Unidentified Bureaucratic Phenomena[Yes That's Right it's THE TRENCHANT EDGES]

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes, 18 seconds. Contains 1661 words

Hello again.

It’s me, your much distracted host through these wicked times.

Call me Stephen.

I know it’s been a bit.

Drawing from the San Francisco Call during the Mystery Airship craze of 1896

But oddly enough I haven’t been slacking. I’ve just not written anything worth sharing. Eventually something comes and kicks my ass and it’s time to lay the cards I’ve collected on the table.

For me, it was finding out that Moxy O’Brien of the fantastic Come and See Podcast is getting back into UFOs and is planning on talking about some of the same stuff.

So I want to get my thoughts out ahead of their’s, if only to maximize my enjoyment of their work.

It means a lot of homework for me and these actually being on time for you. Neat.

Actually, no. Second thought: Time is fake. This will be published when it’s published. Let’s goooo.

Abandon Closure Ye Who Enter Here

I want to start us off with a bit about what we’re looking for and why.

This newsletter started as an exploration of the technological and metaphysical ideas of Terence McKenna and Marshall McLuhan. Two things drew me to those guys: Big Swings and being kind of forgotten influencers of a bygone era.

Influential, but bygone. Ahead of their time, but stuck in the past where they were alive and working.

Makes for a neat way to explore modern culture.

UFOs, I think, provide much of the same.

As their enthusiasts never tire of telling us, they’ve been maligned and banished from the mainstream as a joke. Unfairly relegated to shady conventions, the less fashionable end of the new age scene, and sat next to total fucking nutters.

I both sympathize and don’t.

I’m a liminal fringe creature myself. Disreputable as much by choice as circumstances. Look at who our society thinks is reputable. What sane person would associate willingly with those assholes?

So while the air’s a bit thin here, I’ve long since adapted. The company is often better anyway.

What I’m saying is I get their alienation but not their frustration. You wanted to know more about the world than the average person is interested in? Good! Alas, that comes with a price and I don’t know many who’ve paid it and not found it bought cheap.

Independent thinking is always going to bug many people, so if you want to think for yourself you have to disregard a lot of approval and abuse.

But I digress.

UFOs can teach us a lot about the world we live in. Not so much for the claims of their advocates or the debunking of the skeptics, but for how the subject has been treated by the public at large especially in the US. I want to nail things down here before I spent much attention on the rest of the world for a few reasons.

1. I speak English and live here and have a pretty good idea how the country works and what its history is.

2. The US has a huge number, maybe a majority in the world, of recorded UFO sightings.

3. The US’ culture has had active UFO subcultures since the mid-1940s and these have often boiled into pop culture particularly through movies and science fiction.

4. The US Government has been, pardon my phrasing, balls deep in the UFO Phenomena since the beginning.

So I think this investigation is an interesting chance to clarify some of the relationships between the UFO community and the Government.

It might be considerably different than you suppose.

Coming Attractions

I want to focus in on two of the threads I want to pull on over the next couple weeks.

The Bullshit Cycle: Or how conspiracies form

One of the wonderful things about fiction is its power to expand your sense of what’s possible. This is less a double-edged sword and more a sack of QA check failed grenades: If you want a big explosion sometimes they’re good for that.

Or one might explode randomly.

Less than ideal.

In 1943 the pulp magazine AMAZING STORIES received a letter that lead to editor Ray Palmer to a novella length document that he would pad out to 30,000 words and release two years later titled, “I Remember Lemuria”.

It discussed the hollow earth and the creatures that lived there. I don’t want to spoil too much, but this was a crazy influential story.

Oh, golden age scifi and your “racial memory” stories. Never fails to make me suspicious.

I’m far from the first person to notice this (including regular source of this newsletter Michael Barkun) but the fact that one of the biggest scifi publications put out years of stories about spaceships they claimed were real right before a massive wave of UFO sightings… seems significant.

Especially since several people involved would be tied to the Maury Island hoax of 1947, which ties in Ray Palmer, someone who wrote in about the Shaver Mystery, the first great UFO witness, and US intelligence agents.

