We know that, despite there being “no evidence of a direct threat to national security,” the infamous CIA-sponsored Scientific Advisory Panel on UFOs (the Robertson Panel) formally suggested debunking the phenomenon to “reduce the current gullibility of the public and consequently their susceptibility to clever hostile propaganda,”71 going so far as to suggest the Disney corporation be involved in such public re-education. This is especially intriguing considering Disney animator Ward Kimball worked with Von Braun, was an original founding board member of the Fund for UFO Research, and claimed that the Air Force approached Disney to produce alien acclimatization films.72 And what about Walt Disney Studios Director of Educational Research, Robert S. Carr, whom Vallée claims worked for Disney on classified projects73 and later became a regional director for NICAP?
One of the other outcomes of the Robertson Panel was the CIA memo from H. Marshall Chadwell to the Director of Central Intelligence urging “the psychological strategy board immediately investigate possible offensive or defensive utilization of the phenomena for psychological warfare purposes both for and against the United States.”
Certainly, we have evidence of several human agencies attempting such manipulation through popular culture, as reported in Silver Screen Saucers, in which Robbie Graham documents the Robertson Panel’s debunking influence more than a dozen years later on the 1966 CBS TV broadcast of UFOs: Friend, Foe, or Fantasy? (narrated by Walter Cronkite), and Pentagon employee Chief Master Sgt. Mike Gasparetto’s recognition of the 2007 Spielberg production of Transformers as “a great recruiting tool.” Graham also documents the history of U.S. government and military bait and switch operations in which filmmakers are offered tantalizing evidence of UFOs and alien reality as part of apparent acclimatization efforts, only to renege at the last moment.74
More recently we have pop-punk singer turned UFO disclosure spokesperson Tom DeLonge claiming contact with military sources feeding him information verifying a wide variety of UFO myths. However, thanks to the WikiLeaks release of John Podesta’s emails, we have record of DeLonge perhaps giving us a truer hint at what his military mentors are really after. DeLonge says in an email to Podesta, “This project is about changing the cynical views of youth towards government.”75
We have over 15 years of evidence of elaborate campaigns conducted by both corporate and non-governmental organizations utilizing people’s interest in UFOs, the paranormal, and conspiracies for viral/stealth marketing and alternative reality gaming, from the Majestic ARG76 in 2001 to the Fourth Kind movie (resulting in Universal Pictures paying out $22,500 to the Alaska Press Club and Calista Scholarship Fund for its use of ‘fake news’ and websites promoting the false storyline)77 to the MacMillan Space Centre’s viral marketing UFO drone hoax78 in 2013 and the faked green fireball video and crashed alien-craft site for a FutureLife smart-drink ad campaign in South Africa79 in December 2015.
Tension surrounding any subject can lead to very negative behavior and outcomes. Within the UFO literature there are obvious tensions surrounding the issues of race, ridicule, and sovereignty of nation states and individuals, not to mention the potential domination and subjugation resulting from encountering a technologically superior species. The manipulation of such tensions is the domain of public relations, both commercial and political.
Researchers Wendt and Duvall point out in their 2008 paper, “Sovereignty and the UFO,” that state institutions are inherently threatened by the very possibility of such potential otherworldly political actors due to the anthropocentric structure of modern rule. Such alien interlopers violate our airspace and populations at will and call into question the relevance of individual state sovereignty in favor of potential global governance in the face of potential off-world visitors. Thus the governing structures have had to ignore the phenomena and enforce the “UFO taboo.”
In the face of such empires of ignorance, Wendt and Duvall rightly advocate for (while acknowledging the dangers of) a militant agnostic resistance to the UFO taboo:
… resistance must also be militant, by which we mean public and strategic, or else it will indeed be futile… Modern rule and its metaphysics are extraordinarily resilient, so the difficulties of such resistance cannot be overstated. Those who attempt it will have difficulty funding and publishing their work, and their reputations will suffer. UFO resistance might not be futile but it is certainly dangerous, because it is resistance to modern sovereignty itself. In this respect, militant UFO agnosticism is akin to other forms of resistance to governmentality.80
In our attempts at understanding UFOs and possible contact with Alien Others, let us recognize the challenge of resisting and overcoming such taboos so that we may be free of both the cultural overlays imposed by our faulty perceptions, and the perception management programs being waged against us, whether in furtherance of global governance or nationalistic independence and xenophobic tribalism. We, as stewards of spaceship earth, must no longer be ruled by false fears of counterfeit foes, nor the manufactured machinations and stratagems of empires that seek to undermine our ability to truly see and understand whatever lies behind the UFO phenomenon.
UFOS AND MODERN CAPITALISM: DISSENT, DISENFRANCHISEMENT, AND THE FRINGE
MJ Banias
“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
—FREDRIC JAMESON, OR SO SOME PEOPLE SAY.
