Reality Wars Bunker Notes:
Random notes toward a coherent conclusion.
by Gene Stewart
“Maybe the machines will keep us as pets after they take over.”
/ Gregory Peckk in MIRAGE, 1965.
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Let us begin by defining Descarte’s terms. Or ours, perhaps.
To debunk means to take the bunk, or bullshit, out of things. It means to be skeptical of wild claims and to demand empirical evidence that can be checked independently.
Skeptical means to systematically doubt any claim that appears to wander beyond the normal experience or expectation. Again, rooted in empirical evidence, this is a stance solidly in physics
Ah, but a skeptibunker, that is another creature entirely. Born of Kurtz’s Krazy Krusaders, said Kurtz being Paul, professor of communist studies, these misshapen things were spawned in a publication of Kurtz’s Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, or CSICOP.
Cops they are, of the bullying, hectoring type. Said publications was called SKEPTICAL INQUIRER in order to throw us all off for, while actual skepticism arose now and then, much of this rag focused on smearing, character assassination, (how are the acolytes, Randi?), and outright lying in order to ridicule those claiming to have experienced something out of the ordinary. These articles and those who wrote them wanted to control free speech so no one dared mention anything they disapproved of.
Skeptibunker = fanatic in other words, and that is my highly-slanted version of what they are and where they come from.
Be it noted, even Carl Sagan, in chapter 7 of Demon-Haunted Universe, his last book, tried to warn CSICOP, into which he’d been dragooned as a publicity measure much as Scientology dragoons celebrity actors for glare to hide behind, that it was destroying any good it might do by promoting empiricism, a good thing, by instead turning crazy and irrational about debunking. They ignored this and enshrined him as a stolen plaster saint when he died.
Skeptibunkers so often mistake being able to propose a plausible explanation for explaining. They yap out anything that might possibly explain something and act as if they’re disposing of the claim. They’re so adamant about ignoring fact and dismissing anything that is not their idea that it makes us wonder why they act that way.
Fear makes them so determinedly snippy and sneery, is my guess. Fear of the world. Fear of losing control. Fear that things are not as they so desperately want them to be. So they yap, and pretend shutting down discussion is the same as disproving a claim. It is false logic, their snort schtick. If they’re convinced by the dismissal of it, they’re self-deluded and easily fooled into thinking there was nothing to the claim in the first place. All without having to consider actual evidence. This could be Orwell’s Double-Think on steroids.
Skepti-bunkers also tend to develop a small set of dismissive suggestions that suffice for them. To wave away ghosts, they cite pets, vermin, vibration from traffic, and faulty plumbing or electrical circuits. Those are the basic tools in their box of No Way. While all these and more need checked, merely suggesting something is not a demonstration. A conjecture is no proof at all.
Those desperate to debunk do not do this dismissive magic talk only for ghosts. For UFOs they will say swamp gas, weather balloons, rectilinear clouds, temperature inversions, birds reflecting light, ice crystals reflecting light, search lights reflecting off clouds, and the ever-popular hallucination.
Sometimes they warp statistics to cheat. In an old episode of ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S MYSTERIOUS WORLD, a dowser was tested by debunkers setting out a grid in a garden. Into one of the dozen or so squares something was buried and the dowsers were asked to find it using only dowsing. Most did not, some did. The semi-inflatable Randi immediately declared their success rate no better than random chance and preened for his very young audience.
In stepped Clarke, who pointed out Randi’s calculations were seriously off and that, in fact, the success / failure rate deviated strongly from chance so strongly that the results convinced Clarke there was enough there to warrant further investigation.
He did not allow a CSICOP to cheat, in short, and was not to be fooled by shell-gaming some numbers to confuse the rubes. Clarke was a real scientist in that moment, taking the results and analyzing them fairly.
Skeptibunkers wave their hands and mutter magic words to blur your mind, such as when they chase ghosts by invoking headlights, reflections, and uneven floors. “It’s the carnival effect,” they sneer, rattling their heads.
To chase off Bigfoot the skeptibunkers mutter bear, hoax, and shadows born of fear of the wilderness.
