7/28/20: UFO – DROPPING THE BELIEF BAGGAGE W/ JOE MURGIA
MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS
So the other night during one of my rants about what is going on in downtown Portland, there was someone who was messaging me on Facebook messenger telling me that I was pushing pro-Trump propaganda. I told him that I try to be politically neutral on my show—and then he called me an idiot and that I should stop pushing Trump propaganda because he felt that I was racist, a Nazi and all sorts of other things because I criticized the tactics of Antifa.
I told him to stop and he replied – “all you Trump supporters are going down and you especially because you push your agenda of UFO’s and aliens.”
I then waited.
And then it came – UFO’s are a deception and that I will burn I hell for believing in them.
I always get sour when somebody who can’t win an argument then resorts to saying “Well what can you say about and idiot that believed in UFO’s.”
I always tell people that for me objects that fly in the sky that I can’t identify are not a matter of belief they are a matter of fact. If someone looks up in the sky and sees it as an alien ship then they have already identified it to their own interpretation.
The well-known anthropologist Margaret Mead has something to say about UFO’s and the matter of belief in them that I think is important to share.
When asked long ago whether she believed in U.F.O.s. She called it “a silly question,” writing in Redbook in 1974:
“Belief has to do with matters of faith; it has nothing to do with the kind of knowledge that is based on scientific inquiry. … Do people believe in the sun or the moon, or the changing seasons, or the chairs they’re sitting on? When we want to understand something strange, something previously unknown to anyone, we have to begin with an entirely different set of questions. What is it? How does it work?”
I have always said that the study of Unidentified Flying Objects or even aliens has nothing to do with spirituality, even though unfortunately there are people that want to somehow say they are angels, or fallen angels or demons.
Some say that they are entities that are here to guide us towards peace and tranquility even though most stories dealing with this phenomena are centered on war, abduction, physical torture, cattle and animal mutilations, biological experimentation and military collusion.
For a long time the media and scientists have loathed the topic of UFO’s and alien life for this very reason.
The U.S. media has taken a loathing of UFO stories and hasn’t paid much attention to them. It is as if UFO and possible alien related stories have now been placed into the category of ‘hoax’ until proven otherwise, which has placed UFO observation in the same category as having imaginary friends.
The fact is, UFO stories are ubiquitous and not just relics of the Cold War. The problem with any UFO story that is generated now is the tendency of the court of public opinion to assume that all UFO reports are about aliens and or other new age free energy topics which create a schism where scientists wish to stay clear of.
It can also be said that Russian and American UFOlogy has been compromised because it is difficult to ascertain which UFO reports are the product of secret Soviet and American space and military experiments.
However, it is my opinion that this is what makes UFOlogy fascinating. As more documents become declassified, it is quite telling as to what can be identified and what seems to be considered unexplained.
The more we are exposed to the declassification of some documents from our military and other government intelligence agencies, the more we realize that most governments are now or have been aware for some time – that extraterrestrial craft have either shown up here on Earth or have been observed and have crashed.
Last Friday, we ran with a story that the New York Times was dropping about how now military researchers may reveal that they have have in their possession machines or aircraft of unknown origin – which has been interpreted as not of this earth.
In the new article headlines “No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public” — it talked about how an astrophysicist and Pentagon contractor Eric W. Davis gave a classified briefing to government officials in March about retrieved “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”
This if course is huge news if proven to be correct.
For nearly a century, intel gathering under clandestine programs — Project Mogul, Project Sign, Project Grudge, Project Blue Book, Project Ozma had one guiding principle and that was blanket denial that UFO’s which by definition were speculated to be off world vehicles that may be piloted by ETI did not exist.
The stated goal with military programs was to investigate UFO sightings. The outcome was official excuses.
UFOs were reported to be weather balloons or street lamps or migrating birds. They were illusions refracted by the natural world. They were fantasies of deranged imaginations. They were not real.
All of that has changed dramatically, starting with a 2017 New York Times blockbuster that revealed the existence of the U.S. government’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, created a decade earlier to analyze unexplained phenomena. The Navy has since publicly verified three videos that show unidentified aircraft violating the laws of aerodynamics. Apparently, there are more.
What was once the stuff of supermarket tabloids is now taken seriously by politicians and scientists.
However even though these revelations have been reported in the paper of record many people still treat them as if they are still tabloid and what can be or is the biggest story in 51 years since the moon landing is being ignored because of civil unrest and COVID-19 fears.
However I have been contemplating whether or not fixed belied systems or bias has eclipsed trust with regard to these revelations. There have been many claims over time that have been outrageous, even covered by major networks as the real deal – only to be massively debunked later on another network or a different news network.
The Fox Television Network aired the “Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction” special with Jonathan Frakes as host was released in 1995. The special was aired twice on Fox and each time there was in excess of 17 million viewers. Time Magazine compared it to the Zapruder film, saying that no other film has had so much intense debate since the movie that showed Kennedy’s brains being blown out in Dallas.
This film was later said to be a hoax, however a German film collector, Volker Spielberg bought the rights to the film for an untold sum of money claiming the film was real footage from a German alien autopsy in the 1940’s.
Bias eclipses trust—paranoia can also kill trust –and spiritual faith in what is the UFO alien phenomenon is what turns off scientific inquiry.
