A Modern Myth of Things Set to the Side: UFOs as Cloaking Devices for Worldview Warfare
It has taken almost ten years for serious researchers to begin challenging the Condon Report. The controversy is more lively than ever as increasing numbers of young scientists of the “UFO generation” wonder about the reality of UFOs and eagerly look for an answer. I have long pondered that same question. The answer I have formed is a disturbing one. It can be expressed very simply: it doesn’t matter any more whether flying saucers are real or not.
— Jacques Vallée, Messengers of Deception (1979)
“Who represents the fore of serious studies of UFOs today?” is a question the pursuing of which inevitably reveals a picture of competing conceptual frameworks. This is nothing new. Even within the ET hypothesis, there has long existed a charcuterie of tantalizing narratives. Exploring the options, the only conclusion one can draw is that the aliens are everywhere, inhabiting vast subterranean chambers, the ocean floor, mountains, our moon, public spaces right in front of our very eyes, and other dimensions. The immanence implied by this vast multiplicity of options has coincided with the resuscitation of the extraterrestrials-as-gods narrative, enswathed with a terminological fog — aliens are angels are fae are Annunaki — and regarded with the cultural amnesia so typical of the domain. Anyone with a decent historical awareness will know of the UFO-worshiping cults from the 1960s and ‘70s, often spilling out of the US west coast’s New Age culture, later emerging into a wider and horrified popular awareness via the mass suicide of Heaven’s Gate, and then going into a sort of hibernation, as so many other cultural items and aspects did, following 9/11.
What is different now, adherents may contend, is that the Alien Gods narrative has finally — finally! — found official support . . . never mind that contactee Chris Bledsoe’s 2023 book, UFO of God, has introductions from a “former” intelligence agent who helped found a company for sensationalist UFO-oriented propaganda, and a retired colonel with a background in psychological warfare techniques1; or that the two chief public faces of contemporary scientific analysis of UFOs are Garry Nolan and Avi Loeb, Nolan having been (and likely continuing to be) on the CIA’s dime and having delivered a talk at a tech convention for corporate investors and asset managers, and Loeb having a history with the IDF and SDI, and appearing to believe that the Messiah will literally arrive “from outer space.”
On the less godly and more extraterrestrial side of things, one finds similar issues regarding supposed voices of authority in domains where the layperson may expect the highest of investigative standards, with the New York Times’ watershed piece, “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program”, being a perfect case. Certainly, the identities and interests of the piece’s authors are worthy of commentary (such as Leslie Kean’s prior relationship with ET abduction researcher Budd Hopkins, or Helene Cooper asking the prior CoG and USNORTHCOM head, during a briefing on the alleged aerial object(s) shoot-down of early 2023, “whether or not [he had] ruled out aliens and extraterrestrials” . . . as if this were a sensible query2) — but outranking these details are the circumstances of sourcing and publication, as outlined by a recent Gizmodo article.
The way [Christopher] Mellon explains it, the pivotal New York Times story that is largely credited with helping legitimize UFOs within the broader culture never would have happened without his direct involvement. “This was not investigative journalism,” Mellon tells me. “I handed them the evidence, introduced them to Lue Elizondo, gave them a stack of documents, arranged for them to meet and interview Harry Reid, and made a deal with them. They ran the story, which appeared on December 16 of 2017 on the front page.”
Mellon himself states that this was not investigate journalism; but one wonders how it could be described as journalism at all (as long as we are assuming that uncompromised journalism can exist on major outlets). The complete lack of investigate autonomy, combined with the apparently contradictory fact that perhaps the representative of legacy media would choose for its reentry onto the silly saucers scene the product of a secret sweetheart deal, should be perplexing, if not alarming. Doesn’t this description have all the trappings of propaganda?
If one of the identified problematics with looking for primary representatives of substance is a conceptual incoherence — at times, this conceptual incoherence is celebrated and elevated to the level of gnosis, as in a recent interview with Keith Thompson, author of Angels and Aliens — then another would be the unavoidable presence of intelligence services. Contrary to the aforementioned contention, and far more accurate, is the distinction that officialdom has rebranded itself so that its own members — Elizondo, Mellon, David Grusch, etc. — can present themselves as fist-shaking populists and activists, heroically in pursuit of the Truth.
