When Wonder Occludes Objectivity (American Cosmic): Pawns of Disinformation (2 of 2)

“Religion will continue to influence the course of progress, and creation of a galactic civilization may depend upon the emergence of a galactic religion capable of motivating society for the centuries required to accomplish that great project.”  —William Sims Bainbridge

(Part One)

For a religious scholar who also professes to be a Catholic, D.W. Pasulka is strangely indifferent to demonology. Perhaps this is why, in a book that is at least superficially about generating myths about UFOS and an alien presence, she omits all mention of the most recent attempt at “academic” disclosure, prior to hers, Peter Levenda and Tom De Longe’s Sekret Machines. Though it’s hard to blame Pasulka for wanting to avoid any associations with that tawdry packet, it’s still a glaring omission. And a work—like a person’s life story—is often best measured by what it omits.

There are two reasons that immediately come to my mind for this omission, though they are not mutually exclusive: 1) the Levenda/De Longe project foreshadows Pasulka’s and runs parallel to it, potentially revealing the same shadowy hand (and/or commercial interests) behind both; 2) American Cosmic is the light, upbeat side of the myth, compared to Levenda and DeLonge’s Lovecraftian swamp. The main way in which they converge—besides referring to high-level anonymous government and scientific sources—is that, light or dark side of “the phenomenon,” both omit aspects that might seriously undermine a supernatural, extraterrestrial, inter-dimensional, or transcendental explanation for the UFO. Both opt for wonder over objectivity, or woo.

I will get to what those aspects are shortly. For now, let’s just say that, as a literary attempt to demonstrate that we, as a society and a culture, even as a species, are on the verge of full disclosure of an ongoing “contact” experience with some unknown and intelligent form of life, and that this encounter includes a form of technology presently indistinguishable to most of us from magic, American Cosmic is powerfully persuasive in a way that Sekret Machines isn’t.

In an odd sort of positive reinforcement loop, this makes it seem that much more likely the narrative of “alien contact and disclosure” really is on the verge of official validation, since Pasulka’s book legitimizes the subject significantly, thereby making it both more credible and more reputable.

Information Salesmen

“In particular we focus on the limitations of current economics and science, and on the potential that an integrative and evolutionary image of man might have to reunite . . . ‘the two cultures’ (the sciences and the humanities) in order to forge a more appropriate policy paradigm for our society.”  —Changing Images of Man

Pasulka has certainly done her homework for American Cosmic, so it seems unlikely any omissions are due to sloppiness. In the first chapter (p. 22), for example, she warns about groups manipulating information to generate belief in UFOs:

If we were there as pawns of a disinformation campaign, I thought, this revealed that powerful interest groups were still heavily involved in the creation of UFO/extraterrestrial belief—a fact that has already been well established. I was open to that possibility and would not have been at all surprised if it were true now.

And yet, when she interacts with people like Jacques Vallee, Whitley Strieber, experiencer Ray Hernandez, Edgar Mitchell, and Tyler D., Pasulka shows no sign of being open to the possibility of being deceived. Perhaps it would be bad manners to suggest such a thing—but is social protocol more important than academic rigor? I suspect that, nowadays, it is. In consequence, when push comes to shove, Pasulka seems like the perfect pushover.

Nor does it amount to much when Pasulka quotes Vallee telling her “Trust no one. Do not even trust what you see” (p. 83; for good measure she quotes Vallee again on the next page, as a chapter header: “Believe no one. Believe nothing.”) Of course, she trusts Vallee and believes him—and all of his SRI cohorts—thereby not acting on his advice (since it’s psychologically impossible to do so). This may be one of the oldest tricks in the book, from ancient gurus to modern-day spooks, to create cognitive dissonance by suggesting the impossible (believe nothing) with such enigmatic authority that all that’s established is the superior wisdom of the speaker. Those who tell us not to believe, we believe; those who tell us not to trust, we trust.

I want to linger on this question of belief a moment longer. How often do we hear people saying that they accepted a version of events or a piece of information because they could “tell” the person was sincere? What is their assumption based on? Even leaving aside the possibility that their source might be deceived or deluded (i.e., sincere but still wrong), I think it is based on next to nothing, really, except perhaps their experience of knowing it when someone is lying badly.

