What to Say About UFOs [Trenchant Edges]

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes, 2 seconds. Contains 2808 words

Welcome back to the Newsletter that may podcast again perched upon the third rail of discourse.

I’m your host Stephen, and this is the Trenchant Edges. Trenchant as in insightful and edges as in the near ends of maps and cutting tools.

This is, unfortunately, the first in a series of new posts about UFOs. Part of that is I asked a frequent collaborator what I should write about this week while I’m doing research on Transhumanism.

Editor’s note: Optimistic, lol. Anyway typos provided for free.

A photo from the 1920s of something in the sky, location the photo was taken unknown except that it’s in the US.

I say it’s unfortunate because I find the topic pretty tedious these days. But there’s a whole new whistleblower, congressional hearings, and the like. So plenty to dig into.

But even tracking my personal thoughts on the subject has become difficult. I’ve now written 15,000-20,000 words on UFOs just since starting this newsletter.

I’d planned on writing this to come out on Thursday and I’ve gotten completely lost in my own work and doing preliminary data collection. Some of what I’ve written is pretty good and some is among the worst stuff I’ve published on this page, clearly churned out just to keep up with my publishing schedule.

Why bother if I’m not personally invested?

The short answer is I don’t really understand what’s going on with the whistleblower and I don’t trust my previous big conclusion: The big strains of returning UFOlogy in the mainstream come in two flavors: 1. People like Tucker Carlson using UFO controversy to advance an anti-institutional agenda as part of a larger political project and 2. The sweet never-hurt-anyone-babies at the Department of Defense want more money.

This new whistleblower doesn’t fit in either of those buckets. I don’t understand what that guy is about.

So today I wanna sketch out some problems I want to chew on this time around and talk about my methods of investigation & the standards of proof I’m looking for.

Certainty’s Razor

I’m not a big fan of Occam’s Razor, an intellectual rule of thumb that says that premises shouldn’t be multiplied beyond necessity. To put it another way: The fewer things that need to be true for an explanation the more likely it is to be correct.

This is true and often helpful (and sometimes known as the principle of parsimony), but it has limitations.

The big one is that it’s often used to dismiss any complex explanation. The world is often not a simple place and while there are many highly parsimonoius explanations, parsimony isn’t the only criteria one should look for.

In my favored areas of weird studies, I prefer identifying what we can say with total certainty, and not committing to anything further than that.

So I want to start with what I consider the minimum premises an explanation (or more likely, explanations) for different components of UFO phenomenons has to contend against.

1. People do, in fact, see strange things in the sky. Some of them are detectable by sensors like cameras, some of them are not.

2. The culture and mythology built up around UFOs are their own thing from the phenomenons themselves. Not separate, but easier to understand on its own.

3. Any explanation or combination of explanations must account for: 1. Personal testimony 2. Psychosocial implications 3. Physical evidence

4. Governments in general, but particularly the US Government have been actively lying about UFOs and keeping secrets for decades.

5. Because so much in the field is unfalsifiable, there are a ton of grifters into UFOs. They have no bearing on the validity of the phenomenons, but make real weirdness harder to find.

So we can kind of see 3 problem areas here. Actual sightings themselves, how our culture reacts to reports of sightings, and the fucking government.

Let’s get this out of the way: Governments as we know them are a variety of organized crime. The US government is currently the largest of these cartels and pretty much a money laundering operation.

And here we get to one of my pet peeves of the topic: The fact that the government is lying does not tell us what the truth is.

The national security state as we know it was a response to WW2, the Manhatten Project, and the Cold War. It’s an intensely paranoid culture where projecting strength to the Russians was considered a main priority.

My working assumption about the Government’s UFO cover up is that they’re not trying to hide that we have some secret treaty with aliens, but that they’re just as clueless as everyone else.

These are not people who are comfortable admitting weakness. And they lie about lying as standard operating procedure. It’s called compartmentalization. If you don’t have a Need To Know, you don’t need to know.

This is security 101.

If you compartmentalize information than you have way more options for preventing outside forces from learning what you’re doing or having your own people fuck up.

A ton of the myth of disclosure believers imagine the Natsec state has clear proof and I think there' are a TON of reasons to think it’s more likely that evidence they have for it is itself a government psyop protecting other secrets.

We’ll get to that in the last section of this piece.

A heatmap of UFO sightings by population from the WaPo, we’ll come back to this in another post.

What To Investigate

There are a bunch of questions I’ve got a renewed interest in examining and my starting assumptions.

