THE UFO FILES
PETER BROOKESMITH surveys the latest fads and flaps from the world of ufological research
THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE
There seems to be an unwritten rule in fortean musings that says we don’t do politics. Except that we do, as long as said politics happened a long time ago, and the only toes being trodden on are safely dead. Consider, for instance, the truism that the UFO waves of the 1950s were in part a reaction to the Cold War – an observation accepted by all but the most intransigent nuts-and-bolters. Martin Kottmeyer floated an interesting hypothesis some years ago that UFO waves were a reaction to times of national shame, in other words political events. And military ones as well – but as we know from Clauswitz, war is politics carried on by other means. It’s a tricky idea to navigate, because the cause of one person’s shame may be a trigger for someone else’s pride. The paranoid, reds-under-the-bed style of McCarthyism, for instance, seems to me to be a shameful episode in American history, because of the personal injustices and constitutional desolations it produced – which not coincidentally occurred in the early days of the Cold War. But there was no lack of support at the time for the antics of the Junior Senator for Wisconsin, and he has his defenders even today. It’s not hard to defend the reasonableness of being on the qui vive for treacherous Communist infiltrators and influencers, while seeing McCarthy’s demagoguery and its consequences as a blight upon the Earth.
The extent to which Kottmeyer’s hypothesis is defensible is a subject for another time – needless to say he got flak for it from the usual suspects. As a student of politics for more than half a century – I think it may have been Christine Keeler who first
awoke my fascination – what interests me currently is the probability that Lionel Trilling’s prognostication (or prophecy) in The Liberal Imagination (1950) has been confirmed: that “Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.” And for a swathe of indefatiguably vocal people, this is exactly what has happened. Everything has become, in these people’s eyes, subject to political interpretation, disapprobation, and in extreme cases vicious caricature and censorship. Vote to leave the European Union? Overnight you’ve become a knuckle-dragging, ignorant, low-achieving racist, it seems. Vote for Trump? Gun-toting deplorable for sure. My three or four loyal fans will recall that my merely pointing out that, to my mind, there’s something dubious about the concept of a ‘feminist’ glaciology – cost me a terrible wiggin’ in FT’s letters pages. The point I was making is that ufology had better keep its sentries’ eyes peeled for an approaching horde of angry Twitterati howling down the field’s perceived political shortcomings, lack of diversity and failures of representation.
Was that a rant? Probably, and most likely an eruption borne of watching, in great frustration, actual politics in the US and the UK, and much of Europe too, go shamelessly off the rails. Although my intention is quite sober: to point out that all ufology has a context, which can’t help but be in part political. It may take a decade or two to dissect plausibly the effect of our present political imbroglio on ufology – but that it will have an effect of some kind is surely beyond doubt. We shall see. And I should live so long, already.
NOT ENOUGH INFORMATION
After we’d all been reassured by the
New York Times and Luis Elizondo and assorted others that the Pentagon’s AWSAAP and AATIP progammes had been busy investigating UAPs (alias UFOs), and by other yet more excitable persons that Disclosure was upon us, and perhaps we’d soon see an alien shaking hands with the US President on the White House lawn, the Pentagon has finally found a bucket of cold water and emptied it right over all of that. Neither AWSAAP nor AATIP had anything to do with UFOs, says Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough to veteran researcher John Greenewald Jr, alias the Black Vault. Ms Gough seemed a bit puzzled about the previous impression given by the Pentagon’s front desk. Ms Gough also reiterated that Elizondo had nothing to do with AATIP, which is somewhat at odds with his line. Okay. So now we wait another couple of years to see if the official tune changes yet again? Surprise me.
See www.theblackvault.com/ documentarchive/the-pentagon-correctsrecord-on-secret-ufo-program/).
THEM OLD-TYME ALIENS DO DOSEY-DO
Jason Colavito, blogging on 22 November: “At the end of the day, maybe the ancient astronaut theory and ufology are all about daddy issues. The concepts come preloaded with the notion that punitive and/or loving parental figures will descend from the sky to teach all of Earth’s naughty children important lessons, but it seems that the emotional need for parental validation in the form of government ‘disclosure’ of UFO secrets represents another facet of the same mindset. The same people who tirelessly assert that government is an evil nasty punitive asshole who takes away all our toys and always treats our siblings better than us are also the same people who so desperately want daddy’s love that they believe only a government endorsement will validate their belief in the UFO faith. This is prima facie absurd since government endorses so many ideas that they clearly have no faith in and which they denounce as lies, but deep in their shriveled hearts they still think that if government agrees to something it must be true.”
Previously, Colavito has denounced Freud as “bullshit” – no argument from me, there. But I’m inclined to think he may have a point here. Pray respond on no more than half a sheet of paper.