The Psychology of Dreamland - part 3 of 3
For most bureaucracies, the prime directive is self-preservation. Maintaining the political and economic status quo has always been job one for the military-intelligence community. If they discovered something they believed would "change everything," releasing that information all at once
could totally upset the political apple cart. Thus, some observers of the UFO controversy speculate that we're being slowly conditioned to the idea of extraterrestrials through films, advertising campaigns and calculated leaks of pertinent information, all designed to minimize culture shock.
Culture shock might be the least of the government's problems, however. If aliens are here, the next question is, *why* are they here? This might not be an easy question to answer but increasing numbers of UFO researchers
have concluded that thousands of people are being picked up, examined, and used in strange genetic experiments. Here things *really* start to get spooky.
It almost doesn't matter whether any of this is true in the physical sense. The point is that the evidence, whether genuine or fabricated, suggests to scientists *who are familiar with it* (and that's a critical and often overlooked qualification) that something very weird and shocking is going
on. Again, we're talking about *beliefs* here. If Americans start believing that aliens are snatching people out of their homes and cars, and the authorities can't do anything about it...well, it doesn't exactly enhance the public's faith in the value of government.
Until fairly recently, even UFO researchers--who become accustomed to hearing strange stories--were deeply skeptical about evidence that people were being abducted. Much of this evidence was obtained under hypnosis, a technique that many researchers felt was plagued with serious methodological pitfalls. They wanted physical evidence.
One of the pioneers in this field is psychologist Leo Sprinkle, formerly a professor at the University of Wyoming. Like most intellectual pioneers, Sprinkle experienced some very tough times with his academic associates who felt his conclusions were completely ludicrous.
Inconvenient though it may be, alleged abductions have long been a component of the UFO phenomenon. The issue first burst into public consciousness in 1966 with the publication of 'The Interrupted Journey' (New York: Berkley, 1966) by journalist John G. Fuller. The book told the now well-known story of Betty and Barney Hill and their encounter with a UFO and its occupants on an autumn night in New Hampshire. According to information obtained under hypnosis, the Hills seemed to have been taken
aboard the UFO and subjected to some kind of examination by aliens.
Public interest in the subject was rekindled with the appearance in 1981 of the best-selling book 'Missing Time' (New York: Ballantine, 1981) by artist Budd Hopkins. Hopkins took a much closer look into the phenomenon of alleged alien abductions. He concluded that certain recurring patterns provided support for the idea that abduction experiences were more than
just random psychological delusions.
A still more thorough exploration of the issue appeared in 1992 with the publication of 'Secret Life' (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992) by Temple University history professor David M. Jacobs (author of 'The UFO Controversy in America' mentioned earlier). Now the issue was finally out of the closet. Even the ultra-cautious 'New York Times,' whose coverage of
the UFO controversy has been exceptionally sparse, recognized the abduction phenomenon with a surprisingly open-minded story about Jacobs in its Oct. 28, 1992, edition.
Jacobs does not mince words when drawing conclusions about the abduction phenomenon. "We've been invaded," he says in the final chapter of 'Secret Life.' "At present we can do little or nothing to stop it. The aliens have powers and technology greatly in advance of ours, and that puts us at a
tremendous disadvantage in our ability to affect the phenomenon or gain some control over it."
Before you dismiss Jacobs and others who share his assessment as crazy, you might want to talk with John Mack, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Mack says he became interested in the abduction phenomenon in January of 1990 when an associate offered to introduce him to Budd Hopkins. Mack's initial assessment when told of Hopkins' activities was,
"He must be crazy." After becoming involved with abduction cases himself, though, Mack now says he regards the phenomenon as having tremendous scientific and cultural importance. (His book about the phenomenon, 'Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens,' was published in April 1994 by Charles Scribner's.)
As with Leo Sprinkle and David Jacobs before him, Mack has faced intense criticism from some of his academic associates who are not at all happy with what he has to say. "They've stretched the limits of mid-life crisis," he joked at the Triad conference in July of 1994. "I'm 63. I thought mid-life was, you know, 45-50, so they haven't really got a category for me yet."
Mack insists the experiences of abductees are genuine and says he is continually astounded at the lengths to which educated people go to force-fit them into some inappropriate conceptual framework. "There are new limits of stupidity you encounter in this work," he said. "It's amazing to
me the extent to which people will go to avoid something new."
As far as the underlying cause, Mack agrees with many others who have investigated different aspects of the UFO phenomenon over the past few decades. "I don't see any explanation for this phenomenon other than that there is some intelligence that we don't understand at work," he said.
"The resistance to accepting that there's other intelligences at work here is not a scientific matter, it's a *political* matter," he insisted. "It has to do with who decides, in a particular culture at a particular time, what is reality."
