Putting the Noise Back Into the System

(revised 31st March, 2010)


A Postmodern Fortean
analysis of Consumerism,
Cargo-Cult Belief, and
Ufology.


by Colin Bennett

“We are not realists. We are not idealists. We are
intermediatists—that nothing is real, but that nothing
is unreal: that all phenomena are approximations
one way or the other between realness and
unrealness. Like purgatory, I think.”
Charles Fort, Wild Talents


Prologue

The Saucers That Did Not Crash

If there have been UFO crashes, then it is reasonable to assume that there have been successful landings. If such vehicles contained intelligent live biological entities existing in some kind of active social order, then human culture has been contaminated by ideas and actions not formed by human consciousness. Given this situation, we have no means of knowing how far this penetration has been effective. Therefore we do not know what games may have been played by aliens and are perhaps still being played. We have to assume also that alien cultural levels will be in complex interaction with other, quite separate alien cultural levels; alien level A will be interacting with alien level B, C, D, and so on. We have also to assume that each one of such levels will be in turn relatively time-shifted in overall development. As we shall see in the following examination of cargo cults, confusions regarding image, symbol, and metaphor will abound due to differing planes of psychosocial formulation within different species in space-time and cultural development.
Given such a theatre of multiple interactions, it is surprising that a dwindling number of Ufologists strive with might and main to demonstrate in a very singular way that the Pentagon bureaucracy created the MJ-12 papers. It could be said that this is the equivalent to South Pacific cargo-cult tribes in 1920s believing that Christ had a thriving cargo business in Sydney, Australia. Such confusions abound. Major cultural elements are formed around such often comic distortions. For example, the universal use of the present tense in all "scientific" cosmological discussions is a similar distortion; events which according to Relativity happened long ago are described almost universally as happening in real time—whatever that means—in turn. Distortions of the same ilk include certain UFO communities talking about existing full relationships with alien intergalactic communities as if they were describing a session at the U.N. Other
authors are on first-name terms with aliens while others claim to know the names given to the once-alive aliens in Area 51. Some authors even claim that aliens are running the U.S. government.
Now if we accept for a moment that there may be the tiniest shred of truth about such ideas, then in the light of what has been said previously about cultural contamination, such things as the MJ-12 papers and the claims of Lieutenant Colonel Philip J. Corso in The Day After Roswell (Pocket Books, 1997) could indeed be a pattern of inscrutable alien game play instead of being (supposedly) the result of the leak of pen-pusher’s secret material from the Pentagon.

It is absolutely of no use to believe in alien existence on one hand and not believe in alien plans and activities on the other.

Perhaps the best argument for the claims of Colonel Corso is that we ourselves have done to others what aliens may be doing to us. For example, because of technical and economic limitations, we gave to Third World countries the hand-cranked $100 computer, which is as good a piece of downtown cargo as any. Reasoning by analogy, an indicator of what might be cargo in reverse is that the first transistor “cold” junctions were made of Germanium. In the late 1960s, Germanium pnp transistors were replaced by silicon NPN transistors. This was for various reasons such as cost, difficulty of manufacture, and better all-round technical performance regarding frequency range. In other words, if (according to Corso) transistors DID come from the Roswell wreckage, then they were (like the hand-cranked computer) out of date almost before they arrived!

The important thing is that in expressing such belief and ideas, Colonel Corso created a powerful modern techno-myth, as did George Adamski and the major contactees of the 1950s. Just like Lee Harvey Oswald, such people are now of permanent remembrance in Western culture.

On this level, arguments based on simple fact versus fictional differentiation mean very little. For better or for worse, as narratives and scripts and personalities, Adamski and the contactees, just like some movie stars, have entered the unconscious; (see my Adamski biography Looking for Orthon: The Story of George Adamski, the First Flying Saucer Contactee, and How He Changed the World (Paraview Press, 2001).

Scientific propaganda has of course managed to identify myth with lies, whereas mythological thinking is the most powerful and most ancient means of communicating with the collective unconscious. Powerful myths are not that easy to create. Simple lies, downright frauds, and anarchist techno-fun such as SERPO and CHAD are more than plentiful in Ufology, but they do not stick around very long. A myth, however, is an expression of something created deep in the collective unconscious long before any performance script is ready for enactment. To assume that any of our suggested alien levels will be respectable images of what we consider to be the best of ourselves
is the height of bourgeois scientific confidence. Contact will be no mean event. It is not likely that aliens will appear with a
row of pens in their top pockets offering us the plain facts of the situation; “plain facts” being a metaphor derived from early Protestant work-ethic cultures of a most earthy kind. Neither will aliens come exuding astral light from their navels,
or in the form of a good smooth UFO Scout such as Carl Sagan, the John DeLorean of Old Ufology, all ready for a primetime interview in which he will explain everything beyond the sun, moon, and stars. If we do see such things coming from the open hatch of a landed saucer, we should run for our lives before such deceptions bite our heads off.