Any vaguely possible explanation works for them. Venus as UFO, even if Venus is not visible at sighting time.
They are focused on ridicule and on preventing people from looking further into certain topics. Some suggest this goes hand-in-hand with the conservatives’ desperate attempt to keep natural hallucinogenic substances suppressed. Everything from marijuana to ayahuasca is demonized as if it might topple civilization.
Bothering to worry so much about seemingly irrelevant and harmless experiences marks skeptibunkers as puzzling fanatics. Their focus on shamanic experience puzzles us until we realize the paranormal and certain chemical compounds both lead to insights that tend to free one from the illusion of the corporate society that traps us.
Status quo society fears us seeing past the consumer scam and freeing ourselves from our corporate roles as debt holders.
Yes, I’m stating the main debunker groups are corporate shills for the status quo, which essentially boils down to the 1% banksters, who own 99% of the money and property on the planet. They own the concept of property, too, and the people freeing ourselves from their imposed thinking is what they fear most.
Some status quo thugs, such as Philip J. Klass, are cynics doing a paid job and enjoying the limelight as speaker for the corrupt. Others, such as the die-cast Joe Nickell type, are true believers indoctrinated into materialism.
Full-disclosure time:
I once bought into the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER’s stated goals and mindset. I even wrote an article for that publication, once, focused on science fiction. That was before seeing CSICOP consistently ignore their own ideals and science’s methods, which they claimed to defend. They cheated and lied in order to stifle this or that claim. They claimed to defend clear thinking by muddying the waters, by fogging discussions with pseudoscience and personal, unfounded opinion.
Seeing finally their fanaticism, I bailed.
We need holism. Physics, myth, and psychology all apply to experiences. Keeping the range of our experiential categories apart, as academic science does, only blocks any chance at a glimpse from a higher vantage. We need to cross-check and include, integrating what we now compartmentalize. This includes UFOs, the paranormal, and what is called The Fringe.
Limiting focus can help, it is true, as part of experiment or investigation but at a point these distinct contexts and discrete findings must be gathered so they combine into meaning. Separation creates only misunderstanding.
We do this parsing and separating across the sciences. If a finding does not fit current established narrative, it is ignored and often attacked. Outside narrow pursuits, most scientists ignore what their colleagues in other areas are doing. In this way they justify their status quo and refuse to change despite mounting evidence that their theories are wrong.
The Dinosaur Heresies are a good example. It took decades for solid evidence to make a dent in correcting the lizard theory, and decades more until the bird theory took hold and was validated. The evidence was overwhelming but the established academics had to die off before evidence mattered. They clung to error and lied about it rather than change from decades of having their text books rule the schools. They defended their tenure rather than admit evidence into the discussion.
Awareness of the bird theory of dinosaurs is to the point now that informed fans complained about the new JURASSIC PARK movie not featuring feathers on the dinosaurs. This is dealt with amusingly in the movie, by the way. What was once heresy enough to lose you tenure and job is now seen even by layman fiction fans as an outrageously important accuracy needing embraced. They find it necessary, due to the evidence finally having been considered.
Evidence should matter above all else in science, yet we see it is human ego diverting and slowing science’s progress.
Science is a human pursuit, so the human factor often trumps evidence.
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Let us look at random outré examples to see in more detail how this culture war between evidence and willful ignorance works. We shall speak of these in a cultural shorthand, taking for granted most know the references because anyone sufficiently open-minded to bother Googling can find out if they don’t know.
Be warned, if you do look online, you’ll find much more than could be covered in a mere article. No whining about what’s left out, please, this is a randomly-selected and eccentric historical overview of opposing stances in the reality wars, a report from the bunker.
THE ROSWELL INCIDENT:
Roswell’s captured flying disc — note: it was not labeled “recovered” in the Army’s 1947 press release — compels further examination. The base commander okayed the press release, as was confirmed by a reluctant radio news broadcaster in town when the announcement was dropped off for him to read. He feared causing trouble and confirmed it before daring to read it on air. He was shut down later in the day by federal agents.
