On Hillary Clinton's UFOlogy

Since last December I've noted that Hillary Rodham Clinton (henceforth: HRC) has been openly talking about how she'd like to "get to the bottom" of what the Unistat gummint knows about UFOs/aliens.

Call me cynical (What? In this election cycle? Golly!), but I immediately thought of the neo-Machiavellian political theories of guys like Alastair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and their Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics from 2012: even in a democracy you need enough coalitions of support from the "selectorate" in order to win; you may be yanking other coalition's chains, but you need as many voting blocs of special interests as possible. The ones with money who helped you get elected matter most to you, and if you yank their chains the wrong way, you're cooked.

I thought, "Well, she's going for the X-Files-obsessed vote here." Cynical! (Of me and/or HRC.)

Then I continued to follow HRC and her UFO talk, and I went back and researched a bit to see how phony HRC might be on this subject. It gets complicated. Which is how I like it.

While Donald Trump trots out around one conspiracy theory per day lately: Vincent Foster was killed by the Clintons; Obama may still be a secret Muslim; Scalia was murdered and it was covered up; vaccines cause autism; many thousands of muslims were seen celebrating in New Jersey on 9/11/01; Ted Cruz's father had a hand in the JFK hit; Bill Clinton has sexually "assaulted" several women, etc...he's clearly going for the Nutjob vote, which I think he already had sewn up a long time ago.

I'd say, "Maybe time to dial it back a bit, Donny," but he'd probably have his goons haul me out of the room, telling said goons to "Knock the crap out of him. I'll pay your legal fees." (Ladies and germs: the future President of Unistat!)

I figured HRC needed to tap into the quasi-religious and conspiracist idea that the Unistat gov still has classified files about aliens. That's probably a sizable voting bloc, eh? (The voters, not the aliens.)

It turns out she seems to have been genuinely interested in UFOs (she corrected Jimmy Kimmel on his show earlier this year: the scientific, evidence-based community prefer UAPs [Unidentified Aerial Phenomena]), which greatly - apparently? - impressed the ardent UFO-philes out there. HRC met with Laurence Rockefeller  in 1995, at his Wyoming ranch. She was photographed with serious physicist Paul Davies's book Are We Alone?

(Coincidentally, Davies very recently wrote an article for Scientific American that posits maybe life in the universe is exceedingly rare, afterall...assumptions that there must be life seeded all over this universe - the one you're probably in right now - seem unwarranted...is Davies trying to distance himself from HRC? Wheels within wheels...)

Longtime Clinton operative John Podesta is an X-Files aficionado and has talked about getting the files declassified, asserting recently that "There are still classified files that could be declassified." (Maybe it depends on what the term "are" means?)

Kimmel told HRC that he'd asked her husband and Obama about the UFOs and they didn't find anything. Hillary: "Well I'm going to do it again." Great, because it's not like the economy needs fixing or anything. Go for it, Hills-y baby! (Obama has treated questions about UFOs as a joke.)

So, while Bill was Prez 1993-2000, they weren't able to "get to the bottom of it"? Why? Maybe lots of stuff has happened since then? Who knows...Let's try to keep an open mind here. Let's keep digging...

I stumbled on to an article about former Prez Gerald Ford, who, as a Michigan Congressman in 1966, responded to UFO sightings over Michigan by calling for a Congressional Hearing. He didn't get the hearing, and seems to have taken his constituents' fears seriously (this was only five years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cold War in full swing, UFOs not the humorous Thing they are now), but Ford did get a long report on UFO sightings from the U. of Colorado and Project Blue Book, which ran from 1947-1969. This report considered 12,618 UFO sightings, all explained as weather balloons, atmospheric phenomena, or classified test flights, and a few other things. 701 sightings were still inconclusive.

The conspiracy-minded will want me to mention that Ford was on the Warren Commission. Done. Anyway...

Oh yea: Project Blue Book? Recently, the CIA tweeted that all those UFO sightings in the 1950s and '60s? It was them! I mean...not THEM-them, but the CIA. Which is "them" enough for me. Yea, verily the CIA asserts they were covering up their very high-flying U-2 Program, 1954-74. So, a branch of the Unistat government withheld evidence from a future US President and anyone else who might be interested in what the hell was going on with odd things in the sky. The cads! Those...bounders have done it again!

