I reported a year and a half ago that aliens had visited us. I mean the ones from outer space. More specifically, a spaceship crashed in the desert outside Las Vegas and three creatures managed to get out of the wreckage and make their way into a suburban backyard. Two of them were photographed holed up in a backhoe (see “They’re Here (Sort Of)”). I don’t know why a backhoe except that it was available and afforded a high position from which they could keep an eye (or two or three) on the curious humans gathering around. Also, apparently, the doors had locks. You need that feature in a backhoe.
The photographs back then showed small shadowy figures with the customary enlarged heads, wide eyes, and small noses and mouths. I’m guessing wherever they came from didn’t have quarter pounders. The story was a big deal for about a week, maybe two, and included interviews with the responding police officers, the owner of the backhoe and his family, and even an astronomer-physicist guy in a bowtie from UNLV. I could be wrong about the tie, maybe even the department. I’m pretty sure it was someone who wore a lab coat at least occasionally.
Then the story went away. I was sorry about that, since the description of the crash from “near eyewitnesses” (is this a real category?) reminded me of one of my favorite sci-fi movies growing up as a kid: Invaders from Mars (1953). In the movie, a spacecraft lands as the vanguard of an invading force. The Martians construct an underground bunker and command center. People get sucked into it, sometimes headfirst. Although there is no backhoe, the movie furnishes plenty of conspiracy theories, acts of betrayal, and the release of demonic forces, both conscious and unconscious. As the song goes, who could ask for anything more?
Well, I could. And did. I wanted to hear more about the creatures that had crash landed in the desert. Was it really a crash landing or a ruse meant to conceal an invasion force? Were people disappearing beneath the sands of Las Vegas? It wouldn’t be the first time. Suddenly, no one heard from the family or police. Rumors spread that a three-letter federal agency or two had taken over the case. And, yes, it had become a case. But then it got buried as if in those same sands.
I was crestfallen, as you can imagine. But now we have something new to focus on regarding aliens. It seems that they are patrolling the skies over New Jersey. Dozens of drones have been flying around the skies of the garden state (ever hear of Jersey Corn?), spying on civilians and military installations. No one knows where these drones come from, although there are plenty of theories.
Some have accused them of being from an Iranian “mothership” stationed off the sandy beaches of Long Beach Island. This, from a member of Congress, no less. Others blame the Chinese and cite the weather-spy balloon that went on a tour of the USA early last year. No one has blamed Vladimir Putin yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Lastly, there are the apocalyptic inclined, who have declared the end of the world.
I know why they’re here. You can rest assured that they’re not interested in colonizing the Earth because their home planet is being destroyed by (a) a plague, (b) a cataclysm, (c) rival aliens, (d) the death of their star. No, they are here for one simple reason. As my intermediate calculus textbook in college put it (I have never forgotten it), the answer should be “obvious even to the most casual observer.” What do Las Vegas and the Jersey shore have in common? Not to put too fine a point on it, let’s call it the Vegas Strip and the Atlantic City Boardwalk.
You guessed it: gambling. They’re here to gamble away their hard-earned credits, and their spaceship is the interstellar equivalent of a Greyhound Lucky Streak bus, meal vouchers and all. Is it any wonder that shifting a backhoe is a lot like working a one-arm bandit?
I know what you’re thinking. This time he’s lost his mind. Well, I haven’t. I’m just fed up with crazy. I was hoping that after the election we’d all settle down a bit. I still have hope, but maybe I’m the one with his head in the sand.
Image credits: Alex Shuper; 20th Century Fox-IMDB, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47905832; Bruno Yamazaky. Want more? Click on Amazon top right or go to Robert Brancatelli. The Brancatelli Blog is a member of The Free Media Alliance, which promotes “alternatives to software, culture, and hardware monopolies.”
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Thank you, Jonathan! I looked the book up and it sounds interesting.
Of course the drones are circling New Jersey – that’s where Orson Welles left the Martians in Grovers Mill back in 1938.
Thanks for the dose of humor, Rob. Even if the world is still crazy, I am newly hopeful.
Love it! Seems as logical as any other “official” theory floating around. Wear the bow tie proudly and spew this knowledge to all!
Good day for embracing imagination! Cheers all.