As well as play, which is universal throughout the animal kingdom, we can expect waste, crime, inefficiency from the
alien, and all the ranges of frustrated ambition that define the human species. Generally speaking, films and science fiction
do not show the alien in anything like such a sophisticated focus. He, she, or it is a B-feature monster or some Christ figure tell us all how to behave ourselves.

Concerning contact, multiple deceptions will be the order of the day. The control panels seen by both George Adamski and Betty and Barney Hill had slider potentiometers, large manual switches, and analogue displays. In a similar way, Adamski’s control panels were pure Flash Gordon, quite outdated at the time of Adamski’s contact.
The control panels seen by Betty and Barney were more up-to-date, but still about to fade into history at the time of their abduction. If our own digital electronic development wiped out such vintage (analogue) instrumentation very quickly, goodness only knows what changes any alien culture has gone through. Certainly they will not be using analogue high-impedance voltmeter displays! In this respect, mechanical categories of true or false do not apply. Like MJ-12, instrumentation is pure cultural theatre. The chance is that some intelligent active process is guessing, playing games with rough approximations. Such hardly quite-right mechanical inaccuracies in terms of time-phase-shifted technological eras could well be the source of much cargo-cult confusion within abduction scenarios.

Rather than refer to the old industrial separations of mechanically real or unreal, they may well be tricks set up by aliens playing guessing games and often not guessing correctly. In this respect, MJ-12 could be a rather naff Matrix joke with which to set a thousand human hares a-chasing for pure amusement. Mechanical science is ill-equipped to deal with humour, entertainment, and such cultural deceptions; usually, it sees the alien as yet another a “clever scientist,” a bourgeois affectation if ever there was.

Meme Breeders and Alien Transistors



Evolution is a dangerous and troublesome process with endless mistakes and blind alleys within it. All is hazard and uncertainty. There will be areas into which aliens have not ventured, areas in which they have failed, if only because any biomechanical framework lives and dies by risky and experimental systems analysis. This may involve guessing-games as how to trick system A into thinking it is system B in order to penetrate system C in order to rob its identity. This means that a living process can control and change an evolving agenda in the manner of phishing.

Both the alien “transistor” and MJ-12 may, as dynamic meme-models fall into the category of stage-set signals for manoeuvres beyond our mental horizons. Given the rapid growth of our own image-based society, It is very possible aliens will use images and media as intelligence rather than the “objective facts” of the human military-industrial world.

Both science and technology are evolving into support systems for the entertainment and guessing-games of the image-world. Our media and advertising programs control us in this way. Such highly engineered image-arrays can make us sexually salivate, become exhausted, careless, forgetful, and very often bored and angry.

There is no reason to think that aliens will avoid this mental consumerism, and they may be using ourselves as pawns in
all kinds of software modelling involving many levels of belief manipulation. Even in our own world, honest mistakes—never mind cheating and criminal activity—cause much confusion. Attempts to cover up misbehaviour and crime make the situation even more complex with respect to what aliens may be doing to us, and what indeed we may be doing to them, if only boring them stiff in turn, which could be conceived as a null game.

We have also to consider what is the alien equivalent to our own experience of the rapid obsolescence of technology. Military, media, and domestic sectors are now somewhat reflective of one another’s technological advancement. There is already much confusion with regard to the definition of a weapon. In the techgnosis frame, a weapon may vary from a tank to a TV program. The whole mass-suggestion complex of consumerism and advertising could indeed be considered as weaponry in the sense that changed minds are far more useful than battlefield corpses. As distinct from a corpse, the changed mind can make more films, images, narratives, and scripted adventures in the manner of a metaphysical hatchery. A human being as such a program-absorbing meme-breeder, is far more useful
alive than dead.

