I am one of them! And I keep demanding one question of the Roswellists… “Did it ever occur to any of you to ask us?
“To ask the most rambunctiously independent-minded and creative techies in the world? Instead of dismissing us as some kind of Blofeld-lackey, obediently controlled, James Bond henchmen clichés? Or to track the whereabouts and activities of those who blatantly would have been involved in such an urgent study?”
No? Didn’t think so. Some truth detectives!
Look at what Hollywood has done to you.
== And now they bring in Il Duce? ==
Only, times do change, a little. Increasingly, the UFO community (ahem, cult) has shifted away from the thoroughly-discredited Roswell stuff… to a relatively new story that was never seen until it got triggered by one muttered remark in the nineties, then lavishly embellished just recently. A tale that Benito Mussolini had his own ‘crashed alien ship’ way back in 1933! Shared it with the Japanese and Nazis, in fact. And then…
…and then what? Not one scientist from any of those three countries is known to have disappeared into the kind of emergency research program that such a ‘find’ would have merited or incited, especially during desperate wartime.
Nor was there even a single suspicious leap in any kind of technology. Not even any new alloys – a trivial thing to get from any advanced wreckage. The turbopumps and gyros developed by Von Braun for the V2 were clever increments on Goddard… and only increments. Likewise, when the Americans supposedly seized all the ‘Italian materials’ – the wreckage and alien bodies? Hey, now that makes the whole Megillah NINETY years of near-perfect secrecy….
…despite successive U.S. administrations who hated each others’ guts! And who would gladly have distracted the public by exposing the other party’s nefarious coverup!
So, when the Mussolini Wreck story gets dropped, what’s the next reset? That it goes back even earlier?
That H.G. Wells based his alien invasion story on a stranded pack of spaced invaders?
Hey, I participated in that anthology! See War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches.
== Puh- lease? ==
Mind you I am “Mr. Aliens,” having studied such notions in astrophysics, SETI, NASA and innumerable science fiction thought experiments. I would do a 180 in an instant, if you showed me anything other than vapor, pareidolia and hallucinations.
There are big differences. Both SETI and sci fi are exploratory. On the other hand, shrieking ‘coverup!’ at civil servants who have way better things to be doing with our tax dollars? Raving masturbatory, fantasy what-ifs and yammering that it all must be real, because I want it to be!
That’s the biggest reason why I am so sick of the UFO nonsense. Not because contact isn’t possible! I’m open to that. Rather, because all of the scenarios we’re offered are insipid, time-wasting and dumb!
Mr. Dunning sifts through the now-most-popular UFO fetishisms — other than recent ‘tictacs,’ which are a completely separate matter than the ‘crashed ship cult. (See below – at least those assertions can be grappled-with, as I do, elsewhere.)
Dunning’s most caustic critique is aimed toward the Congressional shills who put us through all this endlessly, tediously recurring ‘crashed ship’ nonsense for their own political reasons, without doing a scintilla of due diligence:
“Now, researching this episode took me the better part of a week, because I had to track down every part and verify each with solid references. If I was a US Congressman, like Tim Burchett who is the one most responsible for putting Grusch on this stage, I would have at least assigned a staffer (an intern, an aide, anyone) to spend at least a day or two on the Internet to verify this guy Grusch’s story just to make sure I wouldn’t end up looking like a fool. Well, Burchett felt confident enough not to do that, and now he looks like a fool — because a lot of people like me can do this research, and we have easy platforms to get it out there.
“And David Grusch, bless his heart, I’m sure he’s honest and he believes deeply in what he’s saying; he just seems to have a very, very low bar for the quality of evidence that he accepts, to the point that he doesn’t even double check it before testifying to it before Congress as fact. And this is common, not just for Grusch and other UFOlogists, but for all of us: When we hear something that supports our preferred worldview, we tend to accept it uncritically. Too few of us apply the same scrutiny to things we agree with as we do to things we disagree with. It’s just one more of countless examples we have, reminding us that we should always be skeptical.”
== The Question No One Ever asks ==
Okay, here’s one you’ve not heard elsewhere, which is a pity, in light of the dumb Gillibrand-Rubio bill.
IF tens of thousands of US experts have been studying alien ships for 80 years without a single outcome or leak – despite every modern temptation to seek either transparency and/or publicity – then have you considered this? That these folks – our very best and smartest people – might have a good reason to keep it secret? A reason that has convinced those tens of thousands to stifle their own natural, strong impulse to shout “Look at what I’ve been doing!!”