While there has been a restocking of the actors, there is nothing really new about the narrative supply. Some frameworks have receded, such as the genial and almost mundane contactee experience, as exemplified by Woodrow Derenberger and George Adamski (both deceased). Others have advanced to align with, and even supplement, mainstream scientific and ontological notions. To use the exemplar personage again, Avi Loeb has written articles suggesting that our universe may be, and likely is, an artificial creation, and positing scientists as the future gods of a new cosmic order (how humble!) — the (nonsensical) implication being that any contact with an ET civilization would be indistinguishable from hierophany, and would necessarily demote humanity’s existential rank.3
By asking that initial question — “Who represents the fore of serious studies of UFOs today?” — I mean to also bring attention to a prior composition of UFO studies, and further attend to this ongoing problem of competing, and often information-excluding, conceptual frameworks. The resurgence of attention paid to UFOs has similarly resuscitated a set of faces preceding the current lineup. A number of these persons are still alive and present to varying degrees, such as Richard Dolan, Jacques Vallée, Linda Moulton Howe, Steven Greer, and Whitley Strieber. Others, like John Mack, Dolores Cannon, Leonard Stringfield, John Keel, and the aforementioned Hopkins have passed on. In between are those who, according to available information, are alive but not visibly active — Raymond Fowler, Edith Fiore, David Jacobs, etc. As with any subject matter, there have always been generational asymmetries among researchers and representatives here, although it might be possible to loosely separate the literature according to certain emphases: e.g., the appearances of craft. Today, for instance, one finds a major thread of situating UFOs in a perennial and ostensibly incorporeal context, with the fairly obvious involvement of the ancient astronauts mythos.
I admit I’m being a little tricky with my question, so let me expand it to its fuller implications via a statement: One can seriously study a subject and still be quite misinformed about it. Worse, one can be “seriously” committed to misinforming others. Earnestness has never been a strict indicator of impeccable work. If we were to review our canon of representatives listed above, we would soon find a cluster of explanatory voids, distracting obsessions, and associative complications. The point of any such exercise would not be to locate an ideologically pure and omniscient individual (good luck with that), but to bring a remorseless synoptic approach to a domain wherein a consumptive public often aligns with whatever ideas are fashionable, and, contrary to its exceptionalist claims, is all too eager to perform obeisance to auto-appointed authorities — including, yes, even Tom DeLonge.
Consider John Mack: a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, psychiatrist, and academic. Today, Mack’s life and work tends to be cited in almost hagiographic tones, in part because he was the target of an unprecedented ethical investigation, in 1994, by the Dean of Harvard Medical School for his work with alleged alien abductees. Mack is thusly upheld as a counter to an ossified academia. To a degree, I think that this is true. At the same time, Mack received considerable funding from Laurence Rockefeller, a figure who perfectly symbolizes the intersection of interests denoted by the term “power elite.” Also worth noting would be Mack’s legal representation through Daniel Sheehan, who today happily represents conman Elizondo.
The content of Mack’s work contains a comparable incongruity. While illustrating a multitude of manipulative and traumatic intrusions, often only describable in terms of differing orders of rape, it also demonstrates Mack’s compulsion to filter each and every experience through the lens of initiation. Consequently, what one finds all throughout a book like Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994) is a mass propagation of Stockholm Syndrome, led by what would become Mack’s progressive inability to consider close encounter accounts outside of anything but an anti-occidental, New Age ecological context. It’s then unsurprising to learn that Rockefeller also funded the work of Greer, who too holds the dangerously naive and unimaginative belief that the ethics of any sufficiently advanced society scale positively with technological capabilities. Here, one finds an echoing of Carl Jung’s description of UFOs as “technological angels.”4
Or consider Jacques Vallée: authoring some of the most sophisticated and stimulating writings on UFOs, yet contributing nothing of note for the past several decades, appearing to serve as an example of how thought stagnates when not adapted to present-day circumstances. During the last several years, although Vallée has been highly requested for interviews and talks, not one of these appearances has offered anything more than dull, aimless recapitulations of propositions made in the 1970s, with an overemphasis on the ostensibly non-materialistic nature of UFOs.