Regarding the drone sightings there is every indication that his is a classic social contagion case where once a phenomenon becomes newsworthy, especially anything seen in the skies, there will be an explosion of low quality sightings fueled by mass hysteria. You quoted Jung’s book on the subject but it may have been a long time since you’ve read it. Jung carefully noted that many of the objects reflected radar and when he pointed out the many psychological aspects of the phenomenon he did not assume that they were non physical but speculated that they might physical exteriorizations of the collective unconscious and psychoid material objects. Privately, he took the physicality of the phenomenon even more seriously. The jokey, dismissive tone you take is classic for those who have not done their homework on this vast and complex topic. If you want a starting point you could read UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record by Leslie Kean. After six decades of immersion on this topic I can tell you the classic sign of ignorance of the topic is an assumption that all who explore it base their work on ETH (the extra-terrestrial hypothesis) when there are a number of more interesting possibilities. Joshua Cutchin’s 1500 page tome, The Ecology of Souls, is the most comprehensive work on one of those more interesting possibilities and it’s mentioned briefly in the epilogue of my book, Parallel Journeys, which you read. A free into to a more serious view of the topic is chapter six of my book on the Singularity Archetype: https://zaporacle.com/crossing-the-event-horizon-human-metamorphosis-and-the-singularity-archetype/vi/. Jokey, snarky dismissals of the topic are as offensive to those who have seriously worked on it as someone taking that tone dismissing a religion (many of which have high overlap with saucer cults, btw). “Oh, you’re a Catholic, so you believe in talking snakes?” That’s the level of ignorance on display in dismissing this vast phenomenon based on your Las Vegas tractor story. Also, as someone trained in philosophy, you should know better than to conflate a low info debunking with “skepticism.” The Skeptics were Greek philosophers who believed correctly that their power of thinking and observation were improved by not arriving at conclusions. Like others who misuse the term, you do the opposite, you arrive at conclusions based on little homework, and that is characteristic of ignorant debunkerism and not true skepticism. Hopefully you know by now that I take an aggressive stance on what I consider bad ideas, but it’s not personally.
I don’t know what you’re arguing here, Jonathan, except that you try to take me to task for dismissing the drones in a “dismissive” tone. Okay, guilty as charged. But what I am actually dismissive of are conspiracy theorists who make unsubstantiated claims and suggest fantastic explanations for the gullible without having done any real “homework,” as you put it. But homework doesn’t consist of reading like-minded people who are equally involved in the conspiracy and/or delusion. That’s neither logical nor convincing. Also, I don’t believe there is “every indication” that the drones are a “classic social contagion case” at all. You state that as if it were fact, obvious to all. That is much too simplistic an explanation. I suspect, rather, that there is another practical explanation, one that I wouldn’t be surprised is meant to have a political effect. And, while I respect Leslie Kean’s journalism, the rest of your argument falls flat, based on an emotional response to a perceived attack on you and your “religion.” I’m sorry you took it that way. But my not being a co-religionist doesn’t make me ignorant. Apparently, though, it makes you defensive. This is the second time.
What I should have explained is that I was also responding to your earlier article dismissing UFOlogy where you wrote: I might have been more sympathetic to Grusch if not for another, recent report of a UFO that crashed in Las Vegas of all places. According to an eyewitness, a “tall, skinny alien creature with greenish color” eight feet tall emerged and hid in a backyard. The creature had a “weird-looking face, big feet and big shiny eyes and a big mouth.” It telepathically rendered the eyewitness powerless until it could get away, although no one seems to know how it escaped. I’m thinking maybe it traveled through time or shape shifted through space.
If I sound skeptical, that’s because I am
In that article, you accept verbatim a classic government boiler plate dismissal (I thought Trump supporters were wary of the deep state) as established fact. Then you use some amazingly poor logic by saying you would have been more sympathetic to Grusch if not for some completely flakey case he had absolutely nothing to do with.
It’s also offensive that you refer to this as my “religion” when I have no fixed belief about what the source of the phenomena is, but from a point of view of actual skepticism consider evidence of various possibilities and least among them is the extra-terrestrial hypothesis. You also grossly misrepresented Jung who defended the physical reality of the phenomenon. I would think that a former professor of religion would take a more serious and informed approach to at topic that Jung took very seriously as he recognized that it had psychological elements of a new religion. The defensiveness characterizes your emotional response. I had nothing to defend as the article was not specifically toward me. I didn’t bother to defend Grusch, et al because there are volumes of creditable material out there if you care to look and I’m certainly not going to summarize in a comment. I have written extensively debunking conspiracy thinking and extra terrestrial assumptions about UFOlogy. The people I would suggest you read are not part of the delusion. Learn to have your ideas challenged with taking it so personally.
“Settle down?” That’ll be the day. I had to comment on “Invaders From Mars” – I mention this movie to people from time to time and no one seems to remember it. Maybe they have those implants in the back of their necks??
No one remembers it…?!? Ann, have a showing at your house over the holidays. You know, along with White Christmas and It’s A Wonderful Life…
I remember it and so did the novelist, Robert R. McCammon in an award winning novel, Boys Life. Close to the beginning, some boys growing up in the early Sixites see the film and each of them becomes extremely paranoid after, unsettling both themselves and their parents. The description of the film’s effect on them is amazing and captures the same paranoid feelings it induced in me as a child.