Toward Ecosophy

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.