The Great Flying Saucer Cesspool
Part One: Are UFOs ballooning into a "national security threat"?
I’ve been meaning to write this one for some time. It was supposed to come out in March, but I had an opportunity to travel for a month and took it. Had plenty of time to get to this topic, I thought.
Nope. Within days of my departure, batshit crazy things started to happen on this front. And by the time I returned to writing something, further batshit crazy developments cropped up.
I should qualify “batshit crazy” here. This piece is about UFOs, but not in the sense they don’t exist. There is powerful evidence they do. The crazy part involves things that got called UFOs that weren’t. At least not in the alien sense.
It started with headlines last February about Canada and the US scrambling jets to intercept unknown objects vectoring over their territory. One was shot down over Alaska and another over the Yukon Territory, with a third over Michigan.
The New York Times:
White House officials said on Monday that the military had not yet identified the source of the objects or their purpose, adding that there was no indication that civilians on the ground were in danger and that the government would redouble efforts to understand the nature of the objects and where they came from.
The incidents over the weekend have transfixed the public — long fascinated by encounters with flying objects that defy explanation, as well as government efforts to study them — and spawned multiple theories as officials try to make sense of the devices.
The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, confirmed that the administration does not believe aliens are involved. “There is no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns,” she said.
That’s a peculiar, sci-fi segue for a White House press secretary. Did any one in the executive branch actually believe that aliens were involved? That’s pretty unlikely, particularly since these three incidents were preceded by one in which US F-22 took down a Chinese spy balloon that had lazily wafted over the continental US for several days.
Not surprisingly, the three successive objects taken out by sidewinder missiles were also balloons: Yet in the above report the New York Times itself engaged in the same rhetoric as the White House press secretary: “On Friday, the U.S. military shot down an unidentified flying object over the Arctic Ocean near Alaska.”
Again, with the scary term, unidentified flying object.
It was the same across the legacy media landscape. UFOS in the skies over America! The previously preferred term for strange aerial objects of unknown provenance - “Unindentified Aerial Phenomenon” (UAP), was sidelined for a phrase that the press never used before without implicit smirks or explicit snark.
Were we in danger? No immediate physical threat, if we’re talking about balloons from China. But it was enough to make you think there was a public relations effort to hotwire the memes of “UFO” and “threat” in people’s heads.
From Foo Fighters to Fearmongers
Upon closer investigation, most reported UFOs turn out to be IFOs - Identified Flying Objects. The planet Venus leads the laundry list of misperceptions, by a long shot. Yet there’s a persistent ten to 15 percent of sightings that can’t be reduced to misperceptions or hoaxes, many involving high-quality reports from law enforcement officers, military personnel, radar technicians, meteorologists, passenger jet pilots and astronomers. These remain the most difficult cases to explain away, particularly when they involve multiple witnesses. (When the late Cornell astronomer and Project Blue Book investigator J. Allen Hynek was asked where the evidence is for nonhuman craft cruising the skies, he replied, “where do you want to park the truck?”)
Unidentified Flying Objects, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon if you prefer, have been witnessed across the world since at least since the second world war, when confused pilots gave them the apellations “foo fighters,” in the belief the small objects tracking their planes were Axis-engineered craft. No evidence was ever found that the Nazis were responsible, and there’s little merit in the argument that the bizarre, intelligently-manuveured objects littering in the skies over the past century are all human in origin, particularly those objects that execute right degree turns at speeds that would shred human pilots from G-forces.
That said, what gives this whole topic a fractal-like complexity is that there’s circumstantial evidence that a fraction of cases over the past few decades do involve experimental high-performance craft engineered and tested by the US Department of Defense and/or their contractors.
To say this muddies things would be an understatement.
Yet no matter what mix of human and nonhuman prevails is the reports, for the past century there have been only a handful of declassified or publicly available cases where the UFO phenomenon seem to represent some kind of deadly threat to human beings. For the most part, it appear to represent no substantial threat.
There are a small number of cases on record where people who have ventured closely to UFOs on the ground, or low to the Earth, have suffered a range of radiation injuries. Yet this appears more the result of human curiosity than actively hostile alien intent. As for the reported instances of apparent UFO interference with human weapons systems and technology (as in the Malmstrom missile silo incident), there have been no reported deaths or injuries.
