On Sunday, May 16, 2021, CBS 60 Minutes had a segment that could change one’s worldview. Bill Whitaker’s interview of Lue Elizondo, a government official and expert on UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena) was perhaps the strangest in the history of the show. It is true that since 2017 the government has been leaking information that pretty unequivocally admits things have been filmed, even pursued, in our air space, that we cannot identify, that seem to be aware of us and that exhibit aerodynamic powers that transcend anything we possess.
The details and urgent tone of Elizondo reveal realities that the government has been covering up for decades, realities known and experienced by countless human beings all over planet. But why has it taken so long to start to own up to what Whitaker said sounds ‘wacky.’ Wacky may not be the right word. This is what Elizondo said: “Imagine a technology that can do 6-to-700 g-forces, that can fly at 13,000 miles an hour, that can evade radar and that can fly through air and water and possibly space. And oh, by the way, has no obvious signs of propulsion, no wings, no control surfaces and yet still can defy the natural effects of Earth's gravity. That's precisely what we're seeing.”
One wonders what kind of technology produces the superphysical effects here described. The phenomena seem like products of a psychic technology that enables one to travel about as one ‘travels’ in a dream, in accord with the logic of dream space.
Why did (does) the government want to conceal the truth from us? One point seems obvious enough: mighty, god-blessed America does not want to appear helpless and baffled in the face of such an unknown power. The instinctive response is suspicious, possibly secret research conducted by our Russian or Chinese adversaries. A technology that can dance rings around our technology will of necessity be perceived as a threat. Elizondo states that one government official backed off from disclosure of the truth for theological reasons. The security expert, Elizondo, was told to read the Bible and know that these manifestations were most likely of diabolic origin, so the truth about them should be hidden from the public. Are we in the digital or the stone age?
A few things I can say with confidence. Wacky or not, UAPs and UFOs are real—but real in a sense that is elusive, complicated, and very puzzling. They may well be a constant in human history, especially during periods of existential crisis, and show up as what C. G. Jung called archetypes. Weirdness in the U.S. noticeably increased in the 1890s with reports of floating sailboats in the sky and the show goes on, decade after decade, often (to use a term of John Keel’s )in flaps.
The mythology of the sky epiphanies is anything but uniform, but in fact has evolved. The first category is the most varied: sightings, more or less close. But it gets interesting for the theory of religion, when sightings lead to contact with an unknown intelligence, or an actual alien, presumably behind the sighting. The early contact mythologies were positive in spirit and aim, with a missionary bent. They brought hope in the evolutionary future of our race. But at the same period we find reports of variously nasty UFOs & occupants. Then in the 1960s, the weirdness gets weirder, and we hear reports of alien abduction—sight, contact, abduction—talk about flipping! The mythology takes off in new directions; at the same time, it harks back to ancient mythologies of gods and goddesses in one way or another co-habiting with mortals. The aliens now seem interested in creating a new species out of our rough human hardware. They don’t mind raping us to advance their reproductive experimentation. Whether all this is to be understood literally or metaphorically is not quite clear. John Mack has studied the stories and the abductees, and found in them a challenge to our greater humanity.
The mythologies vary and mean different things to different people in different cultures. Americans in the 1890s see different ‘vehicles’ of the epiphany from what Americans in the 1950s and the 2020s saw. This seems to suggest that UFOs and UAPs are perceived in terms of the perceiver’s subjective self. This is true. In spite, however, of the extraordinary variety of subjective elements that go into all the mythmaking, there remains a hard core of objective strangeness that overturns our everyday sense of reality, forcing us to stretch our minds.
In my one reality-stretching UAP experience, I saw things that instantly expanded my sense of reality. What I (and two others) saw was like no conceivable vehicle in terrestrial space. Finally, after decades of evasion, the government is admitting that some wild anti-gravity entity is invading our air space. Elizondo has hinted the story is going to take off as the government opens up gradually to what is known. Stay tuned.
Michael — thanks for this post on unexplained aerial phenomena. In this realm, one question continues to bother me. You might call it the Herbert paradox in line with the Fermi paradox: where are they? When the Hubble telescope went up, lots of new discoveries ensued. Now suppose we deploy a new world-wide detector consisting of a billion optical sensors, a giant fly's eye camera distributed over the whole Earth. What new discoveries could we reasonably expect? Such a giant fly's eye detector has already been deployed: there are now more than 3 Billion smart phones in use around the world. Call it the Omniscope. Why are we supposed to be impressed by tiny, fuzzy military blurs? Where are our hundreds of up close hi-res Instagrams of angels and aliens? Our Omniscope is fully functional. Where are they hiding, Mike?
ReplyDeleteWith respect to Elizondo's quote regarding the exceptional capabilities of some UFOs, as unsettling as his statement might seem to some, there is really nothing in it that is new to those who have been following reportage of these phenomena for the past few decades. So, indeed, I am very curious to learn why it is that the government is finally admitting that they are aware of UFOs, collecting reports, etc. But, I totally agree with you, Michael, my bet is that the answer as to the origin, operation, purpose, etc., of these aerial craft, and possibly related phenomena (e.g., alien abductions), is likely so intricately complex as to be beyond our present ability to fully grasp.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading a Politico article this evening that stated there were only two possibilities; either it was a non-human entity piloting the UAV's or it was a terrestrial adversary from a foreign Gov.....it occurred to me that we are leaving out the possibility that it is an earthly, "space animal', that lives in the sea and has the ability to fly up to space and back down in seconds...something biological that lives in the sky and/or sea???? .......why the fuck not?........Earth has so many diverse species, I would not be surprised if one of them became able to exploit this new and novel environment of the sky and eventually space and we never knew it because we never looked for it!?
ReplyDeleteWhy not indeed? Creature vastly more evolved than we are who have migrated around the universe.
ReplyDeleteNick, they are seen and recorded quite a bit--I saw the damn thing with two other people.My guess is that we can't nail them down with our technologies for the same reason we can't nail psi down with technology: they operate from a different ontological base, more mental than physical, and therefore sneakier and more elusive.
ReplyDeleteAnd Miguel, why now the disclosure? Partly due to more courageous whistle-blowers, and maybe because of the endless avalanche of reports that keep coming.