Mack said that the phenomenon is subtle and seems to be trying to correct our self-destructive world view--the view held by large corporations who employ science and technology to carve up the earth for material profit and power. As Mack puts it, "What [the phenomenon] says is, 'We are not masters of the universe; we are not in control.'"
For people who encounter it, this is usually a terrifying notion, he explained. "The terror [that the phenomenon inspires] is the terror of the realization we are not in control."
Dr. Pierre Guerin, a high-ranking French astrophysicist who was employed by the French space agency to study the UFO problem, expressed very similar conclusions in 1979. "...what is quite certain is that the phenomenon is active here, on our planet, and active here as Master. We can neither stop the phenomenon nor comprehend it, and we are well aware that its power totally defies not merely our technological possibilities but probably our mental possibilities as well."
"Science...believes in [extraterrestrials] only on condition that they remain at distances of many light-years from Earth," Guerin continued. "Or rather, it believes that, if they do visit us they will not do it in the fashion in which they are now doing it, -- clandestinely, and with the dice loaded, making it crystal-clear that they come from a transcendental level right outside of and beyond the cozy, reassuring little framework into
which our scientists are so anxious to fit this whole new UFO scene with which we find ourselves confronted."
Dr. Guerin agreed with Mack that this realization inspires terror in government authorities. "Even the security forces of the various governments (who, in our opinion, do know what the truth is about the reality of the UFOs, but have no idea of how to go about tackling the problem) are wary of making the matter public, because of their fear that by so doing, they might not only cause a panic that could destabilize the entire globe, but also they might trigger off a backlash from the intellectual and political elites, who would refuse to give credence to the
security services revelations."
War of the Worlds?:
Assuming the U.S. government reached similar conclusions to those expressed by Mack and Guerin, but much earlier due to its superior intelligence-gathering resources, the seemingly contradictory behavior the government has exhibited over the past 45 years begins to make sense. Seen from the perspective of government, an organization whose entire purpose is control, the UFO phenomenon presents a counterintelligence threat, not simply an interesting scientific problem for open discussion in learned journals.
Science generally assumes that the phenomena it is studying do not "mind" being studied. Such an assumption is unsafe in the world of counterintelligence, where one must assume that potential opponents are aware of your every move unless precautions are taken to disguise them. In fact, it is standard technique to disseminate a cloud of false information, the purpose of which is to deceive the opposing force. In order to deceive an enemy, one must also deceive friends--i.e., the public. Thus, an elaborate game of deception evolves between the opposing forces.
It has often been said that if the U.S. military-intelligence community had undeniable proof for the existence of extraterrestrial visitors, they could not possibly keep this information secret, since leaks would inevitably
occur. In fact, leaks *do* occur in any intelligence-gathering operation but they don't necessarily compromise the secret because the leaks are typically buried in a dense cloud of false and contradictory information. An intelligence expert (or UFO investigator) is thus presented with the formidable task of determining which among the vast sea of facts are reliable and relevant.
In Anthony Cave Brown's classic history of British Intelligence efforts in World War II, 'Bodyguard of Lies' (New York: Harper & Row, 1975) the author explains the basic method used by the elite corps of English aristocrats who made up the powerful London Controlling Section (LCS): "Deception was the province of the LCS, and its special assignment was to plant upon the enemy, along the channels open to it through the Allied high command, hundreds, perhaps thousands of splinters of information that, when assembled by the enemy intelligence services, would form a plausible and acceptable--but false--picture of Allied military intentions."
The plan worked extremely well, as history testifies. Even the massive D-Day invasion force managed to reach Normandy without knowledge of German intelligence. If the entire German intelligence force could not divine the true intentions of the Allied forces, imagine the difficulty of attempting to divine the intentions of an alien intelligence with technologies beyond
our conception. Imagine also the difficulties UFO researchers have faced in attempting to penetrate the security veil of the U.S. intelligence community which has had hundreds of billions of dollars at its disposal.
Were the members of Majestic 12 the equivalent of the British LCS? If the MJ-12 document is genuine, it would appear so. Assuming this was the case, their main problem would have been to gather UFO information clandestinely while feigning disinterest so as not to alarm the public or tip off the perceived opponent to its progress. In this light, the strange games played by Project Blue Book, the mysterious machinations of CIA, the apparent suppression of relevant news and information about the phenomenon, and the Condon Commission's peculiar tricks suddenly come into sharper focus: they are all consistent with a clandestinely planned and executed war of the worlds. Of course, as German intelligence discovered in World War II, consistency and truth may be different matters.
Darkness and Paranoia:
In 'The Russians' (New York: Times Books, 1983), Hedrick Smith's pre-glasnost tale of life in the former Soviet Union, the author describes a society in which the most wild and astounding rumors were given serious credence by the populace because the official explanations were almost universally regarded as lies. The price the Soviet government paid for
suppression of information was a population that was ready to believe *anything,* so long as it did not appear to come from an official source.
