UFO as a Control System and more...

This is in my view a very important paper concerning the UFO phenomenon, written by Steve Mizrach.
.It deserves a complete and careful lecture, particularly by Rational Ufologists.






The UFO as a Control System
The UFO, whatever it may be, appears to have the ability to alter consciousness, perception, and to some degree, maybe even space and time itself. Like Dick's VALIS, it appears to be an "information singularity," which seems to draw bits and pieces of reality around it into a new order. Physical reality is distorted in various ways (cattle mutilations, crop circles, "implants," percipient physiological changes, subsidiary poltergeist phenomena, etc.) in its wake. But it doesn't appear to be any true "accidental tourist"; its transits through our reality seem deliberate, almost contrived, focused on some sort of interaction with us.
Half-baked predictions are told to contactees, abductees, and alien "channellers" about impending cataclysms, "Earth changes," and transitions in human evolution. The peculiar mix of truth and fiction, insight and bullshit, and wisdom and stupidity found in these messages led UFOlogist John Keel to dub them broadcasts from some "Great Phonograph in the Sky," stuck in some worn celestial groove. Like Keel, we need to stop focusing so much on the content of these messages, and start looking at the mechanisms of the messengers.
Information is given to UFO experiences - but carefully controlled information, maybe disinformation. The key to disinformation is to mix truth with deception, so that it's hard to distinguish one from the other; but there's just enough truth to keep the person coming back for more. People are told about fabulous new devices and technologies which will save the human race, but never seem to work properly. People are promised evidence and "smoking guns" to prove the existence of UFOs, which then never materialize completely. People are given explanations of the motives and origins of the UFOnauts, which seems at once profound and yet also ridiculously absurd.
The paradoxical nature of this information seems to point to some deeper truth than vast extraterrestrial conspiracies. It points to the role of the human consciousness in organizing complex and contradictory information into a coherent whole. It points to a reality which is socially constructed through communication and interaction between human beings with different semantic structures for organizing their perceptions. It points to the dramatic ways in which science and technology seem to be transforming fundamental concepts of epistemology and ontology. The medium is the massage...
Vallee suggests the UFO functions as a kind of "thermostat," a regulator which helps navigate our society back toward the subtle and the invisible, after it's become too focused on the gross and the visible. It functions as a kind of autoresponsive control system, utilizing feedback to challenge ossified paradigms, memetic structures, and belief systems. But the use of subtle control mechanisms cannot have been lost on the men of DARPA, who may be interested in the UFO technology for more overt kinds of psychological control.
Paranoia as Control Mechanism
In the media and popular culture, as well as the UFO press, talk of UFO invasion and colonization seems to be growing. What are these sinister Grays up to, after all, with their genetic sampling, cattle mutilating, and secret underground bases? Although alien invasions have been a staple of movies since War of the Worlds , Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Hollywood 50s saucer flicks, it seems like the hostile-alien-invasion meme has returned with a vengeance in the 1990s. We've gone from the "lovable alien" flicks of the 1980s (Starman, ET, Close Encounters), to paranoid masterpieces such as Independence Day, and TV shows such as the X-Files and Dark Skies, where anyone, even your neighbor, can be a pawn of the aliens' sinister master plan.
Even video games like Area 51 or Disney rides like the Extra-TERRORestrial Encounter help feed this mythology into public consciousness. In twilight areas of the alternative media, militia groups and UFO groups start sounding like mirror images of each other, protesting of black helicopters, surveillance, electronic harassment, Men in Black, and "New World Orders" on the move. White supremacist groups have gotten into the game, offering their own vision of superhuman blond Aryan Pleiadeans here to save us from swarthy intergalactic bankers and parasites. "Race mixture," it turns out, is just another strategy by the bad aliens to weaken the strain and prepare us for invasion.
Was the Gulf War syndrome an extraterrestrial virus found on the Tunguska meteorite? Did MAJESTIC-12 kill JFK? Was the NASA Mars Explorer scuttled to avoid people finding out the truth about the Cydonia artefacts? These and other questions seem to swirl around the UFO field today, fact and fiction blending seamlessly together, easily outdoing the mild speculations of earlier UFO researchers regarding Air Force whitewashes and coverrups. As the military has learned throughout history, fear is a great mobilizer of people, and an excellent preparer for war. Even if the enemies are imaginary or their deeds exaggerated.
In an era where the Cold War is ending, how can the U.S. military forces maintain their incredible portion of the national pie? Many UFOlogists have mentioned Ronald Reagan's quip that the next great battle be against an enemy from space. People are finding less and less that they can unite to fight against. Inhuman things from space might fill the bill quite nicely. Nuclear weapons and SDI can find a new secondary justification for warding off rogue asteroids from space, maybe even evil Grays out to turn us into protein soup. However, I don't think this new paranoid phase in the U.S. is all deliberately contrived by the miltary-multimedia complex.
What I think has happened is that the military's obsession with secrecy, discipline, and strength has permeated our entire society, a natural result of living under a culture of "national security" for so long. Rather than some Big Brother watching us, we've all started watching each other through our camcorders, radio scanners, and amateur spy equipment. The UFO myths permeating the Internet are part and parcel of a larger, stranger xenophobia which seems to be taking hold in popular consciousness. Fear robs people of their reason, and closes their minds against the unknown; it activates the most instinctual parts of the human mind, those concerned with personal survival.

read the whole paper