On the other hand, we know that deception—whether about sexual abuse, corporate crimes, espionage, or phony UFO narratives—proliferates, is even an inextricable  part of human society (and arguably of human biology[1]). Isn’t it more logical then to assume the opposite: that, as a general rule, we can’t tell when someone is lying to us? Not when it comes to professionals, at least, and intelligence operatives are professional liars—being that there is nothing more essential for the spreading of disinformation than the ability to persuade others of their sincerity. This makes it necessary to seek out an alternate set of criteria for judgment, which is where academic analysis and the scientific method come in. Only, with American Cosmic, they don’t, not really, not when it comes to the crunch.

As far as I can tell, the deception messengers and perceptions managers Pasulka acknowledges are related more to mainstream media and yellow journalism than to venture capitalists, NASA scientists, or SRI intelligence-augmenters, who are the good guys in her story. She acknowledges that a tawdry, fake UFO narrative has been generated to obscure the truth, and offers this as the main reason why these scientists must remain anonymous (to avoid association with the tacky stuff). But she never attempts to identify who is behind the deception or to explain why these scientists, her sources, with their apparent high-level clearance, can be assumed not to be part of it. Actually, all she would have to do is skim through Prisoner of Infinity—or even The Stargate Conspiracy—to find out that they are. So is this a case of a blind spot, doublethink, or deliberate obfuscation on her part?

Despite my misgivings, I was initially prepared to give Pasulka the benefit of the doubt because of the many insights in her book. As I proceeded, however, it became increasingly clear to me that, whatever sort of analytical rigor Pasulka might be applying, there was a line she was (consciously or unconsciously) being careful not to cross. It is the line that, like an amnesia barrier in a fractured psyche, keeps at bay the malevolent side of the human unconscious. Those demons again.

*

I don’t mean to imply by any of this that there is conscious deception on the part of Pasulka—that would not only be presumptuous but impolite. And if I were forced to decide whether her account of Tyler’s conversion is out-and-out fabrication or God’s honest truth, I might feel compelled to choose the latter. Accusing someone of outright lying (even in our own minds) doesn’t feel right to some of us; and Pasulka’s account doesn’t seem like a cynical yarn, far from it.

The problem is, this is not a fair choice to be forced to make, even on Pasulka’s own terms (if only she didn’t fudge them). One of the many tricks of perception management is to force us to make illegitimate choices between two options that are equally invalid. There may be many layers of truth interspersed with an equal number of layers of deception in her account. Tyler might have faked his conversion for Pasulka’s benefit, for example, knowing she would report it as truth. Alternatively, he himself might have been tricked, by whatever means (by the sort of behavior modification techniques that Pasulka barely touches on in her book, for example), to undergo a phony conversion. This would make both of them dupes, and us for believing their story. American Cosmic’s grand religious finale could be a “true” report of an elaborate deception, a possibility Pasulka never acknowledges because she is fully persuaded otherwise.

If, while she talks quite a bit about “angelic beings,” Pasulka doesn’t mention demons once (check the index), it seems to be a deliberate choice on her part to “emphasize” the positive and deemphasize the negative. In an interview with author Erik Davis, Pasulka was asked (at the end of one of Davis’ long, erudite spiels) how she managed to avoid getting pulled into the darker, more conspiratorial aspects of Ufology. Pasulka’s response was telling (she had to start it three times because their connection failed): she said she had five young children and a position at the university, and she couldn’t afford to “spin off into the negative.” She had to “stay grounded.”

This answer indicates two important things: firstly, that taking a negative turn in UFO research constitutes for Pasulka a kind of “spinning off” track, i.e., something to be inherently distrusted. Secondly, that her position and her stake in the world, as a mother and an academic, meant she couldn’t afford to go into these darker areas because it would be destabilizing for her, both personally and professionally.

It is not hard to sympathize with her about this. By writing American Cosmic, she voluntarily entered into one of the darkest and most deranging information labyrinths in human history, possibly the darkest. In many ways, she does a commendable job, so it might seem unkind not to cut her some slack for not wanting to go all the way in. On the other hand, it is hard to square an attitude of conscious avoidance with academic rigor or the quest for truth.