'Cuz, "national security," of course. If you read the article, professional "skeptic" and debunker Robert Sheaffer is calling bullshit on the CIA here. O! sooo rich! So meaty! Sheaffer once accused Robert Anton Wilson of "malicious, misguided fanaticism." (Personally, I prefer the properly "guided" fanaticism, but that's just me.) Sheaffer is long-suffering. In 1990, he charged the novelist Wilson as one who "attacks language and thought" the way a "terrorist attacks"...and to add insult, Wilson seems to have enjoyed a hearty belly-laugh over what he did as a writer of satire. Horrible!

To be honest, why are you even reading what some dipshit blogger like the OG thinks about these ideas? Clearly: Robert Sheaffer is the go-to Grand Poo-Bah of all things honest and capital tee Truth. What does Sheaffer think of HRC wanting to get to the bottom of the UFO/aliens thing?

HRC and her UFOlogy Sancho Panza, Podesta, just want transparency, evidence-based science, and the destigmatization of those who are interested in whether or not We Are Not Alone. The UFO/alien cohort (Sorry! Very snarky of me: the UAP/alien cohort) is an estimable one too: Stephen Bassett, who spends his time lobbying Congress on extraterrestrial/UFO issues? His organization has 2.5 million Twitter followers. That could put you over the top. (In November.)

December, 2015: HRC tells a New Hampshire reporter, "We may have been visited already." (Yes, and you may have already won the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes of one million dollars cash!)

I like this line from HRC: "There's enough stories out there that I don't think everybody is just sitting in their kitchen making them up." Point well taken. They could be in the bathroom, or out by the swing-set near the wading pool. The possibilities seem well-nigh endless.

In 1996, Bob Woodward's book The Choice made fun of HRC (what a meanie!), seeming to ridicule her for having conversations with dead heroes of hers, like Gandhi and Eleanor Roosevelt.

In delving in some archives (Okay: I read about six short articles published in the last year) and re-visiting the Wm Jefferson Clinton years in Office, I was reminded that, indeed, the X-Files seemed to run alongside his term. And Independence Day did boffo box office. And HRC openly complained about a "vast right wing conspiracy" out to get her and Bill. (I think she had something tangible with that last bit of conspiracy thinking, but this was all pre 9/11/01; it was practically Leave It To Beaver time compared to what we're looking at now.)

And you know what? Even though I confess I'm not a HRC fan - not by a longshot - I do think she has some good points about her UFOlogizing. But it sounds better coming from the mouth of a higher-up who may as well be anonymous to me: a luminary named Christopher Mellon, a former Senate Intelligence Committee guy, former intel at the Dept of Defense: "It shouldn't be a source of embarrassment to discuss it. [UFOs/UAPs/aliens- OG] We should be humble in terms of recognizing the extreme limits of our own understanding of physics and the universe."

Amen to that, Mellon. (Can I borrow a $50-spot?)

So: I've rambled fairly incoherently through this blogspew, and I have no excuse save for I'm stoned on some uber-dank OG Fire and trying to laff my way into November. I've considered my alternatives, and laffing seems the best.

Two more tangential points to make, and then I promise I'll be more sober for the next installment of the OG:

1. Blogger Justin Raimondo thinks Trump is a "false flag" candidate. Or at least as of last July Raimondo thought this. He says that just before Trump got into the Republican race he was trying to help his friend, Hillary Rodham Clinton. How else do you describe the sheer INSANITY of Trump's gambits so far? (Note the date Raimondo wrote this. What does he think now? No seriously: what does he think? Anyone know? I'm too stoned to Bing it.) And what do YOU think of this idea? I mean: consider the implications. Have you read Baudrillard on the Simulacrum? Is it time to resume your studies of the deep structure in The Matrix films?

Which leads me to Noam Chomsky, who recently said a Trump Prez is basically a "death warrant" for humanity and the planet. Noam the Subtle. (I confess I'd rather he was wrong on this one, if for no other reason than my overweening bias towards humanity not dying on a burned-up, uninhabitable planet.) So yea...

