Just how weird are these times we are living in? Well, they're so weird that there's a new branch of the military in the works called the "Space Force." Now, I've talked quite a bit about "Starfleet Reality" and the Star Trek timeline but I never thought things would go this far this fast.
And by that I mean I figured all the toys they've been working on out in the Nevada desert would stay in the black until conditions necessitated their unveiling. Goes to show what I know.
Not a lot.
Or maybe conditions have necessitated their unveiling. I mean, how would we know? The news media doesn't tell us the truth about anything important and I doubt the cut-rate semi-slave labor toiling away in MSM salt mines would even know how to ask the right questions in the first place.
For my part, I connected those weird birds out at Groom Lake with the 2016 election and its aftermath, connected to Hillary and her chums lifting the old Laurence Rockefeller cudgel and sticking their noses in the Secret Space boys' business. Didn't really go as planed.
Crazy, I know. "Crazy" is The Secret Sun's mission statement.
Pentagon sources are seeding their favorite news outlets with leaks claiming Russia and China are far ahead of the US when it comes to space weaponry, or rather, orbital weaponry. Given the immense disparities in defense allocations between the US and the rest of the world combined, I'm having a bit of trouble with that story.
And we're getting the usual rash of clickbait garbage in response to the announcement, usually in the form of opinionizing from celebrities (Jim effin' Carrey?), politicians and journalists who haven't been read in, don't have clearance and have no real clue what's actually going on.
Does Trump himself? Off the top of my head I'd have to say no, but I gave up trying to figure that guy and this Administration out a long time ago. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if Pence does. I'd expect it, actually.
Must be why I'm thinking of Las Vegas
Those of us who pay attention to these things have long been aware of the weird shit flying around out there, dating back to the 1980s. And not just the desert-- a lot of folks have speculated that the Hudson Valley and Belgium flaps from back in the day were test-flights of the B-2 et al, perhaps a real-time test of how effective the technology was in densely-populated --and monitored-- airspace.
More recently, YouTuber Steve Barone has been documenting a rash of major activity over Area 51 and the Las Vegas area. It's impossible to say exactly what he's been recording but I get the feeling it's one hell of a lot more exotic than the B-2.
Go to his UFOs Over Vegas YouTube page and take a look for yourself.
Go to his UFOs Over Vegas YouTube page and take a look for yourself.
And this is where I start to ask myself if we're living in a Star Trek timeline or an X-Files timeline. And is there a difference?
Maybe what we're really living in is a worldwide X-Files LARP.
It goes without saying that this Space Force sort of thing has been an X-Files staple since the very beginning.
The first episode proper ("Deep Throat"*) had our heroes spying test flights over Ellens AFB (Ellens being Nellis spelled sideways) and even had Mulder apprehended by the military and mind-wiped so he'd forget what he saw there.
The first episode proper ("Deep Throat"*) had our heroes spying test flights over Ellens AFB (Ellens being Nellis spelled sideways) and even had Mulder apprehended by the military and mind-wiped so he'd forget what he saw there.
Secret spacecraft and Area 51 were always lurking in the background, becoming more prominent in the revival as Carter tried to distance himself from the tangled web of the alien colonization subplot and base the mytharc more firmly in reality.
Of course, Chris Carter and co. faced the very same dilemma that William Gibson faced when writing his most recent trilogy; how do you write these kinds of stories when the rest of the world has caught up to your science fiction?
But it was a little more pressing for The X-Files given the stakes involved (Gibson's audience is barely a fraction of TXFs), plus the fact that outlets as establishmentarian as The New York Times and The Washington Post revealed the existence of a real-life X-Files program within the Pentagon just weeks before the show's eleventh (and almost certainly final) season premiered.
Worse still, the program's chosen media asset, former Blink182 singer Tom DeLonge, screwed the pooch in an epic fashion. DeLonge's appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience has entered the roll of all-time legendary Internet trainwrecks and led to DeLonge being doghoused as more hands-on types like Luiz Elizondo tried to clean up his mess.
However, the Boys beat the Pentagon X-Files project to the finish line by almost two years. And so they were ready to catch the wave of broad-spectrum hype coinciding with The X-Files' "event series."
Which itself was a bit of a trainwreck but still; bragging rights.
Which itself was a bit of a trainwreck but still; bragging rights.
The Pentagon group has kept a low profile since the initial media blitz. Robert Bigelow, the guy who's been single-handedly bankrolling the UFOlogy establishment for the past 20 years, has a big NASA contract to worry about and the projects have since shifted into a different gear.
Now you're seeing a lot more of Hal Putoff, who ran the CIA's psi programs for several years, than either DeLonge or Elizondo.
Now you're seeing a lot more of Hal Putoff, who ran the CIA's psi programs for several years, than either DeLonge or Elizondo.
And because this is 2018 most of the operation seems to have migrated over to Bigelow's digs in--you guessed it--Heaven or Las Vegas.
The Pentagon project continues to insert itself into the news cycle, albeit on a much smaller scale than before. The controversial "tic-tac video" continues to make the rounds at outlets like Coast to Coast and in Newsweek, which has become a proper clickbait farm in its rather reduced afterlife.
