A Plague of Aliens
|
Martin Kottmeyer has argued (and won a prize for saying) that UFO sighting reports increase in number during times of national paranoia and uncertainty. [1] I find Kottmeyer's thesis compelling, and noted that in the 12 months before the 1997 British general election, sighting reports and extravagant claims mushroomed in the
At the same time, one has to bear in mind that only 30 per cent of the
Jefferson
UFO Secrecy and the Death of the
Readers may be forgiven for wondering if, in raising these points, the pretender (albeit so far unchallenged) to the title Best Pistol Shot In Ufology isn't finding a thin excuse for riding a hobbyhorse at the expense of relevant argument. My point here is that inherent in
IRONY IN THE SOUL
Sometimes things really are as simple as they seem: and just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you. I long believed that the grandfather of conspiracy theories in ufology was Donald Keyhoe. By the end of this year two books bearing my name will be in print saying just that. Staying in
From his preface to his conclusion the man rages against the US Government. But Scully had every reason to be outraged, dismayed and alarmed. In his own mind, he could conclude that the civil and military authorities were lying about UFOs because he could see all about him the results of McCarthyism in Hollywood: if government could so abuse its trust and its power, it would follow that such moral corruption would have in train a refusal to admit the truth about the saucers. The logic is scarcely impeccable, but the strength of feeling is unmistakable and indubitably sincere. It's altogether plausible that his inherited, "natural" distrust of government and the stark reality of McCarthyism led Scully, plainly a liberal man, to presume that the baffled and confusing yet desperately "authoritative" pronouncements of the USAF á propos flying saucers were calculated to cover up the ufological truth as he believed he had uncovered it. It was this theme, shorn of its real political context, onto which Keyhoe latched, and about which he so profitably fantasized. Keyhoe organized the ideas of governmental conspiracies and cover-up, but he did not invent them. The differences between the two men may be characterized as a matter of gullible sincerity on the one hand and pulp-writer's opportunism on the other. [4] Despite the masses of documentation that contradicts it, Keyhoe's imaginary history of the USAF's engagement with UFOs is still, astonishingly, held by some in high regard. So we witness a curious condition of ufology-at-large, which is to prefer the certainties of the imagination to the ambiguities of reality.
INTO THE DARKNESS
The most complete and self-consistent conspiracy "theory" in ufology is probably the one that derives ultimately from the alleged abduction of Myra Hansen in May 1980, whose investigation was attended by
 |
In May 1989, Cooper posted on the Internet The Secret Government, which took the opening notion that "MJ-12 has total control over everything" to its logical, if unlikely, conclusion: the group really ran the country, and in a fashion that made nonsense of everything that everyone took for granted about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But MJ-12 and its international cronies in the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg group and other bodies were in turn the stooges of the aliens. Said Cooper: "Throughout our history the Aliens have manipulated and/or ruled the human race through various secret societies, religion, magic, witchcraft, and the occult." The secret government plans to exploit the alien and conventional technology in order for a select few to leave the earth and establish colonies in outer space. I am not able to either confirm or deny the existence of 'Batch Consignments' of human slaves which would be used for manual labor in the effort as part of the plan. The Moon, code named 'Adam', would be the object of primary interest followed by the planet Mars, code named 'Eve'. As a delaying action, [the plan] included birth control, sterilization, and the introduction of deadly microbes to control or slow the growth of the Earth's population. AIDS is only ONE result of these plans. Connoisseurs will recognize how much of this borrows from the famous spoof TV documentary Alternative 3, as if it had been the real McCoy. There was much more, about the self-destruction of Earth "by or shortly after the year 2000", plant life flourishing on the "dark side of the Moon", and the assertion that in the 1960s future US president George Bush established the international drugs trade as part of a scheme to encourage street violence, generate revulsion against guns, and thereby disarm the American people. Thus, at the level of satire, gun-control campaigner Sarah Brady becomes the stooge of spacemen; but at the level of myth the foundations of the Cooper also maintained that one in every 40 people carries an alien implant, that the In fact a joint alien, In this Cooper sets up his ufological audience for the ultimate bogey of both the patriot movement (the "constitutional militias") and American Christian fundamentalists - the New World Order (NWO), a catchphrase of "drug baron" George