Belief in NHI

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

Here's a video by Mick West, who is pretty active in the UFO skeptic space. He goes over the pre-hearing interview of David Grusch on News Nation.

https://youtu.be/AvhMMhW-JN0

[dubsartur]

That seems like a good overview but I don't have independent sources for the details and don't know the people involved. 

I think I would like a long-form, humane-but-critical account of these spaces.  Given the power of the military-intelligence nexus in the US, I doubt we will ever get a full account of real programs that might inspire UFO mythology (including programs to feed misinformation to believers to hide other programs).  The CIA destroyed records of its Bush era torture programs and MK-ULTRA rather than hand them over!

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

Yes, this is the tricky thing. The intersection of usual claims with actual covert programs means you can only judge the validity former using broad strokes / logical thinking, minus much in the way of concrete details. 

One example: Mick West notes that Grusch got clearance from the pentagon to come forward and make the claims he did in the media and during the hearing. For West, this counts as evidence that there is no conspiracy, because if there was a conspiracy, the pentagon would not have given that clearance.

But for the UFO crowd, this same action by Grusch is viewed as a masterful play. The pentagon might not agree with what Grusch has to say, and might not want him to say it, but they only have grounds to reject his request if it poses a threat to national security. So, to tell him he cannot say it, would be tantamount to admitting that the contents was true. So, from this perspective, Grusch got the pentagon into a corner, where the best case was just to clear him say what he wanted, with the implicit meaning there being that none of it was true. 

Depending on what set of presuppositions you bring with you, you can interpret the same situation in a way that corroborates the understanding that you already have. I do like West's more direct logical points with respects to the unlikelihood of so many crashed craft being collected though. This kind of more direct inference is more powerful.

[dubsartur]

Because the military-intelligence nexus in the USA is so big, so convoluted, and so resistant to congress the courts and the executive, its also possible to tell a story where this part of the system is neutral or friendly, but that part is controlled by the Conspiracy.  Between 2016 and 2021 there was a lot of speculation in the USA about which federal agencies or agency heads were for or against orange guy.

We have seen with COVID policy since 2022 how governments around the world can all implement the same policy without saying they are implementing a common policy, why they are implementing it, or what the goals of this policy are!  There are other examples like the globalized nationalist far right (international conferences on how to seize control of the state and make the foreigners and immigrants pay!) or how the US government and Fidel Castro came together in the 1960s and 1970s to persecute gay people in their jurisdictions.  Its not surprising that some people turn to conspiratorial thinking.

Edit: also, even though I have not done a deep research dive on this, I think its interesting!  I just don't want to express a strong personal opinion based on half-assed investigation.

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

Here's a new expose by the New York post on the hearings, showing the links between Grusch and Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp.

[dubsartur]

On online cold-case communities, I think there are books like Bill James, The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery, and Susan Jonusas, Hell's Half-Acre: The Untold Story of the Benders, a Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier

So those would be the equivalent of the woo-woo books and the books that patiently explain that the cryptid was probably an owl having a bad day.

[Jubal]

In fairness to the hypothetical owl, I too would feel I was having a bad day if someone pointedly mistook me for a horrifying urban legend.

[dubsartur]

"Hi, I'm Jubal Barca and I would like to make the case for reconsidering Georgian chronology in the 830s ... no, I am not Spring-Heeled Jubal the terror of Norwich, the tabloids got that all wrong ... and Reddit too, yes.    What, I was on twitter too? ... No that is not a brain pick that is my spare USB stick with the slides!"

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

An old essay from 1964 that has some continuing relevance here.

https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/

I begin with a particularly revealing episode—the panic that broke out in some quarters at the end of the eighteenth century over the allegedly subversive activities of the Bavarian Illuminati. This panic was a part of the general reaction to the French Revolution. In the United States it was heightened by the response of certain men, mostly in New England and among the established clergy, to the rise of Jeffersonian democracy.

The focus of course is political, but I think this kind of underlying paranoia within U.S. culture is deeply interwoven with the rise of the UFO mythos, which is also originally a U.S. phenomenon.

