Terence McKenna once famously said that the big problem with an alien invasion is to know when you’ve got one.
He was, of course, referring to the mushroom -and with very good reason. But it’s a big galaxy. While the mushroom is self care in a literal, hyper dimensional sense, other alien invasions could or might be happening. Hollywood ones. Spaceships and fighter jets and levelled cities and Will Smith probably. (I mean, NYC is basically destroyed at this point.)
Having just completed a re-paint, re-carpet, re-build of the office, I keep walking past my UFO book shelves, picking titles up and flipping through them again. I feel a pull back toward the subject again after a few years off. Those years off unsurprisingly coinciding with the To The Stars Academy diarrhea fountain that still seems to be sputtering its last few blobs of undigested corn over the New York Times. Honestly, the whole Elizondo rehash of 90s cover stories is just so exhausting. It is patently obvious that it is more disinfo for the current cold/warm/hot war with China… seeding stories of aliens in case they have to use all those toys they’re pretending not to have, in a charade that is about as convincing as me pretending to understand what my mechanic is telling me as I nod in hetero.
But -something I know others have struggled with- it can feel out of step with all <waves hands> this to devote thought or attention to Ufology, the paranormal, cryptids, and so on. Part of what makes These Capitalised Times so capitalised is the near-impossibility of occupying your waking consciousness with anything else. It is both exhausting and damaging to be in that urgent state for five months and counting. (By design, obviously. Even the doughy GenX shitcunts and their Facebook knitting circles seem to have finally worked that out, if we can infer anything from the dramatic reduction in their unpaid thought policing on behalf of the Davos class. We all saw it, though.)
So I’ve decided to sneak the UFOs back into my life under the rubric of self care. Self care is one of those moronically bad descriptions of things that are allowed to exist in the denatured, neoliberal parlance that has mistaken itself for genuine human activity and is principally championed by Twitter accounts that have ‘plant dad’ and #hufflepuff in their bio as an excuse to post another bathroom selfie. It’s honestly hard to find a more bloodless word for liking and pursuing the things that bring you joy -including health. Which means ‘self care’ alone will not be enough.
It also needs to be mobilised as a metaphor-spell; an unbidden and even unwanted reminder that you exist in a vast, ancient, largely-unknowable universe.
Something that came up in the latest episode of the show: No one is happy with the direction everything is going. I mean that’s an understatement, isn’t it? Even the cabals most responsible for 2020’s ruination can’t be happy with either their progress or its collateral damage. (They’re psychopaths but they aren’t dumb.) So an alien invasion -replete with city-destroying space rays, countries on the brink of war, food shortages and blood in the streets- is apt.
Here’s an old article Catherine Fitts wrote in 2012 and re-shared recently.
“We all live in the South Bronx because that neighborhood is the unavoidable proof that American civilization can stop. It can stop literally right around the corner, and if it does nobody can do a thing about it. . . . “ ~ Michael Ventura
It’s the look that grabs you: that moment when a person first realizes that civilization can stop and what that means. There is no law that they can count on; community comes as luck may have it. Sometimes there is no luck at all. The machinery can and will turn against them – and hit hard.[..]
I once lived through a decade-long storm – one that got ugly, turned mean, got dug in. A few years into it, a fellow who used to work for the CIA in covert operations turned up and professed to give advice. He said when the storm hits, you need to let it roll over like a wave. I did not understand what he meant at first. I came to over time. It served me well.
This is good medicine for now. Some very powerful people have unleashed a storm and you need to let it roll over you like a wave. You need to let the flying saucers go past, blowing up buildings and flipping cars as people run in slow motion away from them. The metaphor brings just the right amount of horror with it, in addition to the terrible beauty that the High Strange sometimes elicits. “This is something that happens.”