 

Technological Angels

 

“Thus the coming to presence of technology harbors in itself what we least  suspect, the possible arising of the saving power.”  —Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”

In another interview (for Veritas Radio[2]), Pasulka speaks about the need to focus on anomalous elements when doing scientific research. This method was central to my analysis of Whitley Strieber’s abduction accounts in Prisoner of Infinity. Yet truly disruptive UFO anomalies—such as the many overlaps with SRI and Changing Images of Man, the CIA and remote viewing via Edgar Mitchell’s Institute of Noetic Sciences, and from here to MK-ULTRA, military black-ops, and the systematic traumatization of children as evident throughout Strieber’s accounts—are precisely what American Cosmic avoids. Surely a book that acknowledges deception in the UFO information field, and that presents a bunch of supposed information about the UFO field, should at least attempt to identify some of the elements of deception within that field, and discuss the methods—or at least give some concrete examples? Instead, she simply goes to them as her primary source.

In his famous series of sorcery books, Carlos Castaneda uses the literary method of creating a first-person voice that is highly skeptical and almost annoyingly rational. He exaggerates his disbelief in the face of the sorcerers’ world he is entering, as a means to neutralize the reader’s own doubts, to get us to suspend our disbelief. Because of this, we feel like we are in good hands, that our narrator is reliable, and this makes us that much more susceptible to woo, to opting for wonder over objectivity.

Like Jeffrey Kripal with The Super Natural, Pasulka (if we give both of them the benefit of the doubt) is a scholar who has been converted to full-blown belief. Strictly speaking, this ought to disqualify both of them from further investigations as scholars, since anthropologists who have gone native do tend to lack objectivity. (After he got his PhD for Journey to Ixtlan, Castaneda became a sorcerer; these guys do like to have it both ways).

It’s for this reason, I think, that both Kripal and Pasulka make a big show of the need to stay liminal, on the threshold of belief, and that they do so by using postmodernist jargon that is both acceptable within academia and familiar to New Age and UFO audiences. Since existence is all in the eye of the observer and there is no clear line between subjective and objective reality (or even no such thing as objective reality), objectivity and even impartiality, are out the window.

On page 116, Pasulka states it outright: “I had given up the dualism of real and virtual.”

She has passed through the looking glass. The invisible college has her.

*

“All that is relevant is how interesting is the story that someone invents to explain the origin of the universe. . . There is a struggle between two or three or even ten different poets. Who can invent a funny, amusing, or interesting story so that everyone immediately thinks, ‘That’s what must have happened!’”  —Heinz von Foerster, Guggenheim fellow, fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

I can’t say if the grand religious finale of American Cosmic is especially poorly written or not, but I do know my eyes glazed over while reading it and I found it hard to take seriously. Possibly the fault is in me. Pasulka’s account of an elite NASA scientist’s miraculous conversion to Catholicism is superficially believable, and I don’t think she made it up (though we can’t rule that out either). She seems sincere, and the account is not overly fantastic; if it were reported in a vacuum of previous UFO-New Age-conspiratainment confabulation, if it were the first time I had ever heard a story of this kind, I would certainly give it, and her, the benefit of the doubt.

If it were possible to separate it from a massive, century-long program of perception management and narrative manufacture, designed to create a new religion around the UFO experience, that is. But it isn’t.

Let’s look at the old UFO narrative that Pasulka is advising us was created as a means of perception management and manipulation of collective beliefs, to obscure the actual truth: Beings with advanced knowledge, power, and technology have been interacting with humans for an unknown period, possibly millennia. A turning point involving some sort of fallen craft and found technology occurred in the late 1940s, in New Mexico. Government secrecy and disinformation shrouded the event(s) in ignorance, fear, ridicule, and denial. Accounts of the beings—whether ET or “interdimensional”—suggest they are both physical and nonphysical (possibly etheric) at the same time, making them correlate loosely with mythical beings such as fairies, angels, and demons.  They appear to interface with our own subjectivity (perceptions, beliefs, expectations, cultural conditioning), and contact with them is powerfully transformative. They are acclimatizing us to their existence as preparation for a full disclosure-contact event in the near future.

So what about the new narrative? The picture American Cosmic paints is almost identical to this in every feature besides the one, that it claims that the old narrative is a false version of the truth, a counterfeit, to hide the new narrative, hers. Like Vallee’s admonition not to believe, this is something we can’t even think about, never mind make sense of. The only real difference I could see is that Pasulka’s version is significantly more sophisticated in its argumentation, and possessed of a lot more depth, insight, and nuance.