2. In Chomsky's 2007 book, What We Say Goes: Conversations on US Power in a Changing World: Interviews With David Barsamian, Noam says this:

A couple of years ago I came across a Pentagon document that was about declassification procedures. Among other things, it proposed that the government should periodically declassify information about the Kennedy assassination. Let people trace whether Kennedy was killed by the mafia, so activists will go off on a wild goose chase instead of pursuing real problems or getting organized. It wouldn't shock me if thirty years from now we discover in a declassified record that the 9/11 industry was also being fed by the administration. -pp.39-40

So, I end with epistemology down the rabbit hole: Chomsky bristles when you say he's a "conspiracy theorist." He does "institutional analysis." (He does it really well, methinks.) BUT: If the JFK hit is the great conspiracy - or at least in your Top Five - Chomsky seems to be saying here that the government has been engaged in a conspiracy to mislead people into thinking that the government conspires to mislead people.

Let this sink in.

Or not.

Does Chomsky make a valid point here? A sound one?

See you on the Other Side of the Looking Glass.

Some Other Reading I Did Before I Bloviated; Lots of the Quoted Material Is Found Here:
"Hillary Clinton Is Serious About UFOs," by AJ Vicens, Mother Jones, 25 March, 2016

"Hillary Clinton Gives UFO Buffs Hope She Will Open the X-Files," by Amy Chozick, New York Times, 10 May 2016

"What Hillary Clinton Says About Aliens Is Totally Misguided," by Natalie Drake, National Geographic, 11 May 2016

"A Guide to the Many Conspiracy Theories Donald Trump Has Embraced," by Brett Neely, NPR, 24 May 2016

"Welsh Government Uses Klingon to Respond to Serious UFO Questions," by Sebastian Anthony, Ars Technica, 12 July 2015

"The Government Tested a Flying Saucer in 1956. Here's the Full Report," by Rebecca Onion, Slate, 11 July 2013

June 1962 issue of Paul Krassner's The Realist: Krassner reported that UFOs were really diaphragms dropped by nuns on their ascent to heaven.

"NASA Preps Real Flying Saucer For Takeoff," by Amanda Kooser, CNET, 19 May 2014

"US Secretly Run by Nazi Space Aliens, Says Iranian News Agency"

"Alien Nation: Have Humans Been Abducted By Extraterrestials?," by Ralph Blumenthal, Vanity Fair, 10 May 2013 (Robert Redford planned a film about heretic Harvard psychologist John Mack)

OG here: Just a thought: why worry about possible Extraterrestrial Intelligence "visiting" us, when we already have yellow slime-mold intelligence, a jellyfish takeover in the making, and thousands of asteroids that can wipe us out?  And nota quite bene I'm not even mentioning the antibiotic apocalypse, runaway global warming, AI singularity Worst Case scenarios, or the Trump Presidency.

Have a fine day!

                                           אמנות על ידי בוב קמפבל

Bigfoot: Impressions On Charles Fort's 139th Birthday

Bigfoot (Sasquatch, Yeti), has been included in the set of beings called Cryptids, and some cryptids have turned out to be "real." I have no idea if Bigfoot (about 1/3 of all "sightings" in the Pacific Northwest, the rest scattered all over the globe, except for Antarctica), "is" real, but, like Jane Goodall, I hope they're real. Around 10 years ago she told NPR's Ira Flatow she was "sure" Bigfeet were real; recently she admits there's no evidence, but still has hopes. (Video, bad sound, but skip ahead to 7:20)

In the last 24 months, Dr. Melba S. Ketchum of Texas, a veterinarian turned animal geneticist, has asserted she saw Bigfoot, obtained DNA that shows Bigfeet are a separate species that arose when males of some previous hominids (unnamed) had sex with female homo sapiens around 15,000 years ago, somewhere in or near Europe, then crossed the Bering Sea land bridge before the last Ice Age thawed ("they're very fast"), and are a sensitive, inquisitive but very shy species. And they need legal protection from Man.

