But I also see the value in keeping this stuff under at least some shadow of a doubt, as it helps control a very panicky, armed citizenry who "have enough problems" to worry about. One of our tax dollar services is that the government provides a kind of 'flat earth' cover-up, a "Go back to sleep, grandpa! Humans are still A-Number One!" lullaby for the riot-ready herd. I've compared the "are they really here or not?" debate as akin to the production code of Hollywood in the 1940s-50s, giving people both answers at the same time, so the children and moralists can believe they didn't (have sex) and the hip cats can know they did. And why not? It's basic psychology that once you give people a straight answer, they just ask ten more questions... until all mystery and excitement is drained from their lives. You do them a favor when you hide stuff, like hiding the polar bear's meat in hard to find places at the zoo.
If you want proof the people would panic at full disclosure, consider the reaction to Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" broadcast in 1938. You can also see how the public aren't ready for disclosure by the way they expect the government and the law to supply 'answers' and 'solutions' to alien visitations. If you expect the government to prevent hurricanes, for example, the only thing they can do is order you to evacuate and/or board up your windows. If you demand they do something about the UFO probe hovering over your town, the best they can do is tell you it's a mirage, or a weather balloon, and to return to your homes. If you are smart enough to know it's no weather balloon, you are smart enough to know the cops can't do much about it, so why call them?
Instead you might examine the way you lean on 'the big Other' of government to protect you, the way a child would its parent at a scary carnival. Naturally the parent's job--if you're scared--is to tell you the monsters in the spookhouse aren't real. But if you're not scared, they do you a disservice by telling you... better you don't bring your parents along at all and pretend (i.e. know) to be scared for your little broth, and have a great spine-tingling freak out together. Why the need to feel that unless everyone else believes it, it can't be true? Why not be the only one on your block who knows the true score, and just keeps it to yourself, and your little brother? Don't run around like Chicken Little, just meditate, and keep reading all the great books on the subject.
Disinformation runs rampant, but I think the people who are controlling all this information are doing a bang up job at leaking it all out slowly enough alongside the false stuff that by the time 'the tipping point' comes we wont need to panic, and suddenly instead of UFO nuts being picked on, those who "don't" believe will be made out to seem like repressed weirdos of the "world is flat" variety.
By case in point, there's a documentary right on Netflix streaming, amateurishly done almost by intention, that collects 'the best evidence' of all the UFO material, including Bob Lazar's famous interviews, analysis and presentation of alleged Roswell crash material and something I didn't know of at all before, the work of surgeon Roger Leir, a doctor who has removed 11 implants from abductees and has had enough analysis done on them to know the material they're made of is distinctly extraterrestrial, and what's more, in the areas of the body where they've been found there is no evidence of any kind of infection, antibody resistance, scarring, or anything to indicate a human stuck those things in there (such as inside the jaw near the bone, etc.)
If you don' have Netflix streaming (the documentary is called CLOSE ENCOUNTERS: PROOF OF ALIEN CONTACT) you can read all about Leir's findings and qualifications on the web, including UFO Digest:
Normally there is an inflammation response to any foreign object in the body. This results from white blood cell activity in the area, attempting to rid the body of what it considers garbage that doesn't belong there. If the object is something soft, like a sliver, the body is able to disintegrate it and take it away one piece at a time. If the body can't remove the foreign object, it does the next best thing. Thousands of cells join together in a process called differentiation, changing form and surrounding the object to wall it off and separate it from the rest of the body. Any type of foreign object placed in the body -- whether by accident, such as a splinter, or something surgically inserted by a doctor -- will show this type of inflammation. So it was extremely strange that the pathology reports on these objects showed no inflammatory cells at all. Another strange thing was also discovered. In the tissue around each implant, there were numerous nerve endings that didn't belong there. None of the investigators could say why these nerve endings were there, but it suggests the possibility that the implants act as some kind of monitoring device through attachment to the nervous system. (...) When Dr. Leir received the three different scrapings of the membrane coatings from Derrel Sims, he sent them out to three separate pathologists. When the reports came back, it turned out that the main ingredient in this very tough membrane was something simply made from blood. In this bloody mass were some brown granules. The pathologists did an iron stain test and found that these brown granules were made of oxygen-carrying pigment from human red blood cells. Besides this, they also found a material called keratin, which comprises the outer layers of human skin, hair and fingernails. Dr. Leir pointed out that if medical science could figure out how to duplicate this membrane, we would solve one of the biggest problems in medicine, that of transplant rejection. The membrane around the objects was apparently composed of material from the patients' own bodies BEFORE the objects were inserted. If we knew how to do this, we could put almost anything into the human body and have absolutely no rejection.
Leir and Sims illustrated the structure of one of the implants taken from the woman's toe. When first removed, it was flat and triangular. When the outer membrane was removed, inside were two separate pieces of shiny black metal, tightly joined together in the shape of a "T". Apparently only the membrane itself held these two metal pieces in alignment. On February 22, 1996, the first preliminary lab reports came back on the metal itself. Leir and Sims both said they would await the final reports before announcing any details. They stressed that they had sent the samples for testing to highly specialized labs and had not indicated anything about where the samples came from. Dr. Leir told the Thousand Oaks audience that the preliminary findings are "mind-boggling," and that the first metallurgist simply said: "Wow, you guys really found something here." Dr. Leir stated that as soon as they get final reports from all three labs, they will make their findings public. "I think you're watching history," he said in conclusion. (UFO Digest 8/10)
Say what you will about that documentary, I found it very refreshing in its lack of skepticism. If you read the above and find yourself getting angry at how we're all getting taken for a ride by a quack doctor and his attention seeking gambits, then maybe you're just not ready to 'let this in.' That's fine. That's why I like that I had to 'look' for this evidence in a badly reviewed, left-of-the-dial documentary (two stars based on netflix viewer ratings!) rather than seeing it plastered on the front page of the Times where it would stir only a national panic.