Mistakes, Morons, and Mars

Whether tying a shoelace or causing intercontinental war, life is always going wrong. This chronic instability is for the most part a cause of lifesaving humour to the human race, without which human beings would be mere ticks on a biological clock. Humour can make every single one of us look absolutely ridiculous.
There is absolutely no need to think that alien culture will be, or is, any different. They may slip on banana-skins and
be as comically outrageous as are many human beings. To lay therefore a straight line on aliens is as dangerous as assuming they are all equally intelligent and all po-faced as is any serious researcher who claims to have the most immaculate social-democratic intentions. The thought that aliens might not be completely intent on giving us spiritual enlightenment or even know what such a thing is will come as a relief to some earthlings but not to others. That any alien indeed might be even more ridiculous than ourselves is a thought accepted by almost nobody at all, especially those dour commissars of Old Ufology with rows of pens in their top pockets who talk about reality as it were a set of production statistics from Walter Ulbricht’s rusty-industrial East Germany. It may turn out that a laugh from Britney Spears will be considered by aliens to be far more significant and important than any database from an over-earnest industrial class. We
must prepare ourselves to consider that contact may be intellectually
might well be disappointed in this respect.

In this sense, the films Morons from Outer Space (1985), the TV series Alf (1986-1990), Alien from LA (1988), Mars Attacks
(1996), and Gremlins (1984) are probably better at expressing what contact may mean than Old Ufologists stuck with the fact-versus-fiction battles between their old mechanical-industrial selves. Daft-as-a-brush events of course are not allowed within the bourgeois-scientific spectrum, since the universe—and hence God—could not possibly be silly. Sensible footwear is the order of the day within the ultraconservative Victorian Station Masters of a Ufological yesteryear.

In that the characters of these cartoon films are already in our heads and impossible to remove, the aliens are here already. The aliens are a process. Their images in our heads are already networking and there is nothing we can do about it. At the moment they are neither fact nor fiction, but liminal. In this sense we know they are coming. We are expecting them. We have to get used not to real or unreal, but the idea that things such as the alien are in every sense under construction. Such intermediate states are the structural material with the quantum plasma of the Global Village.

Like Plato’s cave-shadows, reality is a moveable feast along a scale of psychosocial allowances, ranging between the limits of absolute fact and absolute fiction. In this sense we must drop the idea of absolute mechanical distinctions and look at highly unstable media forms representing new concepts of matter and information. Such memes are becoming the quasi-material base of our burgeoning Entertainment State, where, for better or forworse, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton are far more important than the coke-oven statistics of yesteryear.

Jung’s words in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Vintage Books, 1965) come to mind concerning media: “The symbol becomes Intercalated into the cycle of corporeal changes.” In science, as in Old Ufology however, media does not appear to have arrived. The result is that apart from Corso, Roswell is usually investigated as some kind of traffic accident.

Entertainment State

As just one anomaly amongst anomalies, the UFO experience confronts us with absurdity. As an increasingly common
experience, it is a holistic flux of culture, society, media, and our own Entertainment State. In this respect, Old Ufology must be deconstructed from bottom to top. It must transfer from boiler-house analyses to a new age where
transcendental experiences, defined as things which transcend the common fact, are seen to consist of holistic
components. In these elements, all information is media, and both language and culture are constellated as advertising
systems. In such systems, objective solidity is the most perfect prime-time performance of all.
All of these reference frames and psychosocial screens are essentially elaborate, fuzzy play systems. Alien contact will certainly entail meeting a multiple display of such systems. Scientists, who are absolutely hopeless when faced with humour, absurdity, or raw human experience, do not understand that in this respect, the idea of Truth in terms of hard-wired practicality will be almost meaningless as it regards alien mentality, or indeed any other mentality.
The system-noise of trash, waste, and fantasies is functional in such essentially anarchic multimedia systems. However,
Mind conceived as a terrible mess and not as a set of grocer’s rules is not a politically correct view. Isolated from a holistic
context, the UFO experience is meaningless. However, that lower-middle-class trading world, from which almost all practical scientists come, wants what it has bought and paid for: a stable order of things. Very few good Protestant scientists would enjoy finding themselves investigating the ass-end of a declining Howdy Do-Dee show.
If we consider such a noisy holistic view in terms of a cargo-cult model, then we shall not only get any human/alien interface in a better perspective, we will also get our first idea of how such an interface with alien intelligence might function.

