UFO Religions

Archive for the ‘UFO but not religious’ Category

Jack Brewer over at The UFO Trail has begun a two-part series on the CIA’s mind-control programs. UFO Religions readers (and Facade fans) will want to read Part One, along with an earlier essay on John Marks, the researcher who blew the lid off the secrecy.

• John Marks and ‘The Search for the Manchurian Candidate’
  
• The CIA and the Search for the Manchurian Candidate, Part One of Two

As Facade readers know, mind control was one of the sub-threads in the novel. The UFO research community has known for some time that CIA mind control and LSD experimentation had some sort of intersection with the “alien contactee” movement in the United States. The same is likely also true of the alien abduction phenomenon. The latter connection received a bit of attention in Jack’s posts about Leah Haley’s story (which of course included some of Leah’s own commentary about her experiences).  The second post above (“Part One”) overviews some of these intersections. Jack does a nice job of cross-referencing the connections to specific MK-ULTRA / CIA documentary evidence.

Have a look!

Technorati Tags: abduction, aliens, CIA, contact, contactee, mind control, MKULTRA, UFOs

You just HAVE to watch the video below (7:00). It’s clear and to the point, and you’ll no doubt have a laugh or two – a video on how Luke Skywalker’s destruction of the Death Star was *really* an inside job. It’s very well done and has almost two million views on YouTube.

The value of the video should be obvious. Every fact presented in it is indeed a fact from the movie. And every connection drawn is “reasonable” in the context of the narrative created. But the conclusions are absolutely wrong. This is precisely how so much conspiratorial thinking works … and fails horribly. Conspiracy is all about narrative interpretation, not “facts”.  Once one part of the narrative fails, the whole thing crumbles. The beauty of the video is that the viewer already knows the narrative is wrong, but can see how that bogus narrative is created using nothing but factual data.

In short, it’s not about the data dots; it’s about how the dots are connected — and that usually (nearly always) happens in the theater of the imagination when it comes to conspiracy theory.

Technorati Tags: 911, conspiracy, skywalker, truth, UFOs, video, youtube

Readers may find this short post by UFO and Roswell researcher Kevin Randle of interest. He shares his thoughts on the usefulness (or not) of FOIA requests (=Freedom of Information Act). In a nutshell, he describes his own FOIA circus experience when trying to get information our of the government.

With government (especially at the federal level) getting less and less transparent all the time, I have no reason to doubt his tale of obfuscation and scripted incompetence. (Those of you who believed the latest administration’s promises about transparency might want to ask Manti Teo if he and his girlfriend enjoyed Valentine’s Day). The federal government under any administration is going to avoid transparency like the plague (or like term limit legislation).

For those interested in how FOIA works (or tries not to work), I’d recommend John Greenewald’s book Beyond UFO Secrecy. Nobody has more experience with FOIA than John, and his book details how to persevere against the federal bureaucratic quagmire (it’s his story of how, as a teenager, he sent off so many FOIA requests that the FBL showed up at his house). I’d also recommend John’s website, The Black Vault.

Technorati Tags: black vault, FOIA, freedom, greenewald, information, Roswell, UFOs

I recently came across the YouTube segment below that debunked the famous “Tether UFOs” allegedly caught on film by NASA. Back at one of the Ancient of Days UFO conferences (I think it was 2003) at which I spoke, another presenter, David Sereda, touted this video as absolute proof of intelligent extraterrestrial craft in earth’s orbit. David and Dan Aykroyd had collaborated on a video project (that I presume sold well) focusing on the STS-75 Shuttle mission and this video. Turns out it isn’t a video of extraterrestrial UFOs at all (I’ll pause while you catch your breath).

I remember suspecting that something was amiss in this video the first time I saw it. It made little sense to me that any camera could capture an object that was less than the circumference of my pinky at a distance of miles away, but David had a lot of physics mumbo-jumbo in its defense. I went back home to Madison and showed the video to a friend of mine who was a PhD student in electrical engineering (who also happened to have worked on the radar used in the famous Mexico “UFOs on radar” incident — they weren’t alien craft, either). At any rate, my friend, Daniel Rodriguez, tore apart the claims offered by Sereda for the STS-75 video using lots of electrical-engineering-speak which I didn’t understand either (but did appreciate). This YouTube video confirms that the Tether incident video was an optical illusion — the fellow on the video replicates the incident rather nicely. I kept waiting for Bill Birnes to just burst in and accuse the guy of being on the government dole. Bill can turn a peanut butter and jelly sandwich into evidence for aliens. But alas, the segment doesn’t include Bill’s reaction.

Technorati Tags: aykroyd, NASA, sereda, sts-75, tether, UFOs

I think I need to create a new category on the blog: “ET geeks with too much time on their hands.”

You have to read this Wired Science piece to believe it: “Romantic or Reckless? The Plan to Message Aliens with Twitter.” Here’s an excerpt:

As part of this year’s International Symposium on Electronic Art in New Mexico, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern will spend 30 minutes capturing every tweet with the hashtag #tweetsinspace for later transmission into the (much) wider Twitterverse.

Using a radio transmitter in Florida, they plan to beam our messages to GJ667Cc, an exoplanet that might, just maybe, possibly, have the required attributes that would allow it to theoretically support life (as we know it). Four to six weeks after Friday’s event, the planet will move into alignment (just barely) with the transmitter. And that’s when Kildall and Stern, a multimedia artist and associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, will hit send.

Romantic? Reckless? How about “Ridiculous”?

Although I’d be pretty irritated if I got tens of thousands of tweets all at the same time. Maybe reckless it is.

Technorati Tags: aliens, signal, space, twitter