Some years ago, I had thought that Vallée’s greatest contribution was his book, Passport to Magonia (1969), which, despite a bit of outdated data, stands as one of the most convincing arguments for a perennial understanding of certain — not all — UFO reports. Given the recent official repackaging of the UFO narrative and further explorations of the literature, however, I’ve since come to think that a far more significant text is his Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults (1979). It is here that Vallée detects and explores a thread of several pernicious aspects constituting the UFO mythos as sociocultural phenomenon, these being: intellectual abdication, racist philosophy, technical impotence (i.e., the demeaning of human achievement), and social utopia (i.e., the proposed unification of the world under a UFO religion). Vallée offers two premises, both arguably among the most radical because of the possibilities they offer for a culturally totalizing prescience:
Whatever they are, the occupants are not genuine extraterrestrials. This leaves us with few alternatives. Either they are images created within the brains of the witnesses, possibly by remote stimulation of the visual cortex (this would explain why contactees Betty and Barney Hill disagreed on several details of the occupants’ appearance), or they are characters in a staged occurrence, actors in a deception operation carefully borrowing its concepts from basic human archetypes in order to force a global behavioral change.
Were these hypotheses to hold any weight — presumably they did for the author, since he wrote an unredacted book about them! — one would think that they would have compelled an urgency on Vallée’s part to continue following the thread, making updates as necessary. It’s then all the more a frustrating puzzle to find that Vallée has, by all appearances, abandoned this avenue in favor of analyzing metamaterials (partly with the help of noted CIA-lapdog Nolan), co-authoring a book of miserably low research standards on an alleged UFO crash (lay investigator Douglas Dean Johnson has published two conclusive debunkings of the story, here and here), and delivering meagerly reheated monologues wherein UFOs are, to the exclusion of pretty much all other analyses, positioned along metaphysical terms.
Briefer criticisms could be dispersed elsewhere to others. Howe, for instance, who got her start in the field through producing the 1980 documentary, A Strange Harvest, on cattle mutilations, has long lacked any powers of discrimination, propagating very nearly every jig and figment thrown her way. Meanwhile, Richard Dolan has maintained the cognitive dissonance of so many other UFO researchers, resentful of a military-intelligence structure that’s been duping the public for seventy years, if not longer, yet applauding representatives from that very domain when their words are delivered in congressional hearings.5 David Jacobs’ work, I admit, remains fascinating to me — but its predominant reliance on hypnotic regression greatly problematizes it: not because hypnosis must be quackery, but because a scientific understanding of its workings is greatly lacking; and because some experiments, such as one by Dr. Alvin Lawson, have demonstrated that coherent abduction narratives can be induced in individuals who do not claim knowledge of UFOs.6
I could go on. Readers may have deduced this essay’s aim, but allow me to highlight a final specimen, as yet unmentioned — that of firebrand Jason Reza Jorjani; because, on the face of it, his work would seem to exemplify that “remorseless synoptic approach.” Jorjani, a philosopher, author, prior academic (being the target of a successful defamation campaign), and the feature of a recent essay by Tanner F. Boyle, most recently published a book on UFOs in 2021, Closer Encounters, promoted as a unique synthesizing of what are ostensibly all of the available hypotheses for UFOs. While it’s an entertainingly combative read, a good part of what Closer Encounters reveals is not a master narrative for the UFO presence, but the ways in which every text is, to varying extents, autobiographical.
Jorjani is the founder and head of what he calls the Prometheist Movement — at heart, a transhumanist reworking of Marxist liberationist ideology, regarding practically all of history as a sequence of oppressions (here imposed by a fascist breakaway civilization) and technology as, per usual, the cure for all woes. The longest chapter from Closer Encounters is positioned as a take-down of Christianity, understood by Jorjani in Gnostic, or mythologically inversionist, terms: it is God who is the enemy, and Satan who is the hero.7 Closer Encounters, then, is something of a supplement to Jorjani’s anti-authoritarian inclinations.
To a degree, I identify with such inclinations. The problem, though, in one sense, is similar to a remark by author Paul David Collins that “Bledsoe never seems to contemplate at any point in time that he might be used by these people who are writing the introduction and forward to his book.” That is to say: Jorjani gives no thought to how he might be propagating yet another diversionary narrative; and because Jorjani is far more politically informed and cynical of a person than salt-of-the-earth Bledsoe, this is all the greater a blind spot.
