanding. But we have a fairly consistent body of evidence describing the same kind of phenomena over the years that we hear about now - and no disclosure, at least none we know of. We hear all of the usual stories about aliens being the modern version of elves and fairies, as well as the studious avoidance of the possibility that elves and fairies were simply misinterpretations of aliens.

If these UFOs and aliens aren’t simply some kind of perpetual human delusion (which I’m not necessarily discounting), than I’ve personally never seen any evidence to dissuade me from the ‘ultraterrestrial hypothesis’- that we’re dealing with some kind of parallel reality to our own. 

Those massive interstellar distances might not be daunting in sci-fi but are quite a bit more so in sci-fact. The sheer scale of sightings and the millennia over which they've taken place tends to mitigate against ETs jetting back and forth from Sirius or the Pleiades, at least in my opinion. Which by default bolsters the UT hypothesis, if one is so inclined.

I’m partial to the Igigi theory myself, since all of the sightings and anecdotes we’ve heard strike me as some kind of monitoring/surveillance. Abductions/contact/experience reports speak less to the old “take me to your leader” trope one might expect of extrasolar visitors, and more a kind of “let’s keep an eye on the Project” kind of behavior you'd expect of some stay-behind monitors. It sounds cold, but it all strikes me as the kind of contact that human scientists have with fauna in the wild, more than any kind of preparation for a massive landing at the UN.

There could have been earlier civilizations here or on Mars or Venus or the Jovian or Saturnian moons that could have been disrupted by planetary cataclysm. And what we call ‘aliens’ could be the survivors (or their servant class for that matter). Or an earlier civilization could have evolved past what we understand as biological life, and decided to leave the inner Solar System. Why? Well, the closer you get to the Sun the more apt you are to be wiped out by stray bits of rock or ice dragged in by Sol’s massive gravity pull.

Any kind of technological lifeform- ie., androids- would do better away from all of the moisture and heat of Earth, not to mention its gravity. We can only guess, since we can’t necessarily foresee where technology will go, just as even the greatest thinkers of the Renaissance couldn’t imagine cell phones or plasma TVs.

Personally, I believe that UFOs aren’t just figments of our imaginations. But the more I think about it- and mind you, I don’t spend all my time doing so- the less I see them as ETs. I certainly don’t subscribe to any of the religion-based concepts of the phenomena- fallen angels, spirit beings, demons, etc.. If anything, I believe the exact opposite. But I do think this is an age-old conundrum. The phenomenon can be ignored if one so chooses, or it can be entered into an overall exegesis of human reality.

But I do think it’s a waste of time waiting for any kind of governmental authority to ever tell us the truth about it, unless their hand is forced by some drastic change of the present status quo. And it would probably be redundant by then anyway.