And so I want to talk about an alien invasion as a storm metaphor, and also a crash metaphor. But before we get there, I want to give you a few quotations from Volume Four of Jacques Vallee’s journals that cover the years 1990 – 1999. I need to put them somewhere because I have some plans for them and some activities we’ll hopefully be doing among the premium membership in Q4. But -taken in toto– they’re a useful overlap between the reality of UFO phenomena and the reality of powerful cabals operating without oversight in plain view of the whole world. (AKA history. That is just called history.)
16 April, 1990.
Over lunch again with Colonel Ron Blackburn at the Gatehouse in Palo Alto he revealed that the “Secret Onion” group started in 1985 in the classified tank located in his basement at the Lockheed Skunk Works. Colonel John Alexander had brought him a list of the people for the inner circle. The divided the world into layers of concentric trust and ability.
5 May, 1990.
[Former Naval Intelligence Officer in the 1960s,] Scott [Jones] also told us about conversations he’d had with Rabbi Korf, a conservative Republican who was close to Richard Nixon in his hour of greatest stress. “May I ask you a theoretical question?” The Rabbi began as he broached the the UFO subject with the President. “What would be the consequences if we knew that aliens existed?”
“The question is not theoretical,” Nixon is said to have answered.[..]
Ron Blackburn gave the Lockheed viewpoint. When he joined the Skunk Works at Burbank he worked with a scientist named Paul Tyler who encouraged him to investigate UFOs from the point of view of “energy, consciousness, and form -where form is negotiable.” Ron believes Roswell was a true crash, with bodies.
2 August, 1990
[Having lunch with Kit Green, once CIA liaison to the Stargate Project, among other things]. He told me what had changed his mind about the secrecy issue. “As you know, Jacques, for a long time I have claimed that in my position I would have had to know of secret projects on this topic. Even if they didn’t tell me the contents of ‘The Box’, I would have had to know there was a box. Between Hal and you and me, we should have heard something. Well, that was pure hubris on our part. I know this because of something that just happened in an unrelated field, a project I’ve just been invited to join. Not only had I never heard of it, but it involves people I thought I knew well. It also involves five levels of clearance above my own. And I had a clearance above top secret.”
“When I was indoctrinated into that project, (which I should have been invited to join years ago, by the way, because it fell exactly in one of my fields of expertise) the briefing took place at a large facility that the government operates. The first meeting was a psychological orientation, before they would let me see anything else.[..]
“You’d get a badge at the first desk and sign a book, then you would go to a second desk and receive a second badge, and so on five times, and you would not even get through the front door unless you had top-secret clearance. The fellow who came to fetch me and take me into the briefing room was a man I once hired. I had no idea he was involved in anything like this; with a budget in the billions. Even the codename is classified within its own level; it doesn’t appear anywhere. There’s no way for anyone to know of its existence, until someone invites them inside.”
Kit admits that he’s shaken. No wonder he now develops a respect for government secrecy that borders on awe. We discussed the possible location of a super-secret [space programme].
12 April 1991
We went out for a sandwich at Ghirardelli Square and walked around Fort Mason. Kit has now contacted six cabinet-level people, including former CIA director William Colby. All said, “drop it, we don’t understand the statements that were made to you about captured hardware and beings, people must have lied to you.”
Kit now believes I am right about the control system, “but it’s human.” He recently met a four-star general at a desert location who confirmed the existence of a secret UFO project. Later, Pentagon types who didn’t know about that contact tried to mislead him, attacking his clearances. He was shaken by it, although he emerged from the ordeal with a letter from the CIA director: “Dr Green is empowered by this office to inquire into any matters that he chooses to investigate.” He speculates he’s too independent to be recruited by the Cabal and shown “the hardware,” assuming there is such a thing.
24 May 1991
“What that stealthy group is doing is a felony,” [Kit] pointed out. “For a government employee to knowingly disseminate false information to the public is and offence that should send him to jail. The government can’t spend appropriated money on projects that Congress doesn’t know about; it’s an even greater offence if they spend private money to do it.”
“That raises the question, would the President be told the truth?”