In another and related sense, Jorjani has written a whopper of a book, almost five-hundred pages long and making use of nearly two-hundred bibliographic sources, yet with a near-total absence of what we might term the “earthbound” PsyOp Hypothesis. Only near the end of the aforementioned chapter does Jorjani discuss psychotronic technology — at the hand of time-traveling space Nazis. This is not to dismiss a very real, and widely ignored, Nazi presence infiltrating and mobilizing the history of UFOs, special intelligence8, and space exploration. However, it is baffling that Jorjani’s conceptual methodology here appears to have been taking a majority of contactee accounts at face value and then weaving it all into a narrative which satisfies nothing more than the internal logic of fiction.
As I would hope is obvious at this point, my aim here is a new effort — the first made last year — at touching on the distinct lack of research on UFOs as comprising one part of an ongoing, clandestine program of psychological warfare. I believe this sort of perspective is especially necessary right now, given the intense geopolitical destabilization we are experiencing, and how such destabilization may be used to stage and justify an artificial state of emergency.
Those familiar with academia will be aware of its disciplinary quarantining. This territorialization is maintained on the basis that cross-pollination will read as, or actually be, cross-contamination; the dictates of science as a series of corporately, and so ideologically, funded ventures; and the general requirement that one specialize rather than be polymathic. No surprise, then, that there is a never-the-twain-shall-meet divide between the UFO researchers and the alternative history researchers — the latter tending to occupy a cannier position. Crossovers have occasionally happened, as with the work of Mark Pilkington, Jim Keith, and Joseph Farrell, but these examples are few when compared to the segregationist material.
One consequence of this divide has been that, as my other essay notes, “…most recent papers of which I am aware regarding UFOs and ETs are much more willing to dive into speculations about consciousness than anything involving PsyOps.” A second and more profound consequence is that a general public, raised on media including Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the X-Files, and Independence Day — and now a variety of series on the History Channel or Gaia TV — may be far readier to accept the idea of UFOs coming from outer space than from Lockheed Martin.
To this day, the political orientation of UFO studies tends to center on the idea of a cover-up, typically with intimations or accusations of an ET-human alliance, and often with a soft starting date of 1947; yet this cover-up has, by almost any measure, been a terrible failure. Quite contrary to the exceptionalist placement of David Grusch’s “whistleblowing”, there is a bountiful history of informants and divulgers, almost all of whom never faced retaliation even mildly comparable to that set upon Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, with the interesting exception of Gary McKinnon. Furthermore, certain testimonials far exceed Grusch’s in their non-sensationalized specificity of alleged information, such as that of Philip J. Corso, who wrote The Day After Roswell (1997).
This is to say nothing of the countless photographs and videos of UFOs, whether forged or genuine — most, ironically, being of far better quality and of richer suggestive value than the so-called Pentagon UFO videos. So bad of a failure has this cover-up been that one wonders what advocates are actually awaiting, besides a formal admission by abashed men in suits, or an apotheosis by emergence: the aliens at last unveiling themselves to a decomposed humanity, either to enact judgment or disperse the miracle-gifts of a higher science.
Compare this to the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), founded in 1960, of which practically nothing non-trivial was known for the better part of three decades, aside from its existence (exposed thirteen years after its founding) and then some of its functional details, revealed in 1985 via the New York Times — so, likely with official coordination. Of course, any agency will possess human foibles and never be invincible to missteps. It’s not difficult to encounter the perception nowadays that the US government’s most obfuscated branches are, at their core, comprised of incompetents. This perception has gained among some political quarters after the Secret Service security oversights during the (first) attempted assassination of Donald Trump.9 But another truth, just as age-old as those foibles, is that psychological warfare is not just a question of what is perceived, but of how it is perceived; and this has everything to do with where attention is directed, and the oblique inculcation of the belief that one’s attention is always self-directed.
Situating UFOs as one mechanism within a larger geopolitical machine requires an inquiry into its plurality of applications. From a utilitarian perspective, for instance, it is not hard to imagine the advantages of advanced aerial technology in the facilitation of drug- and human-trafficking, or the covert gathering of intelligence. It’s also possible that abduction reports which include physical evidence, such as scars or implants, point to UFOs as a way to perform the long term experimental application of surveillance and psychosomatically-regulating technology.