Here are a few of them:

• Many advocates for the idea we’ve been reverse engineering alien tech point to technologies like Stealth and Transistors as proof we’ve got alien tech, but every time I look into these claims I find like… decades of incremental improvement in the field, speculation, and a mostly iterative process with occasional breakthroughs. I’ve heard of a few new examples I’m not familiar with, so I’m going to find answers. I think this is going to turn out the same as every other tech I’ve looked at.

• Why are most UFO sightings in the USA? According to some data sets it’s over 90% of them. Honestly, I’m pretty sure this is just a data collection bias combined with having a hell of a lot of nuclear weapons (A ton of earlyish UFO sightings were near nuclear test and weapon facilities). We’ve had a mess of labor both official and unofficial gone into the subject since WW1. How many other countries have something like MUFON?

• What’s going on with this whistleblower? Is he credible? Does he say anything we’ve not heard before? I dunno. The vague shit I’ve heard suggests no and no, but I’m going to have to wade through some congressional testimony to know anything worthwhile for sure.

• Is there anything new and useful we can learn from the subject? I don’t really know what to expect. Sometimes I find a rich vein and othertimes I don’t.

I’ll probably have more questions come up as we go.

Some thing I won’t be doing until at least next year:

• Reading the Trickster and The paranormal by George Hansen

• Going through any of Jaques Vallee’s books

That bandwidth needs to go towards novel research as I have less than 3 months before I need to start drafting it.

So let’s go into a bit about how I’m going to be doing this.

We’re going to be using a kind of social media knowledge pump: Produce content to provoke reactions to provide material to investigate to produce content with.

For the technology stuff I’m probably going to have to do some interviews with subject matter experts to rapidly find the kind of fairly obscure and technical information I’m looking for.

Happily, I have a .edu email now. Which makes for a bit more credibility than my usual shit.

As for the data question, I’m going to collect what data I can and do some exploratory data analysis and see if there’s anything worth talking about there. I’ve got a database to scrape already and we’ll see if I’m able to find more.

Combine that with looking people with global UFO orgs and I should be able to put together a map of what places have any kind of meaningful UFO research coverage)

(this is obviously a task that’s a time-pit, but it’s at least worth trying to get some basic questions answered)

As for the whistleblower, I’m going to have to go through his interviews & congressional testimony and do a bit of a background check.

If you’ve got suggestions, concerns, or DIRE WARNINGS FROM THE FUTURE let me know.

How Many Levels of Psyop Are We on My Dude?

OK, we’re back to government bullshit.

This is going to be kind of a blitzkrieg through a few of my issues here.

A quick table of contents for this section:

1. Annie Jacobsen, Area 51, and her CIA buddies

2. Paul Bennewitz, Richard Doty, and Mirage Men

3. Bill Moore and the Poisoned Well

4. Behold an Emperor Without Clothes; Majestic 12, Bill Cooper, and fake documents.

Obviously, each of these could be its own essay.

But now I’ve got less than an hour to get ready for a bachelor party so we’re gonna be speedrunning this section.

1. Annie Jacobsen, Area 51, and her CIA Buddies

This one hurts to write, tbh.

Annie’s a journalist I used to mostly have a positive impression of. She’s written a bunch of books on topics I’m very interested in: Area 51, Operation Paperclip, DARPA.

And she’s an executive producer on the Jack Ryan show with the guy from the office. Which is such blatant CIA propaganda I think Tom Clancy would be offended at what they did.

Yes, that’s right. I think Tom Clancy would have thought they went too far into fantasy. Nevermind why. That show sucks.

But when someone who’s written about how all the people who founded the CIA helped nazis escape justice and working for the US works on a show shilling the CIA, you have to stop and think.

I don’t like accusing people of being feds or working for the feds but this is a show who’s first episode is largely set in Yemen that doesn’t mention the Saudi Arabian War we’ve been providing support for that’s why the CIA is in the country at all.

Her book on Area 51 covers a lot of the history of the base mostly accurately so far as I can tell, made up of dozens of interviews with people who used to work there. It’s really good except for the bit where Stalin used Nazi superscience to clone mutant children to send in a Nazi spacecraft to provoke the US into some kind of civil panic.

And that was what was found at Roswell.

Her source for this was some guy (now dead) who didn’t even have documentation to back this story up making claims.

*Highly* suspect.

And she continues to back up his story as recently as a few years ago on twitter.

I don’t know what’s going on with Annie, but I sure as hell don’t trust it.

Paul Bennewitz, Richard Doty, and Mirage Men

In July 1979, small business owner and radio tinkerer started observing strange lights and unusual radio signals around Kirtland Air Force Base New Mexico.

This become something of an obsession for the man, supported by a complex web of people some of whom were pretty clearly egging him on.