“Worse, it raises the question of who is running the country. If the men who sit in this chamber cannot find out about such a project, we are no longer a democracy. Is a private contractor, a Battelle or a Lockheed, deciding the fate of the nation? Whatever that secret project, it must be controlled by an incredible level of fear, because nobody dares talk about it. I find no leaks anywhere.”
15 November 1991
He’d been shaken up by recent events and there was an edge of fear in our conversation. [Kit] has come over to my view that that we are facing two distinct, interrelated phenomena: there are the true UFOs “as real as coffee cups,” but there’s also an Undercurrent that exploits the expectation of extraterrestrial visitors.
26 March 1992
I have secured a document confirming that the CIA simulated UFO abductions in Latin America (Brazil and Argentina) as psychological warfare experiments.
For the right kind of nerd -say, the premium members getting their remote viewing training right now- there are a number of threads for you to pull on. But there are some key takeaways that built toward the whole point of this post. I guess the most important one is that there is:
- Whatever the UFO phenomena even am. Which is to say the universe is weird and strange and conforms to omen logic above all else.
- There is also an Undercurrent: which is to say there is a predatory class that isn’t simply keeping this awareness away from you -how quotidien- but using skills and insights derived from its own awareness of these phenomena, when it is useful, in its machinations.
Put another way, aliens are real and you are being lied to -and those two things don’t even overlap all that much. This is the terrifying medicine of our cosmos. Everything that is happening -the machinations of the Great Reset- are happening in a living cosmos of spirits and flying saucers and the rest of that sublime ecosystem. There is the phenomenon and the undercurrent.
Invasion as Invasion
Phenomena and Undercurrent as separate. I came by this reminder last week when I had the farm to myself for the first time in about five months for a couple of nights. You all know what that means. Time to smash those streaming programmes your partner wouldn’t watch even if it was your birthday! This is the first one:
It has been on the endless Netflix ‘to watch’ list since it came out last year and you know what? Excellent. Doesn’t and can’t get into the astrotheology you find in the films (that’s what you have me for) but it has its hands full accidentally giving you the synchromystic backstory of how the most important narrative about the off-planet Other ever filmed came to be. I’m just going to give you some bullet points I made while watching.
- Jodorowsky is the unacknowledged grandfather of Alien because he saw Dark Star and invited Dan O’Bannon to come and work on Dune, and Dan, like the rest of us, fell in love with the genius that is Jodorowsky. This is going to be important for the next section of the post.
- As a kid, H.R. Giger got starship-pilled by Egypt. Becoming obsessed with mummies he saw in the museums of Berlin, that kind of thing. (I couldn’t possibly relate.) In fact, the original crashed alien ship (the derelict) was supposed to be a pyramid. The area where the eggs were kept was called the temple and adorning said temple was a depiction of Nuit herself. The depiction in Giger’s early design had the aliens literally being born from Nuit. This who thing was removed for budget constraints, basically. (I have some tea on the Scott boys that I have never been able to confirm that sits somewhere right here. When we’re allowed to have drinks standing up again, rather than just sitting, buy me a drink and I’ll tell you.)
- Giger wasn’t initially involved in the resurrection of the project, but it was seeing his Necronomicon that saw Ridley Scott go all in on insisting he was involved: “I’ve never been more certain of anything before in my life.”
- In interviews with his widow -and I knew this but it was hearing it again in the context of the story Memory tells- Giger would go into a trance and or pull from dreams. She said “He didn’t have agency over where these images came from.”
Let the storm wash over you huh? you see why I shared these notes in the order I did. Nuit, the necronomicon, unbidden encounters in the imaginal being brought into the waking world. But there is a point made in the documentary that sort of stuck with me as a galaxy brain moment: At no point in Alien is there the suggestion that whatever it is that makes us human is the key to defeating this creature. That’s where you see its true Lovecraftian inheritance and also what marked it out from something like Star Trek which was contemporaneous with it. In Star Trek -which I love- each episode is basically “turns out our human emotions are what saved the day after all, eh Spock?”