Me Dream Time Cargo Now

The very first ships to enter the Pacific were soon full of dead men. Quite lost, becalmed, torn apart by storms, wasted
by disease, the crews of such primitive wooden ships stood no chance against the savage moods of the seemingly
limitless Pacific. Their bones, planking, spars, and shredded sails washed up on countless beaches, meeting the
wondering gaze of natives whose tribal life had been static for thousands of years. This is a good model of we now call contact between communities whose cultures were thousands of years apart. The curiosity, the misunderstanding, the lack of a framework of interpretation all contributed to the fear of what to natives were perplexing abstractions. These are typical reactions within what we ourselves now call the UFO experience. There are now catalogues of thousands of such experiences in the last fifty years alone, and all of them exhibit similar kinds of native reactions in a modern context.
Thus, the first experience of what we now call contact between human communities on very different time scales of culture and technology was one of almost complete fragmentation. It is unlikely that natives saw any kind of significance regarding what curiosities may have been noticed and picked up from the shore. A few may have wondered about a curiously shaped iron fragment, a piece of turned and slotted wood, or a shredded fragment of woven rope, just as we wonder about Dr. Roger Leir’s alleged alien implants. According to Corso, this is the way in which we came across transistors. Corso says they were detritus from the Roswell wreckage. By analogy, this is a very strong argument
which puts ourselves in the native position.

Those South Pacific islanders who first saw live men as distinct from dead were in for a surprise. The ships that entered
these distant waters were exclusively pirate vessels crewed by criminals fleeing from Western navies for every reason under the sun. They could not enter ports, they had no supply lines, they were forever on the run, and they used desperate and murderous methods to survive. The first reaction of natives at seeing such desperados—both
white and black—pulling ashore in long boats was violence, mainly sponsored by panic and fear. The crews, racked by scurvy, dysentery, and starvation, were desperate for water, vegetables, and fruit.

According to 1719 voyager George Shelvoke, the crews soon worked out a scheme to ensure safe landing. They
fashioned fantastic masks and clothing, got into boats fully armed, and screaming and howling like banshees,
they made for shore. Such men were anything but holy beings come to offer the natives the glory of their Western culture and the holiness of their heart’s affections. We can imagine a mad cook, a psychopathic bosun, a half-dead skipper, a murdering mate, and a few young palsied matelots with scrofula, fleas, and sore bottoms.

The alien equivalent to such a menagerie defies imagination! Terrified at seeing such things, entire villages fled
into the bush to create fantastic stories of magical beings with incredible devices voyaging in wondrously rigged ships. Thus were created legends of the space ships of demons, space notbeing so much in the sky, but instead represented by the limitless and quite impenetrable horizon composed in the main of fantastic stories which became eventually that thing know as religion.

At times, gift-offerings of food and fresh water were left for the gods, and natives took good note that these were eagerly
consumed before the holy ones sailed away into the far horizon, with not a few captured slaves—men, women, and children—aboard. A considerable number of dead bodies were left behind, bodies of both the pirates and those natives who had ventured too close to the “aliens.” Such men and ships were not to return for centuries, leaving natives with mysteries beyond all conception. That the gods in their highly sophisticated ships appeared to be somewhat desperate, ragged, quite lost, and even frightened was baffling to natives. That some were also sick and ill and obviously limited in many other respects illustrated the differences between time, image, and technological achievement. The same questions are asked today: If the aliens could do one thing so well, why not another? Such mysteries were profound. Nothing made sense. Thus primitive people, quite naked under the sun; without the wheel, tools, writing, and with a very crude language, experienced therefore the full dimension of UFO mythology in terms of culture shock: abductions, fantastic appearances, disreputable and often murderous behaviour, and a technology which appeared to be quite magical on one hand and quite useless in the another. In the native mind such experiences were impossible
to grasp and define in terms of any kind of unified field.


Fractals in Collision

Before the modern phase of continuous contact in the South Pacific, daily experience had been unchanged over an almost unimaginable length of time. Scores—perhaps hundreds—of years had passed by between visitations. The era of contact became therefore like a newspaper under heavy rain: old tribal tales disintegrated rapidly, the interrelation of the textual fabric became increasingly disorganised, the gaps in stories filled by guesses, dreaming, and imagination inspired by new shapes and sounds.

Continuous sustained contact between the two World Wars was yet another experience. It destroyed all native ideas of time as conceived: time now became a dramatic continuum full of spectacular events, staged within what appeared to be within an endless sequence of profound stimulations and excitements beyond all compass. This was an experience of many Matrix fractals in collision; again, rather like the absurd elements within the modern UFO experience.

After 1900, the first iron-hulled steamships arrived in the South Pacific. Lit from stem to stern by electric light,
making a great noise, and pouring white and black steam from huge funnels, this must have been a tremendous new experience for natives and was equivalent to seeing a sudden change in the technologyof the gods, whose traditional sailing ships of course were very different to the steamers.