Bush and, incidentally, of Freemasonry. [*6] The patriots view this composite mythical beast in political terms: its agent is the United Nations, and its aim is the destruction of national identities, most especially the identity of the THE USUAL SUSPECTS Naturally Cooper had to find someone to be responsible for all this. Rather unimaginatively, he chose the Jews to carry the can. In his book [8] he went so far as to reproduce the entire text of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious document that pretends to reveal a hideous Jewish plot to dominate the world. It was exposed as a fake in the early 1920s, but was enormously popular in antisemitic circles in George Hunt Williamson, a so-called "psychic" channeller and longtime associate of George Adamski, wrote as early as 1953 of "negative space intelligences" that were controlled by both evil aliens and the "International Bankers" a code word, like "cosmopolitans", among antisemites for the Jews. Said Williamson: These secret world rulers will never allow official UFO announcements to be made to the public. If they did allow it, it would spell their doom. If the technology of the space visitors is revealed it will immediately limit the need for... practically everything... that... keeps every family in Williamson also explained that the "Silence Group" identified by Donald Keyhoe was an "ancient, hideous conspiracy that is nothing but the spirit of the anti-Christ". This more or less completes the circle that links Williamson's batty splutterings with those of the Internet entity "Branton", whose mythopeic ramblings bring a lashing of rococo to the baroque fantasies of Bennewitz, Lear and Cooper. But the reality of the Darksiders' claims is not really the issue here. What is revealed in the long link between George Hunt Williamson, George Adamski and the present-day Darksiders is how much they have in common with the likes of George King, Ruth Norman, Gordon Creighton and Billy Meier (who has unashamedly anti-semitic followers as well as his own apocalyptic vision), whose perception of "flying saucers" is overtly religious. Consciously or not, much of the structure of the conspiracy buffs' thinking derives unmistakably from the Christian tradition and the New Testament's Book of Revelation - which is sufficiently obscure, and violent, to support almost any destructive belief. For many ufologists of the late 1990s, UFOs and ufonauts were either demonic or harbingers of fundamental, revelatory or creative change. Their inductive justifications for their beliefs is identical in structure, and often in metaphorical detail, to those of the patriots and fundamentalists. At the apex of conspiracy beliefs, the ufological, political and religious aspects become indistinguishable. If that tends to support the notion that ufology is at heart a religious pursuit (and skeptics are not immune to this snare or excluded from the analysis), it also reminds us that ufology has a political dimension, and of a nature that it would be unwise to ignore. Today Cooper embodies the point: he has espoused the patriot movement and disclaims his ufological writings. PLAGUES AND PARANOIA Those who are so susceptible to the lure of conspiracy theories seem to be unaware that they are following an age-old pattern in their response to an intractable mystery. The history of disease provides some telling parallels. When the people of 14th-century Europe found themselves reeling before the onslaught of the Black Death (which they called the "Great Dying"), their religion-drenched culture led them either to blame themselves and their sins for the catastrophe visited on them by a vengeful God, or to lash out at the Jews, strangers in their midst who in Christian thinking were also estranged from God. From there it was not difficult to believe Jewish people were devil-worshipers intent on destroying good Christians. Finicky questions as to how, exactly, anyone at all could possibly control and direct such an indiscriminate disease, were brushed aside or ascribed to demonic, magical powers. (A favorite explanation was that Jews were poisoning the wells of Christians.) Countless innocents were murdered as a consequence of this kind of thinking, if "thinking" it can be called; but it is alive and well in Darkside ufology. When cholera raged throughout The focus of the poor's discontent and fear over cholera became the medical profession. Measures intended to protect communities from cholera provoked riots in The By the late 1980s, the claim that AIDS was a product of biological warfare experiments in In 1996 Dr Leonard G. Horowitz, a dental health expert and former faculty member of Tufts and Harvard Universities, published (at his own expense) a 592-page hardcover "exposé" - Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola: Nature, Accident or Intentional? - of the links between AIDS, the National Institutes of Health, US biological warfare research establishments and a list of several favorite targets of conspiracy addicts, such as the Rockeller family, the CIA, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Nixon administrations of 1968-74. According to Dr Horowitz's book, AIDS researcher Dr Robert Gallo did not discover HIV in 