UFOs FFS
No man ever went broke overestimating the ignorance of the American people.
— P. T. Barnum
In that mood again to kick apart a puffball of mass delusion.
We’ll get to the risible exhibition of mindlessness in Congress lately regarding so-called UFOs; but first I’ll background my . . . skepticism would be too weak a word . . . my unconditional repudiation of this notion that we’ll receive visitors from the far reaches of the universe.
In my last article on the film Sound of Freedom, I emphasized the unfortunate fact that our social imaginary has been substantially formed by ridiculous Hollywood tropes.
Basics
The nearest star to our solar system is so far away that, traveling at the speed of light, one . . . would die for starters . . . but your puréed corpse would arrive in around four years and three months.
The number of factors and conditions that were necessary for our own planet to support the development not only of organic forms, but of a species like human beings (with regard to our ability to manipulate the natural world), is exceptionally rare. In temporal terms, it has to be noted, this developmental process took around 4.5 billion years on this one planet. Oxford scientists from the Future of Humanity Institute wrote:
Together with the dispersed timing of key evolutionary transitions and plausible priors, one can conclude that the expected transition times likely exceed the lifetime of Earth, perhaps by many orders of magnitude. In turn, this suggests that intelligent life is likely to be exceptionally rare.
By some estimates there may be around two trillion galaxies, each with millions of stars, so the odds for “intelligent life” are pretty good after all — that’s a lot of poker hands, so the royal flush is bound to happen. But the problem remains, to which we already alluded — time and distance. Also technology and energy to cover that time and distance. If the life forms we imagine are one in 20 million galaxies, say (optimistic here), and that means there are other thinking organisms “out there”; but the galaxy “next door’ to ours is 42,000 light years away. To arrive today, having traveled at light-speed, you’d have had to begun riding the beam midway through the last Ice Age. But then, we’ve already said, no one travels the speed of light. So there’s that.
More to the point, it’s easier to imagine machines that tear through space than it is to make them.
We have this idea — imbued by fictional stories in books, film, and television as what I call the myth of progress — that our capacity for innovation is unlimited. In fact, it’s very much limited by . . . well, physics, not to put too fine a point on it. Machines require energy, and in some respects, energy is a zero-sum game called the second law of thermodynamics, or entropy. There is one well-known “cheat code” for entropy on our planet called photosynthesis — a longer story (read my book, Mammon’s Ecology) — which we are undermining as fast as we can . . . well, by making machines that are hyper-entropic energy sinks (which convert negentropic stores like fossil hydrocarbons into useless and ultimately destructive atmospheric carbon). Long story short, our photosynthesizing biomass is being supplanted by the proliferation of technomass, which in turn is killing off its own feedstocks. Capitalism’s technologies are sawing off the limb upon which we collectively sit while we look at our phones and scratch our asses.
Ah yes, technomass. Not only do imaginary (and real) spacecraft require shit tons of energy, they require materials. One space shot on earth already tears into countless mines, mills, factories, and forms of transportation. If you follow the footprint out, that single shot has its destructive tentacles all around the world, involving millions of people, many thousand of hectares of land, planes, trains, and automobiles. We’ve been at it for a few decades, and we put a couple of guys on the moon for a few minutes, even as the productive feedstocks collapse.
What does this have to do with space aliens?
We’ve damn near wrecked a planet and barely launched a few unmanned probes and telescopes. That’s the entropy limit thing. And the entropy law actually applies everywhere throughout the known universe. Space aliens are as constrained as we are. (I’m so sorry. The myth of progress is Santa Claus. Time to grow up now.)
How do our extraterrestrial neighbors power the machines to travel over many light years — while sustaining their own bodies — to then arrive on earth, where they apparently sneak around to evade discovery by people like David Grusch?
The answer is, they don’t.
Some of the things we imagine and tell ourselves, like “It’s possible,” are not. Imagination can run free, leaping over tall buildings in a single bound . . . reality, however creative, is still constrained by certain immutable constants.
