Sometimes it just takes a while...

[ecosophia]

I was greatly amused to see a new article on UFOs (or UAPs, or whatever the latest euphemism is) making the rounds. Apparently the US military is now admitting that a great many of the supposedly unidentified objects in the air in the 1950s and 1960s were in fact the US military testing then-secret aircraft -- high-altitude balloons, U-2 and SR-71 spyplanes, early reconnaissance satellites, the first generation of stealth planes, and the list goes on -- and allowing people to mistake them for flying saucers.

This is probably still news to some people. As regular readers of this journal know, Asia Times, which is well worth reading even aside from its UFO-related content, reported it late last year, while the Pentagon was busy trying to drum up more interest in UFOs using a set of photographs that looked as though they'd been made on a Kodak Brownie camera in 1925 or so. That didn't go over so well, not least because most people know the US has cameras that can read license plates from orbit. Of course my longtime readers have been hip to the game since 2009, when my book The UFO Phenomenon (now updated and expanded as The UFO Chronicles) made a case that one of the main factors in the rise of the UFO myth was a deliberate campaign of disinformation carried out by the US military to conceal secret aircraft tests.

What fascinates me is that they're admitting even this much now. (Nobody in officialdom seems to have breathed a word yet of the role of US military intelligence in fabricating the UFO myth.) Are they throwing in the towel, since so few people believed the latest attempts to whip up a frenzy over UAPs? Or are they attempting a limited hangout, as intelligence professionals call it -- getting some of the facts into circulation in advance of a damaging leak, to take some of the shock value away from it? It'll be interesting to watch what happens from here on.

Comments

Hmmm

[degringolade]

My posture as a cynical old man makes me immediately suspicious.

Now, having thus established my bona fides, I am suspicious because now the folks who have lied and "disinformed" concerning just about anything are now telling us that they were just kidding.

An alternate theory would be that the Mi-Go are telling their slave minions that those slated to be harvested are getting too close to the truth and that the minions have been instructed to lay a false trail of breadcrumbs to lead the unsuspecting away from their nefarious plan.

(re-reading "Red Hook" at the current time.)

[jpc_w]

There's this fascinating paragraph in the ATol article:

Amid these developments, it remains crucial for the public to stay engaged and informed about UFOs/UAP – the more publicly observed the evidence is, the harder it becomes to manipulate. Considering the history of government audacity in crafting political and war propaganda, we should remain skeptical of the entities shaping narratives about extraplanetary intelligent life.

To me, this sounds like last year's UAP Senate hearings sank in a sea of indifference.
They want the public to watch for aerial vehicles now, but they've spent the last 80 years convincing the public not to bother. Oops!

[(Anonymous)]

I see at least two, not necissairly mutually exclusive, possibilities: either this is an attempt to hide that large number of UFOs are now foreign aircraft; or it's part of a plan to whip up a panic over a foreign "spyplane" aircraft to justify some sort of crazy foreign policy adventure.

[tritumi]

The fly in this particular ointment is the experiencer testimony. Either delusion is at pitch levels with psychotic breaks common, or something else describes the reports.

[ecosophia]

That depends very much on which experiencer testimony you have in mind. As I noted in my book, UFO sightings tend to fall into two very distinctive categories. There are the witnesses, often many of them at one time, who observe an odd object flying in the air; those sightings show remarkable similarities to whatever the Pentagon is testing just then. (Do you remember when black triangles were all the rage? The first stealth planes were being tested then, and I'm sure you recall what they looked like.)

Then there are the witnesses who experience close encounters with strange beings. Most of the time those witnesses are alone, or with one other person, and as Jacques Vallee pointed out a long time ago, their experiences have really remarkable parallels to shamanic experience as chronicled worldwide.

I'm quite sure both categories of witnesses are having real experiences. My argument is that the experiences are unrelated to one another, but have been lumped together by popular culture (manipulated by US intelligence agencies) into the two pillars of the UFO myth.

Vallee, Pasulka, Hancock

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, Vallee. I first read of him in Pasulka's book "American Cosmic". And then Hancock in "Supernatural" spoke about how similar "close encounters" are to the Shamanistic experience. The parallels are amazing. Hancock then went on to completely discount the idea that they are actual aliens. Instead, it was solely a spiritual, shamanistic experience.

That I think was a mistake. What I get from all of these books is that the aliens may very well straddle both dimensions. They are physical and can inflict harm on people (a fact that Hancock sidesteps). But they also reveal themselves via the shamanistic visions (along with many other beings).

We humans seem to be in a really difficult bind here. Influenced not just by physical matter, but also an indistinct spiritual one. And most times we have no idea how we are being manipulated, or to what purpose - certainly not to our benefit. Though spirit visions by helpful beings have certainly aided us over time. My first real encounter with shamanism was reading Narby's "The Cosmic Serpent". I also have an affinity to nature spirits in the Japanese tradition, or the European fairies. I think there's a lot to that.

You mentioned a week or so ago that the internet and mass media may be infested with demons, and I've thought along those lines a long time. The more I avoid all screens and electronics, the better I feel. And how much these demons interact with the "aliens", I don't know. Or if they are one and the same?

Thank you for bringing this up.

Mark d.

[(Anonymous)]

As regards unusual encounters and 'alien abductions', I had an experience a few months ago which I might easily have interpreted as such.

It was the polar opposite of the Night Hag/sleep paralysis phenomenon - which for me, on the two occasions on which I have encountered it, has seemed like something ghastly and menacing trying to drag my soul from my body - in that the benign experience was of some kind of full-body penetration and what I can only describe as a thorough washing and immersion in light, as though the soul, core of me or what you will was being take out, overhauled and returned in a better state. Rather than some dark entity seeking to get hold of it and run away with it (which I ended by prayer, by the way).

If I'd been a believer in alien encounters I might be saying that the 'good aliens' had experimented on me in some well-meaning way, in a light-filled place.

Anyone here experienced this themselves? I do hope it wasn't one of those so fashionable 'kundalini awakenings', which every man and his dog seems to have! YT is full of them, real or pretended.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't have the book, but does anyone know what was being tested in the late 1980s when the cigar-shaped UFOs were being seen?

[(Anonymous)]

Then there are the abduction stories. And the Missing 411 stories. Did you get a chance to read any of that?

Perplexing...

[(Anonymous)]

Makes me proud to see from the BBC article that those ‘flying saucers’ were made in Canada (VZ-9AV Avrocar fighter-bomber) from back in heyday when Canadians actually researched and manufactured cutting-edge aerial vehicles [nostalgic sigh].

More seriously, it is hard to figure out what is ‘up’ with this latest tactic especially after the media was pushing so hard a few years ago for us to believe that the ‘flying tictacs’ could not possibly be of this world! It’s hard for me to second-guess what these psychotic authorities are up to, so I’ll just leave it that they are the cat playing with the mouse called ‘general public’.

Regarding the occult side of the UFO/UAP phenomenon, I would not be surprised if some sort of ‘flap’ were to occur sometime soon – if not seeing something inexplicable in the skies above us then some other weird phenomena. What makes me think this is that the ‘flaps’ back in the ‘50s – ‘70s seemed to coincide with periods of great social anxiety (usually of an existential nature) and with NATO presently beating the war-drum regarding Russia right now and Russia’s calm-yet-radioactive reply, fears of a hot nuclear war may rattle the collective nerves of our society. But then again people seem to be very blasé about annihilation these days – as if nuking ourselves into extinction might be a blessing – so, maybe I am off-base.

Ron M

[(Anonymous)]

Or are they trying to tell the Russians and other countries that they are not entirely incompetent? I was surprised by the NY Times disclosure that CIA built 12 or so bases on the border of Russia since 2014. Why would you give away something so secret in the pages of NY Times?

My theory is that Russia humiliated them so much in Ukraine that US military-industrial complex is getting arms orders canceled from other countries. Given that arms are the only home-grown US products still making money from other countries (I am not including JMG's books :) ), they need to publicly disclose a bit of secrets to gain credibility.

Karl Pflock's Roswell book

[(Anonymous)]

In Jerry Pournelle's intro to Karl Pflock's 'Roswell' book, Pournelle says a bunch of UFO reports from South America in the 1970's were the result of the Soviets sending a flight of empty ICBM's over the South Pole to burn up in the atmosphere over South America. Sure hope the Chinese don't up that ante.

faerie/aliens

[(Anonymous)]

I always figured that at least some of these sightings were the result of classified testing of military tech. However, that may not account for all of it, and just because there's sensationalist claims by the gov't, that doesn't necessarily disprove that there's a supernatural element alongside mundane causes. Still, it's hard to be sure of this.

My theory on aliens is that they're the modern version of the faerie myth, since they have many qualities in common: strange/non-human morality & motives, lost time, magical abilities, and so on. I wonder if there's something to that, or if that discussion would be better suited for a Monday.

--xcalibur/djs

Re: faerie/aliens

[(Anonymous)]

The Fae likewise can be found on a wide spectrum, from potentially benign or harmlessly playful if capricious, even seeking marriage with mortals, and the bearers of gifts, to tricky and potentially very malevolent.

In the area of the Welsh mountains where I was walking last September, above the legendary magically-associated Rock of Harlech, I was told that some of the farmers as late as the early 20th century would shut themselves in at night, lest they encounter the Fae who were much-dreaded, if disturbed in their activities.

[(Anonymous)]

The latest article in the Sunday paper said the Government was saying "There's no such thing as UFOs, and no, they're not anything we're involved in.

"It has been denied from the Pentagon (ot the White House), so I know it has to be true,"

The UFO "project" is getting long in the tooth

[drhooves]

It's hard to figure exactly what .gov and the "defense" department are up to now with this new attitude about UFOs. Since the interest and effectiveness of their earlier efforts has diminished, maybe they're just in the early stages of retiring the project all together. After all, anyone in the Intel community with ambitious career objectives is working on AI, or deadly viruses or climate change - you know, the cool projects.

Another possibility is that this story is just another sign of The Long Descent. The DoD editors of press releases are falling down on the job now, and playing fast and loose with forbidden content. There's just too many plates in the air to ensure some of the fine China doesn't get shattered.