                                                    Dr. Melba Ketchum

HERE's how Live Science reported on it.

One thing that struck me in following up this story: there is no end of articles from two groups on Ketchum: 1.) the True Believers, but even moreso; 2.) the sarcastic group Robert Anton Wilson called "fundamentalist materialists," or "skeptics," who knew her data must have been contaminated, or she was some nut, an attention hound, delusional, naive, a fraud out to cash in. I thought the Live Science article was fair. But HERE seems the fairest article I've seen, in my present state of ignorance.

Ketchum took her evidence to a forensic scientists, and note why Timmer sees this as a problem, a big one. Forensic scientists are very good at finding what they want to find, and presenting it in court. Also, I learned about how DNA breaks down over time. But the idea that Ketchum's team was coming up with human DNA that looks like it had coupled with something far more remote genetically from the Neanderthals and the Denisovans - primates we homo sapiens probably did/could have mated with...gave me pause. And yet Timmer thinks Ketchum's sincere in her beliefs that Bigfeet are human.

On the other hand, Bigfootologist Dr. Brian Sykes will release his study of DNA evidence collected from European sources in the Fall. So...Six or Eight weeks from now, we may get a Big New Wrinkle in the Bigfoot Story. Or maybe a wart or a zit...

                                              Charles Fort, proto-phenomenologist,
                                               surrealist, data-collector

A Procession of the damned.
By the damned, I mean the excluded.
We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.
-Charles Fort, at the beginning of Ch.1 of his The Book of the Damned. A book that you may find works magick on your nervous system, simply by taking up and reading randomly: The Complete Books of Charles Fort: over 1100 pages of data he'd culled from newspapers or High Weirdness, and an overweening sense that the Scientists were too too enamored of, and blind to, the metaphors they were systematically sifting through to eliminate what Can't Be from What Is.

For (Robert Anton) Wilsonologists, it's indispensible, especially if you want to mine his stances on epistemology, his poetic humanism, his style in The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science, which seems fed heavily by Fort and Swift. (His epistemology was also, of course!, heavily influenced by quantum mechanics, Hume, Korzybski, Nietzsche, Husserlian phenomenology, the most current neuroscience in perception, and literary modernists. And Charles Fort! Etc.)

                                         Our Man in the Pacific Northwest

Vico's Bestioni
Noah's sons, according to Vico who died in 1744, neglected their dad's one true God after The Floodwaters receded. They then scattered and wandered "like brutes through the earth's great forest." Where did Ham go? Through Southern Asia, into Egypt and the rest of Africa. What about Japheth? Through Northern Asia, into Europe. Shem? Central Asia to the Near East. (Vico is writing in Naples, Italy.) It's nice that the brothers, while "brutes," could divide the known world up so strategically.

To be fair, once they went their separate ways, within this great Vast Forest, they were pushed further away from each other by "wild beasts which abounded." And in seeking pasture and water, they were further separated. Vico also tells us the brothers "pursued women who in that state were wild, timid and intractable." (These must have been women who survived The Flood and were just wandering around the Great Forest in packs. Those are the best kind, I've found. So I have something in common with Noah's brutish sons. I also dig the vast forests. What's left of 'em, anyway.)

Here's Vico, in the section of The New Science, on "Poetic Wisdom":

(It's after the Flood):

Since mothers abandoned their children, they grew up without hearing any human speech, or learning any human behavior, and sank to an utterly bestial and brutish state. In this case, mothers merely nursed their infants and let them wallow naked in their own feces, abandoning them forever once they were weaned. Wallowing in their feces (whose nitrous salts wonderfully enriched the soil), these children struggled to make their way through the great forest, now grown dense after the recent flood. And as their muscles expanded and contracted in this struggle, the children absorbed more and more nitrous salts. At the same time, these children lacked that fear of gods, fathers, and teachers which tempers the most exuberant phase of childhood. As a result, their flesh and bones must have grown inordinately large, and they became so vigorous and robust that they turned out to be giants.