In return for work unloading ships, natives were given everything from knives and axes, nails and cloth, in addition to new food plants. These gifts from the “gods” became the famed “cargo,” if only because the crews of ships were heard to use this word many times. It was noticed almost immediately that whilst the visitors got unlimited cargo, the natives got comparitively little, and that only in return for back-breaking physical labour. Since natives had no idea of any kind of a resource spectrum, cargo appeared to come in great quantities from nowhere. It was therefore magical. Reinforcing the idea of magic were stills and shaky frames from early flash-cameras. With these low-quality prints, the natives saw themselves at work and play for the first time, as if looking into a distorting mirror.

Immediately, the interpretation was that they were seeing themselves in other dimensions of existence. This was a belief
which whites found surprisingly difficult to deny or explain! The repeatable runs of later film-frames also caused much philosophical speculation as regards time, space, and technology. As we shall see in the case of canned food, the natives had not experienced any kind of exactly repeatable sequence of any kind, in either nature or life. In addition they heard the
crackle of radios and early recorded sound on portable wind-up gramophones.

Media Interpreting Media

We have only to extrapolate the Corso and Adamski stories alone into this framework of multiple confusions to
see how the whole mess was soon lit up with awe and religious fervour. The projected cargo fantasies of the natives
piled misinterpretations piled upon misconceptions and became integrated into holy tribal ancestral architecture
rather like the Christian Orders of Angels.

That the cargo-gods had a similar tribal architecture to themselves was a nice consideration heavily masked by
the alien-gods material success. In this respect, this situation is not described adequately by the simple equations
of fact transforming into fantasy. The cargo culture might indeed be in the grip of untold fantasies, but then so were
the young Western sailors of the time in terms of the mass media they had begun to absorb: films, advertising, radio
shows, and burgeoning first-level consumerism.

This two-state transfer makes for a very interesting alchemical analogy. In this situation, we have junk (alchemical nigredo)systems transforming into other junk systems. This unique mental traffic replaces all thought of the fact-versus-fiction axis of the old analogue world.

The idea of a religion founded on junk in the mental gut is a rightening concept to many people of religious convictions in
the West. Could our own so-called enlightenment have been inspired by alien detritus, some of which might have given a
few last feeble bleeps before fading away to the last Reject Store in the sky? Could this kind of mutual image-absorption be an historical process still active?

Rehearsals of Rehearsals

We can build yet another level of complexity into our model. In the 1950s many of the sons and daughters of the servicemen of World War II got involved in the New Age movement. This meant that they were as interested in aboriginal native perception of things as the cargo cult societies were interested in our own mysterious thought processes.
This New Age generation rejected their own culture based in the main on those products of scientific rationalism which conversely were so magical to the cargo cults. There was—and still is—intriguing symmetry here. Natives were anxious to leave their junk behind; the New Agers were anxious to pick it up, gaze at it in wonder searching for spiritual inspiration.

Two eyes gazed therefore at their own junk in wonder; two seeing eyes trying to perceive the secrets of the other’s cargo.
Did the lost spirituality become for New Age folk their own cargo?

To answer these questions, we have to deconstruct the entire theory of Intelligent Design.

How many such seeing eyes of this type exist beyond the natives, humanity, and aliens themselves is a good question.
Since the values of our own Western society are now a limitless, media-play of little worth, does our own junk in turn
fascinate some alien? In this sense Old Ufology based on simple mechanical differentiation of fact from fiction is useless in the face of such interactive metaphysical and cultural complexity which make up the matrix of a media plasma.

Is You Receiving Me?

During the fast and furious island-hopping campaign against the Japanese in World War II, American land, sea, and air units used many islands in the South Pacific as temporary bases, as did the Japanese. Often these frenzied activities offered only the briefest of encounters with very primitive native populations who could do nothing but gaze on in wonder as a carrier task force emerged from the dawn, and tank landing craft hit the beach with scores of aircraft screaming overhead. The savage fight for Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands was a typical battle.
The U.S. forces moved on quickly, preparing themselves for the great battles of Okinawa, Taiwan, and Iwo-Jima. Many islands were abandoned, the supplies and men taken off rapidly in ships and transport aircraft, never to return. Vast amounts of material were left behind; the harassed U.S. forces did not have the time nor the inclination to clean up all kinds of waste and rubbish from workshop, accommodation, and canteen litter. Left to rust was faulty equipment that was not worth repairing, parts of crashed and damaged aircraft, and base junk of any and every kind, including abandoned food, fuel, and clothing stocks. Most of the obscure island tribes were forgotten after 1945. An exhausted world was preoccupied with building an entirely new future, and few were interested in either environmental or anthropological matters.

