UFOs and NASA: The Meme Goes On
Like a bad penny that keeps showing up, UFOs have been around on a regular basis from antiquity through modern day. And as 2010 unfolded, the UFO mythology was alive and well. Famed British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, the pope's astronomer, a high-ranking Italian politician and even the late Winston Churchill (according to recently unearthed documents) helped keep UFOs in the news. And sightings of unexplained flying objects came in from all over the world. ~ AOL News Dominant Social Theme: It's all true – the UFOs are coming...even the experts say so. Free-Market Analysis: This is a good UFO article. The idea, generally, in our view, is to sow confusion and provide elite authoritarian institutions with the opportunity to further emphasize their global roles. The fear factor, as AOL itself notes (without offering a larger explanation) was provided satisfactorily in 2010 by astrophysicist Stephen Hawking of England, who warned that extraterrestrial contact might not be satisfying or awe-inspiring but terribly dangerous. Perhaps as a result, the AOL article continues, the Czech Republic created "new guidelines" for dealing with potential alien contacts. Meanwhile, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, governor of Russia's Buddhist republic, Kalmykia, went public with the news he had been subject to an alien abduction but had later becomes pals. Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno spoke of baptizing them. Italy's Mario Borghezio has lobbied the European Union to publish hitherto hidden UFO documents. Former Air Force Capt. Robert Salas revealed in press conferences that UFOs had somehow interacted with nuclear missiles. Former Air Force Col. Charles Halt related similar stories. These reports where then buttressed by predictions that UFOs would show up in the skies of New York, which they duly did on the predicted day – though some claimed they were merely a flock of helium balloons. UFO sightings were also made that same day in Texas, Virginia and China. Britain was not immune to UFO fever. "UFO drills" educated young pupils on how to deal with a potential UFO crash-landing. Meanwhile, the publication of certain post-World War II, hush-hush documents explain that Prime Minister Churchill was reluctant to release certain UFO files so as not to frighten the public. The Unarius Academy of Science "reached out" to the Interplanetary Conclave of Light, "a holiday purportedly celebrated on 33 planets," according to AOL. And New Zealand officials released 2,000 pages of UFO documents going back 60 years. The UN made waves when it was reported that the powers-that-be were considering announcing an alien ambassador to coordinate earth's response to any visitation. At the same time as the UFO meme was gathering steam, America's NASA space agency was embarked on what we saw as a public relationships campaign designed to counteract the ever-swelling chorus of doubters who argue that NASA never landed men on the moon but only provided faked footage of the event. These doubters mustered an increasingly large array of arguments in 2010, everything from the impossibility of traveling through the Van Allen radiation belt to the difficulty generally of traveling 500,000 miles at a clip when the previous distance travelled amounted to nearer to 500 miles, pre-Apollo. The Bell has written about the issue numerous times (once discovering it) because the anomalies are certainly startling. Begin with the oddness of NASA announcing it had lost the original footage of the Apollo moon landings – and then subsequently discovering it had not lost all the footage after all and releasing said footage in a digitally remastered version. Then there was the widely reported piece of petrified wood found among the "moon rocks" that spacemen had returned from the surface of the moon. NASA had no comment, nor any explanation. There were issues raised once again about the amazing frequency of the photos taken by the astronauts – perhaps one picture every 30 seconds; and further arguments over whether the cameras themselves were capable of the feats ascribed to them. YouTube itself continues to fill up with videos purporting to analyze a variety of questionable issues regarding the moon walks, everything from false shadows to false photo angles. And as noted at the Bell, the initial press conference after the first moon landing featuring Neil Armstrong surely ranks as one of the most bizarre spectacles ever committed to film. For the Bell, the presentations of the aliens-among-us meme contrasted well with NASA's increasingly fervent rebuttals of man-on-the-moon skeptics. (Rebuttal-of-the-rebuttals now seemingly number a thousand items or more, a massive amount of point-by-point controversy for those following the debate.) While both of these issues might be considered frivolous to sober-minded people, they do tend to show how the Internet itself has changed the context of reporting on such events. It is the Internet that allows us to put together 100 years of expanding reporting about UFOs. Much of it, as we have reported previously, seems to smack of orchestration. Could it be that the Anglo-American power elite, which uses fear-based promotions to generate increased global governance, intends to put alien contacts into the service of the New World Order? On the flip-side, NASA's increasingly shrill insistence that the moon-landings took place is in keeping with larger government memes regarding the competence of government programs in general. Big science is heralded as the wave of the future and NASA – which apparently managed to put a man on the moon only a decade after John Kennedy enunciated the goal – is a prime example of a bureaucracy that exhibits the can-do spirit near and dear to American hearts. Conclusion: It is perhaps ironic that the Internet has cast both these issues – NASA's moon landings and UFO contacts – in a new light. UFOs may never be scientifically proven (or not in this era); NASA's moon landings were supposed to have been science's ultimate 20th century success-story; yet in our view it is the Internet (never predicted by science fiction) that may prove to be the most profound achievement. Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell. January 1, 2011 Copyright © 2011 The Daily Bell
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