Plastic is eating our brains

But at least the WSJ has solved the UFO mystery

More than a century later, Claude Monet’s kaleidoscopic gardens at Giverny have been visited by a phenomenon the French impressionist never painted — plastic.

Why swallow particles of processed petroleum if you don’t have to? That’s why I always choose glass bottles over plastic whenever there’s an option. That’s also why I felt like an idiot the other day when I learned of a French study indicating glass-bottled soda, beer and wine is actually loaded with more microplastics – up to 50 times more – than beverages in plastic bottles. Researchers said selected samples had something to do with the paint on the caps on the glass containers. So yeah, I felt like an idiot because I had assumed you could avoid ingesting this crap at the cash register. In reality, even the clouds are wafting with plastic, so the only way to escape is to quit breathing.

Following the election, in trying to fathom why 77 million voters thought a man with 34 felony convictions, six bankruptcies and two impeachments was the best choice for protecting their wallets, I looked for something other than ourselves to blame, some exterior variable over which we had no control. I settled on nanoplastics after reading up on the way this ubiquitous indestructible synthetic crud has been glomming onto our brains and innards for decades. In the months that followed, of course, the headlines have only grown darker.

There was the Time magazine cover story about how younger people – Americans under 50 – are getting lower-tract cancers that typically don’t crop up until geezerhood. From 1979-2019, cancer diagnosis rates in that demographic skyrocketed by 79 percent, and deaths climbed by 28 percent, with microplastics as prime suspects. And this sucks too:

Another paper says microplastics are so thoroughly saturating our farmland, leaching nutrients from the soil, blocking sunlight and retarding photosynthesis, that global crop yields – wheat grain, maize, etc. – are projected to plunge by anywhere from 4 to 14 percent over the next quarter century. Studies on bees indicate that, when exposed to microplastics, these essential insects lose memory and cognition, which can render them useless as pollinators. And the assault on our own neural receptors is in for a boost.

But China . . .

Although plastics account for more than a quarter of all U.S. manufacturing – i.e., $371 billion in annual revenues derived from plastics alone – China actually leads the world in the production department. That makes us look weak. Therefore, in March, J.D. Vance held a pep rally at Vantage Plastics in Bay City, Michigan. Promising reduced regulations and more tax incentives to induce a “renaissance in manufacturing,” he told his audience, “I really do believe that America’s success depends on the success of companies like Vantage Plastics.” That renaissance made headlines in May, when the Interior Department reversed National Park Service plans to eliminate single-use plastic products by 2032. And that followed a “BACK TO PLASTIC” executive order to restock federal shelves with plastic straws.

Now you’re asking, what does any of this have to do with UFOs? Well, it could explain why space aliens have been abducting humans for so long. Maybe they need to harvest uncontaminated sperm and ova before the ascendant generation of homo plasticus blunders into world domination. But for sure, the plastic renaissance belongs in a category often used to describe so much of legacy media’s attempts to disenthrall consumer interest in UFOs. Because let’s face it — bullshit comes in so many popular modes and means, none of us are immune to it. Bullshit tells us what we want to hear and believe. Without bullshit, we wouldn’t even have an economy.

Exhibit A: The Wall Street Journal’s UFOs coverage that dropped on June 6 and June 21. This two-part series, reported by Joel Schectman and Aruna Viswanatha, has enough bullshit to go around for everybody. Because it’s specifically about bullshit.

The Journal tells us how, after interviewing “two dozen current and former U.S. officials, scientists and military contractors,” it uncovered an omnidirectional USAF disinformation plot called “Yankee Blue.” The articles do not tell us who, exactly, instigated the bullshit, which unit he (or she, or they) was attached to, or even what year it launched. We are not told what motivated the mission, or what the mission hoped to accomplish by demoralizing its own people.

‘Hundreds and hundreds’ of lies

We are told only that the deception is rooted in the 1950s, with the aim of perpetuating the “myth that the government had a secret program to exploit extraterrestrial technology.” In this “stunning new twist in the story of America’s cultural obsession with UFOs,” WSJ announces, the USAF planted rumors of recovered ET spacecraft as “a ruse” to protect classified weapons programs. And in “a bizarre hazing ritual,” Air Force bullshit agents even manufactured bullshit UFO data for fellow airmen to contemplate. They swore them to secrecy about these fake nonexistent reverse-engineering UFO programs, then told them they “could be jailed or executed” if they ever told anybody about it.

