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Chapter 3
Another MJ12 document
arrives by Special Express Post at the house of Stanton Friedman
"imposture is the imitation of an imitation"
"We
can only measure media by media" |
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Majic 12: A Meditation
In December 1984, a can of exposed-but-unprocessed black-and-white 35mm
film arrived at the home of Los Angeles movie producer Jaime Shandera.
When developed and printed, the film revealed eight pages of a supposed
briefing paper for president-elect Eisenhower, dated November 18th, 1952.
The pages described the discovery, recovery, and preliminary analysis of
the remains of a strange airborne vehicle that had crashed apparently some
seventy-five miles northwest of Roswell, New Mexico . UFO investigators
Stanton T. Friedman, Bill Moore and Shandera have spent many years in
trying to decide whether this document was real or represented an almost
unbelievably clever fraud. Since 1984, many other such documents have
appeared from similar
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This
incident is described in full in Crash at Corona (Marlow
&Company, New York 1992), a book by Stanton T. Friedman and Don
Berliner.
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sources,
the problem is still not solved, despite the success of Stanton Friedman's
book Top Secret Magic, and the most convincing investigations
carried out by Dr. Robert M. Wood .
The briefing document as received by Shandera plainly states that it was
prepared for President Eisenhower by a committee of 12 men. This committee
(who were named) consisted of some of the most powerful military and
scientific men in America at that time, and they are now commonly referred
to as the Majestic-12, or MJ-12 group.
This article does not intend to get involved in the pros and cons of this
continuing 18-year-old debate, but to offer a truly Fortean view of such
astonishing official documents as now appear on the web as seen through
the eyes of Argentinean writer Jorgé Luis Borges. It also argues that
what hangs these many practical field-investigators up is that not being
Forteans, they see no conceivable alternative between fact and fiction. As
the author of a recent book on Charles Fort, Politics of the
Imagination, my object in that book and in this article is to show that a Fort/Borges
"fuzzy" view is an alternative to the real/unreal mental lock
that more often than not occurs in such ufological investigations.
Although according to Andre Maurois, Borges wrote the first version of
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius in 1940, it first appeared in published form
in the Argentinean Spanish-language publication Ficciones in 1945. It is
odd than no MJ-12 researcher appears to have noticed this work. It
outlines no less the complete body of the MJ-12 story, and was written
significantly within that stretch of years representing the formative
middle-ranking period and accelerated wartime promotions of the
significant top players of MJ-12.
Since a great planetary war was raging, intellectual life and literature
and the arts had necessarily been much reduced, and therefore what little
literary activity there was (particularly of the avant-garde or
intellectual type) existed in the form of very few magazines, often of an
A5 size, such as the British Lilliput and Men Only (this latter
had no
connection to its modern equivalent!) that could be carried in the map
pocket of a military uniform. Short stories and short articles were all
that existed practically for mind-food, received and absorbed as it was
under often very strenuous work and battle conditions It is possible
therefore that Borges' original story was sought out in these conditions
by very small elite groups such as those who worked on the Manhattan
Project. Books of course need not be accessed directly; they can exist in
many forms: rumour, jokes, remarks, half-digested hearsay, or pure urban
legend as the saying goes. It can easily be imagined for example, that at
Los Alamos in particular, the main high-level high-IQ figures around
Oppenheimer (including Teller, Fermi etc) came across some rumoured
version of the ideas in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Richard Feynman for
one, would have loved the story. Needing
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intellectual
food in their mental and physical isolation they would in all likelihood
have sought it from such Argentinean writers as Borges whose country was
hardly affected physically by war, and whose publishing and printing
houses still had time, inclination, and materials for such luxuries as
free literary expression
Of all writers Borges is the most difficult to summarise. I have attempted
such a sacrilege to give only the briefest outline of the theme of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis
Tertius. Those who wish to read the whole amazing story can find it in the
Penguin Modern Classics edition entitled Labyrinths.
The story begins with Borges' friend Bioy Casares, remarking to Borges
that mirrors have "something monstrous about them". He adds that
he remembers a quotation declaring that both "mirrors and copulation
are abominable, because they increase the number of men". Borges asks
Casares about the source of this remarkable thought, and Casares says that
he remembers it from a work entitled the Anglo American Cyclopedia (sic) that attributed
the statement to one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar (pronounce erkbar as in
Ur-text). This being a country neither Borges nor Casares can remember
ever have heard of, the pair decide to trace the exact source of the
quotation. But despite both men being expert researchers and dedicated
fanatical littérateurs, Uqbar cannot be traced in standard editions of
the Anglo American Cyclopedia. A name such as Uqbar should appear
phonetically in the XLVI volume of the Cyclopedia, but there is no trace
of it there.
The following day Casares calls Borges from Argentina and says that he has
made a truly remarkable discovery. He has in his hands a XLVI volume of
the Cyclopedia, but this volume has 921 pages and not the usual 917! These
extra pages describe briefly the country of Uqbar, and Borges has in his
hands a "vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet's entire
history". These few pages indicate that they are drawn from some
complete encyclopedia consisting of many volumes about a world that is
very different to our own. What little could be learned from the
fragmentary description of Uqbar culture showed that religion, metaphysics
and popular belief were based on the single idea of the universe being an
illusion. This belief was symbolized by the "imposter magician"
Smerdis. This performer was apparently almost a religious symbol as an
inhabitant of that area of perception where illusion and reality change
places, a unique intermediate states ready to hatch out half-live embryos
such as the UFO and its abductors and such things straight from the
twilight zone as UFO crash-retrieval manuals. Modern post-war mysticism
starts here with such stories as Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. and
stretches out into to our own techno-scientific psycho-dramas of MJ-12 and
Area 51. Sceptics have done a good demolition job with
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Charles
Fort would have liked the idea of an "imposter magician". We
suppose that the phrase is intended to make us ask the question how can
a magician become an imposter when he is an imposter in the first place?