I know, I know — look, I was an imaginative kid, too, back when my Daddy wore mastodon fur — that it’s “possible” there is some kind of super-intelligence “out there” that is unimaginable to us. That’s not my point. What we assume with that telling is that super-intelligence equates to the way we started to describe it inside the myth of progress, as some restless thirst for discovery and control over nature. I could argue at length — not here today — that this characteristic in us, as we now know it, is undesirable, a dangerous bug in our nature adjacent to our concupiscence, this God-playing thing, and that’s walking us into a pretty dreadful future. Super-intelligent beings might just see where it all goes and say, “Fuck that.”
Some intelligent beings right here already have, but they don’t get many Likes on YouTube.
Flying saucers
In 1878, a Texas newspaper reported that a farmer had seen an unidentifiable object flying through the air near Denison, which the farmer described as the size of a saucer. Not the shape of a saucer, but the size. Six inches?
More sightings after the advent of the Great Depression, again in Texas (and nearby Oklahoma), this time with people adding new features, like flames and fireballs. In 1947, the first story that went viral, so to speak, with the tabloids, was a politician named Kenneth Arnold who said he encountered the thing, which he called a “flying saucer” while piloting his private plane near Mount Rainier in Washington. Soon after Arnold’s story splashed, people all over the world started reporting having seen flying saucers.
Researchers have found that just a year before Arnold’s “sighting” kicked off the global trend, the pulp rag, Amazing Stories, featured an illustration speculating on the advanced life forms of a planet circling the a star in the Aquila constellation — which were pictured invading the earth with armies of giant, red, flying crabs to pick off humanity.
“Science” was big around this time. The US had defeated Japan with the bomb, jet planes were coming onto the scene, and a kind of mania took hold stimulating wild flights of fancy among the masses, especially after TV took hold . . . some apocalyptic. Ever since then, unidentified flying objects (UFOs) have become a mainstay of grocery store tabloids and conspiracy loons.
UFOs also cashed out with Hollywood. Alien invasion became a thing. I’ve been able to find 241 alien invasion films, beginning with The Thing From Another World (1951, year of my birth) to one called, welp . . . Alien Invasion (2023). Aliens may not be real, but they’re bankable as all get out. (My absolute fave is Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks.)
The first conspiracy theories involving aliens and their spacecraft showed up in 1949, alongside the first fever spikes of Cold War paranoia. It started with claims that the flurry of unsubstantiated flying saucer sightings were Soviet missiles (fired for what purpose was never clear). In the same year, Charles Linbergh’s former tour manager, ex-Marine aviator, and then writer for pulp magazines, Donald Keyhoe, wrote an article for True — a “man’s magazine,” that leaned into fictionalized adventure. The story was called “The Flying Saucers Are Real,” an elaborate conspiracy theory about a government cover-up that prefigured a cascade of crazy — the Bermuda Triangle, the Philadelphia Experiment, the Men in Black (not the spoof film, but the belief in secret agents that silenced people who were about to let the cat out of the bag on aliens). In the sixties, it was the Pentacle Memorandum; in the seventies, the Holloman Air Force Base; in the eighties, Roswell & Site 51; in the nineties, the “Dulce Base catastrophe”; in the 2000s, the Greer bullshit . . . look them all up.
Here we are again
The first I caught wind of it was last year, when I had the misfortune of listening to a piece on the Breaking Points podcast by Saager Enjeti, upon whom the UFO cover-up angle is stuck like a wet sweater. Enjeti is a kind of right-wing populist (from Texas, where tf else), and it was only later, as this latest notion of government UFO cover-ups penetrated past my self-protective current-events firewall, that I realized this is now a thing on the right. The Democrats have gone full-on security-state-war-monger-kill-the-Russians; and the Republicans have chosen whackadoodle as an opposition strategy. UFOs and a devil-worshiping pedophile under every rock. Beam me the fuck up, Scotty!