1984, but had already invented it by 1971. The virus was deployed in Dr Horowitz also claims that "the world's most feared and deadly viruses" - ALIENS AS DISEASE Ebola and other hemorrhagic viruses have a later provenance according to Captain Joyce Riley, a former US Air Force flight nurse, but are nonetheless man-made. In a lecture in Have you been seeing anything in the newspaper about Dengue fever in Captain Riley blames hemorrhagic fevers and Gulf War Syndrome on an international cartel of drug companies who, she says, are deliberately wiping out the armed forces of the The reason for the Gulf War, upon analysis, was threefold. It was to infect the So here we have politics, the arms industry, the British monarchy, earth magic and mysticism, and aliens and UFOs (and their fabled underground bases) all bubbling together in one horrendous stew along with emergent viruses. As usual, no explanation is offered as to why whoever is supposedly behind these machinations wants or needs to infect "the world population". But the point of conspiracy theories is less to satisfy logic than to articulate and dramatize emotions - often ones, it would appear, that the purveyors of these convoluted schemes are unaware of enduring. [9] In a joint essay, [10] Professors Dorothy Nelkin of New York University and Sander L. Gilman of Cornell University have pointed out that in this context "blaming" and conspiracy theories are "a means to make mysterious and devastating diseases comprehensible and therefore possibly controllable". (And so Dr Horowitz invokes the hope of redress by appealing to his readers to "make a difference by contacting their congressional representatives" to demand appropriate investigations.) Even when plagues were deemed to be the work of a wrathful God, the ultimate cause was believed to be human wickedness, which did lie within human power to control. "But diseases are never fully understood," say Nelkin and Gilman and, despite our medical science, "we still make moral judgments for misfortune. .If responsibility can be fixed, perhaps something - discipline, prudence, isolation - can be done." When confronted by incurable, invisible and potentially universal afflictions like AIDS, These are situations where medical science has failed to serve as a source of definitive understanding and control, so people try to create their own order and to reduce their own sense of vulnerability. In effect, placing blame defines the normal, establishes the boundaries of healthy behavior and appropriate social relationships, and distinguishes the observer from the cause of fear. As the antisemitic outbreaks during the Great Dying illustrate, this does not mean that the perceptions of what is "normal", "healthy" or "appropriate" are necessarily humane, urbane or morally defensible. Blame for disease is most often poured on those who are feared, powerful or, simply by being unconventional, are a threat to social cohesion. Fear of intrusive, over-mighty and uncontrollable "big government" and big business is clear enough in the outbursts of Dr Horowitz and Captain Riley, as it is in the rage of ufological conspiracists. It is hardly insignificant that Horowitz reserves his greatest venom for members of the Nixon administrations, whose betrayals of trust remain in the popular mind beyond all attempts at rehabilitation. Sooner or later conspiracy theorists from ufology, the "patriot" movement and elsewhere were bound to conscript AIDS and emerging diseases to their cause. One can substitute the one word "science" for "medical science" in the passage quoted above and apply it to ufology without disturbing its truth. Scientists have largely ignored UFOs, especially since their skepticism was endorsed by the Condon Report, and so have governments. In the eyes of believers, this has been a betrayal; and so scientists and governments are demonized, made part of the psychodrama in which "the aliens", who seem so powerful, pose an uncontrollable and unfathomable threat to all that is ordered and peaceful - as if they were a kind of chronic, irremediable disease of the night skies. The aliens are also intrusive, according to the abduction scenario, coming upon you unawares, reading your mind and, like an incurable plague, able to defeat any protective measures you take against them. The emergence of AIDS occurred at almost the same time as the popularity of abduction accounts and the birth of the latest rash of conspiracy theories in ufology. AIDS and its attendant mythologies, the abduction scenario, the New World Order and the machinations of Satan all strike at a sense of identity and the integrity and authenticity of the appearance of things. The matter of sexual identity - or more particularly, invisible and terrifying threats to it - are at the heart of the AIDS and abduction myths. UFO and political conspiracy theories address the void that opens when social identities are denatured by remote yet intrusive government, and both participation in and control of political life move out of individual reach. Both these aspects of identity are fundamental to a sense of meaningful existence, which has always been the domain of religion, the great defence against the nihilism implicit in mortality. Small wonder they have mingled and bred. This essay has been developed from material taken from two books due for publication later in 1997: Future Plagues ( NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 Martin Kottmeyer, "UFO Flaps", The Anomalist No 3 (1996), pages 64-89. 