Is an imposter a reflection of a reflection? In these terms, could we
say that an actor is a partial imposter? Both Fort and the
metaphysicians and heresiarchs of Uqbar, would have been intrigued by
the web site that gives a list of different percentages of
"false" and "true" to no less than 160 examples of
icons of modern belief, almost from the ufological area. That the
separation of the false from the true can be accomplished with such
clarity, confidence and ease is truly astounding, a "virtually
impossible" thing in itself. Were Smerdis alive now, he would
become that demon of the sceptical world: the imposter, or
almost-imposter such as Lazard, or three-quarter imposter such as John
Lear, or (well almost) whole-imposter such as David Icke Such
beautifully fractionalized perceptions are pure Fortean manna, as
wonderfully risible and absurd as the ever-expanding demonological lists
of "solved cases" and "hoaxes" of noted sceptics.
These "factual" lists are one of our few valid art-forms. In
time they will be revered and preserved as art-forms just like a
wheelbarrow made of pickled herrings, a scientific
"breakthrough", a government denial, or a yet another
celebrated announcement of the separation of "fact" from
"fiction".
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contemporary mysticism; they have
ridiculed it to almost nothing, and made it synonymous with lazy thinking,
half-mad kooks, the "irrational" and downright intellectual
fraud. In trying to reduce all experience to a plain-cake simple-minded
rather simple-minded rationalism, they might bear in mind what
Rutherford said to Soddy after they had split the atom and transmuted
elements "don't say this is alchemy - they will call us
magicians".
Perhaps all mysteries begin with such a re-naming of things.
Years later, Borges (as a character in his own story) has the good fortune
to come across a single volume of those volumes referred in the 17 pages
on Uqbar. This was A First Encyclopedia of Tlön, Vol. XI. Hlaer to Jangr.
Tlön (pronounced as the "o" in "nose") is the planet
on which Uqbar in located. In Volume XI there are allusions to preceding
and succeeding volumes, as well as a much more detailed description of the
land of Uqbar and culture and inhabitants. These other volumes have never
been found, despite Borges and his colleagues upending "the libraries
of the two Americas and Europe".
But at this point in the story, all appears to be explained. Borges
discovers that the partial and fragmentary texts he has found are the work
of a secret cabal of scholars whose forgeries have been carefully built
over hundreds of years by generations of dedicated and specially chosen
disciples. These scholars have left fragmentary footprints of their
terrifyingly detailed labours in sole support of the idea that only the
utterly astounding is in any sense "real". This is the complete
reversal of the present modern sceptical position: that everything
"real" must be of a mundane nature. This singular binding idea
of Tlön culture supports both morals and mathematics, and the view that
metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature. This leads to a
hair-raising view of the Uqbar theory of literature:
"In literary practices the concept of plagiarism does not exist: all
works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous. The
critics often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works - the Tao
Te Ching and 1001 Nights, say - attribute them to the same writer and then
determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de
lettres…"
But to what point, other than demonstrating an entertaining (but a little
precious) cleverness as regards the theory of literature and imagination?
But let Borges continue his tale.
He tells of the purchase by a certain Princess
Faucigny of a strange compass whose needle "longs for magnetic
north" but will not point in such a direction. Around the concave (!)
metal case is inscribed the alphabet of Tlön. Some months later, he comes
across a small metal cone dropped by a dying drunk outside a primitive
lodging. This cone is impossibly heavy, and such cones in the
"fictional" country of Tlön are "images of the divinity in
certain regions of Tlön".
Both the extraordinary compass and the super-dense cone are breakthroughs
in part of the world of Tlön, appearing in our own world just as
certainly as a foot is put through a faulty floor. Borges finds himself in
the middle of an interpenetration of worlds, the kind of thing that we are
now gingerly approaching legitimately by tentatively rehearsing such ideas
as "quantum entanglement".
Of course it follows that once the hair-line cracks appear, greater
penetration follows. Borges continues his story by saying that
"around 1944" a researcher for the newspaper The American
eventually brought to light in a Memphis library the forty volumes of the
First Encyclopedia of Tlön. In these volumes, the fantastic aspects of
the previous descriptions of Tlön culture have been toned down somewhat.
"It is reasonable to imagine", says Borges "that these
omissions follow the plan of exhibiting a world which is not too
incompatible" with that world we ourselves experience as
"real". Suitably modified and re-designed, effective seeding of
the interpenetrating world of Tlön does indeed take place: "…the
international press infinitely proclaimed the 'find'. Manuals,
anthologies, summaries, literal versions, authorized re-editions and
pirated editions flooded and still flood the earth." Here then, is
the direct analogy with the MJ12 books, photocopies, and manuals: "Almost immediately reality yielded on more than one account. The
truth is that it longed to yield". This is his version of the rituals
of that god-game called "presentation of the evidence".
Borges concludes by giving us nothing less than the theory of conspiracy
theory brought to its ultimate conclusion and summed to infinity. Already
he says, the history of Tlön has wiped out the history of his childhood:
Perhaps, for the invasion of Tlön we may read ufology's progress through
Adamski via von Daniken to Area 51, complete with the equivalent to
elliptical compasses, super-heavy cones, in terms of streams of
hieroglyphics on Roswell debris, and very strange UFO crash-retrieval
manuals arriving from nowhere: "…a fictitious past occupies in our
memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with
certainty - not even that it is false".
His punchline is an anticipation of both the formation of MJ-12 and
Eisenhower's early warning (in his retirement speech) about the power of
scientific elites, and it was published at almost exactly the same time as
such elites were being formed. The structure of such elites was indeed a
kind of mimicking simulachra of what Borges prophesized: "a scattered
dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. Their task
continues". And sounding rather like Charles Fort, he continues:
"If our forecasts are not in error a hundred years from now someone
will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encylopedia of Tlön. Then
English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The
world will be Tlön."