Don’t get me wrong, as someone who doesn’t align well with what is called either “right” or “left” nowadays, I sometimes agree with some people on the right about some things. So I won’t tar the entire right in general with this latest UFO idiocy. Surely there are some critically clear heads near that pole. Please, now, speak up!
This will become a political issue, an adverse development to be sure, but part of our political decomposition. It a reflection of the economic, ecologic, social, and spiritual crisis unraveling our epoch. American politics has always been around 90 percent fatuous, and it’s always been practiced by mountebanks. That it’s getting worse is a little frightful, not altogether surprising, and — in moments of Stoic fatalism — grimly comical . . . like a Coen brothers movie or your brain-damaged chihuahua earnestly humping a throw pillow in front of your guests.
David Grusch, the “whistleblower,” has Congress’s panties in a wad over some supposedly secret Pentagon program related to space aliens. All I can say is, it’s either in the lineage of Kenneth Arnold and The Thing From Another World, or (eek!) there is such a program. If the latter is true, if Pentagon is toying with these ideas, we are in the deepest, the absolute deepest Men Who Stare At Goats shit imaginable. This would nonetheless be consistent with other incomprehensible phenomena, like Rudy Guiliani’s interview with Sasha Cohen, Ted Cruz in general, Joe Biden’s hairy leg stories, and members of Congress who are stumped by the question, “What is a woman?” (I warned you, I’m a bipartisan hater.)
It’s like humanity has taken a collective hit of bad acid just before civilization and the biosphere stagger off the stage. We will be remembered, if at all, not as lost violent souls, but only as the dupe men, the gull men, headpiece filled with aliens, alas. Our paranoia, as we text together, like babble out our silly ass . . . or rotgut in a dirty glass, on our dry Twitter.
Okay, so I’m no poet.
I do, however retain just a scrap of optimism . . . sufficient to believe that Grusch is an outlier, a kook. And the Pentagon, for all its flaws, which are legion, is not entertaining the notion that ET’s family has to be factored into their war planning. Yes, Congresscritters are listening to Grush and his band of merry band of the deranged and attention-addicted, but then again, there are QAnon believers in Congress . . . now . . . elected by some of the Americans described generations earlier by the great grifter, P. T. Barnum.
I’m tempted to slot Tim Burchett as a kook, Republican Representative from Tennessee’s 2nd District; but I’m withholding final judgement. It very well could be a performance. He may just be going along with the con, more the Barnum than the sucker. He’s the guy who’s pushing the UFO cover-up legend in the hallowed halls at the moment.
Hearkening back to the 1946 Altairian invasion, he claims that the government has been “covering this up since the forties.”
“[There’s] a craft which I believe at some point . . . we have obtained some materials that are not of this world that are being studied by different members of industry . . . I’ve been told.”
Okay, you got me. You’ve been fucking told. Checkmate.
The Pentagon has responded, as if speaking to a small child, that unauthorized incursions into US airspace are all investigated, and that, to date, nothing has ever been “of alien origin.” Keep up, boys and girls.
I wonder how the Generals keep a straight face. That’s military discipline for you. I lost mine, on purpose, the day after I retired from the Army. Me? I’d be cackling like a hyena and further amusing myself with wry mocking and schoolyard verbal abuse.
But of course, the true believer might say, they are STILL COVERING IT UP. . . and KILLING those who have DISCOVERED the COVER-UP. “They still report UNIDENTIFIED objects.” And in a sane world, we would reply, “I see unidentified flying objects in my house, too — gnats, mosquitoes, eye floaters, whatever — doesn’t follow that they’re aliens. Quit throwing your pills down the toilet.”
“In the Baptist church,” Rep. Burchett said, “we say that the devil is in our way, and the devil has been in our way for this thing. We’ve run into roadblocks from members, the intelligence community, and the Pentagon.” The devil is hard at work in Congress. Tim and I agree on one thing, at least.