In the 1980’s and 1990’s there was certainly a besting match between investigators who tried to top the latest X-files episode with some outrageous stories. Those were seen to be the classic years when Art Bell was on the air and people like Richard Hoagland. John Lear and William Cooper were telling great stories about alien and military collusion.
It was also the time where Bob Lazar made claims that he worked at Area 51 – in an area known as S-4 where he claimed that the military was reverse engineering aircraft that were not of this world.
Coincidentally, a claim that seems to be vindicated now that the New York Times is reporting their recent stories about the Military’s relationship with UFO’s.
But what is most disconcerting is that even among UFO enthusiasts the New York Times articles have divided the up the opinions that border on the political.
UFO writers have long been suspicious of the U.S. government, which they believe has suppressed crucial evidence of an alien presence on earth, but in the early years they did not, by and large, embrace strong political positions.
Aliens and UFO’s have never really been a political thing – but now with Senators and even the President in on the new revelations we are now looking at the political ramifications of the newly reported revelations.
However there again lies the faith in UFO’s and not the science and again ideological hijacking and ridicule kills the spark of interest that keeps real investigators from doing their jobs , which is delivering crucial non biased reporting on what unknown phenomenon is buzzing our military and threatening our national security.
Recently, I read an article by Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean about the subject of UFO belief and how those who are publishing the columns about the Pentagons interest in UFO’s are now being confronted by colleagues asking them if publishing the articles are a matter or belief or bias on the subject of UFOs.
In the article they say that since they first broke the story about the Tic Tac UFO encounters in 2017 and now that they are reporting about the current revamped program, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force and its official briefings — ongoing for more than a decade — for intelligence officials, aerospace executives and Congressional staff on reported U.F.O. crashes and retrieved materials – they have been asked if they are believers in UFO’s.
They reply “No, we don’t believe in U.F.O.s.”
In the sense that UFO does not mean alien space ship – they investigate literal unidentified craft that are seen on a daily basis in our skies.
Unidentified means we don’t know what they are, only that they demonstrate capabilities that do not appear to be possible through currently available technology.
In their reporting, they have focused on how the Department of Defense, the Office of Naval Intelligence and members of two Senate committees are engaged with this topic. Current officials are now concerned about the potential threat represented by the very real, advanced technological objects: how close they can come to our fighter jets, sometimes causing a near miss, and the risk that our adversaries may acquire the technology demonstrated by the objects before we in America do.
So if UFOs are no longer a matter of belief, what are they and how do they do what they do?
And if technology has been retrieved from downed objects, what better way to try to understand how they work?
The truth is that while much of what we think of UFO’s can be attributed to Cold War mythology, the reality has taken a turn for the complex and the use of experimental aircraft has now created a new discipline for the UFO researcher.
There is no denying that UFO’s are out there; the truth, however, no longer is.
The old axiom of the “truth” being out there becomes trite and hollow as the identification process unveils both elaborate hoaxes and the frightening reality of remarkable aircraft designed by the military and, in some cases, by entities or intelligences far beyond our comprehension.
In the United States, the debate continues over exactly what the truth is behind the sightings of anomalous objects that are above the Earth. The U.S. Air Force has explained on many occasions that a lot of what is seen can be explained.
However, with the obsession of extra-terrestrial mythology and reality, every bright light, shooting star, experimental plane, and weather anomaly can end up on the front pages of tabloid newspapers and on special fringe news programs labeled as bona fide extraterrestrial craft with the acronym UFO attached to it.
Going from data on a distant object in the sky to the possession of a retrieved one on the ground makes a leap that many find hard to accept and that clearly demands extraordinary evidence.
Numerous associates of the Pentagon program, with high security clearances and decades of involvement with official U.F.O. investigations, are now going on the record saying that UFO crashes have occurred, based on their access to classified information. But the retrieved materials themselves, and any data about them, are completely off-limits to anyone without clearances and a need to know.
That is where the interest wanes – people now are demanding that there be proof but they must also understand that they should not put the cart before the horse… it is a remarkable thing that this disclosure even exists –and the proof allegedly is forthcoming – the only question is what kind of proof will satisfy the skeptic.
There is no question that whatever the case, a series of unclassified slides showing that the program took this seriously enough to include it in numerous briefings is something that cannot be ignored. One slide says one of the program’s tasks was to “arrange for access to data/reports/materials from crash retrievals of A.A.V.’s,” or advanced aerospace vehicles.
Sources quoted by the New York Times say “A.A.V.” does not refer to vehicles made in any country — not Russian or Chinese but is used to mean technology in the realm of the truly unexplained. They also assure us that their briefings are based on facts, not belief.
In order to maximize clarity of communication, we need to be systematic with our terminology.
We need to realize that there is some baggage that comes from using the term UFO and we have to unload it.
There are still many people that believe that it is a great leap against common sense to believe that somewhere out there in vast reaches of the cosmos is life. The idea that we are alone in the universe is a geocentric belief that has come and gone for nearly 2000 years and it appears that every millennia brings with it all sorts of ideas about what is out there and what it means to humankind if we discover that we are not alone.
Once again it is a matter of core intelligence, so everything that has been old school is becoming new again and all of the reports will most certainly be sanitized for the public.
While the new interest has its flair, the old school intelligence still has its grip on the subject matter.
Time will tell if the new school of thought will break through the discord we are having at this time in our history.