Not with Alien. With Alien it is just the storm. And it reminded me of something I was talking to Austin about last night. The Dark Forest Theory. It posits that the reason aliens haven’t contacted us -assuming they haven’t- is because they are being deliberately quiet.
The reasoning is laid out best in the science fiction novel The Dark Forest, by Liu Cixin. The plot of the book, the second in a series, concerns questions of how to best interact with potentially hostile alien life.
In the novel, the argument is laid out like this:
– All life desires to stay alive.
– There is no way to know if other lifeforms can or will destroy you if given a chance.
– Lacking assurances, the safest option for any species is to annihilate other life forms before they have a chance to do the same.
– Since all other lifeforms in the novel are risk-averse and willing to do anything to save themselves, contact of any kind is dangerous, as it almost assuredly would lead to the contacted race wiping out whoever was foolish enough to give away their location. This leads to all civilizations attempting to hide in radio silence.
More.
You see where I’m going with the alien invasion metaphor. There’s something useful in temporarily adopting a horror response. And there’s a funny kind of ancestral wisdom in it. What everyone but maybe me and Chris Knowles often gets wrong with AAT is that the human ritual reaction is best thought of as an adaptive immune response to the presence of these entities in the world rather than worshipful behaviour.
I guess the value at the end of the horror meditation is so many Twitter ‘leftists’ and other liberals haven’t just lost the terrain, they’ve lost the map. Reality doesn’t work the way they thought it does. The saucers are landing and their chief concern is whether they’ll park in the disabled spots. Let the implacable invasion be the thing that brings you to terms with what you are going to have to thrive through over the next few years.
Before we move on, I just want to point at this post from a few years ago:
I actually rewatched Childhood’s End a couple of months ago. It’s better and worse than I remember. Probably better if you watch it and also read the review. The least we can say is it puts the technocratic-progressive cosmology ‘in dialogue’ with different politics, and actual magic, and it does it with the precisely-correct sense of inevitability I want you to sit with. You’re getting this moment. Stop having opinions about it.
Invasion as Saucer Crash
The next documentary from my solo staycation I want to point you to is this one:
I went in with low expectations and was very pleasantly surprised. And low expectations only because there is one of these kinds of films every 18 months or so. When Caroline Cory, the producer, was on Grimerica, Graham said that it was like a new What The Bleep Do We Know which is a bit mean because that film was essentially produced by a cult, but his point is well made. It’s a feature length documentary about the scientific evidence for psi phenomena. A really good one, though.
Anyway, it’s most affordable on Google Play in my territory but it’s on a bunch of platforms and one of the things we should be doing is supporting high quality, independent, weird cinema so I really do recommend it. Congrats to Caroline. Cory Feldman’s amazing hat is worth the price of admission alone.
It almost got its own blog post because one of the fun things about my job is I get to Leo meme whenever I see podcast guests in a movie. In this case, it was Dr Dean Radin.
And it was a Leo meme moment because Dean calls consciousness “a substance and everything else is made of it”. But that doesn’t have to be consciousness, does it? And what I’ve said to Dean before and have been saying since before Pieces of Eight is that if you use another word like spirit -and I swear I would accept ether or quintessence at this point- the same data become comparable and possibly even interoperable in a non-extractive way across cultures.
It’s like this. I want to do two things:
- I want to apprehend (literally a-prehend) “it” -whatever “it” may be.
- I want to apprehend “it” in a way that is best suited for a comparative exploration of its many unfurlings on this planet.
And that just works better if you use the word spirit. It just does. At least for the next hundred years. And if you think it is splitting hairs, as Dame Marilyn Strathern says, “it matters what thoughts we think with.”
A good example of this from the film is how often people refer to reality as a ‘simulation’ or a ‘game’. The problem with that is our definition of a game is as a frivolous pastime. So even in the pursuit of possible meaning in the universe, you are sweeping out your own legs by going after it with a framework that limits or eradicates or diminishes meaning right out of the gate. This is what happens when you start from a theory of mind that has the world as fundamentally some kind of illusion.
