ufology

[egypturnash]

The question that always comes to mind when reading about conspiracy theories like the Montauk project is: how much of this is borrowing from pop culture, how much of this kind of stuff is people twisting the narratives around whatever kernel of true Weird Shit happened to them into what existing stories condition them to expect, and just what is in the middle?

I mean, sheesh, one of the Montauk-related accounts I just read has a young girl being taken against her will into a door under a hill, where the strange people there do strange things. Much later in life a mysterious bit of metal is extracted from behind her ear.

Taken under the hill and elf-shot.

---

Now and then I run across descriptions of victims of Secret Mindfucked Operatives. Vast structures of involuted, abused personalities hidden behind "normal" ones, with elaborate keywords based on the Oz books - sometimes just the movie, sometimes the whole series of Baum's stuff. Sometimes other fiction like Alice, but mostly Oz. Clearly there's one source document to this that people are retelling and elaborating on. (Oh, and Wikipedia suggests that there is.)

I wonder if there's anyone out there poking at this stuff as folklore, as comparative mythology, as cultural detritus. The loop is already closed: the main story of the Montauk base might just well be inspired by "Forbidden Planet" and "Time Tunnel"... and how many video games use this sort of thing as their backstory, nowadays? How much of the "revised facts" of things like the Roswell Incident are revised by people slowly eliding the exaggerations that came back around to them into what they think is the truth about what happened to them?

I've felt this happening to me: there's a certain life-path that's the Transsexual Narrative, and I've caught myself looking back at my own life and trying to twist it to fit this myth, to help convince myself that a sex change was and is the right thing - even though there are some major discrepancies between my own life and the Standard Transsexual Narrative. Myth is powerful, even when you're half-conscious of its power.

---

Conspiracies are comforting because they suggest that someone, somewhere, actually knows what the fuck is going on, and has it under control. Even if they're malign, or terribly self-interested, or Machiavellian. Someone's in control, somewhere; the world is not flying off to some unintended direction as the result of the Brownian motion of everyone's individual, unthinking stupid monkey decisions.

Comments

[paka.livejournal.com]

A while back Es pointed out that the Baba Yaga myth could, read by the right conspiracy nutjob, be about aliens. I mean, there's a lander, there's some sort of weird light source, she flies around on some sort of personal jetpack rocket thing...

Heh. Ever read Joseph Campbell?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

By the right conspiracy nutjob, or the right fantasy/sf writer looking for a new twist on an old myth. Heck, Return of the Jedi was full of "chicken-leg huts" piloted by men in strange white vestements.

I keep on meaning to read Campbell, but I haven't. I'm familiar with the outlines of his ideas of "the Monomyth", though.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Or how about Spring-Heeled Jack? he was wearing a kind of helmet, and a tight fitting white costume like an oilskin. His face was hideous; his eyes were like balls of fire. His hands had claws of some metallic substance, and he vomited blue and white flames. ... a tall and muscular man, fully dressed in white and wearing an "egg shaped" helmet, standing there waiting ... Many witnesses claimed that the shots did hit him, sounding as though they were hitting a hollow metallic object, like an "empty bucket" ... Sure sounds like a SPACEMAN with a POWERED EXOSKELETON or an ANTIGRAV BELT or something, if you read it right. Although SHJ sounds more like a space fratboy pranking the natives than a noble stranded alien.

[paka.livejournal.com]

Heh! Would you believe I knew about that legend because it surfaced in apparently 1970s vintage British comics about him being some sort of alien thing - which in turn appeared as samples in Ron Tiner's book about drawing?

And yeah. It's weird. Some stuff is so archetypical. At this point it's hard to figure out, what's external input, what's an individual's own imagination, and what's just going around.

Campbell's good, but he's from a very religious Catholic childhood, and I think part of how he comes to grips with not wanting to be specifically very Catholic in a world he considers to hold more truth. So it's good and bad; he simply can't imagine a culture being radically different, so it always seems like he's trying very hard to plug everything into the same archetypes, although usually also, he sounds right.

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Peggy is a font of good wikipedia links today. Thank you Peggy!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

All of this happened because I followed a link on Clifford Pickover's linkblog! And then followed a link from that page, and...

You cannot step twice into the same river, because you ARE the river.