While checking my facts on this I realized I’d forgotten how complicated the situation was and that it went on for the better part of a decade. The short description is Paul appears to have stumbled on the signs of a secret project and Air Force counter intelligence appears to have lied to him to redirect him away from learning more about these secrets.

This all took place over a decade and culminating in Paul having something of a psychotic break, accusing his wife of being in control of the aliens, and being institutionalized for a month after which he become, unsurprisingly, a much more private person.

There’s a lot of wild allegations I don’t want to go half-into. If folks want more info on this situation there’s a bunch of books about it: Clear Intent: the government coverup of the UFO experience was one of the first major books to pick up on it in the 1980s. Followed up on in Out There: The Government's Secret Quest for Extraterrestrials, And after Paul’s 2003 death came Project Beta: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth, and Mirage Men.

The last one being what cued me to the situation.

It’s a really fascinating case study in half-truths.

Doty, one of the Air Force counter-intel guys, is a regular on the UFO circuit which more or less completes my contempt for them. Saying that no yeah he lied to Paul, but now he wants to spread the real truth which is… similar both to what he told Paul and what this whistleblower guy says.

Isn’t that… interesting?

But it wasn’t just the military lying to Bennewitz.

Bill Moore and the Poisoned Well

MUFON is the Mutual UFO Network, an international organization dedicated to share information about the UFO phenomenon.

They’ve been around since 1969 and there are a bunch of criticisms about them we’re going to ignore because we just don’t have time.

Point is, along with Charlie Berlitz he cowrote one of the first books about the UFO crash in Roswell 1947 in 1980. This made him something of a star in the UFO world and so in 1989 he was giving the Saturday Night Talk at their Symposium.

You can listen to the first part of it yourself here (I haven’t been able to find the rest), but the main thing that happens is Moore admits to being an intelligence asset.

And not just any intelligence asset, but one of the people who was feeding Paul Bennewitz bad information at the feds suggestion.

It was career suicide.

And it’s one of those things I can’t ever really forget about.

Bill dresses it up in good intentions, but here’s a genuine A-lister UFOlogist who worked to psyop someone in his own community for the people they say they’re against.

I often talk about UFOlogy as a poisoned well: A place where finding the truth is nigh impossible just because there’s so much bullshit and this is one of my big case studies why.

That makes it useful if you want to practice some critical thinking.

But if you want to know what the fuck is in the sky?

Good luck.

Behold an Emperor Without Clothes; Majestic 12, Bill Cooper, and Fake Documents

We’ve talked about Bill Cooper before and we will again but the man got his start in UFOlogy as one of the early proponents of the Majestic 12 documents.

Maj-12 was a kind of alleged super-government who had made a treaty with alien invaders under Eisenhower. It alleges all kinds of malicious activity and has its own little subgenre of spinoff theories.

Bill Cooper, who’s background in naval intelligence helped the documents gain some early credibility, got his start as an influencer on UFO message boards in 1989 and who would go onto write the book Behold a Pale Horse and have several highly influential radio shows in the 90s before provoking a shoot out with the police after getting dangerously paranoid and armed for years.

If you’re not familiar, he’s Alex Jones but smarter and more sincere. Less of a grifter. Profoundly wrong about a lot of things he worked hard to convince other people.

I bring Bill up here because I think he did something interesting here: He recanted his original support for UFOs and decided the whole field was a psyop.

Now, some people have described this as shifting with market forces as UFOs became less popular, but I don’t know about that. The 90s seemed a pretty good time to be a UFO buff to me.

Bill’s turn away from UFOs marked an increase in his paranoia as he unpacked what he saw as a globe spanning conspiracy by an ancient religion to subjugate humanity. Between that and his belief that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion contained accurate information but weren’t really about Jews, he probably should have been less surprised when hardcore anti-Semites called into his show.

Now I’m just rambling about the guy, lol.

Alright, go back to my title: Bill Cooper had a real history of being fooled by obvious fake documents (unless I’m overstating his sincerity). MJ12 was just one set of them.

And the point of bringing all this up is is to lay some breadcrumbs about the ways someone (I don’t think anyone’s ID’d the forger) faked documents on the subject.

Wrapping Up

OK, so the government doesn’t just lie about UFOs but has spent decades actively creating whole false realities about them. Occasionally driving people nuts.

And that’s just what we know for sure.

There’s probably considerably more than just didn’t make enough noise to get books written about it.

I’d considered talking more about the whistleblower, but this is already long enough.

We’ll see you next week with an update there.

And if there’s a topic you want me to discuss more, let me know.

-S