Shortly before the U.S. military, flushed with success after shooting down a Chinese spy balloon after it had floated across the country’s air space, began shooting down unidentified flying objects with wild abandon, I happened upon “Into the Blue,” a 2003 documentary about the long-running UFO controversy. Unlike just about every other documentary I have seen on the subject (I wrote a book report on the UFO phenomenon when I was 10), this one, narrated by Ken Burns’ favorite voice of late, Peter Coyote, is not hysterical, nor does it destroy its credibility by going off the rails with conspiracy theories.
But despite my interest in the topic, what I took away from the film had nothing to do with UFOs at all. The evidence doesn’t prove that we have had visitors from outer space, though that conclusion seems hard to avoid. It does prove, however, that the “Deep State” is real, pernicious, persistent, and an existential threat to democracy. What is so frightening and striking about the documented efforts by individuals in the military, scientists, ordinary citizens and in at least two cases (as of 2003, the date of the film), Presidents of the United States to get an open and honest assessment of what evidence there is for the existence of extra-terrestrial vehicles visiting Earth is how thoroughly these efforts have been foiled by Federal agencies and bureaucrats with their own agendas. Not only is the Deep State powerful and sinister, it is apparently impenetrable, especially because the news media and those who benefit from having a shadow government wielding lies that advance their ends continue to deny its existence.
The serial horrible instances of cover-ups, fake investigations and calculated disinformation exposed in the film confirm that…
- President Eisenhower’s farewell warning about the impending power of the “military-industrial complex” was not only prescient, but just only an example of a much wider threat.
- Official government investigations cannot be trusted and must not be trusted.
- Agency employees have the ability to short-circuit efforts by their superiors in many ways.
- The larger a national government is—and ours became too large long, long ago—the less it is subject to democratic controls.
- The Federal government lies, constantly, confidently, and without hesitation or remorse.
- The public is regularly lazy, incurious, ignorant, and has the attention span of a puppy, allowing this to continue, in all likelihood forever.
I thought about the last two items listening to Janet Yellen this morning confidently assuming the American public is too dumb to breathe, She was heralding the Biden administration’s “unprecedented recovery” evidenced by rising employment, job creation and business start-ups, as if all three markers were not still well below the levels that existed prior to the disastrous economic shutdown in March of 2020. She never mentioned that little detail. Of course if you artificially eliminate jobs, kill businesses and cripple the economy by throwing up an obstacle, there will be a rapid return to normal once that obstacle is removed. This is like a track coach keeping his best sprinter shackled to a wall, and then, finally releasing him, crowing about how the runner’s improvement in speed is a testament to his coaching skills.
“Into the Blue” makes frequent reference to the “X-Files” catch-line, “The truth is out there.” The truth about the Deep State and the metastasizing abuse of power by the Federal government—and the journalism-government complex—isn’t just out there; it’s right in front of our eyes.
But the villains just say it’s just swamp gas, and most of the public believe them.
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Added: From this morning’s statement on the “UFO” shootdowns: Defense Sec. Lloyd Austin said, “We’ve not recovered any debris from the three most recent shootdowns.”
Ethics Alarms 
In your opinion, what is the game plan with regards to these balloons? What are they? What do they contain? Is it just incompetence that allowed them to fly all over the place without being intercepted?
Perhaps the bigger question is what about the drones that flew over in the dark in a grid pattern a couple years ago that no one claimed was theirs. Were they from our military or China too? What did they want? Like the UFO videos, they were dismissed even though they were spotted over about roughly thousand square mile area flying at night in a grid pattern around Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. They were spotted over rural areas, but with lights and heavier air traffic in cities one wonders if they simply weren’t seen in the more populated areas.
Imagine what a few well placed drones or balloons could target especially in conjunction with a cyber attack to down safety systems. I love a good conspiracy theory, but this is a possible scenario. I am not up on capabilities of military equipment, but I do know the US military killed that general using drone strikes from what I assume is a long ways away and I do know cyber attacks shut down a pipeline last year and made people panic. It doesn’t take a lot of brain cells to think someone could combine these two attacks on something immobile like a few main components of the grid or a refinery plant or simply fly over ripened crops with drones and drop something to light them on fire or a place a biological weapon in a city or feedlot or three. They could possibly get right through the southern border. You know what I don’t know but hope someone does is what the plans are to combat a threat like this.
While I agree with Jack’s sentiment regarding our unethical entrenched bureaucracy, I believe there might be a non-ethical, survival argument to be made in favor of suppressing knowledge of interstellar contact. IF there is life capable of traversing the incredibly vast distances between stars (even if only by robotic/remote means), and IF it’s possible to keep this knowledge out of public awareness, then it would be essential to do so. Thanks to irresponsibly naive fantasy shows like Star Trek (I love Trek but let’s be honest) the public, or at least enough of the influential elements of the public, would aggressively push to make two-way contact with extraterrestrial life. The potential harm this poses to our species’ survival outweighs almost all other considerations. I’m referring to the Dark Forest analogy (Liu Cixin, 2015. The Dark Forest. Tor Books). Is there a point where the need to support non-ethical (survival) imperatives becomes ethical?
Scenario 1:
Generals; “Mr. President, those are NOAA balloons.”
SloJo: “I don’t care what country they’re from, shoot them down!”
Scenario 2:
“The humans have rudely rejected our gift packages. The ‘Invade First’ faction is now in the majority; prepare the ships.”
Scenario 1 is by far the more likely.
Some think the possibility of us eventually detecting a (possibly long-gone) technologically advanced alien existence is “pretty good”. Still long odds. Communication or being visited is a much longer shot, what with light speed, the life of civilizations, etc. factoring in.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna38727371
Did you ever see the original Disney film “The Absent-Minded Professor” starring Fred MacMurray? In it, the character invents “flying rubber” which he calls Flubber and uses it to, among other things, make his Model T fly.
In an effort to fly to Washington, D.C., he alarms the military brass. In a funny scene, a high-ranking officer is on the phone and, upon being told what exactly the UFO is, pronounces, “Well, I don’t care if it is a Model T, shoot it down! Yes, and if you happen to see a Stutz Bearcat or a Pope Toledo flying over the capitol, shoot them down, too!”
I love that movie!
It holds up, too. We watched it again during the couple of months we had a Disney+ subscription (so we could see the “Get Back!” documentary.)It’s still lots of fun…unlike the regrettable remake.
👽
I don’t, for one moment, believe these are actual extraterrestrial objects. I think our airspace has been invaded a lot over the past few years by both foreign governments and independently-working foreign nationals, as well as more than a few domestic idiots. An abundance of spy devices, including balloons and drones, have probably made their way across the continent either with or without the knowledge of the administration involved.
I’m not even sure I believe they shot anything down at all in the most recent “incidents”. Notice how everyone is talking about these mysterious “objects” (which haven’t been recovered or even photographed), and discussion of the failure to decisively deal with the spy balloon has mostly ended? Awfully convenient.