Lonely Planets

by David Grinspoon

  the hands of the military for decades. For example, we mastered antigrav-

  ity in the 1950s. Secret military groups have “quantum zero-point energy

  power,” an infinite, completely free, and nonpolluting source of energy. All

  this and much more they learned by studying numerous crashed saucers,

  starting with the one in Roswell in 1947. They have “reverse-engineered”

  these wondrous alien inventions—meaning they took them apart and fig-

  ured out how they worked.

  According to Greer, the alien knowledge is confined to organizations

  within our own government that most people know nothing about.

  These groups, blacker than black ops, are known as cosmic ops, and

  they are privy to high-security information so sensitive that the presi-

  dent and the head of the CIA have both been denied access. (This is

  unconstitutional and Greer doesn’t think that we citizens should stand

  for it any longer.) Greer cited numerous specific witnesses with names,

  dates, and impressive titles. For example, a brigadier general told Greer

  that three to five alien bodies were discovered at Roswell, and many

  artifacts were retrieved.

  Greer also told us about a top-secret U.S. Army Extraterrestrial

  Retrieval Team, also known as Operation Blue Fly, in charge of recovering

  objects of unknown origin that fell to Earth. This team had retrieved mate-

  rial from several crashes as far back as the 1940s and early 1950s.* These

  UFOs are particularly interested in our military sites, especially nuclear

  weapons facilities, and they have repeatedly shown that they can render

  our ICBMs inert.

  According to Greer, the presence of aliens was initially kept secret for

  benign reasons—to avoid an eruption of public panic. But after the

  Moon landings and decades of space exploration, it’s obvious that the

  public could handle this knowledge. Now, the secrecy is being main-

  tained to preserve the present economic order. Alien energy and propul-

  sion technologies, if shared with the world, would eliminate poverty,

  save the environment, and end much human strife and suffering. This

  would be bad for business. No more fossil fuel industry. No more

  nuclear power industry. No internal combustion vehicles. The most

  powerful industries of our time will be history as soon as Disclosure is

  *Why are these aliens such bad pilots?

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  achieved. Among those companies that are in cahoots and have black

  operations working on alien technology are SAIC, Lockheed Martin*

  Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and EG&G.

  These evil, rich, polluting, militaristic alien-hiders will resort to any

  means necessary to maintain their control. And that leads us to the true

  motivation for space-based weapons.

  How are they going to maintain control? By provoking an interstel-

  lar war, once the secret weapons have progressed to the point where we

  can hold our own against the aliens. All other rationales for space-

  based weapons are just excuses: Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative

  was needed against the Russkies. The current system is needed to guard

  against “rogue nations.” That’s what we’ve been told. Someday soon,

  there will be a hoax involving an alien invasion—a Gulf of Tonkin–type

  incident to build support for space weapons and the interplanetary war

  effort. They will provoke a war with an alien civilization that will so

  scare the populace that people will allow them to install a military gov-

  ernment over the whole Earth. Ultimately that’s what it’s all about. The

  largest fascist plot ever, backed by weapons and technology of unimag-

  inable power.

  There is an urgency to this threat. According to Greer, our govern-

  ment’s classified military projects have now achieved virtual parity with

  alien abilities. The interplanetary war could start at any time. Soon an

  army of alien ships will fill our skies.

  O N T H E S I D E O F T H E A N G E L S

  Greer knows how to push some buttons with his populist, antiauthor-

  ity message. Big cheers and loud applause filled the room when he said

  we must not militarize space. His presentation skillfully tapped into

  humanitarian concern for the poor, antiauthoritarian sentiment and

  fears and hopes about our future.

  Despite my horror and amusement, I also felt stirred by the spirit of

  the crowd. I related to the collective concern and anger about corporate

  disregard for the health of the Earth. When an articulate and passionate

  speaker says something you strongly agree with, and everyone around

  you is clapping and cheering, it’s hard not to feel somewhat roused. To

  *Lockheed has had operational antigravity craft since the sixties. Greer can prove it.

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  be simultaneously shocked, repulsed, and genuinely moved by a speaker

  was, as we say, something of a mind fuck.

  The loudest cheers came near the end of the speech, when Dr. Greer

  issued a call to action. We, he said, are the last generation that has a

  chance to change course. With genuine pain in his voice, he reminded

  us of the unbelievable poverty in the world, and he reasserted that it

  could be changed only if the suppressed information is released. The

  good news is that several dozen civilizations are ready to welcome us

  into a family of planets, if we are ready to live in peace.

  “What can you do to help?” He told us: Give money (all this educa-

  tional, investigative, and legal work is expensive). Proselytize (if each of

  you here today holds a meeting in your home, and if each of these gen-

  erates ten more meetings, then the Disclosure movement will grow like

  wildfire).

