The Banality of the Weird

Ho hum - UFOs over Washington, 1952

I've been thinking the last few days of Peter Malkin, the Mossad agent who snatched Adolph Eichmann from a Buenos Aires' sidewalk in 1962. He died last week in New York City, at 77. I wonder if, before his death, he'd read The Jerusalem Post story of February 6 entitled "CIA employed Eichmann's men." And if he had, whether he felt punk'd.

Actually, I doubt it. A lifetime in an Intelligence service would have prepared Malkin for such wrong-headed weirdness. In his world, Eichmann's boys going to work for the CIA probably wasn't the most egregious example. Just one of those things: a compromise with evil; one of many. Shit happens.

America started going seriously wrong some time ago. About the same time Eichmann's men - and Mengele's, and others - were recruited into its service. And coincident with that, America started going seriously weird.

To many students of the National Security State, the one has nothing to do with the other. In fact, they regard the study of the other - the UFOs, the Satanic Ritual Abuse and mind control - as a distraction and discrediting embarrassment; an insult to the intelligence. Which has made for one big, ever-lovin' "mission accomplished!" for those who shield their High Crimes in the stealth folk-mythology of apparent absurdity.

The Weird is entertained, chiefly, as entertainment: anomalous episodes that do nothing to inform us about the real world. With respect to UFOs, the propagation of the extraterrestrial hypothesis as the only option, after ruling out the like of hoaxes, Venus and swamp gas, further this misapprehension of their significance and implication for America. (I've written elsewhere - here, for instance - about perhaps a more fantastic, and yet I think more credible, and sinister, explanation of the phenomena.)

But here's a noodle scratcher: the episodes are not as anomalous as we may think. In fact, in Messengers of Deception, one of Jacques Vallee's arguments against UFO's extraterrestrial provenance is that there are too darn many of them:

The first argument against the idea of flying saucers as spacecraft lies, oddly enough, in the large number of verified, unexplained sightings. In my own files [circa late 70s] I currently have approximately 2,000 cases of close encounters from every country on Earth, many of them involving occupants of various sizes and shapes. It may seem that 2,000 cases in some 20 years is not a very large number, but we are talking only about the cases that were actually reported....

Most landings are reported to take place after 6pm. The frequency distributions that my computer studies have disclosed for every continent show this activity peaking at about 10:30pm, decreasing sharply after that time, and increasing again just before dawn. There are few reports after 6am. What could this mean? That the activity of the objects is nocturnal by nature and by choice. Then why do the reports decrease in frequency around midnight? Simply because people go to bed: after 10:30pm the number of potential witnesses is severely reduced. Then let us ask the question: how many reports would we have it people did not go to bed but stayed outside to watch those so-called "spacecraft"? The answer is, about 30,000. We would have to multiply the number of cases by a factor of 15.

Now, this last figure does not begin to approximate the actual number of events, because we know from many independent studies that only one case in ten ever gets reported. Then we should have not 30,000, but 300,000 cases in our files! But this still isn't the whole story: most landings occur in unpopulated areas, away from dwellings. If the Earth's population were distributed evenly instead of being concentrated in city areas, how many reports would we have? Again, taking a conservative multiplying factor of ten leads to the staggering conclusion that the UFOs, if they are spacecraft engaged in a general survey of our planet, must have landed here no fewer than three million times in two decades!

This is one of the little-recognized facts of the UFO problem that any theory has yet to explain. The theory of random visitation does not explain it. Either the UFOs select their witnesses, or they are something entirely different from space vehicles. In either case, their appearances are staged.

The Weird has become the background noise of a Lost America. Few hear it at all, and fewer still for what it could be. (I was going to write, "for what it is," but I think all conclusions we may draw about the deep and dark things that are meant to stay hidden ought to be provisional.)

Thanks to the "Jeff Gannon" story, its similarity to the Craig Spence call-boy scandal and the speculation Gannon could in fact be Johnny Gosch, there is a burst of discovery underway regarding the "Franklin Cover-Up", Satanic ritual abuse and mind control. But the learning curve is steep for such material, and the material so strange and contrary to most of our assumptions about the world, that many no doubt will walk it back, and revictimize the abused with the presumption of pathology. After all, mind control research was a failure - we have the CIA's word for it. And Satanic abuse is a fallacy of weak and hysterical minds. Again, CIA mind control researchers, like Dr Martin Orne of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, have told us so.

The Weird hides in plain sight, because most people are comfortable remaining willfully blind to it. And almost all the rest are too self-conscious to say "Er - do you see what I see?" And behind it hides a world gone wrong.

Now about those UFOs over the Capitol. Here's Richard Dolan, writing in UFOs and the National Security State:

At about 11:40 pm on July 19 [1952], radar at Washington National Airport picked up a formation of seven objects flying near Andrews AFB, moving along at a leisurely pace of 100 to 130 mph. Before long, two of the targets suddenly accelerated and vanished off the scope within seconds. One of them apparently reached 7,000 mph. This got the attention of several controllers, especially when they learned that a second radar at the airport, as well as the radar at Andrews AFB, also picked up the objects. For six hours, between eight and ten UFOs were tracked on radar.

The senior air traffic controller for the CAA, Harry G Barnes, "knew immediately that a very strange situation existed." In his opinion:

"...[T]he movements were completely radical compared to those of ordinary aircraft. They followed no set course [and] were not in any formation, and we only seemed to be able to track them for about three miles at a time... [F]or six hours...there were at least ten unidentifiable objects moving above Washington. They were not ordinary aircraft.... I can safely deduce that they performed gyrations which no known aircraft could perform."

...But the phenomenon was not restricted to radar tracking. Several Capitol Airlines pilots saw the objects visually as orange lights in the same area that radar indicated they should be. Just where were they? Over the White House and Capitol!

Intense sightings of clustered formations continued in the skies of Washington for several days. On July 29, the Air Force held a press conference - it's largest since the end of the Second World War - and announced the phenomenon had been caused by a "temperature inversion" that mucked up the radar, and the visual sightings were attributed to "scintillating stars." Explanations as satisfying as Scott McClellan's derisive snort of "conspiracy theory." But like McClellan's rote response, it did the job of getting the press to back off a sensitive and awkward subject.

Washington has seen a lot of weirdness, and not only in its skies. A hooker in the White House press corp, for instance, also hid in plain sight.

Is "Jeff Gannon" really Johnny Gosch? Could be. For what it's worth, and I'll leave it at that, Ted Gunderson is persuaded. But whomever "Gannon" is, and whatever the meaning of his presence in the press pool, "it's too weird" is not an argument.

If Americans are ever to dismantle the National Security State and have something like a country again, they need to take the Weird with the Wrong. This may mean entertaining, in the best possible sense, the consideration that its nightmare machinery is not just about black ops, but also black arts.

As Donald Rumsfeld's note to self on the afternoon of September 11 advised:

"Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."