UFO discourse exists upon the fringes of mainstream social reality. It has been othered by the mechanisms of popular culture and relegated to the taboo fringe. This is not the result of some government conspiracy, nor some hidden cabalistic agenda; rather, it is the constructs of modern ideological capitalism that have entrenched ufology into the outer limits of contemporary society and culture. This essay will establish the ideological illusions generated by modern capitalism, and how and why the general sciences work against UFO discourse, in order to outline the ways in which UFO discourse is opposed to the capitalist ideological establishment. I will argue that it is due to this conflict between capitalism and UFO discourse that ufology is forever trapped in a marginalized state.
As I was drafting this essay, I was reminded of John Carpenter’s satirical sci-fi film, They Live (1988), in which drifter John Nada, played by Roddy Piper, stumbles upon sunglasses that allow him to “see” the world for what it truly is. When he first puts them on, the advertisements on billboards change from their usual imagery to words such as “CONSUME” and “CONFORM.” All money, instead of bearing the usual American symbolism, is simply a white piece of paper stamped with the word “OBEY.” Everyday modes of consumption, advertisements, objects, and capitalism itself, shed their normal exterior, and become “clear” for what they are—mechanisms to control humanity.
Nada learns that certain people are not what they seem. The sunglasses give him the power to visually differentiate actual humans from the film’s antagonists, skeletal-faced aliens who are infiltrating Earth. These aliens are in positions of corporate and political leadership; they manipulate world economic markets, the media, and government in an attempt to deplete Earth of its natural resources for their own personal gain. They are the perfect capitalists.
Nada realises that the constructs of our reality, the ideological messages that exist in the media or in everyday economic exchange, are false and have no basis in True reality. Rather, they are illusions, constructed by those in power, to control. In the film, Nada is able openly to resist once he learns the truth.
As an audience, we are not so lucky. That power to understand True reality is inaccessible because all human understanding is shaped by ideological constructs—value and belief systems established in our minds by our social and cultural upbringing. There is only the universe we have constructed ourselves; an objective reality is forever out of reach; all attempted understanding and communication about such a reality would be hindered by our social and cultural illusions, languages, and mechanisms. We are, in essence, entrenched in an ideological illusion. T
here is no place we can “stand” to view or know, unfiltered, an unadulterated reality; our perception of the objective truth is fundamentally based upon human social and cultural conditions.
In They Live, Nada is forced to experience the crumbling of his ideological world. When the modes and mechanisms of economic production and consumption shed their ideological exteriors, Nada realizes the entire Capitalist system is nothing more than an insidious fantasy to control the human race. To Nada, the differences between a homeless drifter and an elite banker disappear. Poverty and wealth, even producer and consumer, become meaningless once Nada finds the sunglasses in a dumpster—there is only humanity (the oppressed), and the alien invaders (the oppressors).
For those of us who live outside of the film, there are no such sunglasses. However, by attempting to deconstruct our ideologies, we might be able, at least, to get a Nada-esque peek into these mechanisms of social control. To establish why UFO discourse has been pushed to the fringes of the social world, much like the homeless drifter Nada, we need to sort out who or what is controlling the ideological illusion, from where does the power come that constrains ufological debate to the realm of the oppressed, and who or what is the oppressor?
Going Down the Rabbit Hole
Many in the UFO subculture claim that a secret cabal, shadow government, or similar group of individuals is responsible for the purposeful relegation of the UFO to the lunatic fringe. This, unfortunately, is a dogmatic conspiracy theory based upon belief. There is no secret society that has imprisoned UFO discourse; rather, it is our collective social reality, governed by the mechanisms of modern capitalist ideology, that has done so. There is no conspiracy. There does not need to be one. Capitalism is, in simple terms, an ideology designed to control. Ideological capitalism permeates and drives our culture; it is what relegates ufology beyond the fringes of acceptable social discourse.
In order to discuss ufology and its place within our cultural discourse, we must first understand capitalism and its insidious operation within our society. The elite and wealthy 1% control the physical and economic representations of capitalism, such as banks, big oil and pharmaceuticals, weapons manufacturing, and various other multinational corporate entities. The physical economic structures of capitalism are maintained by groups of people who have their own agenda: to line their pockets and maintain the economic status quo. We can see why some in the UFO subculture have concluded that a secret society is running the planet. In very simplistic terms, maybe they are—but it’s not a secret, nor is it hidden, and we, the people, have given our consent for those physical capitalist structures to exist and flourish. More importantly, these physical manifestations of modern capital are simply a piece of the puzzle. Modern capital has moved beyond being controlled by those in elite positions of power. Capitalism, which we generally define as the hegemonic global economic system, has ultimately been established as the only economic system. No country in the world exists free of the capitalist model. It is more than simple economics; it is a system that generates ideology. It has grown beyond money and trade—it has become a way of thinking. Our social consciousness revolves around it. Our daily existence and experience, our shared cultural ideology, our collective reality, is modern capitalism. By hook or by crook, you and I have allowed no knowable reality to exist outside of it.