...Vico then goes on to elaborate his theory of giants by citing Caesar, Tacitus, Procopius, Jean Chassagnon's treatise On Giants, archaeology (such as it was in Vico's 18th century), Greek and Latin myths...and he's sure most accounts are exaggerations! People tend to go on and on and let their poetic ingenium go wild. Let's be more sober-minded about giants. Clearly though, they interbred and covered the Earth. (I'm drawing from 369-371 from the Marsh translation.)

The Jews - Noah's clan - were taught cleanliness and fear of fathers and so they remained of normal stature.

Okay: so, for Vico, after the Flood, Noah's sons forgot all about the Jewishness, caroused about the Forests of the Earth, shitting everywhere, fucking any Wild Women they could find, and behaving like Freshmen from State on Summer Break, for a long, long time. They were, after all, hopped up and fortified by nitrous salts from all the shit in the soil, which, we all know, makes you huge like Andre the Giant. Or Lou Ferrigno. (Or Barry Bonds?)

The "poetic wisdom" here, as I glean it, not being descended from Jews myself, is this: I am descended from Bigfeet. It's a long story and Vico and tell you a lot more about it - or ask me about my ancestors, according to Vico! -  but right now I'm hungry for something nitrous, a timid and intractable woman, and maybe a Pop-Tart and some wrestling on the telly.

So: The Bigfoot Q: I don't know. Let's see what Prof. Sykes comes up with?

Max Ernst: Une Semaine de Bonte'

Translated to English usually as A Week of Kindness, sometimes as A Week of Grace, Ernst's 1934 book Une Semaine de Bonte' (<-----the images are in a PDF linked there, highly recommended you glance through if you've never seen it!) is subtitled "A Surrealistic Novel in Collage" in my Dover edition, and it's one of the most wonderfully weird books I've ever read. Indeed, "reading" this book seems akin to the reading of Ezra Pound's ideograms, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, a William S. Burroughs cut-up novel such as Nova Express, studying Egyptian hieroglyphics, and you get my point. It's demanding.

                                          Max Ernst: Oedipus Rex, 1922. 

The entire "novel" consists of pre-existing images in wood-engraved illustrations that Ernst tweaked with technical virtuosity; the resulting images, which are framed in sections with a putative theme of the seven days of the week ("Seven Deadly Elements": mud, water, fire, blood, blackness, sight, and possibly falling women?), and other bizarre framing devices, such as characters with heads from Easter Island statues (Thursday and blackness), and a bevy of men with bird's heads, which I find particularly disturbing. Ernst liked bird-men, and even called his bird-man alter ego "Loplop," and "he" appears throughout Ernst's work, and even merges with the work of other surrealist's work, such as Andre Breton's.

                                            One of my favorite images from the book

The only writing part of the text consists of the framing devices, and quotes from proto-surrealist Alfred Jarry, Dadaists (Thursday features this quote from Jean Arp: "The stones are full of entrails. Bravo. Bravo."), and surrealists.

This "novel" of collages was concocted in about three week's time, in Italy, where Ernst stayed with friends, lugging a suitcase overflowing with images he'd cut out/collected from mail order catalogs, popular French novels of the late 19th and early 20th century, and some of Gustav Dore's work. Ernst takes a pre-existing engraved illustration and inserts other images in a cut-and-paste method, in which, during the printing process the visual demarcations of cut-paste are virtually eliminated, yielding a look of fantastic technique and profoundly bizarre imagery. The challenge to the reader - and it's quite a challenge - is to "read" each image, juxtaposed with the ones from the same "day," and attempt to make "sense" of it. (Or is this precisely what you aren't supposed to/cannot do or try?)

                                                   What the...?

Every time I leaf through Une Semaine de Bonte' I become overwhelmed by each image. But that's me. Your results may differ. But that may be a seminal point here: every reader brings to the text themselves and interaction with the images. In a way that seems fundamentally different to the opaque texts featuring WORDS I mentioned above (Pound, Joyce, Burroughs), making sense of a single image seems challenge enough; "reading"/making sense of just one "week" of images seems well-nigh impossible, and perhaps that's the main reason no one that I've ever seen or read about, has ever produced a complete critical analysis of the text. A hardcore Freudian named Deiter Wyss produced (I've not read it) a detailed  and heavily Freudian-jargoned analysis of the first day of the book (mud and the Lion of Belfort). And that's it. The book is that weird and unheimlich.