It is a better telling of the same old story, a remake with improved CGI and a bigger budget, but the core myth remains unchanged. From warning us about the many cunningly crafted, quasi-religious narratives that have been generated by shadowy groups to implant us with faulty perception-memory-beliefs, Pasulka has become an unabashed deliverer of a narrative that is indistinguishable from all these others. American Cosmic is a Trojan Horse, designed to look like an anti-Greek weapon.

At one point, Pasulka notes how “Jung famously called the UFO a technological angel.” This would certainly be pertinent to her thesis, but it turns out that Jung didn’t call the UFO a technological angel, though you will find a lot of people claiming just that. The actual quote is this: “These space-guests are sometimes idealized figures along the lines of technological angels who are concerned for our welfare, sometimes dwarfs with enormous heads bursting with intelligence, sometimes lemur-like creatures covered with hair and equipped with claws, or dwarfish monsters clad in armor and looking like insects.” (Jung, Collected Works Vol 10, Civilization in Transition, p. 322, Princeton University Press, 1964.)

This might seem like a minor discrepancy, except that it shifts the projection-assumption of divine or angelic intervention away from “dwarfish monsters,” onto the technology being used by them. And American Cosmic is all about presenting technology as an authentic expression of the divine, a saving intervention, as promised by Heidegger. The tweaked Jung quote perfectly encapsulates this idea. The actual one seems rather to mock it.

 

Deceitful Workers

“I believe because it is absurd.” —Tertullian, misattributed

Later in her interview with Erik Davis, Pasulka asks this question of herself: “How can I write a book [about UFO myth creation] without being folded into the mythology itself?” Her answer is simple and direct: “I can’t.” It may also be disingenuous.

For the first four chapters of American Cosmic, I was pleasantly surprised by the depth and insight of the exploration, and by Pasulka’s apparently healthy skepticism. To be honest, I didn’t fully believe it, even at the very start, and for a number of reasons. The most obvious one was that I was pretty sure nothing in the book would mention military or intelligence psychological operations, mind control, organized child sexual abuse, the use of staged “alien” abductions to create screen memories for victims, or the mechanics of trauma and dissociation. I was right, it didn’t.

Of course, I have a personal stake in this, having written a book about this aspect of the UFO/abduction experience, and either Pasulka had not read Prisoner of Infinity at the time of writing her book, or she strategically ignored it. A third alternative is that, since her book certainly makes it seem as though it is going to address the problem of perception management, reality distortion, and crucial fictions around the UFO, any hidden acknowledgment of my own work is in the form of a subtle kind of damage control, something I also thought I detected in Kripal’s and Strieber’s similar work, The Super Natural. (Though The Super Natural came out in early 2016 and Prisoner of Infinity was not published until spring of 2018, I had serialized most of the book online, starting in 2013, and shared much of it with Kripal, as well as making sure Strieber was aware of it.)

Clearly, one way for Pasulka to avoid being folded into the UFO myth would be to include areas of research and data that are antithetical to the myth being generated. It was by just such means that I tried, via Prisoner of Infinity, to offer an inoculation to the myth that Pasulka’s book is, apparently advertently, helping to legitimize and update. Once included, these darker and more mundane elements seriously raise the bar of evidence required to establish that something truly transcendental, supernatural, or nonhuman is occurring.

As I argued with Prisoner of Infinity, the effects of directed trauma on the human psyche—even without including mind-altering drugs, advanced technology, and sophisticated forms of theater or “psyop”—are so profound, in terms of fragmentation, dissociation, and the unleashing of coping phantasies, that they at least potentially account for all of the more numinous (and demonic) aspects of the contact experience. I don’t personally believe they can fully explain it, but until they are included, we will never find out. By the same token, once they are on the table, no amount of Hollywood money is going to persuade us to suspend our disbelief in the face of the old “space brother” narrative.

Pasulka claims to have read extensively on the subject of UFOs. She is currently doing the podcast rounds and has appeared on many “alternate media” podcasts, including obscure ones such as Rune Soup and Aeon Byte (a show I have also done). Before starting work on this piece, I invited her onto my own podcast via her website. I have not heard back.

If Pasulka is serious and sincere, there is no reason for her to avoid addressing the issues raised in this present analysis (and in Prisoner of Infinity), and there is every reason for her to do so. It’s possible, however, that while she is sincere, she is not altogether serious; as suggested by her interview with Erik Davis, she may be choosing to avoid areas that might invalidate her thesis, or destabilize her personally or professionally. It’s also possible she is quite serious, but not at all sincere. Then her reason for avoiding these questions would be necessary and strategic, but neither scholarly nor ethical.

