RANT: THE SAUCERS ARE COMING! THE SAUCERS ARE COMING!

 

Along the Banks of an Old River

The electric pain of a calculating world,

with addictions written on every wall.

The pain comes with viewing

a third-world alley in daylight,

or the latest version of Dr. Malthus’s

curio cabinet filled with oddities.

The pain is sudden and sharp,

and surprisingly unexpected.

And it hurts.

But the pain helps focus your mind.

Pain reveals patterns that tell secrets.

Not the secret of the magician’s wry apology

for having pulled the wool over our eyes.

Nor the dark options box of divining rulers,

opened.

Not even the mad tinker’s last desperate sale 

reveals much of anything.

These are yesterday’s relics--

Dry bones cracked open by thirsty believers

hungry for easy, vampire knowledge.

 

The electric pain, because it is

no longer grounded in the world,

courses everywhere, is felt

everywhere.

And soon enough, burning eyes

too late see the patterns in rock,

in the grinding of mountains

and etchings of rain;

too late do they read what’s printed,

lazily and last, in the sun-baked clay

at the river’s wide mouth.

 

Ghosts

At night, across the snow-covered yard,

out past where the big elm once stood,

ghosts drive by.

The antique, steel behemoths

are all but silent,

their great motors muffled

by the sound of falling snow

and tires spinning on wet pavement.

 

The cars’ passengers are children,

capped and scarved, and gloved—

as if returning from

an afternoon’s tobogganing

or some other cold adventure.

Bundled in furs, 

their breath etches

the car windows

as they look out beyond the headlights’ glow,

across the snow-covered fields,

out past where the big elm once stood.

 

 

“In nature nothing exists alone.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring 

 

“The truth is out there. But so are lies.”

— Dana Scully, The X-Files, The X-Files Season 1: Young at Heart

 

I MUST CONFESS THAT I HAVEN'T PAID TOO MUCH attention these days to UFOs and close encounters with aliens; in these waning Covid days, I don’t even want to think about close encounters with humans right now. Flying saucers seem to be off our collective radar for the most part and faded into the general background noise. Or so I thought. It was surprising then, the other day, to see the Pentagon’s newly released video footage of military aircraft encounters with “Unidentified Aerial Objects”, as the air force prefers to call them, one dating from 2014. To me, the vids just look like small white blobs moving rapidly off screen, like a ginned-up game of pong—kind of underwhelming in other words—but apparently the American defense authorities are taking the matter seriously and have opened an investigation into the incidents.

To keep an open mind, and to be fair, just because I personally have not had any alien encounters doesn’t mean they haven’t been happening.

For example, in Canada, according to the Canadian UFO Survey there were 849 sightings in 2019 and as ufologist Chris Rutkowski suggests, 2020 stats will show even more because of the pandemic when “people are being forced to spend more time at home or outside…many are spending more time looking up to the big sky out there and there’s a lot to see.” Too true, Chris! Too true.

   Q: What habit is most likely to to aid you in viewing a UFO? (Answer below)

Globally, there were 6,889 UFO sightings in 2019, according to the website, Statista, and while their helpful chart (above) does indicate a drop-off in recent years, nevertheless something is going on in the skies, but what? Can they all be explained away as hallucinations, misperceptions, secret government weapons research, lies, or natural occurrences like “swamp gas” or a weather-related phenomenon?

Humans have been sending spaceships out to planets and moons in our solar system for decades, as well as rendezvousing with comets, making trips to the International Space Station, the moon. Two “Voyager” spacecraft have passed beyond the boundary of our “heliosphere” in recent years entering deep space. So, why not? Why not extra-terrestrial spaceships in our skies? Why not alien visitors and flying saucers? There have been numerous “contactee” and “abduction” claims over the years. Why not close encounters of the “third kind”? Perhaps former President Trump’s creation of the “Space Force” wing of the US military wasn’t such a bad idea, after all? If there are visiting space aliens, do we really know why they’re here. Maybe they represent a threat to our collective security? (Maybe they’ll offer us admission to the Galactic Federation? Here’s hoping!)

