On UFOs and the paranormal and power, some thoughts.

Note, I respect everyone so far in this conversation, I think they all have done serious research on this and don't disagree, but I want to note something. Thread (not sure how long it will be, we live in times) https://twitter.com/ScolesSarah/status/1292818455280758785

The big issue with the SRI et al group is their relationship to power. Their ties to the intelligence and military communities, forged at a moment when institutions and academia were becoming open to metaphysical ideas, at a time of costly colonial war, sounds real familiar

It sounds a lot like late 19th century Britain, where parapsychology (psychical research) was invented in the cultural and intellectual heart of the most powerful empire on the planet

As @TheProfRog documents in his book The Mummy's Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy, the British Museum was, like other national museums, designed to be a modernity machine, to create modern citizens with a myth about Western/British progress, illustrated with artifacts

Instead, it's haunted

And not only in the traditional sense, tied to fear of contagion from problematic imperial wars, of cursed foreign objects

But in haunting London. The area around the BM became home to numerous mediums. Experiences with them, and concern over disenchantment, got a number of scientists (like Darwin's cousin Galton, Crookes, etc.) so impressed/concerned that they started doing psychical research

And it wasn't just mediums. This also became ground zero for mystical orders, like Theosophy and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Orders which sparked much of what comes to inform the paranormal world, including UFOs

They had famous and influential participants, fans, backers. Many with one foot in privilege, and one foot in the counterculture, whose status and money burnished reputations of these movements, but also led to press amusement & scorn.

Is any of this starting to sound familiar?

The US had a long history of imperialism in North America and Latin America before 1947. But that year more than any other stands out as the formation of the modern national security state. A few other things happened that year too

When I see SRI and its space poltergeist offspring, I see the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Theosophists, the mediums, the museum curators who hung around with ghost hunters, and what they all wrought

Imperial Power amplifies cultural foibles. More power in a small number of hands, more of their quirks and idiosyncracies.

But the UFO case is somewhat different too

First, it got serious interest by the military, for a short while, in an age of massive paranoia about the skies. As @TheUFOTrail and others document, it then became more of a cultural distraction useful when needed to protect assets

But the even bigger difference is the nature of that National Security state, the fetishization of secrecy, and of access to secrets. This doesn't exist in the British Imperial Occult, not in the same way.

But the kind of secrecy that becomes a hallmark of government post Manhattan Project is rocket fuel for UFOs.

Its that concentration of power in a limited number of hands. And the projection of its foibles.

But the secrecy stops it from failing culturally

There is no real version of this stuff being laughed out of the room ... if the room is media attention. The old failures are hidden away, or explained away that maybe they really _did_ work.

Each GRILL FLAME or STARGATE or AATIP (with private-funded NIDS in sabbatical) doesn't become another fizzle. It becomes another _maybe this one worked_ why would I doubt them, they worked on all the others, they come from an important Institute, it was a government program

Putting power & authority in a small number of hands with limited check magnifies cultural beliefs that might not easily propagate.

Cloaking it in glamorous secret squirrel credibility boosts it in the media without any real way of questioning it.

Luckily none of the descendants of the late 19th century occult movement got up to any trouble in the following half century or so