Already the "alien" is breaking through in the manner of an
object from Tlön. Perhaps gung-ho "alien base" believers are
not right or wrong, but have gone too far too soon. The alien as Tlön
artifact can only intrude first in a version that is psychologically
scaled down, such as the heavy cone, which is of no use to anyone. Even
the most conservative of scientists admit that yes the alien is there, but
is impossible to get at - they exist millions of totally inaccessible
light years away. Then, as cultural time passes, the alien life form gets
nearer: the alien is now small, a bio-particle in the frozen waters of
Mars. As the metaphors expand further (and metaphors are the purest form
of show business) the USA (officially) prepares legal grounds concerning
alien rights. At the same time as we do this, Australian scientists
prepare to demolish the space and time separating aliens and humans by (at
first) teleporting a laser beam. Also, Greer prepares to lead hundreds of
self-confessing UFO foot-soldiers from all points of the American social
compass in a new March on the Pentagon very different to that of 1968.
Thus the very gradual approach to the acceptance of the alien idea: we
partially "accept" covertly and otherwise a series of
scaled-down rehearsals in the manner of the teleportations of Tlön, of
which the UFO could just be an example. Each scaling stage represents a
careful management of wonders and involves inducing that intellectual
eroticism absolutely essential to all significant discovery and experience
. Thus the proper answer to Fermi's question "where are they?"
is that just like Faraday's imaginary "lines of magnetic force",
they (consisting of more than types than we could imagine) are in the
wings. They are being costumed for that wonderful cultural pantomime (the
final stage of the psycho-social equation ignored completely by its
protagonists) called Factual Solidity. Such solidity is not mined or
"discovered" it is constructed of gradual allowances, rueful
admissions, and grudging advertisements, plus a veritable gray-scale of
almost murderous compromises, with not a little entertainment in between.
Solidity, like its equally arriveste partner "reality" is also
atrociously corrupt and contains scandals beyond all belief.
Often we hear of the idea of a paradigm being operational in human
affairs. If we could put a paradigm under a microscope, its interior
structure would show up as linked metaphors that can be looked upon as
almost live information animals themselves. The metaphors of Tlon, Uqbar,
Orbis Tertius are analogous with the very possible line of development of
ideas that might just have appealed to the first and second-generation
elitists of the young military-industrial complex. The metaphors binding
these men together and the themes of Borges' story so very close as to
enable cross-fertilisation. As first-generation nuclear scientists they
knew that in the heart of the nuclear furnace input may or may not equal
output. Thus did the Victorian world end proper in Los Alamos, and not in
the Britain of 1914. Perhaps some of these men were of the opinion that
the ideas of fission and chain reaction with which they had played with so
long could possibly go into action as metaphors and produce the kind of
quantum interpenetration described by Borges.
The MJ-12 group was a proud techno-aristocracy. From pampered well-heeled
backgrounds, and over-protected by their essentially corporate shell, they
were presumably as fond of decadent games as is every aristocracy. Could
some of these socially isolated people, over-endowed with brain in a
supremely decadent moment, have cooked something up from Borges' story?
Inward looking, over-specialised and lacking all liberal education, most
were probably in a state of shock after the most intense five years any
human could live through, these scientists faced an immediate post-war
world that they hardly understood. Moreover this world that had taken
their youth away, and their work had given almost all of them fatal
cancers. As Eisenhower hinted, certainly Borges' ideas could have
represented to such severely depressed people as Robert Oppenheimer a kind
of fantastic super-science, the next quantum step as regards conceptions
of Matter and Idea, and there were as many forms of such things flying
around Los Alamos in the late forties and fifties as there were desert
flies. As Friedman and the Woods have so convincingly demonstrated, the
MJ-12 papers show vintage top-secret material that very few had access to
at the time. Is it possible that like the heresiarchs of Uqbar, a small
group at least of the elite of the military-industrial-complex attempted
the experiment of seeding powerful suggestions if only to sit back and
watch such new-born information animals attempt to clone themselves,
producing almost-appearances and almost-objects such as the UFO?
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Two significant examples of history as rehearsal in the
postmodern sense are illustrated by two good guesses at the airplane
and tank by the Frenchman Pénaud and the Australian DeMole,
respectively. In 1876, Pénaud (with some help from
his friend Gauchot), had finished the design of a bat-winged twin-engined
monoplane design of 1876 (with a tricycle retractable undercarriage,
glassed-in cockpit, and plans for a flight-control panel. Though of
course it was to be another twenty-five years before engines were
ready fot this design, it was so close to the F117 Stealth Nighthawk
as to be quite astonishing (see Early Flying Machines by Charles
Gibbs-Smith, Eyre Methuen 1975). As for DeMole, by 1912, he had
developed a tank whose streamlined hull in external appearance at
least, is almost completely identical to the contemporary Challenger
2 MBT. Only recently have documents been discovered of DeMole's
original proposal to the British War Office. Across the top sheet
some chinless wonder has scrawled the word MAD! See article The
First Tanks and Fate by Ken Wright (see The Royal Tank
Regiment Journal, June 2002, pp. 6-8.
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As
amateur occultists, perhaps they did not know that after such a fission of
metaphors, this kind of chain reaction might be impossible to shut down?
Did such a group after the equivalent of Borges' impossible cones started
appearing, try desperately to kill the effect, and to erase all evidence
of such an experiment? Given the continuing and astonishing history of
detected historical erasures after 1945, the Orwellian answer could most
probably be yes.
The crash-retrieval manual, like wiring diagrams and old blueprints are
the only authentic twenty-first century "texts". The faded
neo-Edwardian wallpaper of modern highly camp "literary" fiction
cannot compare with say, the text of the General Ramey document on which
we half-glimpse the word "victims" through a computer mist whose
programmed pixel density is a new mode of consciousness. Like Fort's Book
of the Damned, these are our first electric texts, and they were a long
time in arriving after Robert Anton Wilson took up James Joyce's baton and
gave the stream-of-consciousness genre new life in his Illuminatus
books.