Considering the astounding behaviour by some of these objects, one thing is fairly certain: if the craft and their purported occupants represent a significant physical threat to humanity, civilization would have been reduced to rubble decades ago.
So why does a Google news search of “UFO” and “national security threat” net over 8,000 hits?
The mainstream media certainly has been working this angle hard, mostly since 2021.
It seems rather odd that after decades of official denial from the government and sniggering contempt from the press that UFOs are now officially acknowledged as real and possibly extraterrestrial - yet the question of “national security threat” is immediately slapped on them, like health warnings on cigarette packs.
Tic Tacs and Tricksters
So to understand what’s going on here, we have to go back a few years. On December 16, 2017, the New York Times spilled a stunning report about a Pentagon “UFO program” called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). This hugely revived public interest in the UFO topic, which was kicked up a few more notches in 2019, when a number of U.S. Navy fighter pilots made public statements about their encounters with UFOs while performing training missions off the U.S. East Coast in 2014 and 2015. They described these white objects as shaped like Tic Tacs which performed jaw-dropping aerial manuevers, including plunges into the ocean.
Cut to 2021, when the Office of National Intelligence release of its “Preliminary Assessment - Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon” - a guarded report which left the unearthly origin of some UFOs an open possibility. Very much a first, after decades of denial by the US Air Force of strange aerial objects regularly encountered by their pilots.
UFO experts and enthusiasts were cheered by this report and signals of official “disclosure” like release of the Tic Tac footage, which has been endlessly rotated on news networks. At last, they insisted, the US government was coming clean on the phenomenon, realizing it had a duty to tell the truth!
However, for those who hoped for a menu of confessions about recovered alien technology from crashed discs, the report made for a skimpy meal. Still, the word preliminary held out the hope this was an appetizer, not the entree.
There are several possibly overlapping angles to interpret all this.
Angle One: Full “disclosure” from high levels about UFOs runs in the face of a persistent truth in military and intelligence circles: secrecy is power. The more you know that your enemies don’t (enemies that can range from foreign agents to gumshoe reporters to Congress critters), the more you can compartmentalize access to black budget programs with funding off the books.
Angle Two: with that in mind, you’ve been secretly investigating the phenomenon (from sightings to physical traces) for decades, compartmentalizing it in bureaucratic domains you prefer to be kept hidden, particularly if you’ve been exploiting it for disinformation purposes and/or even simulating a bit of UFO activity, deliberately or accidentally, with your own black technology.
Angle Three: as responsible public servants on the Potomac, you actually do have The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), a Pentagon office tasked to investigates reports of UAPs. To date, AARO has found no solid evidence of alien activity. That’s because…
Angle Four: AARO has bupkis. That’s because the reported UFOs and UAPs are actually all from foreign powers, hence the national security threat, which is decidedly human. Or because…
Angle Five: the really juicy UFO material was farmed out to private contractors for study years ago, where it is under proprietory rather than classified domains, and free from FOIA requests. You can honestly tell the press and Congress you have little to share.
Angle Six: covert investigations into the phenomenon have uncovered a horrible truth that must be shielded from the masses for their own good. Even if that truth is simply that there are beings out there more evolved that us that were not made in the image of God. Or worse, something eldritch the human mind isn’t fully capable of comprehending.
What I’m saying is this: on the face of it it seems there’s little for the military-intelligence world and its proxies in the government and press to gain from saying the UFO phenomenon is real, even in the form of a limited hangout. Unless…
Over the horizon and out of the blue
One of the more intriguing figures in this scene is Luis Elizondo, who left the classified world to rebrand himself as a sort-of whistleblower on UFOs. I don’t have space here to get into the byzantine backstory involving Elizondo, former Speaker of the House Jim Wright, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence Christopher Mellon, and the connection to “To The Stars Academy” and spooky Skinwalker Ranch. Suffice it to say Elizondo, who has been a fixture on the UFO podcast scene for several years, has been presented in the social media universe as a guy who would love to tell all about UFOs, but can’t without violating his security clearance. But suspicions have been cast on his background, his claims and the narrative spun around AATIP.