For a brief time, then, it was true that the U.S. Army had announced a captured flying disk. Captured implies intact. Of course this may have been bravado on the commander’s part to make it sound as if they’d come out victorious in a military maneuver, instead of simply picking up what fell.
Very quickly General Roger Ramey decided to pull out a crushed Rawin weather balloon to display in his office as a means of explaining away the captured saucer nonsense. His farcical dog-and-aluminum show worked, deflecting attention away from the initial claim and shutting things down for 30 years. Go find the pictures of that circus and look at the faces of the men in the pictures. They’re all rolling eyes and having everyone on.
It fooled no one except the public.
More interestingly, in later years it became possible to blow up the visible text on a telegram Ramey is holding in a couple pictures. The telegram mentions the sending of the captured disk on to Wright-Patterson AFB for analysis by the Foreign Technology unit.
Hm. You wouldn’t send crumpled Rawin balloons there, that would end your career, yet we know planes did indeed fly something there post haste.
That the ramifications chilled the Pentagon is evident by the way spending on UFOs rose steeply while information about them fell to as close to nil as possible. We shall not touch upon MAJIC-12.
CANALS ON MARS:
Random thought: Was Percival Lowell seeing not canals on Mars but vegetation, something like a last blossoming of lichen? Most now think he saw nothing but his own delusions but perhaps that’s harsh. He was not in other areas a fool, after all. Maybe he was seeing something we can no longer see because it ceased being.
Such useful rhetorical questions keep speculative investigation alive.
THE MANTELL INCIDENT:
Mantell was not the first pilot killed by or white chasing a UFO, it seems. His was one such incident that made a splash in the media, however, so it is often discussed. The first of several lies about it concerned the planet Venus, which he was said to have mistakenly chased upward well past his operational ceiling, without oxygen, of 10,000 feet, where he passed out and thus crashed. This despite his last report describing the object he was chasing as “metallic and huge”.
The story switched to weather balloons when the scoffing grew loud enough. Skeptibunkers are always ready to change stories when their latest bullshit falls through on them.
The American public lets the skeptibunkers slide, so slapped silly is it every time it dares mention something outside the scope of the constipated official narrative.
OFFICIAL USAF UFO SURVEYS & INVESTIGATIONS, PLUS BONUS SASQUATCH HISTORY REFERENTS:
Call these the Bonus Years. J. Allen Hynek quit in disgust after his swamp gas debacle, to be cited more later. He admitted he’d gone from skeptic to interested due to overwhelming detailed evidence.
That is the key, evidence. He finally let his denial collapse under the weight of fact. He had to admit there was something physical up there we could not begin to explain but that the best hypothesis was the ETH. This scared him.
A preponderance of evidence is confirming Sasquatch, too. Jeff Meldrum’s collection of footprint casts, largest on the planet, demonstrate too much range and detail to be explained as hoaxes. The evidence includes thousands of detailed casts, samples of scat, hair, DNA, (primate, no known species), and various tree structures, among much else. Yes, West Virginia, there is much physical evidence for Bigfoot being a real beast.
Yet reporting a UFO or Bigfoot sighting gets you ridiculed and called crazy. It gets some people ostracized by their family and friends. It’s a powerful culture war taboo that stands against admitting such experiences.
It defines our reality. What’s in it, what’s not allowed to be in it.
Seems reality remains what the status quo decides and demands, regardless of evidence and despite fact. This should distress more of us.
Did you know Donald Keyhoe’s focus on UFOs came from an assignment offered by TRUE magazine? Keyhoe became one of the most informed and ardent of those demanding a serious and transparent investigation of the UFO phenomena. There were a range of them, all being officially ignored. He discovered this by investigating fairly and seriously. As a retired marine, he know how to be systematic and thorough and to keep at the job ’til done.
Meanwhile, Project: GRUDGE cooperated on a two-part skeptibunking of UFOs in national publications, an effort to quash interest in UFOs that failed signally considering the huge popularity of ex-marine Keyhoe’s TRUE article, “The Flying Saucers Are Real.” He would later expand this into a book, write other books, and appear on countless radio and TV discussions, to good effect. He was informed, intelligent, and articulate, not the illiterate rube portrayed in skeptibunker mockery as the typical UFO promoter.