 

In a recent interview, retired Israeli security chief Haim Eshed said extraterrestrials have been in contact with us and that there is “an agreement between the U.S. government and the aliens. They signed a contract with us to do experiments here”. ‘Nuff said. But, before you make yourself a tinfoil hat and start boarding up the doors and windows, I think it would be a good idea to first read a book that I’d happened to have picked up earlier on the subject, John Michael Greer’s The UFO Chronicles.

JMG begins his study with a brief history of UFOs, whose iconic imagery, including that of "flying saucers", had been so prevalent in our culture for many decades. He first asks what is meant by the acronym “UFO”? The letters stand for “unidentified flying objects”, of course, and the term was first coined by the US air force in 1953 as a catchall phrase referring to any unusual “airborne object” that could not be immediately be identified. So, the word means just that—some unknown, unexplained, or unidentified something in the sky. What interests JMG is how we respond when asked what a “UFO” (pronounced “ufoe”) is. Most of us will answer, “It’s a “flying saucer,” whether we believe in the phenomenon or not.

Now, humans have been seeing strange things in the skies for centuries, even millennia. That’s nothing new.  For example, in 1150, in Japan, there is recorded an observation of a luminous object shaped like an “earthenware vessel” that flew over Mount Fukuhara in Kii Province one night. The Roman historian Livy writes that a flying “shield” was seen over the town of Arpi, in what is now Armenia. Between 1896 and 1897 there were dozens of “phantom airship” sightings of “cigar-shaped” craft in New England that used flapping wings and propellers for locomotion, a technology that would not, practically speaking, accomplish such a task. And more recently there were the “foo fighter” lights spotted by pilots in WWII, and after the war gray-coloured “ghost rockets” were seen in the skies over Sweden. Perhaps the most famous sighting was by pilot Kenneth Arnold  of nine “crescent shaped” objects flying in formation over Mount Rainier, Washington in 1947. His observations were later reported in the press as craft shaped like “saucers”. * And we’ve been seeing flying saucers in the sky ever since. So, what is going on?

According to JMG, the UFO community is divided into two groups: those who believe that what they are observing in the sky are spaceships from other worlds, who subscribe to the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH), and then there are those who believe such observations are not spaceships and can be explained by natural occurrences or misperceptions, who accept the null hypothesis (NH). There is a third hypothesis that I'll get to a bit later, one that is, for me, more interesting (and, in a way, more hopeful.)

Krell Monster: Dr. Morbius' Id

Both sides of the debate are filled with true believers, with many simply discounting the other side’s views as wrong, regardless of argument or evidence. JMG suggests that like any belief system, the belief in extraterrestrial visitors has a context and foundation. The context is the wider society’s belief in scientific progress and unending technological growth, with ETs representing a ‘data point’, if you will, on the ever-upward arc of progress, and humans just a little behind them on the curve. Thus, aliens are seen as our future selves [Note to self: Remember the Krell!]

It is interesting to note the parallels between alien encounters of the past several decades (where reports have been made of humans seeing spaceships in the skies as well as having interactions with their occupants) and those encounters with angels (and devils) reported in past centuries. In today's secular society where God has been replaced to a great extent by science and technology, beings from distant stars (whose lights once were imagined to come from doors opening onto Heaven) are now seen replacements for heavenly visitors of previous generations. JMG makes the point that we experience the world through the constructs and iconography of our culture. We see through the ‘eyes’ of our culture is another way to put it, and a technological culture such as ours will have technological visions, fantasies, hopes and dreams. As our society developed technologically in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the literary genre of science fiction also developed and began to explore the ramifications of this new civilization we were building. H.G. Wells was one of the first such writers in the genre, for example when in 1898 he wrote about Martians invading Earth. During the 1920s and 30s there was an explosion of science fiction and fantasy books about travelling in space and flying ships and encounters with aliens. These stories, tales and legends became a subtext, though a foundational one, in our culture, stirring our collective imaginations. And after the 1947 sighting of flying “crescents” by Kenneth Arnold, the iconic flying saucer image was imbedded in the public’s mind. To our technological minds, flying saucers replace the image of flaming chariots in the sky. God’s angelic visitors became Martians. (And it goes without saying that along with angels there are also devils who visit us--or good aliens and bad ones.)