  Greer concluded on an emotional peak: We have a beautiful planet,

  which we’re cannibalizing. We are working for “the good future.” We’re

  on the eve of a civilization that can endure in peace for thousands of

  years. The entire cosmos can be open to us. “You are on the side of the

  angels. Join us. Thank you very much.”

  A long, roaring standing ovation followed, with me scratching my

  head.

  E X T R A O R D I N A R Y E V I D E N C E

  It really was impressive to see the faces and stories of the Disclosure

  witnesses endlessly roll by. Indeed, that’s the point. Greer doesn’t even

  try to present physical evidence. His evidence consists of the sheer

  number of people with some kind of credentials who are willing to

  talk about these experiences. He wants us to believe that the weight of

  numbers transforms these stories, collectively, into something more

  than anecdotal evidence. And it could. A large amount of anecdotal

  evidence is always worth paying attention to. The fact is, if I heard a

  lot of people I knew talking about alien encounter experiences, I’d

  take it seriously.

  Oh, I know people who have seen inexplicable things, and I’ve seen

  some myself. But the social universe I live in is entirely disconnected

  from the one in which these sightings, crashes, and cover-ups occurred.

  There are no six degrees of separation her
e. The separation is total. We

  are supposed to think, “All these people couldn’t possibly be wrong,”

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  but I couldn’t help thinking, “All these people can’t possibly be right.”

  Otherwise, I would have heard about some of this more directly.

  My disbelief in this conspiracy is certainly not based on faith in the

  absolute integrity of our government and military. I would not be

  surprised to learn of secret government operations that skirt the

  Constitution. It wouldn’t be the first time. You don’t need alien bodies

  to believe that some people within our government are cynically risking

  world peace to protect the wealthy.

  Of course there are secret military aircraft and secret projects in

  space. Strange sightings are far more likely to be signs of “military

  intelligence” than of alien intelligence. In fact, many UFO legends arose

  from sightings of classified craft, which were initially denied by the mil-

  itary and then admitted to years later. By increasing the level of distrust

  in official stories about UFOs, these actual cover-ups have contributed

  to the conspiracy culture. In this way, the U.S. and Soviet militaries

  helped to create ufology—another bizarre by-product of the Cold War.

  During the Cold War, the military didn’t try too hard to dispel these

  misinterpretations and sometimes actively encouraged them. Ufology

  provided convenient cover. The most famous of these incidents is Roswell

  itself. The air force initially claimed that the “flying saucer” found on the

  Foster Ranch outside Roswell on June 14, 1947 (ten days before Kenneth

  Arnold’s first sighting of a “flying saucer” in Washington State) was

  merely a crashed weather balloon. Ufologists uncovered many inconsis-

  tencies in the government’s story, which helped fuel the UFO myth and

  suspicions of the official line on alien contacts. In 1994, the Air Force

  released a credible report showing that the crash debris came from Project

  Mogul, a top-secret air force program to develop stratospheric balloon-

  borne equipment for detecting Soviet nuclear explosions.

  The air force also admitted to another experiment that explains

  many of the reports of alien bodies. In the early 1950s, they dropped

  numerous “anthropomorphic dummies” from altitudes as high as

  ninety-eight thousand feet, to test escape mechanisms for astronauts or

  pilots forced to eject at high altitudes. Several of these dummies landed

  near Roswell. Over 150 of them were dropped over Wright-Patterson

  Air Force Base, which may account for alien sightings at that location.

  The truth is that both the skeptics and the believers were mistaken about

  Roswell. For years, skeptics wrongly insisted that there was no cover-up.

  Believers accepted that the bodies that “looked strangely like plastic dum-

  mies” were proof of the existence of extraterrestrial humanoids.

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  In 1997, a declassified CIA report stated, “Over half of all UFO

  reports from the late 1950’s through the 1960’s were accounted for by

  manned reconnaissance flights. This led the Air Force to make mislead-

  ing and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears

  and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.”

  So, yes, the military has secrets and lies and some of these have

  involved UFOs, but the whole Disclosure conspiracy just doesn’t hang

  together. Once I got over my abortive attempt to be open-minded, the

  whole thing seemed incredibly dumb. While amusing, the gullibility of

  the crowd was also a tad scary. The audience wants to believe, responds

  to the charismatic leader, the sense of community in the room, the

  shared pursuit of a cause.

  Greer seems authentic to me. I don’t put him in the same class as the

  “face on Mars” hucksters—people who probably know better who

  have made big bucks on books promoting a ridiculous conspiracy. The

  Disclosure stuff, all said with a straight face, evident sincerity, and I

  would say genuine concern for humanity, is basically a case of extreme

  credulity.