We see this culture war between the reality folks who want to know and the irreality folks who want their beliefs, or lies, or coverups, to prevail as a slimy thread throughout history.
After Keyhoe’s article, an 8mm movie of two disks hovering near a baseball field in Montana, rising straight up slowly, then zooming off to pass behind light poles and a power station tower, surfaced. It was shot by a baseball coach name of Mariana who showed it around town to many of his friends and acquaintances.
Word got around and the military wanted to see it, for analysis, as with the Zapruder film a few years later.
He gladly complied, only later becoming worried when he kept hearing all the dismissal and sneering from the Pentagon crowd. He demanded his film back and got it, mostly. 35 frames from the beginning were missing. Those showed the saucers hovering and rising slowly. The USAF denied any splice and blamed him. He demonstrated his own home splicer was vertical, while theirs was diagonal. They ignored this as mere fact as they would the obvious cut in the Zapruder film when the re-edited frames show the motorcade going behind a sign that should not have been there.
Interestingly, when General Cabell, then in nominal charge of the USAF UFO investigation, saw the Mariana film, he went ballistic. He reportedly stormed around the office slamming fists onto the conference table and saying he’d been lied to and was sick of it. With proof of the lying finally in hand, he crushed Project GRUDGE and soon instituted Project BLUE BOOK. Not that it would ultimately make a difference.
THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, very much a parallel of the Jesus / Osiris myth, was released around then, the same year THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD came out. Here we see the conflicting views of the culture war. Hope vs. Fear. Altruism vs. Menace. Liberal vs. Conservative. Left vs. Right. Democrat vs. GOP. In the former film, TDTESS, directed by Robert Wise, the saucer folks are benign and trying to warn us. Klaatu barata nicto. In the latter, TTFAW, directed by Howard Hawks, they are vegetative monsters that resemble James Arness, out to kill us all for what we hadn’t yet done to Miss Kitty’s Saloon Earth.
TRUE published Keyhoe’s article in 1950. LIFE published its Marilyn Monroe cover issue with an article confirming the extraterrestrial origins of UFOs the same year.
Please note the utter lack of social panic and upheaval the control freaks always argue will happen if we’d confirm the ETH. Ahem.
Donald Menzel, a Harvard astronomy professor and apparently a professional shill, stepped forward to offer a series of increasingly insane skeptidebunking attempts. His explanations were even more inane and contemptible than the swamp gas debacle that had yet to arise, yet he was treated as a triumphant savior of reason by a tame media.
TAKE ME TO YOUR CORRUPT, TERRIFIED LEADERS:
On Saturday 19 July 1952 UFOs showed up for the first of three nights over Washington, DC. Since Andrews AFB was under repair, jets had to be scrambled in from Delaware. Each time the jets showed up the UFOs hid from both visual observation and radar, as if they’d vanished. When the jets withdrew to refuel, the UFOs playfully returned to dance over the White House. Angry Pentagon officials took this as taunting.
The following Saturday more UFOs arrived over Washington, DC and swarmed, making an even bigger display. It was obvious the military could do nothing to stop them. Please note, the UFOs did no harm, either, except to ego, which, as we’ve seen, is enough to thwart rationality.
The Tuesday after that second Saturday, the biggest USAF press conference since WW II took place to dismiss all those pesky UFOs as a temperature inversion. Oh yes, they went with that.
Inside the Pentagon, chaos and career panic reigned. Bafflement exploded like artillery shells. Truman got torqued and ordered serious study.
In swooped the CIA, always willing to spend money on ambiguous projects. Blue Book, by then under Ed Ruppelt, blew up immensely, but of course it would soon be subsumed by the vile CIA Robertson Panel.
More dismissal flowed from the Robertson Panel, from secret meetings in which only eight poor cases were glanced at. It was the Robertson Panel that gave clear recommendation that UFOs were to be ridiculed and those who report them marginalized. No science was done and National Security was cited as the reason.