The surrealists were outraged and outrageous, especially about the state of politics. In order to hold a mirror up to what they saw, they drew upon free-association and dreams and Freud, erotic imagery at times lurid, scenes of violence, anti-clericalism, and anything that would be seen as that which must be "repressed" by the superego: crimes of passion, torture, executions and suicide, and depictions of the emotional aspects of class warfare between rich and poor. As Ernst conceived and assembled his anti-rationalist collage phantasmagorical "anti-novel" in Italy, the Nazis in his native country had condemned all of his work, which no doubt influenced the must-be-seen-to-be-believed disturbing imagery of Une Semaine de Bonte'. 


Because each page-image in the text is probably met by an individual nervous system trying to decode a metaphor from one's fixed stock of (largely unconscious) metaphors, trying to "make sense" of the text, readings seem to inevitably be pixillating; Ernst's virtuosity in juxtaposition, coupled with an implementation of the surrealist program, make each pictatorial "metaphor" so complex and uncertain - a function of mathematically ultra-dense information that verges on "noise" in the nervous system - that any one reading would seem to be as individualistic as the reader her-him-self.

Obviously, another way to "read" the text is by just letting the images wash over you; don't even try to decipher what may lie hidden beneath. I've gone this route too. It leads to odder-than-usual dreams later during sleep.

Speaking for myself and my own readings of Ernst's novel of collage, the main reason I dip into it and attempt the "read" it is because it reliably induces an altered state of mind. It's a cost-free (once the book's bought) buzz. It breaks mental set, gets me out of my "self" and opens me back into that sense of wonderful weirdness and the sheer marvelous of...something lurking outside ordinary "reality." I think this is all the real religion we need. There seems a strong sense in which no one can truly "know" Une Semaine de Bonte'. This kind of thing seems to make some people outraged or feel threatened by the disturbingly uncanny weirdness; some seem to feel vertigo and they don't like it. My nervous system is exhilarated by this uncanniness. I like not being able to "figure it all out." I like the repeated attempt. I like the buzz.

Alfred Jarry, the Dadaists (one said what they were doing was a reaction to the news that people were being bombed from airplanes) and the surrealists were in the avant about questioning technological rationalism in the West. All this wonderful new technology, and yet: an up-tick in mass warfare and killing, and poverty among riches. An artist's protest: use anti-rationality to try and make people feel-then-think in a new way.

Has the jury returned with their verdict on how successful the surrealists and their popular accomplices were?

Brief Scattered Notes on Max Ernst (1891-1976)
He had an authoritarian father, strict religion as a kid. Where have we seen this story before? Ernst was a self-taught painter, and around age 18 visited insane asylums and became interested in artwork by the mentally ill. While ground zero for Dada was in Zurich, Ernst opened a chapter in Cologne. He went to Paris in 1922 and collaborated with anarcho-surrealist/then communist/then libertarian socialist poet Paul Eluard, and lived in a menage a trois with Eluard and his wife. Eluard started to get spooked by this arrangement and took off to Monaco, then Saigon. The three reconciled. Ernst was married a bunch of times, captured by the Nazis twice. The first time Eluard helped him get away, the second time Ernst was helped by Peggy Guggenheim,  who helped him get to Unistat, and whose own biography is almost too marvelous to believe. Ernst was married to Guggenheim from 1942-46. Ernst and Man-Ray got married in a double ceremony in Beverly Hills in 1946, to Dorothea Tanning and Juliet Browner, respectively.

Friends, collaborators and accomplices of Ernst include Miro, Diaghilev, Breton, Giacometti, and Klee. Ernst appeared in Bunuel's 1930 film L'Age d'Or.


How do I sum up my experience "reading" Une Semaine de Bonte'? I think I'll quote one of the inspirations for the Surrealists, "Lautreamont" (died: 1870), who once wrote, "As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing-machine with an umbrella on an operating table."

This video contains a recording of Ernst, from the 1960s, talking about the artist's response to outrageous politics, etc: It's less than 45 seconds: