Toward Ecosophy

I was greatly amused to see a recent article in the Wall Street Journal talking about how the US military deliberately fostered UFO beliefs in order to provide camouflage for secret aircraft tests. Here's a non-paywalled piece about it: 

https://peakd.com/news/@arraymedia/ufos-investigation-reveals-area-51-myths-serve-as-cover-for-military-experiments

The reason this amused me, of course, is that I published a book in 2009 pointing this out. Of course the Wall Street Journal didn't mention that fact, but The UFO Phenomenon -- republished in 2020 as The UFO Chronicles -- made this same point with quite a bit of evidence. Once again, an idea I put into circulation seems to be circling slowly inward, on its way to general acceptance. It's an interesting testimony to the power of the fringes, and the mere fact that it doesn't have my name attached to it is hardly an issue. 

One thing that the Wall Street Journal didn't discuss -- no surprises here -- is that not all strange things seen in the sky come out of Lockheed's "Skunk Works" or the other factories churning out classified military technology. This doesn't mean that some of them come from other worlds; there are very good reasons to think that interstellar travel isn't an option for intelligent species, including hard limits on how much energy any actual (as opposed to imaginary) species will ever have to hand. It remains the case that some UFO-related encounters have weird parallels in ancient folklore and shamanic experience, and others seem to relate to anomalous natural phenomena not yet understood by our scientists. It'll be interesting to see if the Wall Street Journal ever gets around to talking about those. 

...of being a fringe intellectual is that you get to see your ideas now and again being picked up and splashed around by more respectable media. Granted, the borrowing is never acknowledged, and there's always at least a chance that whoever picks up one of your ideas might have gotten there by himself or herself, but the amusement value is still real.

Case in point?  This interesting piece in the highly respectable online periodical Asia Times, titled "Have UFOs been a cover for high-tech defense research?" It makes a case that a significant number of UFO sightings have been US military aerospace projects, which have been camouflaged by careful PR meant to make people think that anything unusual seen in the skies is either (a) an alien spacecraft or (b) not there at all.

It's an intriguing hypothesis. I certainly thought so when I wrote a book about that very subject, originally titled The UFO Phenomenon, which was published in 2009 and got met with an impressive display of dead silence. Neither the believers in extraterrestrials nor the self-proclaimed skeptics wanted to touch it with a ten-foot alien tentacle, despite which it sold quite tolerably well. So has the new, updated edition, The UFO Chronicles, which saw print in 2020. No, the believers and the skeptics still aren't talking about it, but now Asia Times is. (Not the book, no, but one of the core ideas in it.)

Of course there's a good reason for that, which the meme on the left highlights. The US government has very nearly finished the process of convincing most Americans that it can't be trusted to tell the time of day, much less any more serious subject.  There's been a vast amount of handwaving about that, and a lot of plaintive posts and articles about how to make people trust the government again. It's interesting to me, at least, to note that "maybe government officials should stop telling so many lies" hasn't appeared among the recommendations in any of the articles of this sort that I've read. I occasionally (well, all right, more than occasionally) roll my eyes at the excesses of contemporary conspiracy culture, but -- as I noted in a post a while back -- there are reasons why odd beliefs have become so common these days, and those reasons are serious and important.

Meanwhile, I'll sit here, sip tea, chuckle, and see which of my other unfashionable suggestions turns out to be accurate next...

Now available for your entertainment -- or annoyance, as the case may be! -- another Hermitix podcast featuring me and ever-affable host James Ellis. The subject this time is my newly (re)published book The UFO Chronicles, and we plunge straight into the heart of the UFO phenomenon, where alien civilizations in nuts-and-bolts spacecraft are few and far between, but science fiction, shamanic experiences, and secret Air Force projects are as common as Spock ears at a Trekkie convention. 

Interested?  You can listen to it on the Hermitix website here: 

https://hermitix.podiant.co/e/ufos-alien-life-and-human-limitation-with-john-michael-greer-391aa7e8e8264e/

Or on YouTube here: 

https://youtu.be/XxV6tCa5PEI

Klaatu barada nikto! 

Another podcast, this one on Podcast UFO with its genial host Martin Willis. The subject? My new book The UFO Chronicles, and its thesis that a large part of the UFO phenomenon was manufactured by US Air Force intelligence. It's a lively discussion, not least because Willis disagrees with me but is open-minded enough to hear me out. A good time was had by all -- and no doubt someone in the Pentagon is chuckling; I'll leave it to my readers to decide whether someone on Zeta Reticuli is doing the same thing. 

Here's the permanent link to the show, and here's a link to it on YouTube. Enjoy!

Let's hear it for synchronicities. Last week I learned that my book on the UFO phenomenon, somewhat unoriginally titled The UFO Phenomenon, has gone out of print with its original publisher. This wasn't a problem -- first, it took me only a couple of days to place it with a new publisher, and second, it badly needs to be updated to include UFO sightings and related hootenanny since 2000 -- the Planet Serpo phenomenon in particular -- and also to include more information on the rise and fall of the crop circle industry, the role of occultists such as Meade Layne and George Hunt Williamson in the creation of the UFO narrative, and much more. 

So what to my wondering eyes should appear in The Hill on Sunday but an earnest op-ed piece insisting that now that the Navy has admitted that it's studying UFOs, Congress should hold hearings to get to the bottom of the subject and find out what those pesky saucers are, once and for all...

Ahem.  That is to say, somebody in the Pentagon is about to test a new secret aerospace project, and we're about to get treated to another round of disinformation of a very, very familiar kind. 

Starting in 1947, when the secret aerospace technology being tested was high-altitude balloons, "blame it on the aliens" has been the go-to option any time the US military is testing something it doesn't want to talk about. Set aside all those loudly publicized sightings and bogus documents that can be linked back in one way or another to the Air Force, and what are people actually seeing in the sky? Little silver dots in the 1940s, the heyday of the balloons; bright lights high in the air when it was U-2 and then SR-71 flights; stuff falling from space in the early days of spy satellites; black triangles when stealth technology was new and very secret, and the list goes on. Are there other things involved in the UFO phenomenon? Sure, but the US military has been using it six ways from Sunday as a way of distracting attention. 

The Navy hasn't been in the saucer business for a while, but it makes sense that they need to test something -- the carrier-based version of the F-35 Penguin (that's what the pilots call it, because it flies like one) had to be scrapped because of insoluble design problems, and the Navy's venerable F/A-18s are getting very creaky these days. If things follow the usual sequence, we'll find out in ten years or so what they're testing -- and in the meantime, a great deal of malarkey will be shoveled. I'll keep notes, so I can add the details to the third edition of my book.