The Deep State! It was funny for a little while...

That photo above was from when I was a guest on the Three Profs and a Pitcher podcast.

It was a bright moment before the dark times, before the end of SJC. We talked about conspiracy theories and the people who believe in them. I spoke extensively on the subject of Dulce, which was occupying my writing and research time, again before the fall of SJC and my change in thesis direction. In a tongue-in-cheek gesture we donned, as you can see, tinfoil hats to block out the signals supposedly being beamed into our brains by the government or the aliens or whoever. A good time was had by all and as I have for many years, I enjoyed discussing conspiracy theory through the prism of rhetoric and narrative construction.

Lately, I've been thinking about the more dangerous side of conspiracy theories...and I'm troubled.

In recent weeks, more than one person has told me the same story and both did so with all earnestness and sincerity. These were intelligent, decently-educated people. Their vision of the world  goes something like this:

"There is a globalist cabal secretly orchestrating a New World Order. Aiding in these efforts are a 'Deep State'--a US government within the US government--journalists (or the more derisive "MSM"), scientists, and higher education. Along with the Moose Lodge, this vast conspiracy is keeping alien contact a secret from the public at-large. But they can't for much longer. Disclosure is coming..."

Okay, so I made up the part about the Moose Lodge, but there's still so much to unpack in that claim.

Normally, I'd love it. It has all the narrative elements of what makes James Bond and The X-Files so good. It's also understandable why someone might think these otherwise outlandish things. This world is an unfair and unkind place where bad things often happen for no reason. Or there may be a reason, but you are powerless in the face of it. Believing that happenings are secretly organized against you, or even the whole public at-large, begins to make a kind of sense. After a time, one may even feel a sense of comfort in it. It's a form of screaming back into the dark, impenetrable void of the absurdity of existence. Of course things aren't working out. "They" are all against you. There is a populism in such a philosophy.

No one embraces populism more than Donald Trump. He has even openly claimed that there is a "Deep State", mostly composed of the intelligence-gathering apparatuses of the government, working against him. Last year at this time, Senator Ron Johnson, the Senate Homeland Security Committee chairman mind you, went on Fox News and alerted all Americans that a "secret society" that includes the FBI is lurking about.

The problem of course is that this is beyond impractical. Political scientist Joseph Uscinski is an academic (oh no!) who has spent considerable time studying conspiracy theories and why the vast majority are implausible. Here's a mental activity to help illustrate just why that is.

Think of your favorite rock band. Got them in mind? Good.
Now, are they still together? If they are still together, are they still the original line up of members? Unless you are thinking of U2 or another rarity, the answer to one of those questions is very likely "no." That's because people can't seem to work together for extended periods of time. Eventually, differences in philosophy and personality cause paths to diverge. Same goes for government as people regularly leave administrations. The current administration appears to excel at this very phenomenon.

Point being, the so-called "Deep State" would require an enormous amount of people to perpetuate. In time, someone or more likely multiple someones, would walk away and talk. Dr. David Grimes is a physicist at Oxford University (oh no!) who mathematically computed just how long it would take for most conspiracy theories to unravel due to the amount of people involved. For example: Moon landing hoax? 3.7 years. There's secretly a cure for cancer? 3.2 years. 

Despite this reasoning, we have a president and a senior member of the Senate promulgating claims of "secret societies" and "the Deep State", claims few, if any, political leaders would previously have made. When conspiracy theory is passed off as fact by high-ranking officials, I tend to see a problem.

This problem is compounded by the denunciation of journalism, or "the MSM" the conspiracy adherents term it, as "enemies of the people." That's how we end up with people like Robert Chain.

Chain was arrested by the FBI and charged with threatening journalists at The Boston Globe, leaving voicemail messages such as "You're the enemy of the people, and we're going to kill every f-king one of you. Why don't you call Mueller, maybe he can help you out."

Journalists. Scientists. Academics. The FBI. Those who work in those disciplines and organizations are among the most fact-driven people in our society. To be skeptical and look for bias is one thing. Any student of rhetoric will tell you that no writing or communication of any kind is possible without at least the smallest taint of bias. To accuse them of collusion in specious conspiracies and label them as "enemies of the people" however, can obviously have dangerous consequences. While I do try to avoid Godwin's Law and agrumentum ad Hitlerum, I can't help but see parallels between these claims and the "stabbed in the back" myth. Yes, I just linked to Wikipedia, which I also don't like to do, but it has a political cartoon from the 1930s which brings the subject into vivid clarity.

This conspiracy theory stated that Germany lost World War I not because of the Allies' superior military prowess, but because of sabotage at home by Jews and other treasonous undesirables. Nazis were able to implement this falsehood to stir up populist fervor and lead people to do unspeakable things. Bear in mind that Nazi leadership also believed in the Hollow Earth conspiracy. What then was Nazism if not a conspiracy theory run loose to a point where it swept up a nation and millions died?

No, we're not there yet. I think I'd like to avoid it just the same, though.

The milder aspect of the worldview presented to me is that of "alien disclosure."

It's obviously no secret I have a strong interest in UFOs. This interest stems mainly from my fascination with how people construct narratives and rhetorical meaning out of the phenomenon. While I am quite skeptical, I still see a small percentage of cases, maybe around 4%, that have no easy explanation and that may indeed require an answer with extraordinary implications. The extraterrestrial hypothesis is one of those possible implications, but I see it as a remote one.

To paraphrase my would-be television alter-ego: "I want to believe...but hard evidence has proven elusive."

Since life has knocked me from my high horse plenty of times in recent years, I have stopped mocking people if they do happen to be UFO "true believers." You never know what's going on in someone's life and that hobby or interest you find laughable might just be the only thing keeping them glued together. Derision is not only unnecessary, it's just plain unkind.

In fact, it might be something in the same vein as mocking someone's religion. I would be far from the first to compare UFOs with religion. Many who have had sightings or other experiences with UFOs are said to come away with a profound spiritual awakening. This is understandable. Their experience, even if probably explainable through any number of prosaic occurrences, has given them a glimpse of "the other." They received a taste of the ethereal, something fantastic, a connection to something greater than our humdrum lives and something that might just give meaning to our otherwise absurd and random existence.

Doesn't that sound like religion?

For years in Catholic mass, I spoke the words, "And He shall come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and His Kingdom shall have no end." Is that or "the rapture" really any different than UFO enthusiasts crying, "One day there will be Disclosure and the 'space people' will show up, twinkle their little almond eyes, and everything will be fine"?

Most of the time it's a harmless enough "religious" belief, except in cases such as the Heaven's Gate cult. I've noticed however, how often UFO enthusiasts are also proponents of New World Order, Illuminati, Deep State conspiracy theories. Michael Barkun of Syracuse University (oh no!) has even likened this substrata of UFO enthusiast to fundamentalist religious zealots. It's a sort of "populist intellectualism." What happens, however, if these beliefs, such as "the Deep State", are granted validation from authority figures? Then the day the UFO devotee wants most, the day of Disclosure, is kept barricaded from them by secret societies, with the "MSM" and science itself complicit in the act. Therefore, shun all "mainstream media" and instead stay informed by some guy blogging out of his basement, with none of the text given peer review or even editorial scrutiny.

(Note: I am fully aware of the irony of my having just written that in a blog post, but I certainly don't try to pass myself off as harboring any "secret truth." No "files on the secret space program" around here.)

That, I believe, is a cocktail for an even deeper populist anti-intellectualism in this nation, a misplaced distrust of several of its most necessary institutions, and perhaps consequences far more horrendous than any of that.

Naturally, the conspiracy counterargument to all I have written might be a derisory cry that I'm "an ivory tower egghead" who has been "brainwashed by the MSM" in a "liberal indoctrination camp" (read "university") and that I'm "just one of the sheeple."

Given the alternative and its dark potential, I can live with that.


Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Three big stories we're following

Image from the NY Post.


Well, one big story and two pretty interesting ones.

And by "we," I mean the editorial desks here at ESE.

Which pretty much means just me. Anyway, here's what I've found fascinating lately.

The first story comes from the realm of transportation. Hyundai announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that the organization is developing a walking car. You read that correctly. Why would anyone ever require such a vehicle? Besides the fact that it would look really cool? Additionally, if "cool" is a deciding factor, wouldn't you much rather have one that flies?

If you can't have flight, then the walking car would still allow you to travel where other cars cannot. Floodwaters? No big deal anymore...not such a bad feature as sea levels rise. Streets strewn with concrete rubble? No problem...again, not such a bad feature as who knows where the hell our current situation is taking us. Plus, Hyundai claims this car will even be able to walk up stairs should you need it to. We'll see where this goes.

Reminds of when my friend George once bought a jeep and he developed a new philosophy of curbs: "F--k 'em."

Our next story is about NASA's new TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) satellite already being hard at work. TESS was launched last April with the mission of taking over for the Kepler space telescope which ran out of fuel in October, 2018. Like Kepler, TESS will search for exoplanets, but with greater ability to measure an exoplanet's mass and the composition of its atmosphere. TESS has already found three exoplanets orbiting a small star about 53 light years away from us. We should be able to study this newfound solar system in greater detail than ever before.

I don't know. While the promise of gaining a greater understanding of exoplanets is most tantalizing, I can't help but feel bad for Kepler. It's out there, 100 million miles from Earth. It's final commands were sent months ago, now it hears nothing more. It found us thousands of exoplanets, but will now forever drift in silence, because it's out of gas and a new and improved model has been found.