When Western scientific culture dies (as die it must, like every other
culture) it will not be through drugs, crime, or late-Roman levels of
corruption or conspiracy, it will die because it has failed to recognise a
region between Fact and Fiction. Once the anthropomorphic gods fled before
Apollonian rationalism, Greek culture fell apart for exactly this reason.
Its participation mystique with the world of animals and gods was broken
by rationalist ideas of objective "factual" science. Get rid of
the anthropomorphic gods and the mind becomes the Hiroshima landscape of
pure TV, but of infinite extent.
Lacking all alternatives between Fact and Fiction, our culture will be
crushed in the battles between truth or falsehood, between fantastic
claims and the equally fantastic nature of their auto-generated denials.
In the postmodern world we now mentally navigate by such mutual
antagonisms, just as the captains of wooden ships navigated by tides,
winds, and constellations. In our burgeoning virtual world, both
outrageous claim and equally outrageous denial can be seen now as the
leaking ship of Western time and imagination drifts towards rocks
hypnotized by the sirens of factual certainty and their death-song of
decadent scepticism.
The MJ-12 operation goes
beyond Cervantes in the visualizations come about, through a kind of
osmosis. Perhaps this was intended by what we take as real is a series of
exquisitely cloned forgeri, each a hair-line an escape rout to tell that
nothing is ever quite as real as we thinks it is...
Chapter 4
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We might ask is this a lost piece of Joyce's great stream-of consciousness
novel, Finnegan's Wake? Or pages from a
newly-discovered diary of Franz Kafka perhaps, found in a bombed-out
cellar in Prague? Its fragments speak of scratched runes on the burnt-out
walls of twentieth-century consciousness, of grisly items of evidence at
some War Crimes trial. It could be some broken story, finger-nail scrawled
on the cellar-walls of irradiated cities; it could be a last message from
a junkie-pad, a mental hospital; it could be scorched fragments of
abandoned works; it could be a collection of those flashes of interrupted
lives tapped along the heating pipes of political prisons, traced in blood
on the floors of execution blocks, and gas-chambers, or part-stories
smeared on the cell-walls of dirty-protest prisoners as a final scream of
defiance at firing-squads and torturers.
It is a text whose dimensions and interiors image perfectly the wreckage
it mirrors. "Emergency powers" mean Authority, and as every
child of 20th Century Nature knows, that means that everybody (including
Authority itself), is going to get ripped off left, right, and centre.
Therefore as a text it is rather like a map of Hamlet's suspicions that
there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. In its interiors are
hints and glimpses of plots within plots involving the very stability of
the mightiest elements of our own castle-culture. There is powerful deja
vu: We have been here before. We have seen the Late Latin version of this
text on
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a
piece of old scarred vellum taken from a dead Centurion, murdered because
he tried to tell that all was not well with the rebellious legions on the
disintegrating frontiers.
Hamlet did not like the word "seems", but it does seem that
there has been a monstrous conspiracy. The plot is Gulag in size and Nazi
in its savage intensity and destructive implications. The missed words of
the Roswell Scroll (as it shall be called), are smashed teeth,
gravestones, unmarked graves, the broken grammar is of missing files,
grand deceptions by all and every aspect of constituted Authority, Left,
Right, or Middle. As a text it stinks of denials of missing names, erased
dates, and the lying speech of ministers and soldiers, executioners and
murderers. It is rank with intellectual shame, moral corruption, imperial
decay, and wickedness in high places. If a single part of it is true, then
we are in the grip of a tyranny before which all the Caesars would
tremble. In this sense it is the beginning perhaps of a final text: we
have a choice: if we do not try to complete it, we are well and truly
finished as a civilisation and a culture which has any kind of pretence of
moral or intellectual worth.
Here, with phrases piled like broken Auschwitz suitcases, is another
episode of this late 20th century story:
6) **D** SAFE TALK....FOR MEAN-ING OF STORY AND MISSION.
7) BALLOON STORY. SHOW "STUFF'OF WEATHER BALLOONS SENT ON THE
What we are looking at here is a fragment of a whole new genre, with its
new digital/media dimension combined with its psychological/conspiratorial
vectors, integrated in turn with its scientific/technological
implications. As such, it constitutes a "work" in progress which
no single living writer of dumpy conventional "fiction" could
possibly match. As something written on the walls of a bombed city, this
genre has moral strength; unlike science fiction, it has a socio-political core; it avoids obsolete "literary" aesthetics,
it has political significance whilst avoiding the death-trap of Right and
Left distinctions, and it exhibits a discursive strength without
sacrificing awe and mystery. If we require a portrait of ourselves, this
broken text has provided one. Fragmentary, baffling, full of shadows in a
half-light, both poet Carl Soloman in Rockwell Asylum and Orwell's Winston
Smith would have recognised it. When Winston is allowed to look at himself
in a mirror after weeks of continuous torture, this text is his face.
But what is it? Where does it come from? |
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On
the afternoon of July 8th, 1947, US Air Force photographer, James Bond
Johnson, was summoned to the Fort Worth Headquarters of the 8th Air Force.
There were two other officers present, General Ramey, the Base Commander,
and Major Jesse Marcel, the Intelligence Officer of the Roswell-based
509th Bombardment Group, which was at that time the only atom-bomb
squadron in the world. The two officers were examining the wreckage of
what appeared to be a weather balloon, and Johnson was asked to take
pictures of the men as they carried out their examination. After a short
while, the group were joined by Colonel Thomas J. Dubose, General Ramey's
Chief of Staff.
Johnson duly took photographs, but even though the pictures and the whole
Roswell affair became of universal interest, he remained silent for nearly
fifty years until contacted by ex-USAF Major George Filer, in May, 1999.
Filer was a member of the America-based MUFON (Mutual UFO Network), and he
encouraged Johnson to think again about the pictures he had taken.