Which brings us to our second big thread.

The most detailed example of US intelligence fucking with the UFO field before modern day is the Paul Bennewitz affair, which took place over much of the 1980s.

Bennewitz was interested in UFOs in the 70s, and in 1979 ended up joining a local highway patrol officer Gabe Valdez who was investigating cattle mutilations. Paul began self-funding UFO research and started finding weird stuff.

See, Bennewitz was a business owner and former coast guard radio engineer. He was pretty good at fiddling with radios and he quickly found some strange signals near Kirkland Airforce Base where he lived.

Which brings us to US Airforce Master Sargent of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, Richard Doty.

OK, cards on the table: I fucking hate this guy. Not on a personal level. I’ve heard him talk several times and he’s exceedingly charming. Even knowing what I do about what he’s done and assessing him a Liar’s Liar I still kinda like him. I would have a beer with the man.

And that would be foolish.

See, Bennewitz reached out to the airbase with his strange information and his suspicions and suspecting some classified information has leaked or could be stumbled on, the airforce had Doty befriend him and encourage him… in the direction of UFOs.

Check what the ever reliable rubes at Gaia TV say about him:

Richard Doty is a retired Master Sergeant who worked as a special agent for AFOSI (the Air Force Office of Special Investigations). Among ufologists, Doty is a controversial figure because of his work for AFOSI, where he worked as a counter-intelligence and disinformation agent. He may be best known for giving disinformation to Paul Bennewitz and Linda Moulton Howe, and for orchestrating a campaign to discredit Paul Bennewitz. Since then, Doty has become a whistleblower, assisting Robert Collins with his book, Exempt from Disclosure. Doty has recently even worked with Moulton Howe in correlation with fellow insiders to aid disclosure.

Here’s the moneyshot: Doty’s “Whistleblowing” resembles nothing quite so much as the shit he used to tell Bennewitz.

So here we have a counter intelligence agent of the military openly championing stories very much like the ones he told Bennewitz to keep him from classified information.

And you know who else tells a story very much much like this?

UFO Whistleblower David Grusch.

And this is why Bennewitz, who eventually needed to be hospitalized from stress coming from his investigations, and Doty matter. Because Bennewitz spent years telling anyone who would listen information fed to him by Doty and others. And some of those people who listened would make up the founders of the more sinister tone of the mid/late 80s UFO scene. Guys like John Lear, Bill Moore, and Bill Cooper.

Guys who’s ideas would be ripped off and riffed on by the X-files.

Guys who’s ideas are practically identical to what Blink-182 singer and his “To The Stars Academy” claims.

As a novel, honestly, it’s pretty good. As anything else it’s laughably bad. Tom is a fool.

Seen from a certain paranoid view, an awful lot of the last 40 years of UFO pop culture and serious investigation seems to go back through these two men.

Isn’t that interesting?

We’ll also be following a different but very much related trail to Tom Delonge and David Grusch through Steven Greenstreet’s reporting on their mutual friends.

Off hand it’s mainly Lue Elizondo, but there are other connections I just don’t have them mapped yet.

This is a slide from one of Greenstreet’s videos. Always good to have more names to add to your conspiracy wall.

That’s a good amount of open loops for us, I think. Plenty more where that came from of course.

But let’s be wise and satisfied with beginning again.

Wrapping Up

I have a bit of a secret intent here. This whole project is about the exploration of how the stories we tell can rewrite our experiences of reality even when the underlying world hasn’t changed.

To let Terry tell it:

Anything seems a bit of a stretch, but things can certainly be more flexible than we often assume.

In the comic The Unwritten by Mike Carey, this process is described as Ontogenesis. In biology this is the study of the development of an organism from birth to death.

Stories become real.

Of course, that’s just a story. And the “real” stories that “become real” are far messier and fail quite often.

Yet, there’s something to this. And UFOs are a part of the American civil religion.

Have we somehow cursed ourselves with false knowledge?

Seems likely no matter what the truth here is.

So I hope you’ll join me on our little adventure here. The best thing you can do is share this post with a couple people who’d appreciate it.

Alright.

See y’all soon.

-S