But no matter the technical sophistication of UFOs, these are activities which would exist with or without the craft. It is arguably in the UFO as an idea where we find some of its most powerful aspects, many of which can mobilize simply through the perpetual cultural transmission of one idea or another. There is, for instance, nothing about the ongoing string of cattle mutilations which should compel suspicions of an extraterrestrial agency. As Vallée notes, in Messengers of Deception, “In Colorado, there was concentration of mutilation incidents in Elbert County, very near some of the world’s most sophisticated military installations. . .” Adjacency is not always incrimination, but this nearness of a significant military presence is a pattern for cattle mutilations — see, for instance, the series of cases from Cache County, Utah, itself situated fairly close to multiple (known) military bases — and has far more potential explanatory strength than, say, the divulgences of Phil Schneider.10
Very little of this information seems to culturally matter, though. To the layperson, cattle mutilations may be dismissed as a fun little “conspiracy theory”, while to the UFO-head, hot off of a NewsNation video, they are evidence of aliens who have an addiction to bovine blood and organs. All that has been needed for the latter idea to percolate and permeate is the presence of UFOs in the most literal sense of the term. Moreover, the existence of one interpretative extremity has only bolstered its disinterested apparent opposite. This bifurcation, then, is in fact related by a mutual lack of critical exploration, leaving the details to languish and creating an environment where pseudoscience is advanced by, ironically, the sort of people who take great pains to distance themselves from said pseudoscience — such as anthropologist Scott W. Schwartz, whose essay on UFOs I have previously critiqued.
Elsewhere, in The Invisible College (1975), Vallée observes, “. . . mythology rules at a level of our social reality over which normal political and intellectual action has no power. [. . .] Myths define the set of things scholars, politicians, and scientists can think about. They are operated upon by symbols, and the language these symbols form constitutes a complete system. This system is meta-logical, but not metaphysical. It violates no laws because it is the substance of which laws are made.” This observation ties to another: “As a focus for psychic phenomena, the UFO evokes a deep emotional reaction in the viewer, but logical development of an investigation is prevented — or precluded — by the apparent violations of causality that surround it and by the sociological climate it has created.”
The typical relegating of UFOs as stuff only fit for science-fiction, The National Enquirer11, or bawdy talk shows has left a vacuum of visible, reputable study, allowing more room for the mythos to mutate and disperse. It has also created a considerable sense of inferiority and resentment on the part of those associated with UFOs, professionally or otherwise. In a talk given in November of last year at Stanford University, scholar Jeffrey Kripal concluded with this statement:
I sometimes joke, for example, that the present concern with threats and national intelligence is fundamentally misguided; that, “They might as well be trying to shoot down souls.” I then follow up with the challenge: “Good luck with that.” Does such a joke and challenge make any sense in our present order of knowledge? No — of course not; and that’s my point. I think the joke is funny, but then I also feel very alone. Thank you all this weekend for making me feel a little less alone.
On the one hand, I do very much understand the sense of marginality, of existing within a sort of intellectual hinterland, to which Kripal refers. Inevitably, one who is thus engaged realizes (or should realize) that the vast majority of people one will ever know cannot, and will not, participate in these topics on a thoughtful level. It’s too adjacent to the terrors of so-called “conspiratorial thinking”; and it’s too strange. Despite the statistical likelihood of one person among any sizable group of people having had a first-hand encounter with a ghost, or of knowing a friend or relative who did, a great void remains where there might otherwise be a sustained, majority-culture discourse over the soul, spirits, and apparent spirit realms. How much stronger must be the taboo around talking of UFOs?