Another parallel between the alien encounters of today and encounters with otherworldly beings in past times is found in the Nineteenth Century's Spiritualist Movement. The movement began in 1858 when the three Fox sisters of New York claimed they could communicate with the dead. As formal religious beliefs were increasingly being challenged by scientific rationality during that time, spiritualism filled in the gaps and fulfilled a need in people to believe in something more than what their eyes could see and their brains could rationally catagorize. The belief in visitations from the dead, like the belief in visitors from other worlds, both come from a similar place and today's UFO phenomenon can be seen in many ways an outgrowth of the Spiritualist Movement, coming onstream, as it did, just as spiritualism itself began to lapse into obscurity in the 1960s and 70s, eventually becoming just an odd relic of our psychic past. (Just as, incidentally, the belief in UFOs will someday fade away.)

 The Fox Sisters

And before I ramble on too long, I’ll quickly mention the third hypothesis for understanding the UFO phenomenon that does not completely subscribe to either the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis nor the Null Hypothesis. Call it the "Skeptical" Hypothesis if you will. And it has two components: The first is that there are, indeed, rational explanations to the unidentified flying objects phenomenon: Some phenomena are caused by natural events, such as air inversions, reflections, and so on. Some are lies. And some UFOs remain unexplained. But the second component to the skeptical hypothesis is that many of the phenomena can be put in the category of “conspiracy theory.” (Hot diggity dog! Who doesn't love a good conspiracy!)

    Scully and Muldar

I am fortunate or otherwise to have spent many hours watching TV shows like the “X-Files”, so I can say with confidence: Yes, Virginia, there really are conspiracies. When looked through the lens of government coverups and intelligence agency nefariousness, many UFO sightings by the public following WWII can be understood as unintended observations of secret government weapons and defence experiments. For example, the famous Roswell 'crash' of 1947 and the 1948 National Guard fighter pilot Thomas Mantell’s sighting of a “cone shaped craft with an red tip” suggests aspects the secret “Skyhook” high-altitude balloon experiments (among others) conducted by the US government in the region commonly known as Area 51. These were secret programs to test the viability of using balloons to spy on Russian military facilities and nuclear installations. (They got the idea from the Japanese who, during WWII, attempted to launch bomb-laden balloons toward the US west coast.) 

And, interesting for Canadians, one secret, batshit-crazy program, “Project Alien Bodyguard”, sponsored by Air Force General Curtis LeMay** in the early 1950s, proposed using a fleet of balloons, each carrying a nuclear bomb, to hover in the airspace of approaching Soviet bombers flying over the North Pole to attack the United States. The balloons would detonate and damage or destroy incoming bombers before they could drop their payloads on American cities. There were two major glitches in the scheme, however: First, balloons can’t be steered with any degree of accurracy and secondly, the explosions would go off over Canada. (Nice. Bring an umbrella.) Fortunately the program was a no go.

    Supersonic U-2 Spyplane

Sightings in the mid-1950s of UFOs travelling at great speeds and at great altitude coincide with development and secret testing regimes of the U-2 and subsequent generations of supersonic spy planes used (in the pre-satellite era) to spy on the Soviet Union and others. And there were similar reports coming from the eastern block. For example, those “ghost rockets” seen over Sweden after WWII, may have been Russian tests of captured German V-2 rockets. And in the 1980s the “V-shaped” UFOs seen over the United States and the famous British “Rendlesham” landing of an “arrowhead-shaped” craft in 1980 suggests test flights of F-117 stealth bombers and other stealth spy planes, aircraft that were then in the development stage.

    American Stealth Fighter-Bomber

And the gubmint? Intelligence agencies? Did they play a role in covering up secret aerospace programs, for decades in some cases? Of course, they did. Over the years, particularly during the middle of the last century, there were UFO organizations, support groups, reporting centres and so on, with tens of thousands of members worldwide. In Chronicles, JMG details the suspicious number of ‘former’ CIA agents and people connected with intelligence services who were members of these organizations (One example is J. Hynek, head of “Project Bluebook” whose role was to act as chief debunker of UFO sighting claims. He had connections to the Air Force via a third-party "cutout" agency.). These "spooks" and intelligence operators were members in both types of UFO organizations--ones that supported the idea of extraterrestrial encounters as well as in groups whose mandate it was to refute such claims. They played both sides of the saucer game. (If that's even possible.) Why? JMG suggests they were imbedded in the UFO scene to obfuscate, cloud the issues, promote disinformation and to act like magicians—waving their hands and magic wands around to draw the audience’s attention away from the real trick being played on them: hiding in plain sight various secret government weapons development projects begun after WWII.  