Interest in the culture of these islands revived when in the late 1960s fascinating reports came from missionaries and a new generation of young Western anthropologists. What they found in many cases was quite astonishing. Many tribes had fashioned whole and complete new religions based on their very brief experience of contact with the U.S. military.
They had built churches of old aircraft-parts that they regarded as holy relics left by the gods. On the altars of such churches were broken pieces of electronic equipment that they hoped would once more burst into life some day because of their prayers. Flanking items of kinds of rusty military equipment were tins of old U.S. rations tins with labels showing sausages, fruit and soup. On festive occasions a few of these cans would be opened and the contents placed upon tongues, rather like Catholic wafers.

The Coming of the Product

Natives were very much impressed by the military rations they were given in return for manual labour. For pre-war U.S. military, the type of food content was usually printed directly onto the cans, together with the date. But early on in the war, such was the demand that pre-war canned stock with vivid high-contrast commercial labels had to be issued.

Such labels soon rotted off the rusting piles of emptied cans. Natives kept these stained and torn visions of what to them was an inconceivable paradise as glimpses into other dimensions. Here were tantalising and fragmentary glimpses of cars, pretty women, aircraft, and well-manicured roads and forests, seas and lakes. We have here an example of a cultural phase-shift in terms of time, technology and consumerism. These pre-war images were cartoons showing imagined scenes from an affluent American life few of the young women and women in the US armed forces had known. Seen also through the estranged perspectives of deterioration were buildings, bridges and clothing of a time predating the World War II. To make things even more confusing to natives, occasionally the cans and food packaging carried flash-back scenes showing elements of history: horses and carriages, soldiers in ancient uniforms and women on bonnets and long dresses emerging from covered wagons advertising sweets and chocolates from a future time. Such imagined scenes were linked to other kinds of common goods, and they represented a burgeoning appetite-wetting consumer mythology which existed only in the inspirations of commercial propagandists.

But as could be expected, such primitive time-shifted label dramas entered the native consciousness as being part of an eternal present located in some inconceivable nirvana an infinity away.

Thus was formed a kind of participation mystique between the natives and the characters and fragments of cartoon lives seen on the cans and food packs. Given a raging war and surrounded by death, there was no one around to try and explain that this homely Norman Rockwell cartoon life portrayed by the labels had already disappeared from mainstream U.S. culture. The almost identical physical proportions of such food packs also aroused great curiosity amongst the natives. This was their first encounter with what we can define as a product range as distinct from a singular thing. Great numbers of almost identical things was a new concept to them.
To the natives, each unit of previous experience had a face, and a unique self and identity. Each individual leaf on a tree had a certain character, as had indeed every grain of sand on the shore. Yet paradoxically, though each of such tins might be identical on the outside, they had certain ranges of differences when opened.

This caused crises with the traditional framework of cognition. The link between uniform faceless precision and sets of different limitless variety was a strange enigma. Seen in terms of cultural time-differentials, the content of the cans represented sustenance and pleasure—the very essence of the subtle magic of cargo whose long-vanished product chain was organized by a transactional mystique just as incomprehensible -as indeed it still is- to most young Westerners of the time as it was to natives.

Illustrated printed material left behind caused further confusion. Ranging from instruction manuals to newspapers and magazines these images showed yet another America – gone were the beautiful blondes and the apple-pie kitchens and shiny technology: here were grim-faced young women working at lathes and milling machines in war factories.

In these terms, the commonly accepted “mechanically objective” real appears to be more like a kind of psycho-social plasma whose structure consists of time-shifted confusions rather than differentiated spines of fact versus fictions.

As far as Ufology is concerned, cultural misinterpretation and the necessary confusions therein should therefore be modelled in preference to simple mechanical facts versus fictions. Not many historians make models of cultural confusions. The chauvinist/racist assumption is that only the primitives are
confused.

Those of a scientific disposition in particular think of certainties, discoveries, forward progress in time; almost no scientists or historians conceive of media, consumerism as operational mythologies very similar to cargo-cult thinking. In this sense, even the military-industrial-complex can be seen in terms of a cosmos whose mythological time is very different to time conceived as a mere mechanical sequence of days and hours.