On the other hand, Kripal’s admittance holds a great and perilous vulnerability, as implied by his concluding sentence. This condition of estrangement has created a perfect reentry point for a network of entertainment media, news outlets, intelligence and defense agencies, and scientific figureheads to reanimate the UFO mythos — all to the cheers of the disaffected parties. Not only have these parties chosen to overlook that the “de-stigmatizers” were, until only very recently, the stigmatizers12; they also express little to no concern over the complete lack of evidence pertaining to UFOs which would explain a shift from things-as-usual to national security threat. So great has the need become for UFOs to confirm an ET presence that certain members of a NASA team tasked with studying UFOs for over a year were harassed by what can only be called “ET-advocates” for concluding otherwise. Similar retaliations were made against former-AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick.13
I do not know who the first researchers were to advance the hypothesis of UFOs as, at least partially, an advanced type of psychological warfare — weltanschauungskrieg, or “worldview warfare”, a Nazi concept adopted after the second World War by the United States — perpetuated by actors from within the special intelligence superstructure. Most examples of which I am aware come out of the 1990s, such as Norio Hayakawa’s 1993 monograph UFOs, the Grand Deception and the Coming New World Order. One can also find a reference, from the aforementioned Jim Keith, to a 1980s interview with researcher and author John Judge, entitled “Unidentified Fascist Observatories.” As Keith writes, for a 1992 issue of Steamshovel Press, “Conspiratologist John Jodge […] makes a strong case for the saucers being a hidden and higher echelon of government research project, utilizing the secrets of disc craft that we inherited from the Nazis at the end of World War II. The time-line certainly fits.” This is a course of investigation maintained up to the present by, for example, Joseph Farrell. One can also find the occasional supposition among texts, otherwise excluding UFOs, which aligns with Wernher von Braun’s comments to Carol Rosin, as in a remarkable passage from a 1997 republishing of Leroy Fletcher Prouty’s 1973 book, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World:
This is the fundamental game of the Secret Team [Prouty’s titular neologism for the deep state]. They have this power because they control secrecy and secret intelligence and because they have the ability to take advantage of the most modern communications system in the world, of global transportation systems, of quantities of weapons of all kinds, and when needed, the full support of a world-wide U.S. military supporting base structure. They can use the finest intelligence system in the world, and most importantly, they have been able to operate under the canopy of an assumed, ever-present enemy called “Communism”. It will be interesting to see what “enemy” develops in the years ahead. It appears that “UFO’s and Aliens” are being primed to fulfill that role for the future. To top all of this, there is the fact that the CIA, itself, has assumed the right to generate and direct secret operations.
I want to be careful here to stress the equally destabilizing role UFOs have played, and continue to play, of heralding the arrival, whether ancient or modern, of an unimaginably superior intelligence which overrides, or merges with, traditional cultural and religious knowledge. The ideological endpoint of what a scientist like Loeb believes (or says he believes) is, at bottom, no different from that of the New Age UFO cults, or the narrative running through Arthur C. Clark’s book series beginning with 2001: A Space Odyssey. As I wrote in a previously linked essay:
It is not a stretch to suggest that what Jacques Vallée […] identifies as the "intellectual abdication” seemingly inherent to the positioning of the Alien as uniformly beneficent and incomparably evolved, may be just as dangerous as the positioning of the Alien as national security threat. […] Here, the positioning of the Alien as super-indigenous god makes humanity into the true aliens. Could it be that the reemergence of an alien-god religion will go hand-in-hand with a self-deprecating depopulation ideology? It’s hardly out of the question.
This suicidal, or at least misanthropic, impulse goes beyond just the ecological anxieties of younger generations, as fearful of reproducing as they are of throwing a can in the wrong waste receptacle. It is at the core of transhumanist ideology, founded on the idea that humanity is a deficient state, and nature an arbitrary inhibitor, to be overcome — executed and supplanted — via the technophilic will to power.
One can also witness how the linear conflation of technology with existential supremacy defines a major discursive point in the UFO scene: whether the aliens are benevolent or malevolent. It’s not uncommon, in fact, to come across the belief on popular message boards, such as Reddit’s r/aliens, that the aliens are so developed that they outrank, or transcend, any humanly conceivable ethical or moral framework. Given the horrific offenses perpetuated in abduction reports, it’s difficult to imagine what would not be justifiable to those who hold this belief. Steven Greer has attempted to get around this problem by, as mentioned, designating aliens as categorically incapable of malevolence due to their ranking in the cosmic order, and so strictly attributes every bit of harm to the work of MILABs (military abductions). How this assessment is evidential rather than ideological, however, remains a matter of one’s loyalty, or disloyalty, to Greer’s proclaimed cause and outlook.
That one of researcher and historian Richard Dolan’s most recent videos is an attempt at explicating an alien psychology from UFO reports shows just how muddled the field remains. Why is it almost impossible to find any of these researchers noting the similarities between, say, Biderman’s Chart of Coercion and the typical abduction narrative? Think of this trope: a feminine figure enters the room where the abductee has been strapped to a cold table. Although not engaging in what has been euphemistically termed the “examination” — this being left to a couple or several male figures — the female presence sanctions it as a regrettable necessity. Standing close, she assures the abductee that he or she will be all right. The victim, deprived of any other points of relatability, proceeds to bond with this apparent sympathizer and surrenders to the procedure, establishing her future role as a hypnotic authority. I hardly think one need be well-read on the literature of psychological warfare to discern that the dynamic here is far more manipulative, and recognizably human, than it is amoral, transcendent, or otherworldly.
