Here's to the holy crap generation

Sorry, kids -- we've all failed you

We gotcher space brothers right here! And Raul Castro? You’re up next, amigo!

During America’s “space brothers” phase of the 1950s, when atomic bombs were belching radioactive poisons into the stratosphere, a cult of “contactees” was spreading a new gospel – extraterrestrials were here to break the cycle of civilization’s history. There would be no winners in the age of nukes, only auto-annihilation, and the visitors’ mission was to guide humanity into the light. It was an attractive proposition, at least until its top disciple, George Adamski, was exposed as a fabulist whose tales and photos of Venusian spaceships collapsed under cursory scrutiny.

Still, the creation of nuclear arsenals was a major transactional shift that rattled even the old master of war himself. The Atomic Energy Act (AEA) of 1954 created new opportunities for trusting private-sector stewardship with state secrecy and exclusive patents, famously flagged in President Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” speech in 1961. Citing “huge costs” and the galloping pace of technology, Ike warned that “a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity,” in which “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Recent events are tracing the full arc of Washington’s dysfunction all the way back to the Fifties. The AEA was the first domino in the erosion of the legislative branch’s obligations to hold this unelected elite accountable for taxpayer dollars. In the decades that followed, tsunamis of cash capsized the fragile Constitution and took American democracy with it. Consequently, one could be forgiven for wondering if a 21st-century version of a space-brother intervention might be the last hope of saving us from ourselves. And it’s beyond irony that the most promiscuously corrupt administration in U.S. history might well have blundered into an unintentional confrontation with the bona fide Deep State, with which it is deeply overmatched.

Have fun and enjoy . . .

From the get-go on May 8, when the Pentagon dropped its first wad of Trump-ordered UFO vids and docs, it’s been clear this is one fight our incurious 47 doesn’t give a shit about winning. After all, there are no partisan divides to exploit or monetize, only a vanity angle to inject into the cost-benefit analysis. In a nod to a few GOP lawmakers urging him to be the Great Disclosure President, Trump offered a few crumbs in a post: “Whereas previous Administrations have failed to be transparent on this subject, with these new Documents and Videos, the people can decide for themselves, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?’ Have Fun and Enjoy!”

The people can decide for themselves. Not our job. How do you like my AI meme of the space alien looking like Maduro in chains?

That the UFO-related material released thus far via the so-called Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE) has been fairly pedestrian, censored to the point of meaninglessness, or historically familiar is irrelevant. A thorough assessment of Friday’s latest data dump is likely to echo the verdict rendered by analysts at the independent Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies on the May 8 batch. “The Project Blue Book files released over 50 years ago,” they concluded, “provided much greater transparency and included all pertinent unclassified information for each case, such as radar data, photographs, metadata, and investigations.” But at this point, quantity and quality are almost beside the point.

The soft disclosure blues

Trump has triggered an unprecedented process whose scope and complexity he lacks the imagination and cognitive function to comprehend. And no doubt that process also comes with a reverse gear. But PURSUE mirrors the chaotic impulsivity that characterizes his entire mode of governance. And the lack of a coherent plan – the Pentagon’s latest doc-drop indicates it isn’t listening to critical feedback from lawmakers, historians and other stakeholders – stands to threaten the UFO quarantine on multiple fronts.

If you believe the rumors and hearsay emanating from podcastland, at least a few sources within the conflicted black world are chomping at the bit to end the info embargo.

Scoffing at the lame vids released two weeks ago, Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett says the withheld military footage he’s been shown in a SCIF indicate “holy crap is coming.” Missouri Rep. Eric Burlison, who hired former USAF intel officer David Grusch to walk point on Deep State resources, recently tweeted that the trail has led him to the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, which purportedly sponsored a briefing on flying saucers in 1952, complete with film. Claiming MIT’s attorneys have promised to deliver the goods within 30 days, Burlison vowed “Aerospace Corp . . . and the Northrop Grummans of the world” are next. Furthermore, he says baffled and unnamed administration officials are actually asking him for leads.

At last count, if you can believe it (which you can’t, not anymore, not without outside sourcing), the Department of War claims that one billion visitors have checked out its war.gov/UFO website this month alone. Given that expressed level of interest, is it possible the War Department or the DoD or whatever the hell they’ll call it when Trump’s gone can walk this stuff back and pretend it never happened? That’s a tough one; even Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the standup comic of pseudo-skepticism, has made grudging concessions to ET in a new book, Take Me to Your Leader. It’s facile and shallow, but it’s as if even he knows he’s risking irrelevance.

This brings us back to the space brothers.

America’s new national creed

In a recent op-ed for The Washington Post, religious studies professor Diana Walsh Pasulka argues the fed’s reluctant concessions on high strangeness have “offered support and recognition to a new kind of religion: belief in UFOs.”

Describing the phenomena’s allure as “profoundly anti-institutional” for many who “often distrust governments, legacy media, academia and organized religion,” the author of American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology and Encounters: Experiences With Nonhuman Intelligences argues ET’s perceived lack of hierarchy or central authority has given rise to a growing “distributed belief community” of followers. They are being emboldened by social media and speculation over “who controls information and defines reality,” Pasulka writes. And “each new file release, leaked testimony or declassified video generates further interpretation rather than disclosure.”

Decide for yourselves . . .

“Religious impulses have migrated into new technological and media environments that bypass gatekeepers. If the rise of UFO belief is any indication,” she concludes, “anti-institutionalism is America’s national creed.”

And how do you stuff that genie back in the bottle?

The suffocating tragedy of our current moment has exposed fatal flaws in the Constitution that have been simmering since its inception, infused now with an urgency not seen since the Civil War. And with a Supreme Court super-majority whose idea of “originalism” means resuscitating the old Confederacy, Trump’s legacy ensures there will be no going back to the way things were in 2016, or even 1965. Overcoming the archaic and unsustainable “new normal” (our $39 trillion national debt is skyrocketing by $5 billion a day) will demand a reconstruction of unimaginable scale, ambition and courage.

Digital natives will be creating this future. They won’t even have to reexamine the 18th-century horse-trading responsible for our foundational vulnerabilities. They’re seeing for themselves — as analytically compromised as the images are — long overdue officially authenticated videos of exotic flying phantoms that outperform anything we can put in the sky. And they’ll be the first generation to grow up knowing full well their government delegitimized itself by investing in security machinery committed to withholding wondrous knowledge about what it didn’t understand — space brothers or otherwise — from the people who paid for those walls, from citizens who should’ve been encouraged to participate but were not trusted with truth.

And they’ll find themselves struggling with a question no other generation has ever had to ask: If industrial-strength corruption is the inevitable end of things, might we finally be redeemed by ceding issues of morality to artificial intelligence?