WSJ says the only reason we know anything at all about “Yankee Blue” today is on account of thankless work performed by Sean Kirkpatrick, the inaugural director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Established by Congress in 2023 and given “unprecedented access to America’s most highly classified programs” in order to solve the UFO mystery, AARO claims it kept interviewing people who’d been snookered by Air Force bullshit. The agency then took the “shocking truth” to then-Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines two years ago. The Journal, for some unknown reason, declined to name the official who met with Haines, but podcaster Steven Greenstreet has subsequently identified the messenger as former AARO acting director Tim Phillips.

Allegedly blindsided by the news that the Air Force would systematically feed bullshit to its own employees, Haines wanted to know the full extent of The Ruse. “Ma’am” replied Phillips, “we know it went on for decades. We are talking about hundreds and hundreds of people. These men signed NDAs. They thought it was real.”

Just what sorts of weapons was the Pentagon trying to hide? The kind that could – according to the WSJ – knock out 10 nuclear missiles at a Strategic Air Command base in 1967. That real-life non-bullshit encounter was popularized 30 years ago by launch control operator Bob Salas, who was on duty when the missiles went down. Instead of being punked by a UFO, however, the Malmstrom SAC base was – according to Kirkpatrick – being subjected to an unannounced USAF experiment. Launch control was getting lit up by an “exotic electromagnetic generator” mounted on a “portable platform 60 feet above the facility”; when fully activated, it glowed “with a blinding orange light.” Topside security only thought it was a UFO.

Strong verbs!

“The electromagnetic pulses,” wrote the Journal, “snaked down cables connected to the bunker where launch commanders like Salas sat, disrupting guidance systems, disabling the weapons and haunting the men to this day.” And “to this day,” the article adds, “Salas believes he was party to an intergalactic intervention to stop nuclear war which the government has tried to hide.”

Sorry about that, Bob.

Naturally, Salas fired off a response to the WSJ, demanding a correction. In fact, a lot of people were doing that, quoted sources and stakeholders alike, from physicist Eric Davis and former Pentagon whistleblower Lue Elizondo to UFOs and Nukes researcher Robert Hastings. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, head of the House Oversight/Government Reform Committee’s new transparency task force, also used That Word again: “I think that’s (WSJ article) bullshit!” The list of specific grievances – omissions, meandering tangents (see “Art’s parts”), lack of context, gaping holes – is so vast I can’t even. Maybe the most concise accounting of reporting biases can be found here, from one-time Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Chris Mellon.

But I’m still trying to process the ramifications of a longer view, because the confirmation of active chicanery to stigmatize the “UFO myth” is absolutely logical, especially coming from the Air Force, which has the most data to conceal. In fact, as the Journal pointed out, the USAF pressured AARO to omit its Yankee Blue bullshittery from its annual 2024 report – and AARO caved.

Who will tie our shoes?

“The paranoid mythology the U.S. military helped spread,” writes The Journal, “now has a hold over a growing number of its own senior officials who count themselves as believers.” That “lack of full transparency,” it warns, “has only given more fuel to conspiracy theories.” No shit — assuming anyone still believed anything the USAF had to offer on UFOs in the first place. That paranoid mythology also exposed the WSJ’s shallow and facile coverage for exactly what it is; going forward, the Journal’s discernment on the UFO/UAP issue will inevitably be suspect.

Unfortunately, the bigger takeaway here is our delusion that Bubba Sixpack cares about any of this. We’ve been telling him forever this is the biggest story in human history, but the noise obscures the signal. He can’t tell the difference between policy and performance as it is. Bubba Sixpack doesn’t read The Wall Street Journal or much else these days. Like the rest of us, Bubba Sixpack’s brains are getting irreversibly clogged by microscopic shards of nanoplastics. His capacity for telling bullshit from everything else is disintegrating. Ten years from now, Bubba Sixpack won’t even remember how to tie his shoes.

So yeah, let’s talk about Yankee Blue . . .