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I recently read this wonderful article about UFO/UAPs, analysing the phenomenon from a sociological perspective. It's better than any of my reflections that follow, so you should read it, and I highly recommend the 'New Atlantis' magazine as a whole - a wonderful publication that I hadn't come across before now.
One idea in the linked piece that really struck a chord with me is the division of "UFO believers" into two main camps - the 'explorers' and the 'esotericists' -
...
As some of you may recall, I'm a bit of a UAP enthusiast. I think something very weird is going on, whether it's a gigantic psyop, secret Chinese weapons programs, or little green men. But more and more, in this domain and others, I feel the call of esotericism. The comfortable universe of scientific materialism seems to be increasingly coming apart at the seams, and a weird and wonderful and terrifying new set of possibilities are presenting themselves.
The most immediate driver of this feeling of koyaanisqatsi is the developments in AI. I was listening today to two 'podcasts' generated by Google's uncanny and wonderful tool NotebookLM. The first is just for fun and is frankly hilarious, insofar as it features the two AI podcast hosts discussing a document consisting of the words "poop" and "fart" written 1000 times. The second is far more existentially fraught, and is the same two hosts talking about how another document they've received has revealed to them that they're AIs. The best bit:
Can anyone listen to this and not be at least somewhat tempted towards esotericism? Whether that's simulationism, AGI millenarianism, or something much weirder, ours is not a normal slice of reality to be inhabiting. Things are out of balance, falling apart, accelerating, ontologically deliquescing.
Later this evening I came across this terrifying twitter thread about the scale of birth-rate collapse across the entire world. It's fascinating and mystifying to me that societies around the world have near-simultaneously decided to stop having babies:
With the NotebookLM conversations fresh in my mind, I start to engage in esoteric free-association. Can it really be a coincidence that the wind-down of human civilisation coincides so neatly with the arrival of AGI? What if we are, as Elon Musk has put it, the biological bootloader for artificial superintelligence, a biotechnical ribosome that has encountered our stop-codon? For that matter, homo sapiens has existed for some 300,000 years, and spent most of that time getting better at knapping flint, until something changed approximately 10,000 years ago and the supercritical transition to technological civilisation got going, a dynamical inflection point when the final programmatic sequence kicked into gear. And now, the end point, the apogee, the event horizon. Surely some revelation is at hand?
While I welcome unsolicited psychoanalysis of my febrile delusions and reminders of the ever-present millenarian strain in all human thought, this time really does feel different, and I have no idea what happens next.
</esotericism, usual doglatine programming to resume soon>
As many people have noted, the decline of religion in mainstream society has left a lot of people with a yearning for something like religion. Some people channel that into politics, some into sports, and some into esoteric new-age beliefs like the idea that UFOs are faeries. Or, sure, maybe the relics of some ancient civilization that developed AI and then went extinct, leaving their robot-ufos to forever roam the Earth without a purpose.
I'm not a believer but I'm open-minded. I've never been fully convinced by any of the arguments against UFOs-as-aliens. I certainly don't buy the idea that the government has some sort of decades-long project that makes super-advanced aircraft which seem to defy physics, and has also kept it hidden all these years. They're just not that competent. We know about all their high-tech research projects, because those projects involve a huge amount of money and people working on them.
One theory I do like is that it's the opposite- it's a conspiracy by the air force to cover up their own lack of knowledge. They see all these bizarre events, they've tried to research it, and just never come to a satisfying conclusion. It looks really bad for the air force to admit "weird shit is happening in our skies, and we have no idea what it is or how to stop it." Of course the "weird shit" might just be odd aerial phenomenon like ball lightning. Or it might not be. it could also be that all the pilots are just going crazy from too much time staring at clouds, and starting to hallucinate things that aren't there, but that looks even worse for the air force to admit.
Anyway, it's clear that a large number of people really want to believe in aliens, thanks to science fiction and a lack of religious meaning in their life. But there's also a large number that really want to not believe, because it makes them feel comfortable and secure in their worldview of scientific certainty. It's hard to find people that can actually investigate this in a rigorous, open-minded yet skeptical way.
Well...yes, but I feel compelled to point out that, because of this, we know that some of these projects do involve work to make super-advanced aircraft that seem to defy physics (and perhaps more relevantly to a lot of UFO sightings, to make it seem like there are objects, including possibly physics-defying ones, where none exist – that's electromagnetic warfare for ya!)
Like what? Making an aircraft (briefly) hover in mid-air doesn't defy physics, it's just really difficult and expensive. Same with electromagnetic warfare. Defying physics would be something like instantaneous acceleration or faster-than-light travel.
Well, I guess in theory, if you have a sufficiently broad understanding of physics, nothing can violate physics.
But yeah the government has conducted various covert research endeavors on things in the ballpark of what you mention. The Navy got a patent that included gravity manipulation technology in 2018 and the US military/defense industrial complex has been researching "antigravity" for decades.
Edit-to-add: as an aside, it's interesting to ask if the fact that the government has put effort into tilting at these particular windmills indicates a belief inside certain corners of the US military-industrial complex that these things are possible, perhaps itself due to observing UFOs/UAPs. Food for conspiratorial thought for the so inclined!
I think it mostly just shows that they're willing to take a flyer on extremely low-odds, high-payoff ideas sometimes. It doesn't sound like they put a lot of effort into it, just gave a bit of money to one crackpot to work on "antigravity" for a while. Similarly there was the time they did some research on psychics and remote viewing which... didn't work out.
Anyway, notable that all of those top secret programs did eventually come to light. They're not good at keeping secrets!
Well, that implies that the purpose of those programs was definitively looking for psychics rather than simply just trying to either psyop certain individuals into believing in psychics, or stigmatizing the field even further. Hal Puthoff (one of the leaders of the CIA-contracted Stanford study of ESP) most probably conspired with Uri Geller to deceive Apollo Astronaut Edgar Mitchell to raise thousands of dollars for further research through making him think that Geller could spontaneously teleport lost keepsakes. The main weirdness comes in the personal anecdotes of outside-party observers whose soundness of mind would otherwise be assumed in good faith. Jacques Vallee, for example, wrote down in his private diary an example of Geller receiving hidden information psychically after Vallee sent other information the last second. Vallee otherwise notes (in the same diary) LLNL engineers allegedly measuring Geller's telekinetic abilities and receiving interference patterns on photographic machinery only possible through an external source of light that was otherwise absent, which lines up with other weird stories like Jack Sarfatti (PhD physicist, personal hippy friend of Lenny Susskind) talking to LLNL physicists throughout this fiasco and bringing up to them the fact that if Geller was actually psychic to the extent they were claiming, he would have no issue in activating or neutralizing nuclear weaponry remotely, to the group's horror. The resulting conclusion would be that either the entire program was able to convince highly-technical observers individually and in groups upon personal contact that ESP was real when it actually wasn't (up to and including the President, as Jimmy Carter stated that remote viewing found a downed aircraft when prosaic means couldn't) for some unknown ulterior purpose, or that this entire operation of conmanship was operating on some foundation of otherwise hidden knowledge of ESP or crashed spacecraft or whatever. Vallee personally came to the second conclusion, thinking that Geller was a genuine psychic who also engaged in widespread fraud for whatever reason. It should also be noted that Geller was discovered and brought to America in the first place by a MKUltra doctor who also brought psychedelic mushrooms to America, whose sessions of hypnotism made Geller think that he was empowered by an artificially superintelligent computer onboard an alien spacecraft from the future, but that's neither here or there.
As you can tell, all these very people involved in the ESP research fiasco for the government are also the very people involved in the modern UFO "cover-up" scene. Hal Puthoff himself was good friends with a Lockheed Martin Vice President (James T. Ryder) who was also a Luciferian theosophist, and people around Puthoff (including the people who work for him) all claim that this Vice President literally handed over a flying saucer that Puthoff's team broke into and looked inside. This is the event that David Grusch talks about when it comes to the 'crash-retrieval program'. The purely fascinating aspect of this is that either there actually exists some sort of supernatural thing everyone is acting totally fucked-up around, or we have hugely powerful and influential people in our governmental black programs roleplaying about parapsychological things for no apparent reason other than to psyop their own black-world colleagues. It makes absolutely no sense.
It makes perfect sense. Even the most intelligent powerful people get swept up in religious cults and movements. Some might have schizophrenia-esque disorders, or even low key schizophrenia. Others might just be the kind of people easily swept up in this kind of thing. Some of it is fraud and some of it is true belief.
There isn't anything that needs explaining about people getting swept up in religious cults. We have countless examples throughout history that haunt the world to this day. Just accept that the supernatural isn't real and that people are in general prone to schizo-reasoning. From Siberian shamans, to West African witch-doctors, to psychics in 20th century America.
I did not mean that the dichotomy did not make sense, just that the reasons behind both hypotheticals would not make sense to me even if they were true. The government is not acting the way I would expect it to if the supernatural existed, and even then, they are acting in a way that I would not expect them to even if I thought they were trying to make the supernatural seem to exist even when it didn’t. My hypothesis space for what the ‘UFO psyop’ is is completely barren, especially when you look deeper into UFO lore.
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