IN THE UNITED STATES OF PSYCHOSIS, SHOULD ANYONE REALLY GIVE A RIP ABOUT UFOs/UAP ANYMORE?
“Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse." -- Sophocles
A long time ago in the early ‘90s when I was becoming further immersed in the UFO community while working with CSETI and personally undergoing a series of strange “abduction”-like experiences (real and or “manufactured”?) that are detailed in THE SPACE PEN CLUB, I talked enthusiastically to a friend about the broader issues and the possibility that we might, at some point, have this news disclosed worldwide and what the positive implications might be. He listened patiently, shrugged, and said basically, “Why should we care about this when there are so many other social- political issues on the ground to really care about – and work for?!”
His reaction, although candid and friendly, was surprising, or maybe a better word for it was revealing. Today that friend is an Associate Dean for Social Sciences at a well-known university. And I’m still blogging about things like the recent Senate Armed Services Emerging Threats Subcommittee hearing on the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, on April 19 (See below). I say “still blogging” – but maybe not for much longer.
My friend’s statement, however, is always on my mind, maybe even more so with the barrage of everyone’s personal challenges in contemporary ‘Merica and the tragic national truth that belies news headlines on a daily if not an almost hourly basis in 2023. IMO we’re in a slow motion civil war, the signs of which you need look no further than the January 6 “insurrection.” For starters. But a particularly bleak headline April 22 -- just three days after the hollow UFO/UAP hearings – really captured the horror, if not the attendant absurdity almost, of what life has become here: U.S. ON RECORD PACE WITH MASS KILLING ABOUT ONCE A WEEK, screamed the headline from the Associated Press-generated story. It’s like we’ve become the United States of Psychosis.
Biden, show me the Money!
The Plight at the End of Tunnel
So maybe my friend’s 30-year-old perception is ultimately the right one now as your chronicler rhetorically asks, should anyone really give a rip about UFOs/UAP anymore? Many of us – including Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations – have expressed what now seems the Pollyanna view: that a disclosure about life on other planets that may have been interacting with ours would change the way that we think about and behave with one another here on planet Earth.
Mellon expressed such sentiments at a UFO/UAP forum in Spain last winter. I’ve always thought that since I was a kid out in lonesome western North Dakota where my first sightings and experiences – and as they say in the recovering and journaling communities, my UFO/UAP journey began. But then Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine in 2022. Kids keep getting killed in schools, cops keep shooting or kneeling on innocent Black people. The rich get richer, cellphones are still the opium of the people….The UN has issued a CODE RED for consecutive years about an increasingly warming planet with dire consequences…So now all bets are off.
The plight at the end of the UFO/UAP tunnel may well be that at some point the tunnel may finally become dismantled like the Cold War’s Berlin Wall and life will go on as it usually does. The “ontological shock” that John Mack once predicted in such a scenario may become nothing more than a passing philosophical shrug, a momentary spike in global consciousness. And nothing more.
I hope that’s not the case.
But after watching the Senate hearing last week and following the Twitter trail of bitter, predictable opinions and the onslaught of informed and uninformed online and offline analysis of those in the know and those who think they are (and I don’t claim either camp), I guess this latest blog finds me shrugging with the majority of people who, like my friend in academia, believe there are more important matters to cogitate and act upon.
So in that half-beaten, eyes-wide-open-and-shut spirit, these random observations from and about last week’s Big Whoop hearing.
Overall Analysis: Send Money. Need Money. Where’s My Money?! Hard Stop
AARO’s first boss, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, who expressly championed the scientific method to get to the truth of this “phenomenon” (ignoring the idea that a lot of our science doesn’t seem to fit the science exhibited by UAP) fielded questions from only three Senators during the sparsely attended one-hour-plus subcommittee hearing. He also sorted through a lot of housekeeping issues, after Senator Gillibrand (D, NY) took a shot at Biden to adequately fund the effing office so it could do its work.
For many in the UFO ghetto, that’s a non-starter right there about whether the government is really serious now about moving this discussion forward. Gillibrand’s over-arching message – despite Kirkpatrick playing a new unclassified video of a metallic ball moving through the air someplace in the Mideast – seemed to be “Send Money. Need Money. Where’s My Money?! Hard Stop.”
The Russians! The Chinese! Those Balloons! Really Senator, stay on topic.
Is It Our Adversaries!?
Senator Joni Ernst (R, from the appallingly regressive and getting worse state of Iowa) seemed fixated only on whether our big adversaries, Russia and China, were to blame in all this. Come on, Joni, do a little homework on topic! Both Superpowers have faced this issue for as long as the U.S.. It might be politically convenient for you to dump on them as the 2024 presidential caucus events heat up. But really, one shot-up Chinese spy balloon is nothing to get your knickers in a knot for, is it, especially during a hearing of this nature?
Is Aerospace Safe Space?
Nevada’s Senator Jacky Rosen (D) had a golden moment to reiterate the breakthrough efforts of the late Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) who was instrumental in funding the secret government study of UOFs/UAP 10-some years ago. You know the one that in 2017 landed on the front pages of The New York Times and changed the media narrative about UAP., perhaps forever? But she didn’t. Instead she focused on the safety issues for commercial and military aviators and the number of “near-misses” over the years where collisions between these extreme flying machines and conventional aircraft seemed imminent. A good moment about the importance of air safety during the hearing, but hardly a headline.
Of course, Dr. Richard Haines and the rest of the folks at NARCAP (National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena) have been pounding on this drum since 1999! So, Senator, I guess we have to score your UFO IQ in the slow-and-low range. Unless, of course, you and the others on this committee were privy to the real raw meat during the Classified briefings (Whistleblowers, where are you?!)
It’s my burden but at some point, it becomes somebody else’s.
“IN OTHER WORDS, ARRO’S MISSION IS TURN UAP INTO SEP -- SOMEBODY’S ELSES PROBLEM”
And so it went. But at one point, Kirkpatrick made a very glib and funny comment about handing off data his office might gather about these objects, the ones that aren’t spy balloons, bugs, swamp gas, meteors, Venus rising and setting, or any number of other junk terms used to discredit the real thing. He opined that he would welcome that opportunity to dump actionable AARO findings on another branch of the military-intel-industrial complex. That statement is quoted above in the subhead.
This isolated Twitter clip captured his remark in the ‘ol room where it happened:
https://twitter.com/shakeleather/status/1648736780613451789?s=20
It reminded me of the old Steve Goodman tune (peace be upon him), “Somebody’s Else’s Troubles”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nfp1wyvi5Hg
WHY BOTHER ANYMORE?
After it all, though, I -- and probably everyone else who cares about this issues at any level -- wonder why we even bother any more. It’s intellectually exhausting, emotionally unfulfilling, and maybe the last thing we as a civil society should be concerned with right now, given what’s in front of us daily and what may lie on the near horizon.
Should this be my last blog? Talk me out of it.
Or not.