Grush, the chief witness in these farcical “hearings,” claimed — without revealing his source, of course — that the government has actually recovered the bodies of the aliens who piloted the ill-fated flying saucers. Maybe they shoulda gone with dinner plates or tea cups, idk. Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN-5th District) asked, with a straight face, if these could be “reconnaissance missions.” Fucking reconnaissance missions!
One of the witnesses replied in the affirmative. (Sigh.) Cue the background music: “T for Texas, T for Tennessee.”
God help us
Returning to Breaking Points, the sometimes irreverent Washington insider podcast that puts itself up as the alternative to the mainstream media —well, I used to watch them. They were among the few who called out the Russiagate conspiracy theory, and they made frequent and accurate references to the WMD conspiracy theory that walked us into a losing two-decade war in Southwest Asia.
Now, alas, Enjeti’s gone full-on woowoo with this UFO thing, and I’ve lost all confidence in anything he might ever again think or say.
Insult to injury, co-host Krystal Ball (her real name) did an attack dog thing not long ago against her guest, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right after her wedding to podcaster Kyle Kulinski was “officiated” by Kennedy’s rival, self-help author Marianne Williamson. (Kulinski, by the way, is one of the most undeservedly arrogant, sophomoric, and annoying twits to ever grace the screen — he has this kind of wealthy frat-boy act going that makes the younger me want to slap the cowboy shit out of him.)
And so . . . I am done with Breaking Points. Subscription cancelled.
The Enjeti-Ball right-left populist thing was replicated (after the Hill fired Enjeti and Ball) on The Hill’s Rising with former Bernie Sanders staffer Briahna Joy Gray and Brady Bunch libertarian Robby Soave. One right-winger and one social democrat getting along with each other, an admirable performance in today’s warlike political milieu. It’s pretty easy to get along when you’re raking in dollars, but they may be doing it in good faith. Who knows? I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on that one.
But two days ago — as this is written — Rising, which I’ve discovered has run a series of UFO stories lately — one called, all in clickbait caps, ‘CONSPIRACISTS’ VINDICATED! — broadcast an interview with Leslie Kean, an “investigative journalist,” on the “bombshell revelations” about UFOs. Kean, a member of New Jersey’s Kean political dynasty, has been selling the UFO Koolaid since around 2000. “Investigative journalist” . . . it’s a joke, get it? She sports a photograph of a UFO in her office, some grainy footage reminiscent of the Loch Ness monster and Sasquatch, and she’s back on the circuit, feted now by Republican conspiracy-mongers.
The barkers being paraded through Congress as witnesses include ex-Navy pilot David Farvor, who testified that in 2004 he saw flying tic-tacs made of ultra-powerful technology. Technology so powerful, in fact, that “it needs to have oversight from those people that the citizens of this country elected in office to represent what is best for the United States and best for the citizens.” It is, Farvor contended, a risk to our national security. He doesn’t explain how oversight can be accomplished over technology that’s a thousand years beyond our ken.
Ryan Graves, another former Navy pilot (Department of the Navy, CHECK YOUR DRINKING WATER!), said he’s seen UFOs every day for two years off the Atlantic coast.
Dude, those are seagulls.
We are so far through the looking glass that we are now looking up our own recta. There is not one shred of credible evidence for these stories, which read — see my last on the Sound of Freedom hoax film — like a really dreadful Hollywood script. And YouTube is the new supermarket tabloid, the problem being it’s free.
Once upon a time, long long ago in a world far far away, when everyday people who’d eaten the wrong mushrooms made these claims, most of the establishment would put the burden of proof to prove there are aliens among us— that thing which requires actual evidence, not grainy photos and hearsay — on the person who made the claim. Ah, those days of yore! Now, members of our political and media establishments are placing the burden of proof on the Pentagon, ffs, to prove the negative (yep) that there isn’t an alien reconnaissance effort afoot.
You really cannot make this shit up.
Now, you really don’t have to.