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.

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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.

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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?

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

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

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.

[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...

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[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.