Alex: Thanks for your reply to my reply. You wrote:
Hi Rod... I realize I'm only responding to a tiny piece of your post, but wasn't Billy Meier shown to be peddling photos with fishing line exposed? or am I missing part of the story?
Yes, very possibly –a glance at Wikipedia gives a fairly extensive idea of the exposure, but if it was a hoax (and it surely was) it sounds to me like a very sophisticated one, and I doubt whether a one-armed Swiss farmer could have done it on his own, especially the way experts were found who gave an air of great mystery to Meier’s extra-terrestrial metal samples, etc. –at first.
But let’s go back to the 1970s or 1980s when Billy Meier “burst into the headlines.” For me it would have been about 1985 –I watched a TV program about him. At the time I said something to the effect that, well, it sounds quite convincing –even though one of the visitors looks a bit like his wife (by the way, Wikipedia quotes her as saying that it was actually an acquaintance of theirs). But at the time I said that even if was all a hoax, I quite liked the story he told.
The story was, if I recall, that visitors from another star cluster were telling humble Billy that Earth was in trouble –the population explosion, nuclear weapons, pollution, etc. All the problems that have been rolled out since about the end of World War Two, although these concerns go back to the 1920s and 1930s and perhaps even earlier. Yes, I thought at the time, Billy Meier’s done a clever thing there, finding a way of drawing attention to these problems at a popular level.
He had his devotees around him –I wonder what happened to all those people. But let’s very briefly turn to the story he tells about Earth. So concerned were the Extra-terrestrials with human over-population that Meier came up with a set of “humane” measures for combating it –see:
http://theyfly.com/On_Overpopulation.html
I won’t go into this. Suffice it to say that I have already written about overpopulation on this site and you can have a look at it if you want. Basically, what’s been happening for several decades has been a slowdown in population growth to the point where absolute population growth has gone negative in certain regions and countries. Whether this has anything to do with “measures” of any kind or whether it has more to do with human reactions to the globalized growth of the system (the decline of the nuclear family and migration, for instance) I cannot say –I tend to think the latter is more important, and certainly more important than received wisdom would have it.
But getting back to the main point, we find that after 30-odd years even Billy Meier’s story about the human dilemma has holes in it and the remedy that goes with it –never mind whether he faked the close encounters of a third kind. I don’t think many people would have seen that in 1985. More of us believed in it then, even if we doubted the theatricals. I don’t know if you get this point, but it seems to be very important.
Now, today, the story has changed (probably not Billy’s; but the Top of the Pops story). A parallel: thirty-odd years ago, when a terrorist attack occurred, the groups responsible generally claimed it. You knew from their lips who did it –or who was supposed to have done it (even if this wasn’t true, and sometimes –or maybe more often than sometimes –the intelligence agencies were responsible, but the IRA, say, was happy to say it was them). Nowadays, that’s not so much the case. Al Q’aeda didn’t claim the 911 job (not immediately anyway) and this typified what was to come.
So, nowadays, ETs are from who knows where and are here for who knows what purpose? They don’t look human, although they usually seem to have a head, body, two arms and two legs (we aren’t yet ready, I guess, for invisible entities or cloud-like beings). And they do nasty things to people.
Am I saying the story is “just made up”? How can I? But we seem to believe now, today, that Billy Meier’s tales were an invention, whereas then, in the 1970s-80s, they weren’t so easy to see through as they are now (even if Jacques Vallée and others dismissed the whole thing at the time) –just turn to Wikipedia (no Internet in those old days) as I noted earlier.
Ah, but the present story has a cast of thousands. How can you get all those people involved? Well, I don’t know. But I didn’t know how Billy Meier did his things in the 1970s. However, science has advanced quite a bit since then. The CIA has been experimenting with “truth” various drugs. We now have Photoshop as a spin-off, I suppose, of a far more sophisticated program. They are talking about “invisibility cloaks” –obviously developed for military purposes. And a host of other new or not-so-new scientific developments… Oh, I hear someone saying “I don’t see how invisibility cloaks would help to get people to believe they’d been abducted.” It’s just an example, you know, of where science is going –thanks to the embrace of the military-intelligence-industrial complex.
Robert Hastings tells us a more cheering tale involving extra-terrestrials –their appearance at nuclear weapons bases to interfere with America’s nuclear war-heads –where they do seem to be doing something to help mankind. And yet Hastings has assembled a large number of military people to testify to seeing these events. I like that –I believe that. However, if this is a hoax it wouldn’t be the first time a large group of soldiers had been assembled to tell a lie. Back in 2008, an article appeared in the New York Times, “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html?pagewanted=all
It shows how retired officers have been used to shape media coverage of terrorism. From this article we read:
Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse –an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.
I’m not saying Hastings is a hoaxer or proxy to a hoaxer. And moving from the idea of deliberate lies by men who are “only doing their duty” to civilians who tell us a story that may have got into their heads by foul means, not fair, is obviously a long step to take, not just technologically. But the story they tell is one of
our times. And it is sophisticated watchable theatre.
I read some years ago that someone had discovered crop circles were done with laser technology by one of America’s large auto firms on contract to the Pentagon (if I find the original story I’ll send it to anyone who’s interested). Exactly why they are doing this was a little unclear, but it may well be aimed at giving us the idea that aliens are here –to help or hinder as the case may be –that Earth is not in the hands of human beings any more or won’t be in the not-too-distant future. Blame can be reassigned. Was it Reagan or Mikhail Gorbachev who is said to have remarked at the Geneva Summit in 1985 how much easier it would be to unite the world if only there was an external threat by aliens. I don’t think it was the first time a leading statesman said this.
Overpopulation is not a part of the abduction story is it? However, there are indications that these particular aliens are doing something on the population front –hybrids, etc. Unlike Meier’s supposed “humane” measures, our minds are drawn in on something sinister. Are they preparing to re-populate the Earth? we might ask. After… the holocaust? When over-population is no longer a problem… Write out the words “Bush overpopulation genocide” on Google and you’ll get something like 7,760,000 hits.
John Mack was a compelling writer. I was visiting Britain in September 2004, and went to Dorset to the house lived in by T.E. Lawrence –it’s even possible I rubbed shoulders there with people from the conference he attended. The guide was very irritated when I brought up Richard Aldington’s name. Aldington wrote a highly critical book on Lawrence (published in 1955) –I don’t know what Mack thought of it. What I’ve seen of Mack’s thoughts on Lawrence would not seem to agree with Aldington (and who does nowadays?). But while Mack won a Pulitzer prize for his work, Aldington (during his life, a celebrated novelist, poet and translator, little known or recognized today) was hounded out of Britain and forced to settle for the rest of his life in France –by the Lawrence “establishment” in Britain –for his skepticism.
A view that seems to dominate Skeptiko is that the status quo is solely materialist. I don’t think so. The anti-materialist paradigm also gets support from the most arcane forces (led by some of the most privileged families in society) whose heads always seem to spring up especially during times of dire emergency.