While writing this essay, I have reexplored a number of books on abduction from my library, one being Karla Turner’s Into the Fringe: A True Story of Alien Abduction (1992), and it’s been stunning to see how much text leaps from the pages when using the interpretative lens of mind control — from the smallest remark by Budd Hopkins: “‘Pleasure and pain,’ I heard Hopkins remark, ‘[the aliens are] interested in those two aspects’” (p. 176); to the recollection by one abductee of hearing a voice in his head, saying, after inexplicably being drawn to a hilltop while driving, “‘See how easily we made you come to this place? You don’t have any control over it. In the future, when you’re supposed to go to a certain place, you’ll be made to go there. Don’t worry about it, there’s nothing you can do to stop it’” (p. 56); to a bizarre comment by a sergeant to an abductee and Air Force officers’ program recruit: “‘You don’t want to work in Meteorology,’ she told Megan. ‘Don’t you want to get into R & D? That way, you’ll get to find out the truth about UFOs and aliens. You might even get to do tests and research on them’” (p. 94).
Of course, the question remains of what ultimate utility the UFO has to the deep state apparatus — of what all of this mythologizing and psychosomatic intrusion could be driving at. On one level, I think that it has the as-noted advantage of distracting attention away from truly insidious, but also decidedly human, experiments on a global populace (cattle included). On another and far more dangerous level, it may represent a trump card, a spectral contingency, to be turned on and let loose when all other justifications for the radical activation of military emergency powers — to quash the voice of popular discontent, further the militarization of outer space, subvert and displace religious thought, and begin the dismantling of national sovereignty (and thus any recourse to diplomatic immunity) — have failed.
It is far from inconceivable that the high-altitude object events of 2023, almost all occurring in remarkable succession during Feburary, formed a minor test run for such a scenario. Whether or not this plan could work when various communities, still so near to the closures, curfews, and lockdowns of 2020, have a decidedly lower tolerance for such mandates, remains anyone’s guess — but it is hard to think of a riper time for its implementation, given the riotous clamor of geopolitical chaos, the ever-more present and desperate hand of neoliberal authoritarianism, and the advances of generative A.I. which have further degraded collective apprehension and opened the floodgates for an event akin to the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
To conclude, I’d like to share a complication and admission. First (as if I haven’t already alienated (ha-ha) enough of a potential audience): I do not think that UFOs, close encounters, and abductions can be entirely explained as the devices and actions of human agency; that is to say, I believe that the phenomena represent an occult intersection of the parapolitical and the paranormal. I recognize that this view poses significant challenges to phenomenal delineation and the understanding of what we consider to be “material.” I have no concrete methodology for determining the former, but I believe that certain perennial resonances indicate an agentive presence far preempting the formation of any intelligence agency or private military; and that, like I have suggested elsewhere, “the presence of comparable phenomena might very well represent an advantage for the terrestrial command of such technology. By mimicking it in certain ways, a human agency could hide within similitude, and thus mislead us into the false and inflexible domain of the singular hypothesis — provided that such a hypothesis never exerts scrutiny upon said agency or becomes a major interpretation.” As regards materiality, to be brief, I will again quote Paul Collins:
There is a soft physicality because angels, demons, all of this falls within the realm of the preternatural, and the preternatural is not the supernatural. It’s still part of the creative order, and being part of the creative order is going to have some physical implication. If there [were] artifacts out there that seemed to prove the whole thing is real, I would suggest that it’s probably a modern-day UFO equivalent of the Piltdown Man: in other words, “Oh, here’s our missing link!” And then one day you find, “Oh, wait, that’s a hog’s tooth”; “Oh, that’s part of a chimp skeleton.”
Second, and to finish: I found working on this essay, overall, very unpleasant. For me, writing is only really worthwhile when it constitutes a struggle — a series of steps occupied by unforeseen obstructions, and requiring ingenuity to get around. The reward of this struggle is the unveiling of more than one thought was present at the outset — the work metamorphosing to greater complexity. Simultaneous to this is being unable to imagine embarking on anything as lengthy ever again, similar to how any future meal might seem the most remote and repulsive thing after a filling dinner.