The Film Crews Arrive

Consider: acargo-cult believer wakes up one morning in 2008 to see a film company on a beach shooting a dogfight between an F-51 Mustang fighter and a F-47 Thunderbolt. Such aircraft would inevitably be re-builds, fashioned from many parts of wrecked World War II aircraft plus modern parts built from original blueprints. These classic planes would be on hire either from private owners or from the equally private Confederate Air Force of the United States. Now let us suppose this combat represents a fight between a Japanese Zero and a Douglas Avenger, simply because now there are very few actual Zeros or Avengers in flying condition. Already, without metaphysics or theology, the situation as described is becoming symbolically rather complicated for an observer who has not yet invented the wheel, never mind agriculture or primitive navigation.
This simple dog-fight situation becomes symbolically rather complex with regard to how we structure the real. Here are imitations within imitations fighting yet other imitations. The four aircraft mentioned are already subliminal filmstrips within the Western imagination. We cannot rid ourselves of such flying machines and their background any more than we can rid ourselves of James Bond or Charlie Chaplin, whose adventures are still running in our heads as we read and speak.
Each young child, whether he or she likes it not, is going to have such aircraft in the head as operational software from countless games, commix, TV shows and films; kits will be sold, models made, dreams will be
dreamed indeed of battles long ago way before almost a spoon is lifted to the mouth.

As well as being finite things, such machines are therefore major historical elements. They trail social
psychology, science, and technology, as well as vales of tears and grief regarding the living and the dead.
These shapes and sounds are therefore direct routes back to the almost-past of Western technological culture. Our holistic life threads right back through these aircraft and their mighty struggles, back to the Industrial Revolution via the development of engines, carburettors, propellers, rudders, and undercarriages.Can we be objective with tears in our eyes before the ghosts of machines and men?

Fractal Aeroplanes: the Forms of Time

How would our native conceive of such socio-historical-technological scaling, with all its complex history and
its many dimensions? How could we explain that though the aircraft mentioned are now static in one form of time, in anotherform of time they represent ever-evolving adventures in the head? Further possible confusions abound as the fractals of perception open. Suppose our islander knows of a long-forgotten B-29 buried deep in the bush, and suppose the film-company carpenters built parts of a fuselage of a mock B-29 for this supposed war film before his very eyes, indeed? Mentally, his mind would be like a smashed telephone exchange. What would he make of our concepts of fact and fiction and infinite scaling of Sartre’s "being and nothingness" in between? Supposing one of our mock-mock aeroplanes were to develop engine trouble and crash to the ground, killing the pilot whose ancestors might well have happened to have flown the original planes in the original situation over the very same island?
What measurements are possible here? What time, what clocks, and what measuring rods? Next, let us imagine that as part of our film a great naval task force appears offshore to land Marines. Let us suppose that blanks of varying dramatic power are fired, and the dead fall to the beach, only to get up again and head for the refreshment tent!

What a pickle out native philosopher would be in! He would hear radios, he would see women, he would smell fuel, and he
would see many men as black indeed as himself comfortably involved in the entire order of things. However, he
would not know that the whole dimension was a stage set. He would not know that what he was seeing was part of a system organized to produce and supply a series of artificial images without which almost all image-fed human beings in the Westwould suffer withdrawal symptoms.

Supposing now a UFO flies overhead, as has happened. The film crew are now in the position of our native, who won’t be
bothered much, because in all likelihood he will equate the UFO with the Mustang and the Thunderbolt. The double trick is that the film crew themselves do not understand such paths in any case, due to internal differences of class, education, and intelligence.

If we build further into our model a theory of fallibilities and mistakes, then we have a reasonable degree of sophistication
emerging involving a model of alien/human interaction.





Supposing our observed UFO above is from alien level A. There is of course going to be alien level B or C, as well. When the mistakes of level A are compounded with the mistakes of alien level B and summed to infinity with succeeding levels, both consciousness and culture become something rather like the manifold life on an old garden wall. Now supposing one of the film aircraft actually crashed near where the film shooting is taking place. Supposing the pilot is killed, but his observer is alive, although injured. The body of the dead pilot and his injured observer are both put on a stretcher momentarily alongside plastic models of dead and apparently severely injured Marines on stretchers. What would our native think of crude fact and fiction separations then, with large and small robots everywhere moving between the living, the mock-dead, and almost-dead?
What if an enterprising film director decided to film the entire confused scene complete with the still-blazing wreckage of the mock aircraft? How would our curious native deal with theselevels of pseudo-illusions which turn fact into fiction and vice versa? Alone, he would also have to deal with the idea of accurate falsehoods manoeuvring between different sets of commercial trickery whose authenticity is supposedly "real" in order to generate that abstraction called paper money.
Let us imagine that our native sees himself imagining and wondering and questioning on the many flat-screen monitors
within the film unit, and the situation becomes completely liminal. Like ourselves indeed, our native islander, bless him,
is surrounded by varying levels of pantomime. Like ourselves again, he will not know where the hoaxes start and the associated advertisements finish.