Filer went first to the Arlington Library of the University of Texas,
where four of the original Ramey office negatives were stored. Via MUFON
and the Internet, he invited any interested parties to help form a fresh
and modern technological view of the pictures he had taken. This led to
the creation of RPIT (Roswell Photographic Interpretation Team), a
non-profit organisation whose members provide their own financial
contribution as regards time, equipment, and travel. Eventually this team
was to include members from Britain, Russia, and Australia as well as the
United States. The team worked on 16 x 20 enlargements of the Arlington
Library negatives, and the project was coordinated by Ronald Regehr, a Los
Angeles aerospace engineer and MUFON Orange County associate director.
RPIT quickly established a new centre of interest other than the strange
debris itself. In four pictures taken by Johnson, General Ramey is holding
a piece of paper, fairly obviously a "Telex" of some kind, this
being a main form of communication in those days. In two of these
pictures, the General has the message folded, but in two other shots, he
holds it unfolded. RPIT decided to try and read this message using the
latest computer techniques. Ronald Regehr says of the results:
"The 'translation' was performed independently at several locations
and achieved an outstanding degree of correlation. The file from which I
worked is a scanned image of solely the message, and is 821 megabytes
(this from an approximate 1" x 3/8" size). Because of the
differing image intensity, we were required to vary the brightness and
contrast of different areas of the image to best resolve the individual
characters."
That the characters were non-proportional, that is each occupied the same
amount of space, assisted the operation considerably, and at an excited
monthly meeting of MUFON Orange County, the text was revealed, the final
part of which is:
6) **D** SAFE TALK......FOR MEANING OF STORY AND MISSION.
7) BALLOON STORY. SHOW "STUFF" OF WEATHER BALLOONS SENT ON THE |
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In the light
of this extraordinary discovery, our idea of what constitutes a
"text" must be revised. The old B-29 bomber is a
"text", as are the "non-literary" texts of George
Adamski, and the texts of other early "contactees", which in no
way conform to the standards of formal literary aesthetics, whose almost
pre-industrial structures, are terribly passé in a Internet Age. Since
conventional one-dimensional literary forms have plainly wilted and died
almost before what Harold Wilson called long ago "the white heat of
the technological revolution", such "pan-dimensional" texts
are emerging as the prototype texts of the 21st Century. Yet a little
unsteady on their partially-formed legs, they form nevertheless a unique
genre - what might be called a kind of part-literary epic which combines
intrigue, fraud, the near-unbelievable, and a kernel of near-truth as
dammit.
Some might say that the Roswell Scroll is not much of a read, but the fun
comes when we try to fill the gaps. This is not passive literature, and a
reader has to get out of the armchair and start hunting for clues. In this
sense, such texts are interactive, involving physical participation, they
are thus both dramatic and social instead of being leisured and dreamy
essays in character and motivation, symbol and circumstance. In that we
are made to participate in this sense, it is as if the technology were
trying to psycho-analyse itself through the reader, to find out here where
it came from, and within what framework of lies (or should we say tragic
deceptions) it was conceived. In this sense even the notorious "alien
autopsy" videos become a text straight from the night-side of the
military-industrial spectrum.
The limits of the technology involved in giving us the Roswell Scroll draw
the edges of the outlines of this conspiracy. As its power of resolution
increases the technology becomes an active participant involved in the
conspiracy, indeed, is part of the shape of the path-loop by means of
which the mysterium of these new-found Rosetta stones is entered. Again,
since any technology is a bundle of unified ideas in itself, its creation,
role, application and function all have deeply political and social
agendas. In this, it is almost as if the technology were some disembodied
intelligence struggling for realisation. It follows that there are all
kinds of dialogues going off between creator and created whenever technology is developed and applied, even when it is not particularly successful, or disappears (as does so
much technology) up a blind historical alley.
Perhaps in the final analysis, the ultimate product of technology is a
state of mind and not a finite product.
But let not any good old-fashioned Sherlock Holmes fan after a rattling
good tale think that he or she will be disappointed. Solve the puzzle of
either the origin or authorship of the MJ-12 papers, or contribute to the
completion of the Roswell Scroll, and the prize is the complete and entire
turning upside down of world history, no less. Holmes' hunt for Professor
Moriarty pales beside the quest initiated by such
"pan-dimensional" texts.
We should be aware of prejudiced critics, and take another look at Corso's
The Day
After Roswell. It is on the whole, a quite well-written and vastly
informative book. Again, like the Roswell Scroll, and Friedman's Top
Secret/Majic, it is the drama in the many sub-texts which gives these
books and computerised fragments their Miltonic scope. Their trails lead
certainly to the sacred geometries in the heart of the modern pantheons:
IBM, the RAND Corporation and many other Herman Khan systems-animals born
out of the innumerable cast-out think-tanks of that time, now gibbering
battlement-ghosts of the Eisenhower and MacNamara era. If we are patient
and ignore the many faults in Corso's book, we undergo initiation into the
technological mysterium as developed by the American military-industrial
complex after 1945. We must forge new definitions of "fact" and
"fiction" as regards these books; they represent a new art-form:
such books as The Day After Roswell will be remembered as part of a kind
of Bayeaux tapestry of the twentieth century. Their paradoxes, mistakes,
inconsistencies and contradictions nevertheless express that century's
fear, doubts, and uncertainties. They are better by far than some
lauded-to-the-skies pen-toed cross-eyed piece of faded English
pastel-shade "literary" fiction.
In our own advertising-soaked existence, when television has virtually
replaced language by soap-heiroglyphics, our world has become such a
multi-dimensional tapestry. Witness the screened "pageant" of
both the Iraq War. In
contrast to the last dying spasms of Victorian "solidity", in
our mall-world, suspended in cyberspace, "fact" versus
"fiction" and "concrete" versus "abstract"
are hardly relevant. As such, the books of Friedman and Corso are virtual
texts, whose conspiratorial nets open out into an ever-widening penumbra
of uncertainty, yet avoid the forbidding label of "science
fiction". Neither are they "faction" whose twin threads can
be part-unwound. Their bizarre excitements will replace surely the
antediluvian "literary" piece about cat-detectives, recipes, the
history of piano-accordions, or the endless gender problems of the many
and various Jeremies of Hampstead.
