The UFOs aren’t news
The UFOs aren’t news
Recently, the US military sent out a press release containing years- (and sometimes decades-) old, previously released UFO footage and admitting to be totally stumped by the phenomena. This made greater waves in the press than in previous years, when the British and Canadian governments did the same. It shouldn’t have.
The problem with this press release is obvious, to those of us who have even a passing familiarity with the history of the UFO phenomenon. Project Sign, the US Air Force project to investigate UFOs, ran from the Kenneth Arnold sighting in 1947 to the beginning of Project Grudge in 1949, and during Sign, UFO investigations were being done in a serious manner — with the expected results: a lot of these reports were mysterious & not really consistent with either man-made craft or known natural phenomena. Project Grudge was a policy shift: everything needed to be explained away. Although Grudge didn’t last long, this policy shift did: all future official releases of UFO information to the press by the US military continued a policy that apparent UFOs are misidentifications of natural phenomena (the “swamp gas defense” or the “venus defense”) until the recent PR release, wherein the policy shifted back to its 1949 state. Notably, the official explanations here not only reject the (highly popular) nuts-and-bolts extraterrestrial craft hypothesis, but they also reject both unknown human-generated and unknown natural phenomena.
What is upsetting to students of the UFO phenomenon about this press release — and we have no reason to believe that the upcoming Pentagon report will make this any better — is that it seems clear that the needle on this issue has not moved since 1949, with regard to the internal consensus within any governmental body. We’ve known that, although the Navy and Air Force stopped publishing investigations of UFO reports, these reports have continued to be filed at about the same rate since 1950; outside of the aegis of government, there has been some excellent research (although this research has no institutional support and is difficult for outsiders to separate from the avalanche of dross). In other words, the internal government UFO investigation programs not only have failed to do the kind of research that Jacques Vallee has been able to do on his own, but they have actually ignored the state of UFOlogy.
UFOlogy’s biggest advances came in the 70s, out of folks like Vallee and John Keel, who noticed that UFO reports (even ones with a high degree of independent verification) are not any more consistent with extraterrestrial visitors than they are with swamp gas. They recognized that the UFO phenomenon has something in common with other “unexplained” phenomena outside of merely being unexplained. They found that in independent, individual, and group experiences, regardless of controlling for communication between experiencers, there is a component of psychological projection mixed with highly-consistent-yet-paradoxical details shared between accounts.
In other words: the only consistent and complete explanation of the UFO phenomenon must involve an intelligence, native to earth, capable of inviting us into a suggestible state, and systematically lying to us.
This is a big deal. After all, as soon as the nuts-and-bolts interpretation popped up, we started getting seemingly intentionally unbelievable explanations from UFO pilots in line with that interpretation — claiming to be from the moon, or from Venus, or from twenty thousand light-years away, coming to the earth on a ship powered by love in order to demonstrate to specific individuals that martians are dominican catholics or similar foolishness. As soon as Bud Hopkins’ “bedroom invaders” idea popped up, abduction accounts systematically took a dark turn in line with that interpretation. The UFOnauts are reading our science fiction, if they aren’t reading our minds, and if they’re not reading our minds then they send us into dream-like states where we project our own thoughts and fears out and mix that fiction into our memories of the actual events. While hypnotic regression can contaminate memories in this way, these characteristics are present in memories that were never “repressed” or considered “traumatic”, never subject to regression therapy — absolutely fresh UFO experiences, when recounted, always have surreal and paradoxical elements, and these elements are the key to understanding the experience.
So long as this line of inquiry is ignored, government UFO ‘disclosure’ will never get any further than the nuts-and-bolts cranks have. Earth simply is too uninteresting for us to be visited on a daily basis by extraterrestrials from light-years away for a period of more than one hundred years.