When we meet extraterrestrial aliens, we will be in exactly
the same position.

Perhaps for both the alien, the islander, and ourselves, experience is a matter of having to work and organise that wonder management system called explanations. Explanations are the ultimate placebo. They help us to get some sleep at night. In the morning our fears are gone. Many cases have occurred in which islanders have asked Western
folk to explain things. When this is attempted they are suspicious and think they are being lied to, and surely we do not
blame them! One thing is certain: we have to discard many of our late Victorian Station Master ideas rooted in inputs, outputs, and information that travels in straight, hardwired lines such as trains and wires strung between poles. Consciousness is pure theatre without end. This is what the word "holistic" means.
This kind of thinking is suitable to an age of media where everysingle stage of perception is rooted—some say contaminated—with wall-to wall performances for which there is no possible OFF switch.
We ourselves and the alien live in a mythological continuum just as much as do our primitive islanders.
This is the true Matrix.

Departure

Eventually of course, our film crew, like the old gods, will sail away never to return. They will leave a layer of detritus over
that left by the American forces over sixty-four years ago. Only the advertisements on the labels of the discarded
tins will be laughing. The happy smiling Betty Grable-style housewives of 1943 with steaming apple pies in their innocent
hands will have been replaced by svelte young women who appear to be offering us a lot more than cans of preserved
strawberries. That we in turn might be worshipping a preserved version of someone else’s sugar-plumb fairy is a sobering thought indeed. However, perhaps back in the thatched huts, the tribal seer is laughing his head off. Perhaps he knows, like Shakespeare’s Prospero, that the world of the imagination is the only world
that counts.
Western society has its own cargo dreamtime called intellectual consumerism. This is that pantomime of facts and fictions
and many things in between struggling upwards to get to that media Valhalla called Prime Time. If any aliens are reading this, perhaps they will understand. As media stars, they too are struggling to get to the same objective.

Deconstructing the B-29

A wrecked B-29 bomber is found in the deep bush of a nameless Pacific island in 1944. Like Princess Diana and Elvis Presley, this wreck has reached the regions of that advanced life form called pure inspiration. We can be sure that for the islanders, the crashed four-engined 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 B29. The idea of “improvement” of course is, like Rationalism, a very late and rather callow arrival on the historical scene. 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 and Wormholes.

Let us enter the haunted fuselage of this crashed sample of the Product Time of the almost-recent past.

Let us imagine.

Within its rust and grease and the analogues of its fractured shapes 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 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 magic-man, who whirls a bamboo-stick before the cracked Perspex nose of that essay in wonder and danger that is the Boeing B-29. This is the entrance to the shrine. In the back row of our congregation, let us imagine a pair of eyes, which avoid the magic-man’s gaze, and look rather more discursively into the silent ruins of the torn-off Pratt & Witney engines. Let us say these are the eyes of Hero.
Hero avoids the magic-man’s concern with the great chiefs buried in these ruined pyramid-chambers of broken American aluminum, 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 come to an end.

Night comes, and taking care to avoid the magic-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, forty years after the crash, 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 dinghies and oxygen bladder-masks. The dregs of long-dried brake-fluid and carbonised rubber come to him as a mid-century techno-industrial Proustian madeliene: 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 of the techno-industrial “solution”. He will begin to understand a little of the mythology of the aircraft, now as 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.
Hero, as a first experimental cerebral, will begin a journey of initiation through the rites of techo-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 he will 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 forty years. He will try to jump out of his loincloth paradigm by attempting that celebrated process of stage-management called de-mystification. But from the B-29 to the F-117 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.
Unknown to Hero, the magic-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 magic-man 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. He will have to go back to the Colt pistol and Gatling machine-gun of the Civil War, and 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. Here, questions loom: on what dismal cold morning did the outline of that particular decision take form? What was so and so doing at the time? Was there a particular night on which the curve of a woman’s 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 primal forest of other wrecked fuselages beyond the sun and moon.
When Hero comes full circle, the waiting magic-man 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 now need machines to fly? Why do they now need radios to talk to people on other islands?

Meantime, back in the bush, in a secret place unknown even to the magic-man, Hero picks up a stone and starts to shape it into a B-29, whose robot being exists as a broken Roswell Scroll in his head.

The magic-man smiles.

He knows how far Hero has to journey before he frees the shape from the block.



Colin Bennett

March, 2010