Thank you [Trenchant Edges]
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes, 20 seconds. Contains 1269 words
Hello my pretties, welcome to a paid-subscriber only episode of TE.
As most of you know, I’m your host Stephen. Welcome to our newest members.
Also, at the bottom is a poll I’d love to hear from you about.
Enough pleasantries, today’s hopefully the first subscriber only bonus of many. I still don’t like gating away content but it’s really only fair because most of you have stuck with me through fallow periods.
And don’t worry, I won’t be flooding you with posts. This will be at most a twice a week thing between the free and paid subs.
Today I’m gonna let you in on what I secretly believe about most of this UFO shit.
And then we’re going to look a bit at my reading lists.
Ready? Alright. Let’s get started.
Boy, it sure seems like there are a lot of spies around the UFO field.
Have you noticed? What’s with that? And they basically always have been around going back to 1947.
Not quite to Kenneth Arnold’s first sighting, but from his experience in Murray Island onwards there have just kind of almost always been intelligence guys around.
We’re going to go much more in depth with this in the mainline investigation, of course, but my broad point here is the UFO community has always had a contingent of spies, informers, and feds. Part of this is that in the 1950s if you saw people doing something weird you just kind of wrote J Edgar Hoover a letter.
Then we’ve got flips from government insider to whistleblower: Donald Keyhoe, J Allen Hynek, John Lear, Richard Doty, Bill Cooper, Luis Elizondo, David Grusch.
Just off the top of my head. Seems like kind of a lot.
OK, it’s since 1947. But still. All those guys were in fact paid to keep national security secrets, well, secret.
The common sense explanation for UFOs is generally that they’re secret government projects. Stealth airplanes, drones, etc.
I would like to make an adjacent claim: Since about at the latest 1980, there’s been a cohesive attempt to spin the UFO community into a particular direction of misinformation. The overall narrative David Grusch spun has its roots in the things Richard Doty told Paul Bennewitz in the early 80s.
‘Cause the thing is: Paul Bennewitz told everyone he could. A whole cohort of UFO researchers. Almost every trope the X-files is based on that doesn’t come from Men In Black shit goes through this line.
And there’s certainly a cluster of insiders trying to actively get the government to do more publicly with UFOs. Steven Greenstreet has done some…. variable quality reporting on these guys, but mostly seems content with debunking them.
I think there’s something either more complex or interesting going on.
So, if they’re UFO believers because they have genuine secret information direct from inside the establishment, that source is more likely to be fraudulent. A psyop of some kind. Maybe a test to see if they’re smart enough to disbelieve their superiors, as is suggested in Mirage Men.
I don’t mean that there’s no chance they’re right. I just think we need to rule out more likely options. And assuming that because some information is both secret and originating within the world of black projects, that it’s true seems woefully naïve.
Richard Doty himself at various times has claimed that he was lied to by the DoD on the subject of UFOs, but who the hell knows what that means? Probably nothing.
The other options is is that these guys are true believers and victims of an unusual kind of blowback: They’ve bought into misinformation their predecessors spread in the 80s.
Self inflicted mind control. The military machine accidentally zapping itself and unable to fix the issue despite decades of work. There’s a lot of reasons the state might think this is a good idea and we’ll likely be trying most of them out over the next few months.
I base this a bit on Come and See’s speculation about the overlap in vibes from the Barney and Betty Hill story and what you might expect a CIA MK Ultra experiment to derange civil rights activists into being unable to organize.
It’s certainly not the worst thing they did in MK Ultra and fits snugly besides the state’s well documented role in disrupting civil rights organizing through projects like COINTELPRO.
Of course it could be some mix of these. We’ll probably never know either way for sure. That’s a huge reason why I want to do this series.
Because I want to subject my reactions to researching this to scrutiny.
That’s where all of you come in.
You’re the most likely folks to engage with my work and I don’t expect anyone to agree with me. Questions, comments, shit I miss.
I can’t say I’ll agree, but I’ll definitely consider anything.
Alright. Let’s get into the other side: The book list.
The Richard Fucking Doty Saga: A phrase that sent me spiraling to photoshop for this awful thing
And also, while I was searching for that google decided to drive me a little more insane:
But seriously, let’s get to the reading list:
Project Beta: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth by Greg Bishop
Mirage Men: A Journey into Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs by Mark Pilkington
Saucers, Spooks, and Kooks by Adam Gorightly
Underground Alien Bio Lab at Dulce: The Bennewitz UFO Papers by Christa Tilton et al
Dulce Base: The Truth and Evidence from the Case Files of Gabe Valdez by (you guessed it) Gabe Valdez)
UFOs and the Deep State by Kevin Randle
UFOs and the National Security State Vol 1 & 2 by Richard Dolan
Need to Know_ UFOs, the Military and Intelligence by Timothy Good
The FBI-CIA-UFO Connection by Bruce Maccabee
The Black World of UFOs: Exempt from Disclosure by Robert Collins and Rick fucking Doty
Normally I’d do a breakdown of why for each of these, but we’ve gone on too long already and there are too many fucking books in this list, lol.
The Richard Sharpe Shaver, Raymond A Palmer, and Kenneth Arnold Saga
OK, so this is going to be quick and dirty and a bit more focused.
I’ve bounced around a bunch of rabbit holes and need this done. The point of this arc is the blending of fiction and fact through Raymond Palmer as a kind of cultural alchemist of the Golden Age of Science Fiction and how that contextualized a lot of the early flying saucer lore.
I considered including Donald Keyhoe in this but I’ve not found a plausible tie-in between him and Palmer. Keyhoe also wrote pulp fiction, notably Capt. Philip Strange, a ww1 flying ace, but is that close enough? It might be.
The Shaver Mysteries by Shaver and Palmer
The coming of the Saucers by Arnold and Palmer
War over Lemuria by Richard Toronto
Shaverology: A Shaver Mystery Home Companion by Richard Toronto
The Man from Mars: Ray Palmer's Amazing Pulp Journey by Fred Nadis
I’m going to mull that over and see if I can find a couple more books for this.
I haven’t found sources on it but I’d like to see if I can find out what publishing houses had direct or indirect ties to intelligence or the mob. I know NYC publishing was pretty mobbed up in the 30s and 40s and I assume at some point that intersected with WW2 era
Anyway, before I get into either of these I think there’s going to have to be some broad history laid out. Something more like A Brief History of US Military Secrecy.
So, let’s start this off with a bit of a poll.