This alone speaks volumes.
Ruppelt lost Blue Book and quit the service. UFOs and especially the ETH went dark, kept in a forgotten cell.
Up bobbed the Contactees, of course, with George Adams leading the march of kooks. In 1954 at Giant Rock in the Mojave desert they had the first Intergalactic Contactee mass meeting. It was like The Burning Man but without the rancor.
Many wondered then and wonder now if the Contactee phenomena were stirred up, staged, and encouraged by CIA to keep the ridicule high and the mockery intense. If so, it worked.
Then came Betty and Barney Hill.
After Hynek pulled the swamp gas brain fart in Michigan, Gerald Ford, senator from that state, go riled over his constituents being patronized. Ford’s committee stirred up further calls for investigations, but led, of course, only to Condon issuing more cynical debunking than ever.
The civilian groups convened by Ford and supposedly cooperating with the Condon Committee at the University of Colorado quickly smelled skunk. They realized the fix was in when some of them overheard Condon himself asking the USAF representative what conclusion the Air Force would prefer. Oh yes. It was all done so the U. of CO would get federal grants, you see. A tit-for-ass favor. Sheer pay-off.
Dr. James McDonald was among the few scientists genuinely interested in UFO research and willing to do the work. He was, of course, suicided, his research seized and presumably destroyed.
(For a good biography of him, and a great account of his struggle against the culture warriors, find a copy of Firestorm by Ann Druffel. It is rare but worth finding used perhaps.)
Along came the Ed Michalak case, a man who, while hunting in woods, saw two disks, one on the ground, the other hovering. Thinking one of our experimental crafts might be in trouble and wanting to help, he approached the grounded craft as the other shot off. He touched it, was surprised at its heat, and then, while he walked its circumference, was burned on the chest by what he described as exhaust from a checked-pattern grid. The marks on his chest and burns on hands and face were severe and puzzled doctors. He never fully regained his health, which showed signs of exposure to high radiation. Of course there was nothing there when he showed others later where it had happened.
Such cases argued for the reality of UFOs even as Condon fiddled his subversion and received huge media acclaim, even though even a casual reading of the report the committee issued shows absurd misstatement, ignoring of established fact, and outright lying. Rather like the Warren Commission’s report, hm?
Condon’s committee, in fact, fell apart during its so-called investigation. Many scientists left, citing the witnessing of far too much dismissal and almost no actual discussion or investigation. Condon even fired two members for mentioning such concerns to the press, and further, Condon threatened to destroy their academic careers to the extent possible for them having “betrayed” him.
The Condon Committee, like the report, was a farce, yet this debacle was hailed and praised by the NY Times science reporter, for one, as the final work in this UFO nonsense. Can we say ‘plant’?
The fix was in at all levels. Still is.
Keyhoe’s own organization NICAP, was destroyed, Blue Book was closed, and James McDonald was suicided; this is like Soviet tragedy.
In 1969 Jacques Vallee, a student of J. Allen Hynek and a prominent French astrophysicist who did groundbreaking work in computer algorithms for scanning stars, published Passport To Magonia. It pointed out that historical reports of elves, faeries, and other folks exactly paralleled modern stories of UFOs, even down to abduction, which were once called Changelings, etc.
This had the effect of easing Ufology into the realm of parapsychology for along while. Slivers of it remain there to this day.
This spell snapped when the 1973 flap came along, bringing the hardware vs. hallucination debate once again to a head. Since Menzel had long since wandered off into his bitter little garden, he was replaced by the equally bitter and willing shill, Philip J. Klass, who has none, and whose real name need not concern anyone in any way. Another idiot skeptibunker had mounted his decrepit charger to hoist the lance and rejoin the joust.
As a kind of one-two punch, Erich Von Daniken struck in 1974 with a movie of his best-selling book, CHARIOTS OF THE GODS? It grossed 125 million 1970s dollars, proving far more popular than skeptibunkers whining about their bad case of swamp gas cramps.
In 1975 Travis Walton was taken for five days in front of his logging buddies and to this day no one has been able to dent their stories. The movie FIRE IN THE SKY chronicles what happened, they say accurately.