[dubsartur]

An old essay from 1964 that has some continuing relevance here.

https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/

I begin with a particularly revealing episode—the panic that broke out in some quarters at the end of the eighteenth century over the allegedly subversive activities of the Bavarian Illuminati. This panic was a part of the general reaction to the French Revolution. In the United States it was heightened by the response of certain men, mostly in New England and among the established clergy, to the rise of Jeffersonian democracy.

The focus of course is political, but I think this kind of underlying paranoia within U.S. culture is deeply interwoven with the rise of the UFO mythos, which is also originally a U.S. phenomenon.

Oh, did not know that essay was free online!

The USA is so full of real conspiracies by powerful people, churches, and government agencies that its very easy for Americans to slip into conspiracy theorizing (which is different than theories about real conspiracies: the conspiracies in conspiracy theories work differently).

[Jubal]

I think the bigger things that make the US an especial hotbed for conspiracy are around the lack of shared societal trust in just about anything - the extremely sharp political partisanship and high reliance on often rather predatory non-state institutions for fulfilling certain state functions (healthcare, etc), combined with quite high technical living standards and thus rates of information flow, I think are a fairly unique combination. If you grew up with lots of powerful actors telling you that you can't trust the government, and in any case it's not like the government does much directly for you that you notice, and you know you can't trust private business because you know how your health insurance (barely) works or have had to conclude it's unaffordable... it feels really easy for Americans especially to end up in a situation where they have already rejected all the standard anchor points for information in society?

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

Some more interesting articles.
https://harpers.org/archive/2023/11/disclosure/
The dark historical roots of 'starseeds'

[dubsartur]

The Daily Mail (!) accuses Jay Stratton, Travis Taylor, and David Grusch of having written the UFO disclosure legislation which Senator Chuck Shumer tried to slip into the National Defense Authorization Act (which authorizes the FY 2024 budget for the Department of Defense).  They cite anonymous sources which from the Daily Heil does not inspire confidence.

Sources told DailyMail.com the legislation was drafted with input from former officials who worked on the Pentagon's programs investigating 'Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena' (UAP).

These include Jay Stratton, who headed the Defense Department's UAP Task Force from 2018 to 2021, his former chief scientist Travis Taylor, and program predecessor Luis Elizondo.

The most involved with the drafting was David Grusch, a senior intelligence official who later became an Air Force liaison to the Task Force, and has claimed to Congress that the US has recovered multiple crashed UFOs.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12860881/Congressmen-battle-disclosures-non-human-intelligence-UFO-bill.html

[Jubal]

I am personally disappointed that harpers dot org did not turn out to be a real life version of the Harpers, as honestly that feels like something the world could do with lately.

Re BDB's second link, I hadn't realised that there was a whole new wave of New Age pseudoracist UFO stuff coming out on TikTok. It doesn't surprise me but does feel depressing. I think I get particularly dispirited by TikTok stuff because the whole medium, not just the content per se, is so totally alien to how my brain works that I struggle to fathom a world that communicates like that. It makes me feel rather ironically, uhm, alien.

[dubsartur]

Re: BDB's second link, I hadn't realised that there was a whole new wave of New Age pseudoracist UFO stuff coming out on TikTok. It doesn't surprise me but does feel depressing. I think I get particularly dispirited by TikTok stuff because the whole medium, not just the content per se, is so totally alien to how my brain works that I struggle to fathom a world that communicates like that. It makes me feel rather ironically, uhm, alien.

One of the rough lessons for people who liked the scholarly early Internet is that a lot of digital things in the smartphone age are not for us.  As the Internet grows bigger, it becomes less like a cross between a university campus and a geeky convention and more like people in general.

The History Channel has been marinating the brains of older male Americans with less college education in ancient aliens nonsense for 20 years.  TikTok can't do any worse, it just reaches a different demographic.  I think that anyone who dismissed this as long as it was 'only' on a major cable channel and group of trade publishers but not in media that market themselves to the richest, most educated quarter of the USA population was making a terrible mistake, the same mistake which determined the result of the 2016 presidential election.  But I don't understand that side of contemporary US culture, the sheer contempt that university-educated higher-income urban people and lower-income rural people often have for each other.