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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   35268 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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Further developments on the ayy lmao front

You may recall a few weeks ago, former intelligence officer David Grusch came out with claims that the US has several alien spacecraft in its possession, and has been studying and reverse-engineering them for decades. While claims like this have floated around for decades, including from former government employees, Grusch was different because of his undeniable credentials, and because he is going through 'proper' whistleblower channels.

This was the latest act in a drama that goes back to 2017 (well, 1947, but let's not get ahead of ourselves), when Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal published a piece in the New York Times disclosing the existence of a pentagon program dedicated to studying UFOs, known as AATIP (or AAWSAP, depending on when and where) led by a man called Lue Elizondo. This sparked an apparent sea change in government, and UFOs and aliens, formerly dismissed out of hand, began to be taken more seriously.

Everyone from Obama to former CIA director John Brennan started dropping hints that hey maybe aliens might possibly could be here. Some apparently very sober Navy pilots came forward and shared their apparently inexplicable experiences on 60 minutes. Lue Elizondo did the talk-show circuit.

'UFOs' were rebranded 'UAPs' since over the past few decades, 'UFO' had become synonymous with 'flying saucer.' Congress held its first UFO hearings in over fifty years. A new office, AARO, was founded to investigate and classify UAP sightings..

Well, now the latest development. Chuck Schumer has sponsored a congressional amendment with bipartisan support mandating that, if it exists, any alien biological or technological material, or any evidence of non-human intelligence (and yes the bill uses those terms) held by any private or illegal government entity be turned over to congress.

I've been pretty skeptical about this whole thing. NY Post journalist Steven Greenstreet provides an alternative narrative, where this is the result of a small but fanatical, well-financed, and well-motivated group of UFO/paranormal fanatics that has been pushing all of this stuff for years in and outside of government, without any real proof to back any of it up. He has provided evidence that AATIP started out not as a 'UFO program' but as a pet project of senator Harry Reid, who in conjunction with Robert Bigelow, another big-time paranormal fan, wanted first and foremost to conduct a study of Skinwalker Ranch, which they believe(d) to be a hot-bed of supernatural activity, including werewolves and (as Greenstreet never tires of pointing out) "dinobeavers." While the media has focused on the apparently more grounded, sober claims of mysterious craft in the sky demonstrating apparent technological superiority to any known human craft, a lot of people don't realize just how closely aliens and UFOs are tied up with werewolves, bigfoot, demons, ghosts, remote viewing, and every other kind of woo.

That said, now that Chuck Schumer is sponsoring legislation that boils down to "show me the aliens!" it's getting harder for me to believe that this is all down to a small band of committed UFO nuts taking everybody (themselves included) for a ride. I'm still skeptical, and I still don't think this is going to end with a flying saucer being wheeled in front of congress. But it seems increasingly undeniable that something is going on here. The lazy counter is "it's a psyop" but one has to ask, "a psyop to what end?" To increase government funding for the military? I don't think the military needs to put on a dog and pony show like this to squeeze some extra dollars out of congress. To "distract us"? This stuff tends to not be front-page news, actually. I don't think a lot of people have even heard about this new amendment. To fake an alien invasion and use it as a springboard for a one-world government? I kinda doubt it. To scare Russia and China? That would be the most plausible version of the "psyop" hypothesis I think, but it still doesn't ring true for me.

Another possibility is this: it is known that the government has, for ulterior motives, psyopped people into believing in UFOs and ultimately driven them insane.. It's entirely possible that this is all 'sincere' insofar as, within the tangled web that is the US federal government, there are SAPs staffed at least in part by people who believe they're studying or have studied alien spacecraft or alien bodies, even though they aren't, because they've been lied to or misled by their colleagues and superiors.

IMO at this point, that's the most likely explanation.

Or maybe it really is aliens.

As to the culture war angle, interestingly, with the exception of Kristen Gillibrand, who is not the leftiest of dems, most of the representatives and senators who have been vocal and active in pushing for UAP transparency have been republicans like Marco Rubio, Tim Burchett, Mike Gallagher, and Anna Paulina Luna. If some government official does come out and say, "yes, okay, fine we have a flying saucer in the basement" it is interesting to think that aliens might become a new culture war battlefield, with aliens-are-real being right coded and aliens-are-fake being left coded. But seeing how in-flux political alignments were in the early months of COVID, who knows?

Reminds me of the MJ-12 documents. As Skeptoid theorized:

During the early days of the cold war, the Air Force became concerned that such UFO groups might conceivably collect actual sensitive information about classified Air Force capabilities. It stood to reason that Soviet spies — who were no dummies — might reasonably attempt to infiltrate such groups. It was perfectly plausible that the UFO groups on stakeout formed a pipeline of classified information to Soviet spies. And so in an ironic twist, the UFO groups, who intended to support national security by revealing what they thought was an alien threat, actually became the national security threat themselves.

...

How was the Air Force to deal with this potential leak? They could have arrested the UFO guys, but among the various types of fallout that would create was the fact that such arrests would certify to any Soviet spies that the information was indeed valuable. Another way to deal with it was with disinformation, to discredit the UFO groups by persuading them that their observations did indeed pertain to aliens, and not to actual Air Force capabilities. Soviet spies were much less likely to take interest in claims of flying saucers than they were in film of American F-117A aircraft. So the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) developed a new expertise: Feeding made-up disinformation about aliens and UFOs to the UFO enthusiasts, indicating that the United States did indeed have deep relationships with aliens. In some cases, this information — which was exactly what the UFO groups salivated for — was actually provided in exchange for information about the UFO groups' movements and what data they may have collected.

This does have quite a bit of explanation for other parts of the story that never seemed sensible. Like moon bases, aliens needing human dna, hybrids (which I don’t think make biological sense at all as life on another planet might have different t-rna and thus the DNA would essentially produce gibberish proteins and thus not a hybrid living being), and sharing technology (which, assuming they’re far enough ahead of us to travel to other solar systems is likely to be incomprehensible much like us trying to explain jet travel to Abraham). All of these things are sci-fi tropes more or less, including more than one type of alien, galactic wars, and hippie ideas of ascension make perfect sense as cover. None of it would require those telling the tales to know anything about astronomy, chemistry, physics, or biology. Hell they don’t even need to explain how they’re translating the alien language.

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