Speilberg presented CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND in 1977, keeping up the drumbeat for open investigations and acceptance of at least the possibility of the ETH. He took the kitchen sink approach to Ufology and came up with perhaps the best film of his career.
Since then, we have seen many cases: the Hudson Valley flap, the Exeter Lights, the Shag Harbour, the Andreasson Affair, Budd Hopkins investigating abductions, Whitley Strieber’s Communion and subsequent books, John Mack of Harvard taking abductions seriously, the Japan Airlines sighting of a UFO the size of three aircraft carriers over Alaska, the O’Hare air port sighting that left a hole in the cloud cover when it zoomed straight up, John Alexander’s book, Leslie Kean’s book, and on and on.
And so far the hard-liners manning the Willful Blindness barricades refuse to give up on their by-now pathetic basic excuses to explain away the preponderance of evidence.
In his book The Ancient Alien Question, highly recommended by the way, Philip Coppens concludes that much of the blur, many of the fights, and almost all of the craziness results from keeping things channeled and compartmentalized when we do science. As an example: In Egypt, no mummy has ever been found in a pyramid. No sign of one. Yet the prevailing view is, pyramids were tombs. Even though the ancients stopped building a pyramid if its sponsor pharaoh died. Wouldn’t he need it all the more if he died? Yet hard-liners insist they were tombs on the basis of no evidence and declare the absence of evidence to the contrary proves their thesis.
This is bad logic and bad faith because there exist many ancient records and documents that explain precisely how pyramids were used. They were ceremonial compounds in which the Pharaoh would meditate and commune, possibly with the help of hallucinogenic substances, with the spirit world, in order to ensure the physical and spiritual realities remained linked. That was in fact a Pharaoh’s function, like a shaman.
This is all explained in various texts and papyrus books found all over Ancient Egypt.
Hard-line archaeologists reject all this, calling it myth, legend, and folklore, and relegating these to the categories of ethnology, sociology, and anthropology. Far be it from them to delve into other disciplines to help explain their own puzzles.
This is infantile but is how science operates.
As we have seen, change comes slowly, too. In Mexico a dig by a certified, accredited, and respected archaeologist who just happened to have been a woman found evidence the site was much older than the then-current estimates dated it. This evidence was duly presented for peer review and instead of being examined, tested, and proven, a firestorm erupted and the evidence was dismissed out-of-hand. “What would you expect from a woman?” was the general sneer.
It was 30 – 35 years later, after her contemporary superiors had died off, that the evidence was finally considered fairly and, lo, accepted as valid.
Next time you think of Science think instead of infantile ego squabbles and ridiculous, meaningless, even harmful turf wars.
Human beings make science, so science is full of human flaws.
Science is an idealized method of inquiring into the world mere human beings cannot attain but only approximate. Objectivity is impossible for the part of the whole doing the observing.
On this basic observation is a culture war being waged, as ever, between those with Answers who want on questions, and those with Questions who are always willing to change their answers depending on new, proven evidence.
Are you empirical?
You’d better be. Much of science is not empirical, at least not all the time, and there’s a war on, a reality war that determines what is “real” and what is “unreal”, what we are allowed to accept and discuss and which topics get us marginalized or worse.
The Reality War is a fight over where you live, in reality or in someone else’s chosen, imposed, limiting delusion. What’s real is what’s freely confirmed by anyone who cares to check. All the rest is propaganda.
Next time you see a UFO, a ghost, or anything paranormal in any way, please discuss it openly. Be rational. Check into it. Seek evidence. Find out who else may have witnessed or experienced it. Do not let the fear of being called crazy or stupid stop you. It is only by open discussion of gathered evidence that we can shift the academic and socio-political status quo closer to rejecting the psychopathic corporate theater of control and accepting the freedom of reality.
Rise Up Now.
RUN.
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Conspiracies are common. Any time two or more people try to pull something over on others for their gain, that’s a conspiracy. Demonizing the word and concept helps only conspirators.
/ Gene Stewart
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