In which case – if their consensus-agreed reason is that strong – then who the F are YOU fools to screech at them over possibly existential-level reasons for discretion?”
Sure, the fellow saying that to you right now is widely called “Mister Transparency!” Transparent accountability is key to our civilization!
But I am also a sci fi author and historian and hence I can imagine more than a dozen scenarios in which the sage answer – consensus agreed by all those thousands of our best people – would be: “We’d better keep this quiet for a while.”
Certainly they’d have to have ‘reasons’ a whole lot better than the clichés we hear bandied about: National Security (???) or ‘prevent public panic!’ (seriously?)… or the dumbest one: protecting military contracts. (You imply that revealing the existence of unfriendly aliens would reduce defense spending?)
No, it would take something really compelling. Maybe something *I* can’t even imagine! (Hey, it’s happened.) Moreover, if ALL of those thousands so-agreed, and kept to that consensus across 80+ years, then who the heck are you to declare – without any of the facts – that we should spasm it all?
What a stunningly self-centered and bratty position to take!
(In fact, I explored exactly this scenario in a novella called “Senses, Three and Six.”)
Okay… in that case…
…want a solution? A middle ground?
Form a commission of the dozen most respected and trusted human beings on Earth. Maybe start with – um – Tom Hanks and Morgan Freeman and Oprah? Add Kip Thorne and Neil Tyson and Beyoncé and Bill Nye and Patrick Stewart? Give them go anywhere passes to see anything and question everyone.
And then let them tell us:
“We found nada –“
Or “We found THIS! –“
Or else maybe – “Everybody Shut th’F up. Sit down. We mean it.”
== It’s time to shift tactics, dear UFO folks ==
Seriously, the entire premise of the ‘crashed ship’ cult is so execrably dumb that it seems quite compatible with a different ET contact scenario… that aliens are spewing down at us some kind of stoopid ray!
The cult really would be advised to drop that ‘crashed ship’ part of their catechism, altogether. Along with all the silly-debunked ‘photos’ from the 1950s and such.
(With ten million times as many active cameras on Earth today, why do the ‘images’ get fuzzier, every year?)
Instead of the insanely ludicrous Crashed Ship stuff, you could focus on the present, like the ‘tic-tacs’! Those recent ‘sightings’ of blurry, zipping glow-balls, reported by Navy pilots and such. The few of them that haven’t been clearly debunked by Mick West, that is.
Those few exceptions do appear maybe to be glowing dots, flitting about in the atomosphere above US Navy test ranges! And at least the tictac thing doesn’t pre-suppose that tens of thousands of top humans are movie cliché lemming-henchman!
So sure, offer up your cheap sci fi star drives that violate every known law of nature and physics! (I can do much better!) Yeah, I suppose a magical zippy-drive that crushes, Newton & Einstein & Thorne might rank somewhere at the very low end of a long list of Tic-Tac UAP possibilities.
Though maybe you might first consider more plausible explanations, as I do here? Theories for the phenomena that don’t require viciously nasty space teasers breaking every law of science?
== By far a more likely “they’re here!’ scenario! ==
A few final thoughts on this, for now. Especially something that MIGHT ACTUALLY BE HAPPENING.
Consider. If ‘they’ do exist and are truly are here in the solar system, would they not already be on the Internet?
Isn’t our technology supposed to be child’s play for such beings?
Picture them amused by our primitive political thrashings and TV shows and fetishes… maybe selling it all to Galacto-Netflix as space-voyeur reality TV? (“Oh, Those Funny Humans!”)
Indeed, maybe…reading – and chuckling over – what I just typed, just now?
And what you type in response? Maybe hacking your webcam and phones etc., for giggles? (Shouldn’t that possibility make you a wee bit…angry?)
Isn’t that scenario vastly, vastly more plausible than vapidly vaporous and incompetent ‘crashed ships’? (Ships that the aliens never seem interested in recovering, or their lost comrades?) Or flitting-teaser fuzzballs, desperately adjusting their blurr-rays, as we keep improving our cameras?
Let’s dive into that Internet Lurker Scenario for a bit. If aliens or probes are listening in on our TV and Internet (a form of ET contact that I do believe does have a small chance of being true, as I depict in Existence), then they must be laughing, or shaking their heads, sadly, over this recurring UFO mania.
In fact, as part of an effort to test that theory, anthropologist Alan Tough posted a website in 1999 — his “Invitation to ETI lurkers” endeavor!