The economic crash of 2008 serves as an example of how modern capital functions beyond physical economics and maintains ideological illusion. The American government, which is supposedly designed to serve the people and the public good, openly protects the physical and ideological mechanisms of capitalism. When the big banks caused the financial crash of 2008, and the government sponsored a bailout, the government allocated more than 12 trillion public tax dollars1 to pay for the mistakes (or crimes) of privately owned banking institutions. While there was an initial public outcry, nothing was, or has, changed. No serious enforceable regulations to protect the public were put in place to ensure this could not happen again. With the exception of one investment trader, none of the high-level bankers who caused this crash went to prison, somehow circumventing the legal system designed to protect the people. As of 2015, only $4.8 trillion of the bailout package has been given to the banks.2 It is interesting that the American news media does not discuss the $8 trillion public dollars (at the time of writing) still being paid out to private corporations, when funding for education and other public services are being cut. No conspiracy, no secrets. All of this is public knowledge reported to the people by mainstream media. Modern capitalism is not only an economic system, it is also an information system that generates public perception and awareness. In effect, it is the ideological structure of our contemporary world, inescapable and omnipresent.
If modern capitalism is responsible for the relegation of UFO discourse to the fringe, the first question we need to ask is: why? To get to an answer, we must “look awry” at UFO discourse, and the systems of power that repress it. We must chip away at the “symbolic order” of modern capital.3 We must understand that capitalist ideology permeates our cultural reality, and that it uses the bastion of objective truth we call Science to force its ideological agenda.
Science, The Rebel Who Sold Out
When asked about the scientific tracking of UFO sightings and reports during an interview on the Open Minds podcast in 2015, UFO researcher and author Chris Rutkowski responded by saying:
[This data] is the foundation upon which all the speculation is based. The whole constituent of ufology is based on these reports from the average person… this is what is really being seen. When you strip away all the other stuff, we know these cases are real. Let’s try to build on this basis… go from the data outwards rather than from the outside into the data.4
The general sciences discredit ufology due to its speculative nature, primarily regarding hypotheses suggesting the existence of an intelligent Other visiting Earth. While the scientific community’s objection to ufology may be legitimate, good ufologists, like Rutkowski, do not “cry aliens” when a well-documented/credible UFO sighting occurs. Rather, they cry, “What was that? We probably should look into it …” It is interesting that the same cry was the basis for the birth of the sciences as a social enterprise. The sciences established themselves upon a principle of counter-culture, a revolt against mainstream ideological thinking—people, primarily men, wanted to escape the ancient religious stranglehold on knowledge, and to develop an enlightened observable method by which to understand the world. Today, science is no longer counter cultural, but is now the arbiter of mainstream culture, the self-proclaimed hub by which all knowledge is. Ironically, science has become what it rebelled against.
Science has adopted an ideological illusion that it is the only road to “the Truth.” Academia has entrenched science into the social worldview as the harbinger of destruction for religion and, if one reads Neil deGrasse Tyson,5 the destroyer of philosophy. Interestingly, we collectively understand, scientists included, that science does not have all the answers right now. We also understand that future developments will undoubtedly change many of the scientific rules, laws and theories we now “know.” However, science, in some strange ironic twist of ideology, is also able to convince people that some ideas are not worth studying. It is a curious phenomenon. Scientists, and people in general, accept the present limitations of the sciences, and its future potential to grow and change, yet, in the same breath, they are able to dismiss other ideas, such as UFOs, as apparent nonsense.
We accept the ideological myths told by the sciences; they “make sense” to us. However, significant scientific “facts” have been proven, and later disproven as human knowledge expands, grows and shifts. As our cultural and social landscape changes, so too does current scientific knowledge. Take Phrenology, for example, a cutting-edge science in the 19th century that attempted to prove the size and shape of one’s skull was a measure of intelligence. Obviously, this is nothing more than a debunked pseudoscience today, as all evid
ence currently contradicts it—but, in the 19th century, brain scientists taught this theory in universities and colleges. From an economic and political standpoint, it was used to justify racism, slavery and colonization. Science was used to justify an economic agenda: the subjugation of a group based upon “scientific facts.” Today, the sciences continue to support the power of the corporate elite. While it may not be used openly to dehumanize, as it did centuries ago, it does create a simulated sense of truth, the illusion of objective reality which, actually, is ideology.
That being said, the UFO phenomenon has not been relegated to the sidelines because of scientists themselves. In actuality, scientists do not usually oppose UFO discourse; indeed, like most people, undoubtedly they do not even think about it. It is simply a non-issue for them. They really don’t care about it. However, the few scientists who are interested in ufological phenomena are looked at with curiosity. Any scientist who pursues an interest in the subject has a choice to make: they can shut up about their fascination with UFOs and work on the projects that fit within established parameters, or, they will choose option one but continue to work privately on their ufological research. Unfortunately, this work will be slower, as they will have to use their spare time and their own resources. Also they do not have the aid of their peers to review the work. A third option is to “go rogue.” They leave their employer and dedicate their life to the study of the UFO phenomenon. There is almost no outside funding for this type of work; the scientists will be ostracized and targeted by the scientific establishment for going “loony.” There is simply no organization that works within the mainstream official scientific community that will fund scientific research into UFOs. Why?
UFOs- Reframing the Debate Page 19