2 And true to form we find that the RKBA has been usurped in the 3 See Andy Roberts's illuminating essay "Saucerful of Secrets" in Hilary Evans and John Spencer (eds), UFOs 1947-87, Fortean Tomes 1987 4 A devastating expos‚ of Donald Keyhoe's intellectual dishonesty can be found in Curtis Peebles, Watch The Skies!, Berkely 1995, passim. 5 Jerome Clark's invaluable 3-volume UFO Encyclopedia addresses various aspects of the case under several entries (see the Cumulative Index in Volume 3). The chapter 'Beyond Dreamland' in Peter Brookesmith, UFO: The Government Files, Barnes & Noble (USA)/Blandford (UK) 1996, outlines the evolution of the case into the Darkside Hypothesis and points to some of its antecedents and its significance in ufology. 6 A reliable enough guide to the thinking of the religious right on the NWO is Pat Robertson, The New World Order, World Books 1991. No mention of black helicopters in this one though. 7 As Hilary Evans pointed out in Visions ù Apparitions ù Alien Visitors (Aquarian Press, 1984), the MIB have forebears in religious as well as ufological imagery; and the latter derives from political imagery - the G-men of Hollywood B-movies. 8 William Milton Cooper, Behold A Pale Horse, IllumiNet Press, 1989. 9 For the record I had better note that none of these claims bears much relation to scientific facts or history. The earliest identified AIDS cases date back to 1959, when the concept of genetic coding was unknown. Reverse transcriptase was discovered in 1970, and retroviruses were discovered in people in 1978. But it was not until 1983 that the technique of polymerase chain reaction, which revolutionized research into and manipulation of DNA, was invented. Essentially the cloning technology that the "invention" of HIV requires did not exist in 1977, let alone in 1969. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the Soviet Academy of Sciences apologized for suggesting AIDS was a deliberate invention, a move it admitted had been inspired by the KGB. The US State Department had already concluded as much, and believed the accusations were designed to discredit the UFOs, DISINFORMATION AND DECEPTION Skeptics frequently talk about Occam's Razor. They use it to choose between alternative explanations for something, especially where no one alternative has been either proven or disproven. But what is it? Many people will tell you it says, "Choose the simplest solution". But it doesn't say choose the simplest solution. Opponents of Occam complain that it will not necessarily help you choose the correct solution. But Occam's Razor does not pretend to choose the correct solution. So what is it and what is its point? Occam's Razor actually says: "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate", which is translated as "plurality should not be posited without necessity." The words are those of the medieval English philosopher and Franciscan monk William of Ockham (ca. 1285-1349). The archaic English needs to be interpreted for modern times. What it means is this: Do not invent unnecessary entities to explain something. An example Suppose I have a cat. One night, I leave out a saucer of milk, and in the morning the milk has gone. No one saw who or what drank the milk. Lets say there are two possibilities: The cat drank it or the milk fairy drank it Occam tells us to reject option 2. This is because option 2 requires us to invent an unnecessary entity - the milk fairy. It is an invention because we have no proof that the milk fairy exists. And it is unnecessary because there is a plausible explanation that does not require the milk fairy - the cat. (We know he exists.)
Note: we haven't proven that the cat drank the milk. Or disproven the milk fairy option. Strictly speaking, we keep an open mind about both options. But Occam says that if you insist it could be the milk fairy, you have invented an unnecessary entity. And why would you do that? Note also that strictly speaking, both solutions are equally simple. The cat hypothesis is only simpler in that you haven't had to invent a new, unproven entity. Also note that there are additional options that we could choose if we abandon Occam. For example, it could have been ghosts, or aliens, or the boogieman or Santa Claus. Why choose one of these over the others when there is an equal lack of proof for any of them? Occam Applied Occam can be applied to a myriad of supposed paranormal events, including ghosts, psychics, UFOs, people who talk with the dead, reincarnation, the soul, spoon benders, near death and out of body experiences. Usually, the paranormal explanation for these phenomena cannot be disproven, and this is often given as the reason we should consider the paranormal explanation. But Occam says go with the natural explanation for now, until any new evidence challenges it. But if there is a natural explanation and you believe, without proof, that the paranormal one is possible, you are inventing the milk fairy.
Occam's Razor