In this sense, why should we rave on about Picasso, when we ignore, say
Frank Stranges' Stranger at the Pentagon, or Howard Menger's From Outer
Space to You? Such writers, together with Friedman and Corso (who are at
the other end of the spectrum of conspiracy-credibility), have all helped
break open modern pyramid doors for the very first time. In the
half-light of endless flickering conspiracies, the vision of who and what
we all were long ago is spell-binding. Littering the tomb-floor are the
masks we all wore once upon a time, and on the walls, we recognise the
tales we told before the womb, and they all look like the Ramey
Memorandum.
Chapter 5
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Deconstructing
the B-29
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Now let us do something we
are not supposed to do. Let us re-discover the power of one of the great
banned faculties of the 20th century. Forget products, discoveries, facts
and opinions, what science and scepticism both are trying to do is stop us
imagining.
So let us imagine, and in
doing so let us also remember it was John Lennon's favourite word.
Let us imagine a B-29 bomber
crashed long ago on a island in the Solomons group.
Like Princess
Diana and Elvis Presley, the B-29 wreck has reached the regions of that
advanced life-form called pure information. We can be sure that for the
islanders, the crashed Superfortress will enter the mythological pantheon
of universal advertisements, just as the UFO itself has done for the
people who have long since moved on to make the very different
"improved" wings of very different aeroplanes to the B-29. The
idea of "improvement" of course is, like Rationalism, a very
late and rather callow arrival on the historical scene. The concept of
getting "better" relates to very rapid industrial class-change
rather more than anything else.
The idea of "improvement", either sociological or technological,
means managing the nature and targets of ever-young Product Time and its
latest development, the show-biz politics of promise-control, from Five
Year Plans to Mars Bars, from Monica Lewinski to Dark Matter to Wormholes.
Let us imagine.
Let us enter the haunted fuselage of this crashed sample of the Product
Time of our almost-recent past, but to the islanders is a past as far back
as Pyramid time
Let us imagine.
Within its rust and grease and the analogues of its fractured shapes of
the wrecked bomber are
interwoven the plots of both consumerism and technology and the mystique
of change. Here in this alien artifact are the long dead crew, most of
them victims of the 20mm Shigeru cannon of a supercharged Zero coming fast
out of the Pacific sun one early morning in May, 1945. Here, still in in
flying suits and life-jackets covered with yellow dust from cannon-burst
bags of shark-repellent, are shin-bones and vertebrae from Miami, Little
Rock, and Texas. There, rusting headphones still cling to shot-up skulls
from New York, and San Francisco; broken legs, necks and backbones from
New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Philadelphia, still sit upright before
controls, radio sets, and navigating equipment built, tested, and almost
paid for in Detroit, Memphis, and Idaho.
Before this broken lance of the vanguard nation, stand the ranks of a
worshipping congregation. They listen intently to a dancing and chanting
ju-ju man, who whirls a bamboo-stick before the cracked Perspex nose of
that essay in wonder and danger which is the Boeing B-29. This is the
entrance to the shrine. On the back row of our congregation, let us
imagine a pair of eyes which avoid the ju-ju-man's gaze, and look rather
more discursively into the silent ruins of the torn-off Wright Cyclone engines. Let us say these are the eyes of Hero.
Hero avoids the ju-ju man's concern with the great chiefs buried in these
ruined pyramid-chambers of broken American aluminium, for Hero is
experiencing instant Natural Selection. He has begun to replace all
medicine-man concerns by quite another kind of question, and we can
reconstruct a moment in which that great white hope of humanity called
rationalism is born.
The dancing and chanting finish. Night comes, and taking care to avoid the
ju-ju man, Hero pays a secret visit to the depths of the temple. By the
light of a shrouded pig-grease candle, there is revealed inordinate beauty
and form. Hero asks himself new questions as his fingers and eyes move
over the shapes and surfaces of thousands of old American dreams. Unable
to avoid his eternal present, he examines products and techniques long
gone with the America of Glenn Miller's orchestra. How do they do this?
How do they do that? Hero does not know that a half-century years after the crash,
that in many cases, "they" have forgotten the techniques by
means of which they did this and that.
Hero moves from new gods to old technologies as he surveys precise angles,
neat joints, and smooth shapes. He touches textures and shapes of
Vulcanised rubber and Bethlehem Mayari low-alloy steel; he passes by
wiring, castings, and very early plastics (of varying quality), from
Seattle, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Through the complexity of the shattered
instrumentation; carefully he moves past the 50. cal turret, discarded
parachutes, half-inflated dingies and oxygen masks. The dregs of
long-dried brake-fluid and carbonised rubber come to him as a mid-century
techno-industrial Proustian Madeliene biscuit: Paxolin, Bakelite, and Celluloid,
all incense rising in praise to the lost gods of apple-pie America:
Chance-Vought, Curtiss, Northrop, and Convair; Bell, Tesla, and Edison.
On this night, all are present as Hero moves through this broken lance of
the vanguard nation. Passing early radar vacuum-tubes, fuel-tanks, and
still-full bomb-racks, Hero will become aware of the extent of a
conspiracy beyond all his imagining. He will begin to understand a little
of the mythology of the techno-industrial solution as represented by the
aircraft, now long gone as Bob Hope's America. He will begin a new
experience of Time not as the coming and going of sun, moon, and tide, but
Time as ideological quanta pulsating between Plan, Product and
Performance.
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As a first experimental
cerebral, Hero will begin a journey of initiation through the rites of
Industrial passage: principles of operation, purpose, and manufacture will
permeate his very being. In this shattered temple of a fuselage, he is
being painfully re-birthed. On his voyage of discovery he will often wish
he had stayed with the rattling skulls of the tribal sorcerer, and
continue to think and accept that the hydraulic fluid seeping from a
shattered brake-drum are the grotto-tears of some dying animal, sorrowing
for mankind.