Might be a metaphor in that for the American worker.

The biggest story is, well, pretty big.

We have detected repeated radio signals coming from space. The point of origin is a galaxy 1.5 billion light years away, but this is still most encouraging. The radio bursts repeated six times and from the same location. They were "flung out with the same amount of energy the sun takes 12 months to produce," as it says at the link.

This is the second time that repeated radio bursts have been found coming from deep space, leading astronomers to suspect that such repeating radio bursts may be a bit more plentiful than initially thought. Before we get our hopes up about aliens, it would be prudent to check ourselves. These signals could be the product of dying stars, or strange astronomical phenomena we don't yet know.

And yet...

And yet...

It's the "signal from an alien civilization" scenario that is the most enticing, isn't it? This is especially because the fact that they are repeating from a fixed location is rather suspicious. Have we somehow overheard someone else's conversation? Also possible, could it be another civilization similar to our own, one transmitting a signal into the void that asks the question, "Is anyone out there?"

Oh boy, do I want that to be true. To finally have, in my lifetime no less, scientific confirmation that there are alien civilizations...well, I'd be busting. I don't think my college would be very happy about it as I doubt I'd teach classes for a week or more. I'd be continually glued to the news, soaking in all the information I could. I'd pitch myself as pundit. Why not? I'm no less informed than many the cable news channels go to for perspectives. You would get daily, nay, hourly updates from ESE as the biggest story ever unfolded. 

What would this mean to society? What would this mean for science fiction? Would it grow more or less relevant in the face of science fiction becoming fact? I would opt for "more relevant," for if a signal were confirmed, there would only be greater speculation about alien life as we would still likely know precious few details.

This all sounds a blog post in and of itself. More to come and well...let's keep hoping.


Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

David Bowie and UFOs

It was round about this time of year when we lost David Bowie.

I suppose that's why I've plucked this topic from my overflowing "To Blog" folder in Google. It was a "long read" I found in The Independent many months back about music stars who were also connected with UFOs. It contained this little tidbit I had not previously known (where I've added the emphasis):

"But the king of the UFO pop stars has to be David Bowie. If his oeuvre wasn’t enough – “Loving the Alien”, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, “Starman” – the young David Robert Jones not only put out a UFO newsletter with friends when he was a teenager, but spotted his own mysterious skybound object over London in 1967."

Bowie ran a UFO zine? I shouldn't be surprised, but geez, like I needed any more reason to worship the guy.

Of course I did know about his UFO connection. For further reading on the matter of rock musicians and UFOs, I recommend the book, Alien Rock by Michael C. Luckman. Naturally it has an entire chapter devoted to Bowie. Here's a precis of one of my favorite passages (p. 84-85) from that chapter:

It's 1974, and Bowie is on tour in America, making a stop in Detroit. A 6pm news broadcast on one of the local stations said that a UFO had crashed in the area. The downed craft was described as being "six feet wide and 30 feet long."

Just picture that for a moment.

Anyway, the report continued to say, as Bowie later excitedly related to Mirabella magazine, that "three creatures" in the craft were killed on impact. They were taken to a hospital and examined, and found to be human-like but smaller and with more developed brains. More news on the shocking development would come at the 11pm broadcast.

Unfortunately, the whole thing was revealed to be a hoax at 11pm and that the news crew who initially reported the matter was summarily fired as no UFO or alien craft whatsoever had crashed, landed, been intercepted, or anything of the sort. It was like the Roswell UFO crash and Orson Welles' War of the Worlds all rolled into one.

David Bowie, however, was undeterred. He had one of his personal assistants go buy him a telescope. He aimed this telescope out the moonroof of his limousine as he traveled to Minneapolis, the next stop on the tour, watching for UFOs the whole way.   

Doesn't it just...make sense?

Bowie's connection to science fiction is obvious, particularly with Ziggy Stardust, and his  breathtaking role in The Man Who Fell to Earth, but it's more than that even. He truly seemed otherworldly to me. It wasn't an act, it wasn't a persona, there was just something that made him seem not of this Earth. I will never forget being in the third row at his concert in 1995 when Nine Inch Nails, honestly the real reason I was there at the time, were finishing up their set and Bowie just strode out in the midst of these sweaty guys who had just finished smashing their instruments, and stood regally at the front of stage. His presence, his voice, his visage, I've never seen any musician with that total package and that "I'm really not from around here" quality.

In addition to the book by Luckman, which I believe must be easily ten years old by now, there is a new text on this subject by Jason Heller called Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded. You can't miss its cover. It has a cartoon rendering of Bowie's face and the title is in the same font as the title for Gold Key's Star Trek comic book. The dust cover description says that the book goes into detail about Bowie sneaking into a movie theater to see 2001 and how much that changed his life. Can't wait to read it all, and fortunately I have easy access to it as I first learned of the book by seeing it in my college library.