This recentish story caught my attention, seeing as how this X-Files program was quite literally an X-Files program. Or better yet, an X-Files episode.
Or, of course, an X-Files LARP.
I mean it looks to me as if its mission statement was essentially lifted straight out of the X-Files title sequence. Which I do have to say I wish they didn't use for the revival. They haven't aged very well and gave the episodes a musty kind of attic smell.
I'm one of the few people who thought the Season Nine titles were fantastic, a major improvement over the original. Maybe the only people. A heretic to the core, is what I am.
But aliens and UFOs equal clicks in the hyper-competitive environment of 2018, so the semi-fake news outlets and clickfarms continue to publish stories on them. Aided quite handily by the equally attention-starved space-science establishment I might add.
I couldn't help notice that this story popped up around the same time that SETI types were begging Congress for more money. Surely a coincidence.
Even so, it couldn't help remind me of The X-Files' Season Two opener "Little Green Men," in part inspired by the "Wow" Signal story from back in the day. Not one of the more memorable episodes in the series' canon, but we're just getting warmed up here.
Another clickbait farm (Business Insider) ran with this headline, based on a story in a Syracuse newspaper (Syracuse being the setting of a pivotal season in Season Two's "Colony").
While it's fun to believe that UFO sightings are being intercepted by the government, I think it's more because of the fact that most people are so mesmerized by their phone-screens that you could have an Independence Day mass-landing and hardly anyone would notice.
However it should be noted that the government intercepting UFO reports forms the premise of Season One's "Fallen Angel," which more or less lifted the idea (and some dialogue) from the Intruders TV movie a year or two prior.
Personally, I'd wager that MUFONs Stasi-like reporting form has also helped inhibit UFO reporting. I've read deals with the Devil himself that are less invasive.
I know this for a fact seeing as how my family have had a handful of our own UFO sightings. My son and his friends filmed some rather-sizable orbs back in 2015 and my wife and I got a very long look at a very bright chevron-shaped UFO that was making weird movements under a dense cloud cover in the skies over our neighborhood for nearly 20 minutes back in early 2017.
But since I didn't feel like handing over the keys to my house plus my deepest, darkest secrets plus a kidney to Bigelow's flunkies, I never got past the upper third of the reporting forms.
Then of course there's Kyle Odom, X-Files LARPer Supreme, who allegedly threw documents over the White House fence that apparently were meant to inform Barack Obama as to the insidious takeover of our planet by sex-crazed, shapeshifting Martians.
Mind you, I'm not saying he's necessarily mistaken but still; guy got a little carried away here.
X-Files diehards will recognize Kyle LARPing the Season Eight thriller, "Three Words," which centered on a paranoid Census worker hopping that same White House fence to inform George Bush about a remarkably-similar takeover plot.
Only without the "getting shot" part.
Only without the "getting shot" part.
Odom had previously shot an Idaho pastor named Tim Remington whom Odom claimed was a secret Martian leading a secret sex-cult within his parish. Miraculously, Remington survived several bullets to his body mass and recovered remarkably quickly, according to reports.
Odom cited this as proof that Remington was in fact a Martian.
Odom cited this as proof that Remington was in fact a Martian.
X-Files fans will recognize the plot of Season Five's "Folie a Deux" here, in which Brian Markinson plays a telemarketing toiler who believes that his new boss is an alien(ish) monster who is turning his employee's into his zombie slaves. Of course, this turns out to be the case and the monster is essentially identical to the mummified Martians in Quatermass and the Pit.
Do note that Steven Spielberg's Taken ripped this episode off blind, going so far as to cast Markinson as the gunman in that as well. The Outer Limits did their spin on "Folie a Deux" in "Alien Radio," with The Matrix's own Joey Pants in the Markinson role.
One could make an argument that Odom's manifesto was not entirely unlike the manifesto written by an alien contactee in Season Three's "Jose Chung's From Outer Space."
And is it my imagination or does Odom's Martian sketch remind you a bit of a certain froggy meme which became quite notorious not long after this story broke? Weird times, indeed.
On a more serious note, it goes without saying that surveillance is a major issue, not to mention privacy and freedom of speech on Internet platforms. It's not just the government, pretty much anyone with the right access can rifle through your life and use that information to their own advantage.
All of which The X-Files dealt extensively with in any number of episodes. The most explicit example is Season Nine's "TrustNo1", which Carter and Frank Spotnitz rather boldly aired in the aftermath of 9/11 and the whole business with the Patriot Act and the rest of it.
And the LARPs just keep on coming...
Here's an item about a treasure hunter who claims he stumbled upon a sunken spacecraft in the Bermuda Triangle.
This brings me back to the recovered spacecraft divers discovered in the indelible Season Three scorcher "Nisei," one of the most zeitgeisty eps in the entire canon.
This storyline was revived a few weeks later in "Piper Maru," which saw a French recovery team searching for the UFO, not realizing it had already been recovered by the Yanks. What they ended up recovering instead was the Black Oil, the invasive alien virus that was at the center of the Mythology.
But I'm also reminded of the spaceship that either washed ashore or was uncovered by beach erosion in Season Six's storming "Biogenesis."