Of course you can still use ‘game’ as a model for apprehending the cosmos if you have a fully haunted understanding of a what a game is. (The Dynastic Egyptians played the board game senet as a form of training or practice for coming and going from the afterlife. It’s literally a game of going backwards and forwards across the Nile.)
In the tarot course -which is available in the members area- we spend a lot of time on the notion of ‘play’, and how the universe is built on it and for it in a very real sense. The universe is not frivolous, it is joyous. That’s a crucial distinction. And you get much closer to apprehending that joy/play/all-one-thing-expressed-in-the-telling when you use animist words rather than ones that comes from an orientalist modification of the western theory of mind, and then bandy about words like simulation and computer programme.
Because why? Metaphors, babes. Where do you think you end up but up the asshole of the demiurge if you keep using mechanical metaphors for describing and navigating the cosmos? As Carol Sanford said on the show, frameworks are alive. ‘Collections of thinkings’ are alive. (There’s a way into -and thus out of– the deceptive appeal of the machine/computer metaphor in the story of Sauron as ‘Lord of Gifts’ or Annatar, if you are interested.)
So there’s the metaphor of the invasion as invasion, and there’s the metaphor of invasion as crash -which is to say the surprise or curious arrival of something inexplicable that then has an epidemiological spread. (The black goo invasion.) The tarot is one of the best examples of this, which is why I asked the tarot about what I’m missing in my brief exploration of it as UFO crash.
(Alan absolutely nailed this off the cuff read, by the way.) The arrival of the saucers from the firmament is the result of summoning or an invitation to embed within society. This is a process they enjoy as much as we do.
The rosary is a kind of UFO crash as described in this section and in the cards, not just because it received a major update from an actual UFO (Fatima) but because it emerged within culture rather than top-down from orthodoxy (the Vallee model), and built itself with components that are themselves strange metaphors (the Rune Soup model). The rose is one of the most ‘genetically modified’ plant allies we have. Indeed its joy and appeal is in modifying it toward a beautiful end state. So to ‘plant a rose garden to’ or ‘garland’ a space goddess with roses is to put mutation and extradimensional intervention into elegant dialogue. As for the beads, our Denisovan ancestors we shaping beautiful beads tens of millennia ago. They are sliding, tactile encounters with sacred time.
And the time part is important. Whilst not exactly a UFO crash, having had Google photos on my phone for long enough now, I’m aware of certain patterns and thoughts that recur at the same time across the years. We’re all becoming little Paul Westons and this is to be celebrated. The week I have been writing this post in various cafes and bars in Hobart, I was in NYC for a discussion on UFOs at the Guggenheim last year, the year before that I was sitting on my porch reading along with Dr Becca Tarnas’s first Lord of the Rings course, and the year before that I visited the ghostly remains of P.A Yeomans’s experimental farm just to the west of Sydney. And five years ago, James and I were conspiring and celebrating at a pub in Stamford Brook as I had begun the process of triggering a redundancy in advance of my books coming out early the next year. I can’t tell you how -it wouldn’t make sense to you because it’s not for you, anyway- but these are all one thing and they are about when a storm washes over you like a wave.
We’ve spent a lot of time lately with the medicinal notion of “this too shall pass”, and rightly so; it’s 2020. But it is also September in 2020 so ‘the thing that will pass’ hasn’t passed yet. Especially from about now it is also helpful to adopt a ‘you will live to see signs and wonders’ attitude. An Acts 2:19 attitude, if you will: I will show wonders in heaven above and signs in the earth beneath: Blood and fire and vapour of smoke.
Finishing off with another McKenna phrase, that what we are facing is a cosmic intelligence test disguised as a UFO invasion so as not to alarm us, a lot of us are currently failing the test. It doesn’t require your solve or your emotional reaction. That’s the key. For all my talk of cycles, what is happening only happens once in our lifetime. All I can tell you is the metaphoric invasion fails rather than is averted. So let it wash over you like a storm.
And be ready to pick over the crash sites for beads and cards.