Hero will want to know the "facts" that he has no doubt heard
talk of from missionaries and visiting anthropologists, from whom,
intuitively, the crashed B-29 has been carefully concealed for fifty years. He will try to jump out of his loin-cloth paradigm by attempting
that celebrated process of stage-management called de-mystification. But
from the B-29 to the F117 Stealth aircraft is a long journey again into a
mythological world-text. Before he goes on that forward journey, Hero will
have to learn to read backwards, although he may not be familiar with
either textual dimension. He will have to travel back in time through many
centuries of sleepwalking experiments with temperatures, pressures,
alignments, tooling, finishing, fitting and design, and on the way will
see bankruptcies, suicides, madness, and not a little love and dedication.
Hero does
not realise that the ju-ju man knows what is happening. He can see inside
Hero's head. He does not do or say anything. He knows from the way Hero
looked at the aeroplane that he has begun already a great epic journey.
The ju-ju man knows that in his new task of trying to understand, Hero
will have to travel back from the B 29 to the struts of the Wright Flyer,
to the Colt pistol and Gatling machine-gun men of the Civil War, back to
the English blacksmiths who first hot-hammered the crude-forged iron
straps round the parched water-barrels of the arriving Mayflower.
He knows that Hero will have to struggle with the pre-Newtonian puzzles
about momentum and acceleration, mass and pressure, and will have to
re-discover Pythagoras, Archimedes, and Aristotle. Beyond them lies the
open-hearth furnace, its stone cups boiling with bronze, and all
surrounded by cursing, and hope, despair, defeat and victory, birth,
death, and dream.
Off the main roads of the central mystery, there are numberless
side-turnings in the shape of questions: on what dismal cold morning did
the outline of that particular decision form? What was so and so doing at
the time? Was there a particular night on which the curve of a cheek
became the shape of an aeroplane? All the mistakes, guesses, and
approximations of all these days and nights will feed back on themselves,
providing interpretation as crazy as anything in our own science or
religion. An ever-evolving landscape of belief turns the fuselage into a
grail-vessel. Matter decoded is pure dream, leading back to the cave-mouth
and Hycernian forest of other wrecked fuselages beyond the sun and moon.
When Hero comes full circle, the waiting magus will smile. What has Hero
learned from his great journey? Perhaps he knows of the mysteries of the
Fall in terms of a question: why do the gods need machines to fly? Why do
they need radios to talk to people on other islands?
Perhaps Nature does not experiment socially, choosing instead to
concentrate upon certain individuals, such as Hero or Adamski. The rest,
like the animals, go on happily flapping and hooting, snorting and
grunting to infinity. Perhaps that is why certain people lead shattered
lives. To be "chosen" is to be the subject of some illimitable
cosmic experiment. Just as we are about to award Frank Stranges, and Adamski very low marks out of ten, we must remember that
soon after their pan-dimensional texts were published, flower power hit
California, the home of both Adamski and Stranges. After that, the world was never the
same again, and space folk were seen everywhere. Adamski's life-long
obsession with Aetherian Theosophy, which links almost every single one of
these early saucer visionaries, had reached social melt-down, and partly
because of this development, the American army was later to be taken from
the battlefields of Vietnam.
If such people have anything to teach us, it is not that the gods are
good, bad, or indifferent, but that they can manifest at all, that they
can run riot like a cellular virus, sow their images in minds which become
Malls, and vice versa. They show us also that we ourselves have power to
create that sacred and utterly scandalous tomfoolery which is always at
the heart of time, change, and product.
Meantime, back in the bush, in a secret place unknown even to the ju-ju
man, Hero picks up a stone and starts to shape it into a B29, whose
robot-being now exists as a broken Roswell Scroll in his head.
The ju-ju man smiles.
He knows how far Hero has to journey before he frees the shape from the
block.
Chapter 6 |
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The
Last Post and Farewell to Wendy Connors
From: Colin Bennett sharkley1@panzerben1.fsworld.co.uk
To <ufoupdates@virtuallystrange.net>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 1:45 (GMT Standard Time)
Subject: Postmodernism - Bennett
>From: Laurel Oplatka calabash2003@webtv.net
>To <ufoupdates@virtuallystrange.net>
>Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 19:12:03 -0800 (PST)
>Subject: Re: The Dark Side Of Postmodernism - Oplatka
>>From: George Hansen gphansen2001@yahoo.com
>>To <ufoupdates@virtuallystrange.net>
>>Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2003 07:44:56 -0800 (PST)
>>Subject: Re: The Dark Side Of Postmodernism - Hansen
>>>From: John Auchettl Praufo@aol.com
>>>To <ufoupdates@virtuallystrange.net>
>>>Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2003 02:57:02 EST
>>>Subject: Re: Postmodernism - Auchettl
>>>>From: Jerome Clark jkclark@frontiernet.net
>>>>To <ufoupdates@virtuallystrange.net>
>>>>Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2003 17:58:08 -0600
>>>>Subject: Re: The Dark Side Of Postmodernism - Clark
>So, if modernism is seeking to refine the efficacy of the
>prevailing systems, PM is moving to change the "rules" of
>knowledge-systems themselves. This idea, vis a' vis science, is
>pointed to by Colin in "Politics of the Imagination" when he
>talks about scientific "discoveries" being merely changes in
the
>product, not the store. Vis a' vis literature, the PM approach
>is represented (some times) by a more non-linear, stream-of-
>consciousness style, rather than the non-fragmented, straight
>line story narrative; for example, Colin's recent "Fourth
Day"
>post is a very clever and artful piece of PM writing. Although
>this is perhaps a preposterous over-simplication, I want to say
>that PM craves an end to the dominance of scientific
>rationality, instead urging an all-embracing approach,
>emphasizing the importance and relevance of the subconscious, a
>plurality of viewpoints, images, mystery, magic and myth.
