Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m no hard-nosed skeptic. That said, Charles Fort himself warned against being so open-minded that one’s brains spilled out.
The sudden candidness about UFOs on the part of the military, Congress, and the media raises ample reason for caution, if only because all three are acting in concert.
Even greater cause to question who’s really behind the curtain comes from the entertainment industry.
The first great era of ufology kicked off with pilot Kenneth Arnold’s sighting in 1947. Arnold’s account came ten years after Donald A. Wolheim delivered John B. Michel’s “Mutation or Death” speech at the Eastern Science Fiction Convention. The speech called for socialist utopian ideas championed by the Futurian subset of fandom to dominate science fiction.
It’s worth noting that the early American UFO flaps, including the Arnold incident, coincided with Campbellian sci fi’s triumph over the pulps. For the first time since it came into its own as a genre, sci fi wasn’t about heroes inspired by Christian morals battling evil to save space princesses. It was overrun by Big Men with Screwdrivers engineering their way through allegories about then-current social ills.
Significantly, superior aliens descending from on high to lead mankind out of our barbaric ways were fixtures of Campbellian SF. Reflect on the glut of Star Trek stories wherein a Starfleet captain smugly delivers the, “We were once much like you …” speech to a benighted pre-warp civilization. Those backward cultures were always thinly veiled stand-ins for some aspect of fallen human nature the Left wanted to fix with Science™ at the time.
Note that the model of the USS Enterprise is an airframe glued to a flying saucer–a term introduced into the popular lexicon as a result of Arnold’s sighting. A deliberate callback? Probably not, but it’s a perfect example of how art imitates life imitates art, etc.
At the extreme end, that equation turned out a smattering of UFO cults whose doctrines read like rejected B movie scripts. To this day they stand as case studies in cognitive dissonance.
Also keep in mind that Gene Roddenberry had a background in political science, flew planes for the Army, and worked for the LAPD as a press liaison before creating Star Trek.
The alien craze that peaked in the 1950s largely died out by the start of the 70s. People had more immediate concerns on their minds, like a forever war quagmire overseas, social unrest at home, soaring gas prices, a tanking economy, and cultural malaise. The Big Men with Screwdrivers had failed after all. The Venusian High Council hadn’t arrived to save us from ourselves.
Skip ahead to 1977–an even 30 years after Arnold’s sighting and exactly 40 after “Mutation or Death”–and along come two maverick film makers named Steven and George. Nobody thought these two would amount to a hill of beans, but they proved the critics spectacularly wrong with adventure romps hearkening back to the pulps that resurrected pop culture.
Though Spielberg in particular couldn’t shake the Campbellian “alien savior” trope.
Owing almost entirely to the work of these two film moguls, generations X and Y grew up marinating in a sci fi-saturated pop culture. Television got in on the act with paranormal investigation series featuring news magazine style production. The slick presentation used the visual language of TV to associate tales of aliens with serious news. 30 years later, aliens are serious news.
The alien revival kicked off by Spielberg and Lucas cross-pollinated with In Search Of style TV shows in the form of The X-Files. The childlike optimism of 80s sci fi had turned dark by then, casting aliens as sinister forces pulling the strings of government conspiracies. Late-night radio call-in shows like Coast to Coast AM filled a role similar to the old UFO cults by running the pop culture-to-subculture feedback loop.
Then, right around Cultural Ground Zero–there’s that pesky 7 again–the alien revival lost steam. The Star Wars Special Editions signaled the beginning of the end for SF’s flagship franchise. The X-Files jumped the shark with a feature film in 98. UFO reports largely faded from the mainstream, perhaps in part because the proliferation of cell phone cameras in the aughts made hoaxes without photographic evidence less plausible.
But now, with forever war quagmires overseas, social unrest at home, soaring gas prices, a tanking economy, and cultural malaise at the forefront of people’s minds, government and media team up to bring UFOs back into the limelight.
Am I suggesting that the same people who blamed unseen Russian spies for one election, handwaved away manifest irregularities in another, and manufactured an idolatrous foot-washing cult are lying?
I’m not saying they are. But I’m not saying it’s aliens.
Not yet.
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Jacques Vallee’s “Messengers of Deception” is a very, very relevant book here. The book is about his encounters with various “saucer cults.” He isn’t sure what UFOs actually are (though based on his other writings he is more likely to agree with the demons explanation than the visitors from other stars explanation). However, he is certain that most sightings are staged events for the benefits of the witnesses (i.e. if a spaceship appears to have engine problems and land for that reason, in actuality it was landing specifically to be seen). Furthermore, the purpose of these encounters is to enact societal change both through the saucer cults and through a more general influence. He even calls the force behind the sightings “the manipulators.”
He also noted various common themes as to the messages given by the supposed aliens:
-Demands for a one world government, and often an authoritarian one. Going along with this, a message that humans cannot be trusted to take care of themselves (so the world government is usually planned to be subordinate to some alien administration.)
-Religious overtones, often incorporating Christian terminology in the discussion of aliens (though the beliefs themselves were more often “new age”).
-Racial supremacist overtones, often alluding to fallen perfect races from places such as Atlantis. However, these are simultaneously tied into the idea that our previous accomplishments were due to aliens anyway (think “aliens built the pyramids.”)
-Replacement of “hard” science with vague appeals to science generally, backed up with nonsensical technobabble.
My own view is increasingly aligning with Vallee’s.
It’s interesting that he was the basis for Lacombe in Close Encounters.