[normanrafferty.livejournal.com]

I wish Alternative Realities wasn't out of print. It's a fascinating book about the unrealability of eye-witness accounts, and how to be skeptical but still open-minded.

Re: You cannot step twice into the same river, because you ARE the river.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

LJ is a good way to be reminded of this, if two people post accounts of the same shared day. Except I write less and less about day-to-day stuff in it myself.

I'm devouring this stuff with an attitude of "what if?". What if there is something there? What should I be seeing if so? and what correspondences emerge between far-flung stories - and why?

because, you know, I'd really like to be able to lay some of the blame on our world being this shitty due to our being led by malign lizard-people in the guise of humans, and I'd like to have some hope of there being aliens lurking aroud with hyperdrive because that means we might be able to get off this one planet we're choking to death...

[ineffabelle]

well, as always the Real answer is:
both and neither...

conspiracies are real, but they're never totally successful...

there are secret wars that no one wins...

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Thousands of tiny conspiracies, all counteracting each other.

[ineffabelle]

indeed...

[wolflahti.livejournal.com]

Years ago, I lost an hour and a half driving from Seattle to an SCA event in Olympia, Washington. It should have taken a little over an hour, and it took almost three. It turned out when I compared notes that the same thing had happened to a number of people. No one could account for the time disappearance.

This does not mean we were kidnapped by aliens or drove through a time vortex or had a meeting with the sasquatch who hypnotized us afterwards to forget it happened.

I lost an hour and a half. I don't know why. That's as much as can be reasonably said about the matter.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Large chunks of my high school years are kinda vacant, just vague memories and things I've been told I did. Of course, I was pretty damn depressed and withdrawn during a lot of that.

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

I need to track this down again, but I found a large body of literature about mind control and brain washing in refereed journals back in the 1980s. There are three epochs to discplined research in this area. The first period dates from the Spanish Civil War in which both sides spent considerable resources figuring out how to break prisoners. One experiment involved the construction of a Cubist holding cell which completely distored perspective. I think the socialists did this one. The result was largely prisoners who went completely mad. The second epoch dates from late WWII to the end of the post war period and focused on how to resist torture and interrogation. The third epoch of discplined public research on the matter was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, driven largely in response to the acitivities of cults. A lot this is pretty crap research, but I think the referees were in panic mode after the whole Symbionese Liberation Army thing. The basic conclusion that was reached was that it was possible to break a person, even make them completely dependent on on leader(even if the leader is a fiction created by the inner circle), but that it was not really possible to put that person back together in a way that they could independently function let alone have a hidden agenda tucked away in their subconscious. Now I'll be happy if I can just find the bibliography for that research project in my archived undergrad stuff because I have not been able to reverse engineer this list using all these new fangled electronic databases.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow. Truth is not quite stranger than fiction in this case* but a Cubist cell? That's great.

And yeah - the essential problem with these conspiracy theories involving mental superscience, for me, is that geeze, we're so fucking stupid as regards care and maintenance of the human mind in this culture; I figure that these skills for disassembling and reassembling a person would have seeped out into some sort of spinoff effect by now if they were real. IN4MATI0N WANTZ 2 B FR33 and all that; secret techniques quickly get spread anyway when they actually work.

*assuming the whole MK-ULTRA spinoff of schitzo-kids-controlled-with-Oz-quotes thing is not, in fact, truer than I would prefer to hope

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my take on the whole mind control is that it's possible to condition people to have these knee jerk responses to situations and we actually do it quite often. Evangelicals do it all the time, especially groups like Assemblies of God. The military also does it in Basic Training and Advanced Training. Martial Arts is the archetypal example, and when I did the bit of ground control work I did on that satellite, I got a bit of the conditioning as well. This responses come from repition and group reinforcement, culture in other words. But, when you walk away, it all fades. My martial arts trained reflexes are pretty much gone. All I remember of the troubleshooting for the satellite is when the alpha rises over the North Star, you frumble the framasitz. Nothing in other words. But back in the day, when presented with a problem in the morning ephemeris, I could run the data through a diagnostic in ten minutes and tell you the exact state of our instruments. While evangelicals do seek to control the thoughts of their members, that is not true in the military despite what the conspiratorial minded might think. The military along with emergency First Responders train their members to act quickly in situations where fractions of a second mean life or the alternative. The military also has to train individuals out of thinking as individuals and to do things that, while counter instinctive(and downright insane) actually help the individual surivie combat. Some of the tactics for getting out of ambushes seem flat out crazy, but they do work and soldiers need to be able to execute those manuevers instinctively. But the moment a soldier musters out at the end of service, he becomes a civlian much quicker than he might like. Anthony Swofford wrote well about that process in Jarhead.