  The Disclosure Project ultimately struck me in the same way that

  much New Age thought does: I often find myself sympathetic with the

  quest for new solutions and new frameworks, but repulsed by the flaky,

  uncritical thinking. Can’t we subvert the dominant paradigm without

  abandoning reason altogether?

  H O L L Y W O O D B A S E M E N T

  What makes me so sure? It comes down to this: the whole thing sounds

  too much like a cheesy movie plot. If it sounded like a good movie plot, then I’d have to consider it more carefully. But I can’t believe that if and

  when alien contact happens, it will seem just like a comic book or a

  B-grade movie.

  Admittedly, the Disclosure guys know exactly as much about ET intel-

  ligence as the SETI folks: nothing at all. Both carry assumptions about

  aliens based, in different ways, on extrapolations of human traits. But

  the Disclosure scheme, like many ufological books, appears to borrow

  heavily from the pulp science fiction of the forties, fifties, and sixties.

  These people need to watch less television and get out more.

  Anyone who drew their ideas about alien civilizations from the deep

  well of science fiction literature, their spiritual sense from the great reli-

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  gious texts, their ideas about the wider universe from the insights of

  modern science, and their sense of evolution’s possibilities from the

  direct experience of nature (rather than Jerry Falwell, Babylon 5, and

  Wild Kingdom) would not create such cliché aliens and plots.

  The idea that alien technology could be captured, held secret, and

  reverse-engineered, that aliens could interface with humans in any way

  that would seem like a “war,” is just as ludicrous as the idea that our

  computer disks will fit perfectly in alien drives and our viruses will be

  able to crash their computers as in the blockbuster movie Independence

  Day. These fantasies carry an unrealistic expectation that our interac-

  tions with aliens will be safely within the realm of our previous experi-

  ences, including, especially, our TV watching experiences.

  I cannot prove my “non-B-grade universe” hypothesis. Like Occam’s

  razor, the Immaculate Conception, or the tenets of any faith, this is an

  unprovable belief about the way things are. Maybe reality does resem-

  ble a B-grade movie, and I am deluding myself into thinking we live in a

  cosmos that is more original or finely crafted. Maybe God is a hack

  director, banished to our universe because she couldn’t get good work

  on the Coast.

  Anyway, once I satisfied myself that the Disclosure claims could not

  possibly be true, I lost interest in learning any more of the details of their

  conspiracy. It’s more interesting to research the real world. Disclosure is,

  ultimately, a little sad, a little silly, a little scary, and more than a little

  stupid. But, why should I care what other people believe, if what t
hey

  are doing is harmless?

  Because, I don’t think that the Disclosure Project is completely harm-

  less. In June 2002 Greer jumped on the post-9/11 “it’s a shame that

  thousands of people were killed but at least I can use it to promote my

  cause” bandwagon in a new paper he circulated on the Internet stating,

  “One of the few silver linings to these recent tragedies is that maybe—

  just maybe—people will take seriously, however far-fetched it may

  seem at first, the prospect that a shadowy, para-governmental and

  transnational entity exists that has kept UFOs secret—and is planning a

  deception and tragedy that will dwarf the events of 9/11.”

  At the very least, these guys are destructive to our society in the way

  that a useless mutation in an organism is maladaptive—simply because

  it uses up energy and resources that are needed elsewhere. On the way

  out of the Campaign for Disclosure meeting, we passed by donation

  boxes where you could make a tax-deductible contribution to the cause,

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  and people were stuffing them full of bills. Maybe the Disclosure Project

  is really a vast right-wing conspiracy to sap the life out of the environ-

  mentalist and pacifist movements by getting people to believe in this

  crap.

  All in all, it was one of the weirder days I can remember.* Believe it

  or not (some of my relatives won’t), I had gone to temple that morning,

  for a bar mitzvah. The alien revival meeting had less singing but more

  clapping and cheering than the service at the temple. It had better spe-

  cial effects, too, but in the end I liked the bar mitzvah a lot more,

  because it was all about real hope for the future and bringing a new

  generation into the spiritual community. It was uplifting, and it didn’t

  give me the creeps. Just gimme that old-time religion.

  *Although I do wonder about some of the ones I can’t remember . . .

  Believing Is Seeing

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  I’m breaking through

  I’m bending spoons

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  I’m keeping flowers in full bloom

  electronic edition

  I’m looking for answers from the great beyond.

  —R.E.M.

  Image unavailable for

  When one admits that nothing is certain one must,

  electronic edition