from the I-want-to-not-want-to-believe dept
It’s one of those things I don’t discuss on main. I’m not really sure why. Maybe it was my strict religious upbringing, which made discussing anything outside of preferred interpretations of the Bible sacrilegious, if not actually blasphemous. Or maybe it was a concern about being a bit outside of the mainstream, which might result in fewer opportunities to “tap the keg” or whatever.
But I — like my hero Black Francis/Frank Black (former and 1750129843 current lead singer of the Pixies) — have always had a fascination with UFOs. To my ultra-religious parents, any unidentified flying object was most likely a demonic manifestation. (I wish that was a punchline. It isn’t. This is something they actually said.)
To me, UFOs were unexplained, which was fascinating to me because so much in life is, and so much of it is over-explained.
It also was my own expression of faith: a belief in something I couldn’t readily understand. And while that created friction with my own resistance to Christianity (another belief that couldn’t be grounded in reality), I always considered my irrational belief to be superior. Why? Because what harm has believing in UFOs ever posed to other human beings? No crusades have been carried out in Area 51’s name. No Roswell residents have ever bombed members of other religions into non-existence.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve shed some of that willingness to believe. I mean, I definitely don’t trust the government, which means I can theoretically build a better case for stashing greys in an underground Nevada lab. On the other hand, I just got older, which meant being less fascinated by things that are undeniably fascinating. It happens to all of us. When I was five, particularly large tractors fascinated me. Forty-plus years on, particularly large tractors are just annoyances slowing me down during my drive to my day job.
We can never truly regain the magical sense of wonder we had when we were younger. But for a short period of time, the X-Files TV show reignited my fascination with the not-immediately explainable. It also made me a Mulder: someone who feared explanations almost as much as he suspected powerful people might be hiding something from him.
Whatever was left of that delayed childhood was stripped away by the normal stuff: jobs, parenthood, a steady stream of releases from the federal government explaining away pretty much every UFO, or at least, making otherworldly explanations far less probable. It also stripped away that magical abbreviation, replacing it with “UAP:” unidentified aerial phenomenon. And that kind of sucks.
“Phenomenon” should mean once in a lifetime experiences. Instead, it just means anything that happens that the government doesn’t have an immediate explanation for, even when the “phenomena” was witnessed by hundreds of people.
This massively overlong intro leads to this: the disheartening (for younger me at least!) revelation that Area 51’s UFO roots are inextricably tied (most likely!) to the government’s interest in engaging the UFO crowd in a snipe hunt to better protect the seemingly magical vehicles and devices it hoped to use for the decidedly less-magical purpose of, you know, killing people.
A tiny Pentagon office had spent months investigating conspiracy theories about secret Washington UFO programs when it uncovered a shocking truth: At least one of those theories had been fueled by the Pentagon itself.
The congressionally ordered probe took investigators back to the 1980s, when an Air Force colonel visited a bar near Area 51, a top-secret site in the Nevada desert. He gave the owner photos of what might be flying saucers. The photos went up on the walls, and into the local lore went the idea that the U.S. military was secretly testing recovered alien technology.
But the colonel was on a mission—of disinformation. The photos were doctored, the now-retired officer confessed to the Pentagon investigators in 2023. The whole exercise was a ruse to protect what was really going on at Area 51: The Air Force was using the site to develop top-secret stealth fighters, viewed as a critical edge against the Soviet Union. Military leaders were worried that the programs might get exposed if locals somehow glimpsed a test flight of, say, the F-117 stealth fighter, an aircraft that truly did look out of this world. Better that they believe it came from Andromeda.
Where did this come from? Oddly enough, it comes from an investigation clearing the government of any wrongdoing. The internal investigation was only tasked with finding out whether or not the government had lied about its knowledge of the existence of extraterrestrial life. That it covered it up its own UAP activities by planting stories about UFOs was considered to be the sort of thing a government should do to protect national security.
In other words, there was a cover-up. But not the cover-up people expected, at least not those prone to believe in UFOs and little green/grey men. Instead, the government pushed the UFO narrative to encourage the public to believe the unexplainable stuff they saw in the sky should be attributed to interstellar invaders, rather than the US’s own attempts to outmaneuver the Commies.
Even more strangely, the government insisted on continuing the cover-up of flight activity until the year of our lord two thousand twenty-four, despite years of accounts of UFOs and anal-probing aliens being treated as no more credible than Virgin Mary appearances on local tortillas. When the Pentagon was forced to relinquish UFO/UAP files, it still pretended stuff needed to remain classified, even when it discussed technology more than a half-century old.
To be clear, there may still be some form of “Deep State” operative in the US government. But it’s not subject to partisan pressure. It’s only subject to its deeply paranoid beliefs that there’s something out there. And that “something” is the public’s understandable desire to learn more. Secrets have to be maintained, even when they no longer serve a purpose. The truth will always be out there, Mulder. But what that truth is may disappoint you more than it surprises you.
Final note: I referenced Frank Black/Black Francis/Pixies earlier and I realize many of you may not know how much the lead singer of this seminal band was infatuated with UFOs. To clear this up, here are a few picks from one of the greatest bands/lead singers ever.
Pixies – Motorway to Roswell (self-explanatory but enjoy the keyboard work from Pere Ubu member Eric Drew Feldman)
Pixies – The Thing (a b-side shortening of “The Happening,” but pay attention to the “good man” whose name was “Bill.” IT’S A CLUE.)
Finally:
Pixies – Lovely Day (A regular-ass love song, except for this tag line “You will be my martian honey all the day”)
Filed Under: area 51, defense department, disinformation, fox mulder, ufos