A similar situation has developed in the United States in regard to UFO sightings. The constant background of sightings--reported now mainly by regional newspapers, videotapes, specialized newsletters and books--has been greeted in recent years only by official silence. Attempts to discover
the government's true attitude toward the phenomenon through the Freedom of Information Act have been met by resistance and censorship justified on vague national-security grounds. This absence of official information has fostered an environment rich in rumors of the most bizarre and creative sort.
It's being said, for example, that the U.S. government has opened direct, face-to-face negotiations with extraterrestrials, similar to what was portrayed in Steven Spielberg's film 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind.' Others claim the government has made a kind of Faustian pact with the
aliens, allowing them to use some of our people and farm animals for their genetic experiments in return for saucer technology. (Robert Lazar claims to have seen nine well-preserved alien spacecraft at S-4, a surprising number.)
Another story has it that a massive cooperative effort is underway between the U.S. military-intelligence community and the aliens to construct vast underground bases where horrific biomedical experiments are underway using abducted street kids as guinea pigs! Others say the U.S. government is
planning to use its clandestine knowledge of alien technology to stage a fake extraterrestrial invasion in an attempt to unify the world's people behind a common but manufactured threat. Some say the whole captured-alien-hardware story is just a highly elaborate cover for the wholesale looting of the federal treasury by the corrupt and cynical secret government.
Many of the most bizarre and unsubstantiated rumors originate with self-appointed "investigators" who seem to appear out of nowhere to suddenly become superstars of the UFO lecture circuit. One of the more controversial examples is John Lear, son of the Lear Jet's inventor and an admitted former CIA employee. Lear claims his inside knowledge of the frightening UFO situation originates with sources in the U.S. intelligence community. More established and conservative UFO researchers say they are deeply suspicious of Lear and claim he is effectively a government
disinformation agent out to undermine the movement's credibility. By making the entire subject sound as ludicrous as possible, they say, the CIA's psychological warfare people can ensure that most serious scientists and journalists will never come *near* the subject, much less publicly admit any serious interest in it.
Whatever the case, paranoia runs very deep indeed. As reporter George Knapp commented in July 1994, "We all have our share of loonies to deal with but the [government] coverup angle attracts a special breed--dark, foreboding conspiracy buffs who see evil tentacles around every corner: Secret treaties between the government and the aliens--they give us technology; we give them permission to conduct abductions--as if they need our permission; the Trilateral Commission; the CFR; the Bilderbergers, the Illuminati; Neo Nazis; the Rockefellers; One World Government--and UFOs. The gang's all here."
But as someone once observed, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they really aren't out to get you. And therein lies the dilemma. After all, the U.S. government clearly does lie about quite a few things and doesn't say much at all about many others. As long as very odd things continue to happen and authorities are unable or unwilling to tell us what they know, almost anything begins to seem possible. Take a persistent and genuinely puzzling phenomenon, add a half-dozen or so secrecy-obsessed government bureaucracies, a scientific establishment that is fearful of pressing for an investigation, throw in hundreds of well-meaning but financially strapped amateur investigators, a handful of cynical con artists, a few
literary opportunists, some disinformation agents, and half a dozen egotistical scientists who glibly dismiss events they've never taken time to study, and you've got the perfect recipe for mass confusion.
Welcome to the troubled frontier of officially sanctioned knowledge. Whether American society will ever move beyond this frontier depends entirely on whether we can summon the courage to do so, for we must accept that the answers to our questions may not be to our liking, nor to the liking of powerful commercial and government interests.
Science, always a potentially subversive activity, began as an investigation into the nature of experience conducted by a handful of brave intellectuals, often in the face of brutally repressive church-state authorities. Things haven't changed all that much in 350 years. As Herbert Foerstel explains in 'Secret Science: Federal Control of American Science and Technology' (Westport: Praeger, 1993), the U.S. government has
increasingly come to regard scientific knowledge as both a threat to social stability and an opportunity for increased geopolitical control. Foerstel reports that most scientific research in the U.S. is now federally funded and most of this research is conducted by the military whose obsession for secrecy is astounding. Over one trillion classified documents are now in
existence, Foerstel reports.
"Scientists have taken their place as an influential force in society, even as the state has emerged as the chief sponsor and promoter of scientific research," Foerstel writes. "As a result, scientists have compromised two of the most cherished aspects of the scientific ethos; the freedom to
pursue knowledge unhampered by interference from authorities, and the freedom to communicate their ideas without hindrance to the international community of scientists to which they belong."
More fundamental than the question of scientific freedom, though, is the question of whether we wish to live in an open society or in a society controlled by military bureaucrats who determine, without oversight by our elected officials, what we can and cannot know about what they're up to. It would not be overstating matters to say that the choice is really between
totalitarianism and democracy, between a society of ignorant serfs and an open society of informed citizens.
Etched on the main lobby wall of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, is this line from the 'Bible:'
"And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free."