One of the big reasons I had questions about Roddenberry was that he wanted to go with the ‘alien Christ’ idea for the first Star Trek movie. After that got shot down, he pivoted to ‘time-travelling Spock killed JFK to ensure a bright future for humanity’ for later films, which hits some of the similar notes of Boomer mythology.
Roddenberry glowed in the dark.
If the media, the feds, and the military are all saying the same thing, it’s time to start asking, “What’s their angle?” The media have a documented tendency to coordinate their stories, and an apathy toward the truth. Now that the Five-Sided Puzzle Palace is as political as capitol hill, trusting any of them seems unwise.
If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that the people in charge are not to be trusted.
This is particularly true given how much effort they expended debunking this stuff since the beginning. One does have to take what they are now saying with a big grain of salt. The clowns running this circus always have an angle, and it never is one in our best interest.
The portrayals of alien races before the 1940s and after are rather striking, especially if you are looking at the pulps. Burroughs, Clark Ashton Smith, and C.L. Moore, among many others, all portray alien races as little more than humans from cultures that don’t exist on Earth. That, or they are cosmic monsters or fae not unlike the ones in world mythologies. This is one of the reasons I saw there is no “Science Fiction & Fantasy” split, because there wasn’t one back when the genre sold.
Once we get into Fandom’s era, aliens begin to be shown as either incomprehensible to man, their “equal” (but only because man has “advanced”), and/or are above them, never anything else. This shift is very hard and part of the reason aliens became what they are in pop culture. How often do you see the pulp style portrayals now? They used to be all over video games in the ’80s and early ’90s, even. Now they are all the same.
As I’ve said, if you stop looking at your entertainment and art from a 20th century lens, then a lot of Fandom’s creation look utterly bizarre and inhuman. We need to craft a different framework for the 21st century to lift people up.
Ted Chiang’s Arrival is a perfect example of post-split superior aliens.
It’s so perfect, I wouldn’t be surprised if the military-entertainment complex uses it as a template.
It occurs to me that the “Fandom era” split between science fiction and fantasy nicely parallels the divide of paranormal studies into clean “genres” (ex. UFOs piloted by aliens, ghosts as the spirits of the dead, cryptids as unknown species of animals, and never shall the three meet.) Charles Fort wouldn’t have separated out things in this way (“one measures a circle beginning anywhere.”)
Really, the types of theories that become popular are very reminiscent of the snobbishness of establishment SF editors. For example, in the 80’s it became popular to say that poltergeists were not actually ghosts at all, but rather the unknowing manifestations of psychokinetic powers, usually from adolescents. If you read books from that era on the phenomenon there’s a big feeling of “what kind of uncultured rube would believe that ghosts are doing this?” as if believing in unproven psychokinetic powers was any more respectable. Very similar to the anger certain editors would get if a ghost were to suddenly appear on a starship.
I recently read your series about that Scandinavian writers’s very slanted history of science fiction. Between that and the video Brian linked above, it seems that the sci-fi establishment has been a death cult on-ramp since the 1930s, and that all the good stuff looks farther back to gothic horror, fairy tales, and epic quest stories, all of which have a moral compass. Maybe that’s why they hate Tolkien so much. He’s not doing what they think science fiction and fantasy should do, and more to the point, is much better at telling a story in the first place.
Indeed. I’ve heard it said that the main difference between medieval Traveller’s Tales of dog-men and blemmyes are essentially the same kind of story as science fiction; it’s just that after the world’s surface had been so thoroughly mapped we had to move the monsters and strange people off-world, because they can only live in Parts Unknown.
I know people who have seen UFOs. Multiple people saw the same things at the same time, no drugs or alcohol involved.
Some of it was obvious human test craft. Some of it violated physics.
They saw one of the human test crafts perform an “event” that couldn’t be ignored. The next day the newspaper came out explaining it was a natural phenomenon.
Oh, and old-timer military men can get talky. Some have seen UFOs, some have had a little more involvement.
I don’t doubt that people have seen UFOs. Search this blog, and you’ll find I’ve published UFO accounts.
I’ve missed those but your other uncanny true stories are compelling.
I’ve got lots of books by Vallee, Keel and the like and take the UFO phenomenon seriously (though like those two I don’t treat the idea that they are actually extraplanetary in origin as likely). However this is precisely why I am skeptical of the newest reports.
Why are these cases being pushed by both the media and the government at this moment? Neither the videos nor the testimonies are particularly impressive from a relative standpoint; there has been this level of evidence available in dozens of other cases for decades. And note that while previous events were explained away as witness error or natural phenomena, these are being pushed as either alien or at least incredibly advanced aircraft of unknown origin. Why?
Some possibilities:
1) Our corrupt ruling class needs a constant state of crisis to distract people from their illegitimacy, and they’ve gotten about all the mileage they can get out of Corona-chan.
2) Something like Project Blue Beam is in the works, and our elites plan to stage a First Contact/Second Coming hoax to shore up their crumbling credibility.
3) The most likely–our elite mostly consists of psychopaths who simply enjoy jerking their subjects around.
4) all the above.
Everything else is unsatisfying. Interstellar aliens? Why? Interdimensional aliens? No evidence that’s cosmologically possible. Demons? No, this really doesn’t serve particularly to draw people from Christ.
But a desperate and inept psyop glommed onto by irrelevant and increasingly out-of-demand media propagandists? Yes, that fits nicely. It’s even got the inevitable Nth Attempt to Relive the Glory Days stink to it that has come the characterize our exhausted, effete fake-elite.
Aliens are demons. Research how “aliens” can be dismissed simply by calling upon the name of Jesus Christ.