   Moving Fake Tank into Position

They took their cue from a fascinating WWII operation called “Operation Bodyguard” which created fake airfields and army barracks, fake weapons stores, fake tanks, artillery batteries, etc. staged across south-eastern England—like props you’d find on a Hollywood movie set—built to mislead the Germans and their spy network as to the time and the place of the forthcoming Allied invasion of occupied Europe. They hid in plain sight what they wanted the Germans to find (their fake invasion force and armaments), while the real Allied landing forces massed in Southampton and other southern English ports in preparation to cross the English Channel into France.  

    WWII "Foo-Fighters" Glowing Balls

This third hypothesis, the “skeptic” model I'll call it, is the one that offers rational explanations for most so-called extraterrestrial sightings and encounters. If we accept the formulations of Enrico Fermi’s 1950 ‘thought experiment’ (see Fermi’s Paradox) that the probability of Earth being visited by intelligent beings from distant worlds (or Earthlings visiting them) is vanishing small, then explanations about those lights in the sky and physical encounters with aliens will ultimately be seen to have decidedly earthly causes. Many turn out to involve deceptions made by governments to keep certain aerospace experiments under wraps. Others can be explained by natural phenomenon, reflections, faulty camera lens, misperceptions and so on. Some remain unsolved, perhaps involving yet-to-be-understood natural phenomena. “Foo-fighters”, for example, those mysterious round, glowing balls seen by pilots in WWII remain a mystery, and might have causes that further scientific study will disclose.

    "Greys"

Close encounters of the “third kind”—meeting “Greys” or “Little Green Men”, experiencing out-of-body sensations, “lost time”, bizarre settings and occurrances etc., are a bit different. Some of these encounters can be explained by repressed childhood memories coming to the surface of the contactees' consciousnesses. Some might be false memories, created intentionally or otherwise during hypnosis sessions. Some might simply be lies. ON THE OTHER HAND, some might be actual experiences of altered states of consciousness that we once associated with shamans, medicine men, witches and others who have mystical experiences. Such experiences and practices are frowned upon today in our scientific and rational world, and are seen as primative and regressive. Yet, people still crave for answers not found solely in science and logic or from mainstream religion. Perhaps, as our technologies faulter and become ineffective, or break down altogether, such experiences and practices may again become relevant in people's lives. Perhaps such UFO experiences can be better understood in this light.

Today, the UFO scene is dwindling, becoming less popular, less relevant to people. JMG says it will probably dwindle away like the Spiritualist Movement faded to irrelevance by the middle of the last century. On the other hand, a new religion might emerge from one of the UFO stories that still reside in the interstices of our culture and take hold of people’s imagination. Who knows? The truth is out there. Look to the skies!

 Cheers, Jake.

 

 

[According to the UFO Canadian Survey of 2019, 35 percent of the sightings came from Quebec, while Ontario reported 20 percent and British Columbia reported 17 percent. Far less were spotted up in the far north or on the east coast of Canada.]

 

*The term “flying saucer” originated from a newspaper story based on Kenneth Arnold’s account of his 1947 UFO sighting, in which he described seeing "crescent-shaped" objects moving through the air “like saucers skipping on water.” [italic mine] The reporter incorrectly transcribed or misstated that Arnold said the objects  were saucer-shaped, thus birthing the idea of flying saucers. Makes me want to get out the frisbee and take a few snaps!

Incidentally, “World UFO Day” is celebrated on either June 24 to mark the date of Arnold’s flight or July 2 to commemorate the Roswell, New Mexico UFO crash which also occurred in 1947. Take your pick.

 

**LeMay oversaw the fire bombings of Japanese cities during WWII and originated the infamous phrase: “Bomb them back to the stone age,” when he advocated using nuclear weapons during the Vietnam War. He later ran a third-party Vice Presidential candidacy as Governor George Wallace’s running mate. Mano-a-mano! He’s my kind of guy!

 

Q:What habit is most likely to aid you in viewing a UFO?

A: Smoking. You're outside staring off into space more than most people!