Here’s an interesting tidbit from a 2019 report on Elizondo in The Intercept:
The documents he has provided include recent annual Defense Department performance evaluations and his October 4, 2017 resignation letter to then-Defense Secretary James Mattis, which bears the apparent seal of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense. In the letter, Elizondo alludes to internal opposition at the Pentagon to investigate UFOs that he wrote had menaced Navy Pilots and posed an “existential threat to our national security.” He was leaving, he strongly implied in his letter, because the Pentagon wasn’t taking that threat seriously.
So this is Elizondo’s stated incentive from departure from a Pentagon department investigating UFOs: the failure of his bosses to recognize the “existential threat to our national security.” The bombshell New York Times report on Elizondo and AATIP mentioned above soon followed.
Hmmm.
In any case, Elizondo’s trustworthiness isn’t germane to the main question I’m posing here: why the big - or not so big - reveals now, after decades of denial? And what would possibly inspire such lunatic talk about UFOs causing “the next Pearl Harbour”?
The military-intelligence-security establishment may be a black box to the likes of you and me, but I think it’s safe to say that with proxy wars risking a nuclear confrontation between east and west, a safer and possibly more reliable way to ‘scare up’ billions to trillions more of taxpayer dollars for defence contractors is to project a new threat on the horizon. Over the horizon - into space. And to feed it the meme to the stenographers in the legacy press.
So are these media reports and congressional testimony of a possible national security threat from UFOs - ahem - trial balloons? Could there be an even bigger aspect to this, involving a global contingency plan that’s been on the shelf for decades?
Update: Here is some testimony on July 26 before the “House Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs for unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAP).” I recommend you watch it in it’s entirety, but this exchange leapt out at me:
Mr. Andy Ogles: I serve on the National Security Subcommittee for the Financial Services Committee, so I really want to stay in the National security lane, if I may.
When we think about traditional adversaries, both us towards them and them towards us, we probe their capabilities. We look for weaknesses, and we collect that data, that reconnaissance for in the event we need it in the future. For each of you, yes or no question: Based off of your own experience or the data that you've been privy to, is there any indication that these UAPs could be essentially collecting reconnaissance information? Mr. Graves?
Ryan Graves: Yes.
Mr. Andy Ogles: Mr. Grusch?
David Grusch: Fair assessment, yeah.
Mr. Andy Ogles: Mr. Fravor?
CDR. Fravor (Re...: It's very possible.
Mr. Andy Ogles: Again, in the national security vein, is it possible that these UAPs would be probing our capabilities, yes or no? Mr. Graves?
Ryan Graves: Yes.
Mr. Andy Ogles: Grusch?
David Grusch: Yes.
Mr. Andy Ogles: Fravor?
CDR. Fravor (Re...: Definitely.
Mr. Andy Ogles: Is it possible that these UAPs are testing for vulnerabilities in our current systems?
Ryan Graves: Yes.
David Grusch: Yes.
CDR. Fravor (Re...: Possible.
Mr. Andy Ogles: Do you feel, based off of your experience and the information that you've been privy to, that these UAPs provide an existential threat to the national security of the United States? Mr. Graves?
Ryan Graves: Potentially.
Mr. Andy Ogles: Yes, sir. Potentially.
David Grusch: Same answer, potentially.
CDR. Fravor (Re...: Yeah, I'd say definitely potentially.
(I should add the testimony from the participants highlighted the extraordinary nonhuman performance of observed craft. They’re definitely not playing up Angle 4 here.)
I agree that Lou is a controlled plant. Too many close ties to the government. And I agree that the aliens would have terminated us eons ago if they wanted. I tend toward the belief that humanity is one big experiment and the universal law is to leave us alone as much as possible and not interfere. We have free will and free choice, let’s see how humanity acts. I believe we have failed, or at least the power hungry politicians and elites. Too much corruption, too much greed. Technology was given to mankind for the benefit of mankind but the power brokers kept the technology for themselves and developed weapons of war with it. Until man comes to the understanding that our purpose here is to expand and develop our spirituality we will forever be doomed.
Yep, I totally agree with your take on this bizarro theatre.
Can't wait for the second part...
I used to know someone-one of the smartest people I ever met-who insisted that he could 'contact' aliens via his mind....WTF?