OK: as that headline should make clear, you’re going to struggle with this one if you’re an Agent Mulder type, but run with me for a moment. While there are ample stories suggesting that alien spacecraft have visited (or crashed into) our planet, solid evidence thereof is very much lacking in proportion. The usual response to that is “well, of course, the government/military/Illuminati/lizard-people have covered up the evidence!”
It’s a conspiracy theory classic. But consider for a moment the old aphorism that the most effective lies are the ones that include substantial elements of truth. Then apply the cui bono test – who benefits from people believing in UFO cover-ups?
Nick Redfern has been thinking along these lines, and has gathered a bunch of clues to support his own hypothesis – namely that the majority of the big UFO conspiracy stories have been quite deliberately encouraged by the more secretive echelons of the world’s military and governmental organisations. After all, if you’ve got something worth hiding, flat-out denial is never going to be quite as effective as pretending to let something slip that is actually a smokescreen for the real story. Says Redfern:
… it seems to me that – for years – the crashed UFO community has been well and truly played, manipulated, and even controlled.
The trick to overcoming this is to throw out your belief systems and start fresh, with no preconceived ideas about crashed UFOs, and no emotion-driven need to believe in wrecked saucers, dead aliens, underground cryogenic chambers filled with ET body-parts, and all the rest.
Do that, be totally unbiased, and you may find some surprising facts about the origins of certain crashed UFO events.
If you’ve ever been into UFOlogy, I heartily recommend reading the whole piece for interest’s sake. What I will note here is that, much like the original conspiracy theories, Redfern’s re-readings of the classic UFO stories are based on interpretations of old classified documents, which means they’re based on the same suppositional logic as the stories they aim to replace; their appeal is that there’s less of a cognitive leap involved in assuming that the whole business is an elaborate smokescreen than in assuming that the aliums r comin OMGZ.
I used to be mad-fixated with conspiracy theories, but as time has passed they’ve been eroded by the same cynicism that initially nurtured them. And much as the military red-herring theory as presented above is more plausible than actual alien visitations being covered up, recent events suggest to me that the governments of the West aren’t anywhere near as capable of keeping secrets as that story demands I believe.
But then again, what if all the recent bungling and slip-ups in government secrecy are just another layer of the smokescreen, eh? Maybe best not to throw out all the tinfoil just yet… 😉 [via PosthumanBlues; image by Simczuk]
Extrapolation of present-day science and technology (risky, but it is all we have) suggests that *communication* with extraterrestrial intelligences should be achievable long before physical contact with them. Even if an advanced civilization launched huge numbers of probes to travel about their interstellar neighborhood, these probes would have to travel very fast, and accelerate for long periods, to cover even local interstellar distances in a reasonable number of years. Slowing down to actually stop at Earth (or anywhere else) would simply not be cost effective. Rather, such extremely fast-moving automated probes would sweep through or near various solar systems, making many measurements, and (just maybe) communicating in response to any signals detected from intelligent life. Regardless, we would expect to detect, or even communicate with, extraterrestrials long before actually meeting them. But, sadly, we do not appear to have had any detections or communications yet with extraterrestrial intelligences. As such, claims of physical contact are especially difficult to believe.
I wouldn’t say the UFO myth has been deliberately fostered. It just emerged on its own, sort of speak. The myth has been fueled by wild stories, claims, and of course the media. Even though the media may have a slight bent on skepticism, believers want to believe that there someone of higher intelligence looking out for our interests. And of course they various means of the media to make their points.
As a materialists and a skeptic, I look for the suspicious happenings of what I call the terrestrial conditions. This a borrowing of the sociological view that when it comes to a phenonmenon, one must look at the social conditions that apply. My approach is a two-step one. The evidence for ets is elusive and that there have been social stirrings taken place here on earth.
Psychoanalyst Carl Jung was right to call the UFO phenonmenon a myth and was right they must be mass hallucinations. I take a socio-historical approach in saying that the UFO myth is a product of the Cold War and the rise of secularism. My book “How Modern Society Invented UFOs.” breaksdown major themes of this myth and provide a strong argument that there has been a void missing in the West and in the industrialized world, one of seemingly godless technological world. You can find the book through amazon.com