Chimeric hybridization is at the very core of the X-Files mythology, being a major plot point from the original pilot to the bitter end. And inevitably, we're seeing no end of stories about human-animal hybridization, thanks to the miracles and wonders of CRISPR-CAS9.
Some of the series' most memorable monsters are chimeras, like our man from Chernobyl here, Flukey. Season Ten's "Founder's Mutation" went so far to imply that all of the X-Files' monsters were the result of various and sundry genetic experimentation programs.
Chimeras are called out by name in the Mythology, such as the discovery of a hybrid farm deep in the bowels of the Pentagon in Season Five's otherwise ponderous "Redux." Do note that the "Redux" trilogy formula was essentially reworked in the revival's mythology, such as it is.
More recently, we're now seeing the use of fetal tissue in cloning and hybridization programs, in exactly the same way we were guaranteed back in the 90s would never actually happen. I guess they forgot.
You forget stuff too, you know.
You forget stuff too, you know.
Make no mistake; Gattaca Reality is coming faster than you could imagine. That is, if you're an optimist. If you're a pessimist than it's X-Files Reality we're looking at.
Because the use of fetal tissue in breeding programs goes all the way back to Season Two's "Colony/End Game" and by implication all the way to the finish line as well. In "Colony' the fetal tissue is used to allow renegade alien clones to acclimate themselves to our biosphere.
Since the LARP never ends we recently saw this story, about a shuttle astronaut claiming to have encountered a nebulous alien form up there in LEO.
And of course, this little plot point comes lock, stock and barrell out of Season One's "Space," about a former astronaut who takes it upon himself to sabotage the space shuttle program after being possessed by an alien form he also encountered up there.
Which came first? Before you answer, don't forget The Lone Gunmen pilot.
X-Files LARPery isn't just an American pastime, even those pesky Russkies are getting in on the action. In this case they're LARPing the Season One milestone "Ice," whose premise is identical to this story here.
"Ice" itself is a bottle show drawing heavily on The Thing from Another World, remade by John Carpenter in 1982.
The tragic story of British researcher Max Spiers, who died of an acute case of sudden-onset UFOlogy, continues to make headlines. An inquest into his mysterious and horrible death has revealed that his laptop was wiped clean by the authorities before being returned to his mother.
It's never the crime, it's the coverup, as the old saying goes.
This ties in to a number of X-Files storylines, including the aforementioned "Fallen Angel," which introduces us to a similarly-doomed UFOlogist named Max.
Max Fenig, in this particular case.
Max Fenig, in this particular case.
The now-notorious fact that Max Spiers had vomited up a large volume of a mysterious black liquid reminded me of Krycek vomiting out the Black Oil in Season Three's "Apocrypha."
Except for the fact that Krycek actually vomited out the Black Oil through his eyes.
And the bit with the laptop reminds me again of "Three Words," when Mulder recovers Howard Salt's laptop before it can be erased by the FBI.
It seems like a lifetime ago, but some of you might remember the headlines about a Twitter user claiming he had somehow received mysterious voicemails that appeared to be code dealing with the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 by "nonhuman" agents.
That story seems to have fallen down the memory hole, other than this British tabloid headline here.
Anyone know what's going on with this situation? Let us know in the comments.
Of course, the downing of a commercial airliner and a UFO feature in the cracking Season Four two-parter "Tempus Fugit/Max," which recounted the tragic fate of Max Fenig.
Which leads us back to the Space Force in a roundabout kind of way...
We also saw how the announcement of the US seeking the military dominance of space--in Pence's own words-- validate the claims of UFO hacker Gary McKinnon, who found evidence of a nascent Space Force almost two decades ago.Yes. Next question? #SpaceForce #XFilesReality https://t.co/A3wtsGmSEN— The Secret Sun Speaks (@SecretSunBlog) August 9, 2018
The announcement, in addition to the semi-overt test flights over Nevada in the past few years, vindicate McKinnon, who was dismissed as a kook and a fantasist by the usual shills. Maybe I'm naive but McKinnon never struck me as the kind of attention-starved "whistle-blowers" who hover over UFOlogy like flies over dog-doo. And just about as useful.
I think the fact that Uncle Sam tried so hard for so long to dress McKinnon's ass in Orange is validation enough, but this just seals the deal, IMO. How's about you?
And of course, McKinnon is the spiritual descendant of the doomed UFO hacker "the Thinker" from Season Two's legendary "Anasazi." It's amazing how these things pan out, don't you think?
Bonus factoid: Brad Pitt modeled his stoner character in True Romance on the actor who portrayed the Thinker, who was a former roommate of Pitt's.
McKinnon's mother claims that he became so obsessed with UFOs since he was raised in Falkirk, widely recognized as a major UFO hotspot and next to Bonnybrook, called the "UFO Capital of the World" and reportedly a major window area.
How about that, eh? Window to another dimension. Huh.
Speaking of young musical prodigies being groomed for bigger things, this alleged UFO photo-- apparently legendary in UFO circles-- was taken in a little burg you may have heard a thing or two about called "Grangemouth."
*Note that "Deep Throat" featured a 19 year-old Seth Green as a grunge boy.