Both of those conditions were present here; but the subject matter, and my perception that it can’t hope to compete with the established UFO mythos, no matter how eloquently argued or evinced, forms such a depressing picture that I’m tempted to call this my last public exploration of UFOs and psychological warfare. Still, it’s impossible to know if, or when, that sensation will yield to a greater conviction. I thank all of you who read this to its end for your time, interest, and imagination.
This is the same John B. Alexander who, when interviewed by Sharon Weinberger for a 2007 Washington Post article, mourned the hesitancy around conducting and funding psychological warfare experiments, following the 1975 exposé of Project MKUltra, and seemed heartened that 9/11 had since reversed these reservations.
What should concern people even more about this exchange was General VanHerck’s reciprocating response: “I haven’t ruled out anything at this point.” Think about this: the person who was effectively the leader of the United States in the event of a state of emergency (VanHerck has since been replaced by General Gregory Guillot, for unclear reasons) wasn’t willing to rule out aliens during aerial object shoot-downs.
Scholar Michael Heiser notes that the UFO mythos regards outer space and interstellar travel as the new eschaton; thus, the ET civilization becomes the new angelic host.
Jung speculated that the shape of flying saucers held a mystical symbolic value, linking them to mandala and the notion of God as “a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.” But Jung failed to account for the vast formal diversity of UFOs — or to acknowledge that the sight of an airplane to an unacquainted but devout person could be taken as a manifestation of the crucifix.
Since most are likely unaware, Grusch's legal advisor — and the person to whom Grusch was continually deferring for how to answer questions, during the 2023 hearings — is Charles McCullough. McCullough was a primary architect of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act, and a protégé of Mr. Conspiracy Theory and advocate of prisoner torture, Dick “Illegally Wiretapping Citizens is Good, Actually” Cheney.
A comparable experiment was arranged (on very shaky ethical grounds) by the production crew of the documentary series Hellier. Results such as these, of course, create their own questions. How could it be that persons who do not know one another and have no interest in UFOs impart such similar narratives? Is there some archetypal aspect of the “abduction experience” with a proximity to the shared motifs of dreams? Could this indicate some level of reality to certain abduction scenarios which exceeds subjective impressions?
Through a strange form of literalism and appropriation, Jorjani borrows the belief, held by certain UFO cults back when and today, that Christ was a ufonaut to advance the notion that Christianity was conceived from the beginning as a control system, today partly prolonged by the angelic, Greta Thunberg-like Nordics of contactee literature. In this way, Jorjani renders Christianity as the equivalent to Mormonism.
Jorjani is correct when noting that Prescott Bush, grandfather of once-CIA director George H. W. Bush, was a major financier of Adolf Hitler’s regime
An inclusive review of the available details will show this to have been anything but a gaffe — as if an agency with more than a century-and-a-half of experience would be outdone by a lone gunman positioned at the most obvious vantage point.
Researcher Emily Louise has also shed what little light is to be had on the precedent of “quiet” helicopters, which may have had their origin in the Hughes 500p, utilized during 1972 — so, anticipating the ramping up of mutilation reports by just a year.
Originally known as The New York Evening Enquirer, the paper was later purchased by Generoso Pope Jr., despite its failing circulation, who “revamped the format from a broadsheet to a sensationalist tabloid.” Pope was an employee of the CIA's psychological warfare unit, which should raise questions as to Pope’s investment and programmatic refocus. I would refer to those who are interested to YouTube user Red Panda Koala’s video, “How the CIA and Air Force created the UFO Stigma”, for more information.
Kripal’s statement is all the odder, given that this event also featured Christopher Mellon, defense-intel scion of the Mellon billionaire dynasty, who, as noted, has been instrumental to the national-security-threat narrative — and Harold Puthoff, co-founder of the aforementioned bunk, and similarly oriented, organization, To the Stars, Inc. Of course, it’s possible that these inclusions were made to promote conceptual diversity; but I doubt it, given the current UFO-celebrity status of Mellon and Puthoff. Note, too, how Kripal’s situating of the role of national intelligence as it pertains to UFOs as an absurdity — the physical versus the nonphysical — negates a parapolitical framework by exclusively prioritizing the mystical, or non-materialistic, interpretation.
Given NASA’s proclivity to explain-away apparent anomalies and Kirkpatrick’s history of intelligence work, my mentioning these retaliations is not an attempt to absolve any person or agency of manipulation so long as they deny alien cohabitation.
“Cracks in the Great Wall” by Charles Upton is an interesting short read