The UFO Menace

In Richard G. Mitchell Jr.’s Dancing at Armageddon (2002):  Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times, he took a survey of as many survivalist as possible and asked them what Future Crises were most on their mind- participants could answer with more than one item. After nuclear war (50.4%), and economic collapse, came alien Invasion (14.1%).  This fear even coming ahead of the dreaded take over by world forces.

To get some ideas of what some people might you might try this link to a home crown periodical: The Phoenix Project.  Granted their current concerns seem a little more open ended than mine, but they do share my interest in historical research. 

So while the alien’s in our midst was not the dominant concern of most, it certainly had its adherents.  Although many associate the rise in UFO-ology to Molder and Scully of X-files fame, it has a much longer and deeper history than that.

FLYING SAUCER CULTS  by John Shirley

Everyone's trying to see past the boundaries. They want to see past the edges of mortality; or past the frontiers of perception; they want to see past the barriers of time and space, which really means past the barriers between themselves and people around them. They try to see into the future; they try to peer into the dust-trailed past. They don't spend much time in the present. They crowd along the fences of the fringes of the consensus reality. They're motivated by fear and hope and sometimes by something profounder than those and deeper than curiosity. Step into the fringes, and you see a suggestive chaos. If you don't erect a skeptical filter, the Rorschach effect will take hold; the chaos wills Rorschach-twitch itself into whatever you came there hoping to see...

The impulse to explore the fringe of consensus reality is, in many people, and unknown to them, something more: an underlying spiritual hunger. In those people, it is something sacred. This sacred impulse for seeking has been desecrated and violated by cults and cult leaders and false prophets and false gurus. The most recent manifestation of this violation of the sacred impulse to seek comes from the new crop of FLYING SAUCER CULTS.

The UFO field, if field it can be called, is an exemplar of a thesis beloved to me; that many things are true and untrue at once; that yes and no can be said in answer to the same question, accurately, for many, if not most, situations…

It's true that the UFO field is bogus and largely inflated with credulity and deception and that this makes flying saucers improbable; it's simultaneously true that it's founded in a reality, and that there is good reason to believe that flying saucers are real.

The saucer cults push us toward incredulity.

he saucer cults go back a ways, even before the saucers (which entered public awareness chiefly in 1947 with Kenneth Arnold's sighting and his coining of the term) to the pseudo-Theosophical I AM cult of the 1930s, which had regular psychic congress with Venusians. According to Peter Jordan in UFO Magazine, the sect was founded by Guy and Edna Ballard who were the Earthbound intermediaries of a Venusian named Sananda, also known, on our world, as Jesus Christ.

Among the thousands of I AM followers were those "absorbed from American fascist William Dudley Peley's Silver Shirts -- the influence was conveyed strongly by I AM's staunch paramilitary character." The fascist, and racist strain in UFO cults crops up frequently.

Steeped in the literature of the I AM cult was Marion Keech, a 1950s housewife who "contacted" aliens from the planet Clarion. Keech passed on warnings and advice from her alien chums; a group of her followers gathered at her home on a fateful night when the Western USA was ET-predicted to be engulfed in a sort of re-enactment of Noah's deluge; there the saucers were to come, Marion calmly explained, to carry the faithful to safety. Of course, neither flood nor saucers came, but followers who need to believe despite the obvious contradictions will concoct outrageous rationales for failures of proofs. As psychologist Leon Festinger had it, in studying this group, "...new cognitions or rationalizations are created in order that the belief system can be preserved..." in the mind of the devotee. (Hence Scientology too survives every damning accusation against Hubbard and his "org").

Christmas UFO

Obviously part of Santa's logistical team

Who is Minding the Black Helicopter Store?

The previous  US President being both widely unpopular and generally identified with the conservative wing of politics.  How does the current sitting President manages to continue so many of these policies and yet at the same time be viewed as a left-wing Trojan horse, is rather amazing.

And yet he has managed to do this, and there is an truth in both accusations. 

President Barack Obama and CIA Director Leon Panetta have managed to accomplish what the Bush administration and three CIA directors failed to do over a five-year period - significantly compromise the position of the CIA's statutory Inspector General (IG) and its Office of the Inspector General (OIG). In announcing the completion of the CIA's internal review of the tragic suicide bombing at an agency base in Afghanistan in late December, Panetta acknowledged that the review was prepared by senior officers of the CIA's counterintelligence division, that the report would be provided to the OIG in "keeping with past practice," and that - despite the deaths of seven agency operatives and contractors - no one would be held accountable. 

...President Obama has demonstrated time and again that he is unwilling to address the CIA's controversial - possibly illegal - actions, and CIA director Panetta is making sure that no internal oversight body does so. The president seems to have succumbed to what his favorite philosopher, Reinhold Niebuhr, terms the "false security to which all men are tempted" - the security of power.

Melvin A. Goodman at Truthout hat tip  Naked Capitalism