That's when you know you teach at a joint that's worthwhile. It orders copies of quality reads like Heller's. I'm serious.

More than anything, I think part of Bowie's creative genius came from this sense he had that there was something far greater that lurked outside of ourselves. By "ourselves" I mean the collective consciousness of humanity. UFOs are a psychological, if not physical, manifestation of that sense.
 
 

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Portals

“Nothing changes on New Year’s Day.”

-“New Year’s Day” by U2

It is New Year’s Day. 2019.

Last night I gleefully toggled between marathons of Twilight Zone and Space: 1999. I had a small plate of Pizza Rolls next to me. I have precious few New Year’s Eve traditions, but Pizza Rolls are one. My Dad would make them for my brother and I as kids, part of a small buffet of snack foods. We were too young for champagne, so it was a way of making it feel like a special night. It’s different now, though. I am much older and when I get horizontal and wrapped in a blanket, well, the result is usually assured. Though I fought hard, I fell asleep at about 11pm. I was nudged awake 15 minutes before midnight so that I might witness the arrival of the new year.

Like always, the clock struck midnight and it didn’t feel like much changed.

As is the case with so much else, “New Year’s” is an artificial construct we humans have concocted together. Of course, I’ve blogged bitterly in the past about how much I dislike the concept of this holiday, but my stance has softened quite a bit. I’m still not a fan, but I am left wondering about how much the Eve/Day represent our desires.

I think we want to step through a portal. We want to move through a ring of bluish-white light that washes us clean. Suddenly we find ourselves somewhere new with a fresh start. Last year, I certainly came to understand that desire. I’m going risk sounding grandiose here and not in the way that I usually do. But that’s what happened. The year 2018 represented a portal and I crossed through it into a new world, one I am quite pleased and thankful to inhabit. More on that later.

When I ruminate on these topics, I naturally look around at what else has been written about them, from the neoteric to the arcane. All I can say is my, we do love our portals and “wormholes” in popular culture.

Sometimes it’s the thrilling idea that we’ve found a hidden doorway to someplace else, such as the Hopi legends of people and entities passing between worlds through portals. Other times it’s the utility of being able to bypass vast stretches of time and space, like on Stargate (pictured above). Both are telling about human nature.  

I was disappointed to learn that black holes are not actually portals to a parallel universe. That was the thinking in my youth (see 1979’s The Black Hole, perhaps the best film Disney ever made.) Turns out that, according to the late, great Stephen Hawking, these vortexes formed from collapsed stars draw in matter and energy and then spew it all back out in a sort of cosmological carnage and flotsam. So no traveling through a black hole to a new universe if this one begins to collapse in on itself. Yes, yes, I know it would be quite a feat to survive the crushing gravity and the distortion of all space and time, but I was sort of hoping transhumanism could help us out with that. Then again that’s pretty much my fall back for most things these days.

Guess I’ve been thinking about things in astronomical terms lately. I wrote a “Socratic dialogue” between me and my dogs about the cosmos for a nature writing class. Maybe I’ll post it on here if I can’t find a publisher. Also, the cosmological perspective found its way into my book about the College. I described the closing of Saint Joseph’s College as the center of the universe falling out and a black hole left in its place. I was left adrift to go find an entirely new universe to replace it. In redrafting, I realized that is an imperfect metaphor.

Maybe, in a way, a portal suddenly opened beneath me. I fell through the wormhole into terra incognito, being thrown and tumbled about in all directions as I did. It’s not a ride I can recommend to anyone. It isn’t much fun.

And yet…and yet…

The portal dropped me off in someplace that’s not too bad. In fact, it’s pretty damn great, really. Would I have ever chosen that portal to open beneath me for me to fall through? No. I doubt I ever would have. In fact, I know I wouldn’t have. Somehow though, it might have ended up being exactly what I needed.

That doesn’t mean I’ll ever stop carrying a raging fury for the operators of the portal generator, but that’s an entirely different can of tuna and I’m already meandering into “vague blogging”.

Life is made up of meetings and partings. Or at least that’s what Kermit told me a week ago in A Muppet Christmas Carol. Another way to see it could portals that suddenly open and take us away from somewhere or someone, only to drop us off somewhere else, somewhere else that’s becomes home. If only we could control and stabilize the openings and closings of these portals. But we can’t. Sometimes that’s all right.

So goodnight, America. Good luck nursing your hangover, should you have one.
Wherever the portal of 2019 takes you, I hope it is even better than the world you found yourself in during 2018 and that it will always feel like home. 

POST SCRIPT: The year 2019 is when the movie Blade Runner (one of my favorites) takes place. If you get a Replicant, be nice to him/her and may you always pass your Voight/Kampf test.


Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets