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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?
In Dan Carlin's Hardcore History series King of Kings, he recalls that his college professor once asked "What influence has magic had upon history?" Meaning that, while we know today that magic doesn't exist, the ancients thought it may have existed. Due to this, the ancient Persians disseminated propaganda boasting about their powerful mages, which may have scared their enemies such that the Persians had an edge on the battlefield.
I think the USA's handling of alien technology is similar. It's designed to scare our potential enemies (foreign or domestic) into thinking we may have alien military technology, or at least to create enough public doubt such that our enemies need to waste time considering whether or not we have alien technologies. If this is the case, the U.S. military would have an incentive to cultivate this belief, which they could accomplish by releasing doctored footage of mysterious spaceships or by having ex-military guys claim that they saw alien technology.
They wouldn't have just thought it would have existed, thanks to the placebo effect it actually would have existed in a real way. If you were a medieval scientist who did a study comparing the outcomes between people who received magical healing and those who did not, the people who received magical healing would most likely show better subjective outcomes (objective too most likely, but good luck measuring blood concentration levels in 200 BC) and recovery rates. When you remember that the placebo effect exists and you can even see people getting (placebo-equivalent) results from faith healing in the modern day, I think that believing in magic is actually entirely reasonable for the ancients - after all, a double-blinded study would actually provide evidence for the efficacy of magical healing in those times, so I don't feel like judging them too hard for believing what would actually be statistically significant and easily replicable phenomenon in their context.
One of the other uses for magic, divination, was useful because it essentially functioned as a random number generator - and if you're trying to make sure that your opponents cannot predict your movements, literally throwing the dice and picking at random is often the optimal strategy. There are actually real, adaptive reasons for the ancients to believe in magic, it would have been a useful tool in their lives and the experiments they were capable of performing would indeed show that magic was real for them.
Why would magical healing prove more effective than a placebo in a double blind study, where, by definition, neither the doctor nor the patient knows whether the patient receives the “real” treatment or a placebo?
I may have been being a bit glib - my mind automatically translated "most effective research technique we have for dealing with placebos and magic in the modern day" and simply transposed it to the past. I meant more that their most effective research techniques would actually produce repeatable and consistent evidence that magical healing worked.
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