And if it's not true, so what? Why let it make you mad that some people believe it? It doesn't directly effect the events of your day, so it needn't effect your life one way or another, any more than a house fly should be expected to worry about your taxes. Your job and family aren't in jeopardy by accepting the fact--pretty unshakable if you have an open mind--that 'they're here.' So what's the big deal? Why is science unwilling to even accept mountains of eyewitness testimony as the basis for even a workable hypothesis? Shall I tell you? Or do you know by now that once you open that door you can never close it, that admitting the truth will not provide us with answers so much as an infinite number of terrifying questions. Do we really want to learn that we're not on the top of the food chain after all? Do we want to know what really happens to the cattle, and the missing children?
There's so many documentaries on UFOs out there that are either a) conservative, no-risk science with flimsy rationalizations, b) full of obvious hoaxes almost to discredit the entire idea, and c) stuck at the "But what if...." stage. The CLOSE ENCOUNTERS documentary goes way past all that to become its own one-doc disclosure proclamation: "well... so they're definitely real, science now has its hard evidence, so what now?" I like that, it takes guts, and the shoddy construction of the film helps it go down with just enough dubious fringes--just enough BLAIR WITCH-iness-- that you can still fall asleep at night.
Gulf Breeze
I also like that it looks beyond the hang-up a lot of UFO researchers have about "disclosure," as if disclosure is the be-all and end-all, that once it happens all their worries will be over because they'll know for sure they were right, which is understandable if you're devoted to the study and have been doing all this good work for so long while idiots around you jeer and scientists wont let you in their dorky clubs, or that you're jonesing for some mainstream recognition, to become the Newton or Einstein of your day, but if you're not, why do you care so much what the government says? Even when they disclose they'll be lying.
Validation from Big Brother is just the curtain parting on an even bigger curtain. It's like THE WIZARD OF OZ suddenly reversed, with the gentle old man Frank Morgan as the mask in front--the sneering scientist declaring UFOs a lot of rot--and the crazy green face--terrifying in its size and scope like you can't imagine, waiting behind the curtain, and behind that, still another curtain to be pulled, maybe scarier, maybe stranger, maybe God-esque. Don't blame the shadowy sects who work so hard to spare you the shock and awesome horror. You'll thank them later, like you'd thank parents who didn't let you see THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE until you were at least 13 and so allowed you to grow up untraumatized. The government similarly won't tell you the CHAINSAW MASSACRE is not even a movie, and that in just two years you're going to get sawed up and served, literally, at the thanksgiving table of hungry reptoid pilgrims.
And anyway, even if it's not true, you can pretend you're pretending it's true for the scare effect, like THE BLAIR WITCH and PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (above, see also my Acidemic review).
It might be interesting for people still wrestling with whether or not aliens are on our planet, coming and going in ways our science can't comprehend any more than a dog can comprehend nuclear physics. And in our sly will-to-stay-sane-y way, we're playing right into their hands. At any rate, they like things as they are -- obviously. They don't want to land on the White House lawn like scared skeptics demand any more than nature documentary teams want to intervene in the matters of the the African Serengeti. Imagine a pride of lions reasoning that they're the highest life form in the universe, because if those humans at the edge of the preserve really existed, why don't they come forward and challenge the dominant male of the pride? Obviously as they have no fangs and claws, they're not real.
Arizona lights, 1997
Or, imagine a jeep of nature conservationists spotting lions attacking a gazelle and racing to stop it. "That gazelle had a family, goddamnit!" Since we don't do that, the gazelles think we're evil. "How can God the protector of our Eden actually exist if he lets this slaughter of our people go on?"
Or now take the metaphor further, the conservationists decide to tag the ears of some gazelles so they can monitor the population, and to check their blood and see what parasites they're carrying, etc.. So they grab a gazelle, take a blood sample, tag its ear with a plastic tag, and release it back into the wild. Maybe while examining him they notice he has ringworm, so they give him a shot for it. Then they release him into the wild and he gambols away as if nothing happened. The gazelle's brain isn't really hardwired to accept this strange event, but somehow this gazelle, even without a proper memory as such, feels that something weird happened to him, something not of his world.
His friends don't believe it; that plastic thing on his ear is probably a leaf and will fall off in time. They analyze the plastic tag in their gazelle labs (they nibble at it and do a taste test) and since it doesn't compare to any leaves they know of, and they can't eat it, they dismiss the tag as an tumor in the ear of said gazelle and quickly change the subject. There's lions to worry about!
Even more complex, different agendas persist: some humans invade and kill gazelles for sport, or to take their horns or meat, some just tag them or take pictures. There's not much gazelles can do about it, so they forget it. In dreams they remember the white men with the tags and needles as a lion, a lion with thin sharp venomous stinger claws, but only in dreams, cover memories, ways to try and fit the strange events of their lives into their normal existence. If the abducted gazelle demands the dominant buck do something about it, the only avenue said buck has, therefore, is to assure the herd this gazelle was only dreaming.
This conversation never happened. Do you deny it? Don't worry, aliens can't stand the cold germs that God, in his infinite wisdom, spread upon the earth, and every once in awhile a fast lion takes a human hunter down. They can be stopped. But first they have to be believed--and not in a half-assed 'oh yeah, military knows all about 'em' way, but in a "holy freakin' we're barely a pawn in this cosmic game and we're fin to get our asses kicked off the board any day now" way, and who wants to deal with that, except artists and crazy people? For they alone have always felt thus. Ask not for whom the flu germs toll, they toll for thee.
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