[eselgeist.livejournal.com]

when the sox were in final games for the world series against the yankees and playing here in Fenway Park, kate and i were walking to kenmore square from my campus and saw a pair of "Black Helicoptors" fly by.

i shit you not :) however, this was the world series, this was boston, birthplace of 9/11, there were crazy crowds already drunk and in the streets. any number of wierd aligning reasons could've accounted for it.

but they were definitely two unmarked, black gunships, flying very low and very fast over the buildings. like -right- above us and -quiet- not silent, but definitely no louder than a passing car.

i cannot tell you how psyched i was about that :D this was a couple blocks from the ballpark, so i'm guessing they were scouting around for tourorists :D

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Or spraying mind-control gas to keep the crowds from rioting, who knows? How crazy do you feel like being when trying to make sense of it?

[zrath.livejournal.com]

Gunships? Are we talking Apaches (http://www.namsa.nato.int/gallery/systems/ah64-apache-3.jpg) or Cobras (http://www.richard-seaman.com/Wallpaper/Aircraft/Helicopters/SuperCobraDiving.jpg) here? Actual combat helicopters with weaponry?
'Cause, as far as I know, they ain't allowed to fly over a city, and especially not a low altitudes.
They have to fly very very high over population centers.
I once saw a Cobra fly over Downtown L.A., and it was very high indeed.
The only way I could even tell it was a Cobra was because I had binoculars with me.

I've seen helicopters fly overhead with no lights on at all, and from the sound, I think they
were Hughes/McDonnell-Douglas/Boeing 500s (http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/2307/blue500E.jpg). It's been a while since I've seen them though.
I'm pretty familiar with helicopters, so I know what I see and hear.

[eselgeist.livejournal.com]

it was a sudden splitsecond above me, looking up from below. and i'm
not pretty familiar with helicopters. it could've been either of
of those you mention or something else. i'm still passingly familiar enough to know the shape of armaments on a craft when i see them, guns and rockets. it was not a trauma helicopter or media or police, etc. not in shape certainly, but more simply because these were quite black and entirely unmarked. it was a pair of them and they were low enough for me to hit with a fastball. if i could throw one. the stadium is right in the middle of the city, it was game day, and these were definitely passing by as close as they could get.

[dragonscholar.livejournal.com]

Actually a lot of modern conspiracy theory is growing like folklore - and enabled by the internet. It's amazing how I can watch things being 'transplanted" from one theory to another.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm seeing symbols turning up in more than one far-flung place, one theory having cross-links to another... it's all becoming this massive philkaydicksian pantheon of paranoia. I remember fragments of some of this stuff when I was a kid - ufo stuff and the like - but it's become as interrelated as the Marvel Universe or something. No theory may stand alone.

[orb2069.livejournal.com]

My favorite dip into the MKULTRA/MindControl mindset is Elanor White's RAVEN1.NET (http://raven1.net). If you dig, you can find her first hand accounts of being harassed by psychoacoustics and distance itch-inducing microwaves that force her to have painful orgasms until she learned to sleep on a bed of copper pot-scrubbers inside of an all-steel filing cabinet.

[jenkatb4u.livejournal.com]

to help convince myself that a sex change was and is the right thing

Rings in my ears all the time. Except I'm sort of standing here and staring at this doorway. I look down it. There's a long and winding tunnel. Some of it open enough that I can get a good feel of what's coming. But it's so blurry... I can't be sure. It's so dark. It's hard to see. There are specks of light along the path, but my doubt makes me blind.

I am moved

[adequatemagic.livejournal.com]

to make what can only be considered, in this context, a cryptic aphorism:


Many people spend their lives looking for the One Big Thing.


Sometimes... it's really a bunch of One Small Things carefully located, identified and herded together.