>In Colin's magical PM recipe, we find blended a sense of the
>metaphysical, a quantum world view and a really witty sense of
>play/humor.
>>The so-called "scientific" paradigms of the old white
men of
>>ufology are obviously inadequate. Bennett provides a very
>>useful, alternative way of addressing the phenomena.
(snip)
>>To his credit, Dick Hall understands that Bennett's ideas
>>severely challenge prevailing notions of science. In his
>>attacks on Bennett, Hall would find many allies within the
>>physical sciences. However, those allies will not aid him in
>>his study of UFOs, rather, they will sneer at him in just the
>>same way he sneers at Bennett.
>>>Colin Bennett has a gift that opens up the text. I am very
>>>surprise how some US groups have reacted to Colin. If you
don't
>>>get it then get someone to read it to you. Go back to the
posts
>>>Colin has placed up, take your time. Read his books. We need
>>>more of this type of thinking.
>>>Jerome Clark, Laurel Oplatka, Brenda Denzler, George P. Hansen
>>>and many others got the point (message image & text)!
>>>>I, too, recommend the book. It's wonderfully
thought-provoking
>>>>and very, very funny. Watching much of the response to
Colin
>>>>Bennett on this List, I get the clear sense that many are
>>>>missing his splendid sense of humor, which Fort himself
would
>>>>have appreciated.
Hello all List Savants,
Well I am heartened indeed at this level of support from Listers for my
attempt to introduce an element of Postmodern thinking into Ufology. The
support is such that as far as this List is concerned, I think it could be
said for the first time that there is a now a definite Postmodern element
in modern Ufology as represented by this List.
To which Wendy Connors replied:
>From: Wendy Connors FadedDiscs@comcast.net
>To <ufoupdates@virtuallystrange.net>
>Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 18:25:00 -0700
>Subject: Re: Postmodernism - Connors
>What a crock of crappola and waste of life.
To which The Bad Man replieth:
Hi Light of my Life, Darling, you've blinked! You've been
peeking at my posts! Naughty girl! You know you said you wouldn't, but I
knew it would happen sooner or later. No need to be blush. I am glad we
are talking again and I look forward to long conversations with you. Yes,
I agree, my posts are far too sexy to resist, and the world knows it. Jan
looks at my posts in the cowshed when there's no one around, and Dick
locks the garage and uses a torch from his tool-kit. Anyway, glad to see
you back, honey. How are things on one-syllable farm? Shot any good
progressive avant-guarde intellectuals lately, babe? Their brains and
education make very good primal stew for the entire family (including the
dogs) when night falls around the old bunk
house. There's some fine fat blue-chinned thinkers in the woods (with
thick spectacles and foreign accents), so get out your good-old-girl Annie
Oakley 12-bore and wait for my next series of long posts on the origins of
Postmodernism.
Don't fret, pet. You'll come to love the three-clause sentence,
the obscure historical reference, the Shakespeare, the
metaphysics, and the super-cerebral claims for virtuality
in an attempt to imminentize the Eschaton.
Now Wendy go pour yourself a glass of home-brewed Tree
Frog from the old tar barrel, switch off the peasant's lantern,
and read the rest of my posts. Soak yourself in History and
ee where you came from. Give yourself a bit of class. Go
back and back and see where the workshops in which every
single one of your beloved facts were manufactured. With a
brain like yours, you deserve this. As the Brentford Polonius
will testify, my posts will thrill you to death, and your other half
won't know what has hit him.
I've dedicated the first one to you, sweetheart. It's a postmodern
portrait in my coming List series on Postmodernism. Parables
of Media: 1. Carriage Window Face, 1840. That face is yours,
Wendy. That's the last time I saw you. When you read this story,
you will remember. I shall immortalise you as I have immortalized
Mr. Goldstein in 4th Day Like Four Long Months of Absence (Combat Diary No
8)
This signed portrait will be of great value to your grandchildren,
although I doubt whether the same could said in the case of Mr.
Goldstein.
I'll be back, Bin Laden be willing.
Colin (Bad Man) Bennett
Wendy's Mantra:
Eat an egg-head a day
Keeps the Forteans away!
Book
Reviews
From: Mac Tonnies
Date: Monday, March 24, 2003 01:53:18
To: UFO UpDates
Cc: Richard Dolan; Colin Bennett
Subject: "The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings" (review)
"The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings" by John Keel
review by Mac Tonnies
"The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings" is a rambling but
extremely entertaining guide to extraordinary phenomena and bizarre
entities as viewed by one of the most original and controversial
researchers in the field. Keel sets out to separate the wheat from the
chaff, revealing genuine cryptozoological and paranormal mysteries and
relating some great hoaxes along the way. "The Complete Guide"
is a formidable stew of weirdness: sea serpents; unidentified hairy
bipeds; the "Mothman" made famous in "The Mothman
Prophecies"; menacing roadside figures; diminutive flying saucer
pilots, and blood-sucking phantoms.
Keel is convinced that UFOs and monster sightings are two sides of the
same paranormal token. According to Keel, an other-dimensional
intelligence is adeptly manipulating and exploiting human belief systems
to unknown (but potentially insidious) ends. The "monster mania"
that often accompanies highly publicized sightings of
"Bigfoot"-like creatures, posits Keel, might be deliberate
attempts to attract attention away from deeper mysteries. Keel scoffs at
"mainstream" ufology, with its quaint "nuts and bolts"
view of unexplained phenomena; he's convinced we're dealing with something
vastly stranger. And whether you agree with his thesis or not, you can't
help coming away from "The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings"
without viewing "Fortean" anomalies in an unsettling new light.
Also recommended: "Passport to Magonia" by Jacques Vallee and
"Uninvited Visitors" by Ivan
Sanderson.
UFO books galore: http://www.mactonnies.com/ufobooks.html
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A
Rhapsody on the Ramey Memorandum