As 2012 comes to a close, scientific-oriented British Ufologists are frustrated. While physicists have finally found their God Particle and orthodox Abrahamic followers hold fast to the ancient downloads from their angry sky gods, materialist rationalists dependent on scientific replicability and measurability just can't pin down those dream-hopping, pyramid-inspiring, hybrid-breeding modern incubi. Apparently aliens have figured out that if they don't let scientists take their picture while they fly through the sky or rape us in our dreams, then they'll have free reign on the planet! Prompted by a November 4 article in The Telegraph documenting the public announcement by Britain's Association for the Study of Anomalous Phenomena that their field is nearing death, writer Matt Cardin produced a brilliant analysis that would probably be a tad bit optimistic for the Archon-conscious Gnostic, but is likely well worth your time, if only for an introduction to Cardin's invigorating writing and references to the work of daimon-inspired scholars Jeffrey Kripal, Thomas Nagel and Patrick Harpur.
Though I highly recommend Cardin's blog entry, I do not share entirely his entusiasm for nor his interpretations of the news. To illustrate my more pessimistic view, I offer an analogy. Imagine that a group of respected researchers came out in 2006 saying that they just couldn't find any evidence that 9/11 was arranged by forces powerful enough to do so, and instead lampooned 'truthers' who claimed to have lots of evidence and interpretations supporting alternate realities. Imagine that many people, respecting in most ways remarkable people like Noam Chomsky and Matt Taibbi and the magazine Popular Science giving in to the tricky coercion put forth by those same voice-morphing forces, believed that we no longer could objectively state what happened on 9/11, or draw any firm conclusions from the event (other than the 'official' conspiracy theory). Well, I and many others like David Ray Griffin would argue that this is exactly what happened, to the great benefit of the tricksters, and to the great peril of many people and no doubt the overall health of the planet (unless the planet likes its species and forests being exterminated).
While some (like me and Cardin) will continue to study and respond to the paranormal regardless of how little human energy is invested wisely in this direction (how convenient for the visitors), most of the population tuned in to the priests of science (even those priests who study UFOs), will take this news as an excuse to maintain their comfy apathetic stance towards powerful anomalous events that shape our decisions, art, wheat fields, and massive technologically advanced religious subtle energy generators. Like 9/11, an event whose weak-minded and weak-spirited interpretation by the zombified USofA masses has led to unbelievable 'patriotic' power acts by the same forces who likely pulled it off and continue to lie about it for their own or their masters' gains, it just seems to me that malevolent immaterial beings are plussed by this news. (I'm not saying they're purely or only malevolent, but there are certainly plenty of documented cases that are quite difficult to label benevolent on an individual level.) Like those who study 9/11 can read David Ray Griffin or Derrick Jensen with a sick mixture of horror and intrigue, students of 'paranormal occurrences' (a term that to my inner scientific critic sounds pejorative) can turn to Kripal and Harpur. They're all brilliant, and they're all amazing writers, and I get kind of high from learning how reality works while reading their awesome books, but pardon me for wishing that instead of being allowed out of the straightjacket of reasonable scrutiny, orchestrators of terrible and terrifying deception (think Rumsfeld, Cheney, human-tormenting mind parasites) be put in a tighter straightjacket. Or, to be more amenable to the pacifist crowd who want to be nice to terrible torturers, perhaps what I could say is I'd like humanity to have these tricksters under a more powerful microscope so we can figure out how to permaculture ourselves some more pleasant situations.
No matter how busy or distracted we are, it's not time to give up paying attention to and dancing fiercely with reality. And Cardin mentions this in his post. I'm not arguing his brilliant analysis. But to me, as 2012 comes to a close, I think this Telegraph is indicative of a troubling trend. If science is the boat that dominator culture is sailing in, and the world is dominated by dominator culture, and scientism (a major vector of science) is pretty much the only worldview in the history of man to hold a fundamentalist stance saying that the immaterial is not real, and scientists steering the boat are waving a white flag and bailing water… well, I'm not liking my position on the boat. I like the idea behind the boat (it allows you to travel on water and see distant lands), but the whole navigation of the boat has left much to be desired.
My feeling might be summed up by another analogy. If science is a batter standing at the plate, and aliens, demons, fairies, UFOs, dreams, astral influence, gods, ghosts, spirits and the soul are pitches thrown from the mound… well, science has pretty much struck out time and time again, batting about .020 while convincing us (its manager? owner?) to put it in the starting lineup every game of every season. And military industrial science – even moreso than Abrahamic faiths – convinced us to pay it, well, a shitload of money every year, with a no trade clause in the contract. And just ask paranormal investigators, lab animals, witches, children, Reichs, Indians what it's like to hang out with science in the locker room. 'Science' and its entourage are assholes even when they're winning. Sure, as Cardin says, we can now chalk this up as another failing of science, and relish in the delights of Harpur and Kripal (and they're all delightful), but maybe we should take a moment to look at the situation scientists (and maybe those entities who so enjoy manipulating science) have left us in. We've got powerful nation states armed with radioactive weapons and GMOs, a fraudulent banking kleptocracy using powerful computers to cheat and build death arsenals in every possible way, an interweb of information sharing that is dominated by the trade of violent pornography, a rainforest that's not a forest, a deadening mainstream historical worldview, and an ocean filled with islands of plastic.
Rather than UFO's and aliens being free of the straightjacket of science, I'd prefer us humans gain an inch of freedom from this arrogant, radical cult's torture devices, be they deceptive philosophies or numbers games used to build death machines. Maybe we don't have as much control, or as many options as I like to think we have, at least in terms of preserving and continuing on this physical planet that seems of so much interest to such a wide variety and massive quantity of non-purely-physical beings. Maybe we have about as much chance of negotiating a more graceful position in their interdimensional multiverse as a chicken has of escaping a Perdue factory. But damn it, I want to try, and to do so, we're going to need all the help we can get, meaning the last thing we need is a massive announcement to the public that Ufologists can't find enough evidence to continue studying this human-obsessed cryto-zoology of beings! A pessimistic (or realistic) way of interpreting this news is that scientists built the ship (maybe their ship should be called a shape-shifting UFO), convinced us (often with guns and lobotomies) to take a ride on it to the middle of an ocean, and now are bailing.
I don't like it one bit! But I kinda like the ride. Darn you, aliens. Thank you, Matt Cardin. Time for dinner.
More links stolen from Cardin's blog post:
Jasper Copping, "UFO enthusiasts admit the truth may not be out there after all," The Telegraph, November 4, 2012
An announcement from Britain's 'well-regarded' Association for the Study of Anomalous Phenomena
An announcement of the closing of the UK's official investigations into UFO phenomena
Image by ellenm1 courtesy of creative commons