It may be part of the same necessary strategy when Pasulka (in her interview with Veritas Radio) dismisses Christians who reject UFO phenomena as “demonic” as being overly “fear-based.” She does add a partial concession to her dismissal, that there is a spectrum of UFO experiences, ranging from positive to negative, thereby indicating—without actually stating—that there could be both demons and angels involved. If so, why does she only write about the positive experiences and about the possibility of angelic beings? Why no space for demonic dwarves? More crucially, why does she presume that a seemingly angelic experience could not be generated by demons—or by highly unethical humans? Do her religious studies no longer afford her time to refer to scripture?

*

“For such men are pseudo-apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into Apostles of the Anointed.”   —2 Corinthians 11:14 (David Bentley Hart translation)

It’s fair to ask who or what is being rendered unto here. The Catholic church came about when the Roman Empire coopted the original teachings of Christ and the apostles, and turned it into a vehicle of attention-management by which to establish a new form of institutional control. Now, with the UFO, the same thing appears to be happening.

As William Sims Bainbridge acknowledges in the quote that opens this piece, it is standard operating procedure for the State, when co-opting people’s faith as a means to consolidate its own power and influence, to give rise to new religions. Central to this form of religious engineering is the recycling of key elements of the old “pagan” belief into the new, state-established orthodoxy. And just as Catholicism cannibalized both early Christianity and pre-Christian “pagan” (Roman, Egyptian) forms of worship, so the new techno-utopian church of the UFO appears to be doing the same with Christianity.

With the UFO, we have a mediator-medium being installed between humanity and the divine, that potentially needs no reference to the divine (besides in words). This means the mediators can offer their own simulation via a combination of performance (like the pomp and circumstance of Catholic ritual) with the mass-belief of the “flock.” The word Catholic is derived from the Greek adjective καθολικός (katholikos), meaning “universal.” 

Here’s what may turn out to be the key to the UFO riddle: The UFO myth entails the construction of an interpretation of an unknown phenomenon that makes it possible to counterfeit it.

In Pasulka’s unholy trinity, the third variable, technology, is a legitimate representative of the divine presence, of the human soul. It therefore becomes a necessary extension of—and even a replacement for—the human body. (As she has written elsewhere, we are all already cyborgs: post-humans.) This is an inversion of Christian doctrine, in which the body is an image of the divine.  The new doctrine of scientism—via the technological angel of the UFO (AI?)—provides a persuasive template for us to experience something that appears divine, but is really just a sociocultural and political construction. “And no wonder! For the Accuser himself transforms himself into an angel of light.”[3]

Central to the ascension of this postmodernist pseudo priesthood is the dethroning of not just religion but the whole idea of objective reality. The curious fact is that, today, religion has been replaced by science, while science has become more and more religiose, or scientistic. It has now reached the point where, what we continue to associate (almost religiously) with our conduit to empirical truth (science) has become increasingly insistent that there is no such thing, because now reality is—quantum indeterminately—in the wonder-struck eye of the observer.

This is a bit like the Cretan saying all Cretans are liars, or Jacques Vallee telling us to trust no one and believe nothing. For social creatures, trusting no one and believing nothing is not really possible, and nor is belief usually a choice, in any case. There may be some beliefs we choose, but our deepest ones are the things we feel sure about, and are incepted in us at levels well below the threshold of consciousness. To be asked to believe that belief is both a trap and the means by which reality comes into existence leaves us in a sort of Catholic limbo, from which we may feel increasingly in need of salvation. We may end up compelled to believe in a power—or a technology—that will save us from ourselves, and from the limits of our reason and rationality.

Enter the technological angel. A new form of authority that is both mundane and apparently transcendental, a god we can believe in because (we are told) we have co-created it—like technology—through the power of our own belief. And the moment our belief (and our technology) becomes autonomous—the moment seeing supplants believing—is the moment we have lost all option not to believe.

Wonder has occluded objectivity.

****

[1] See for example Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind, by Ajit Varki and Danny Brower.

[2] “Diana Walsh Pasulka, Ph.D, American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology,” Veritas TV, 14 Feb 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcbvdBK8uyw

[3] 2 Corinthians 11:14, David Bentley Hart translation. I used to read, and apply, that quote as the future redemption of Satan, rather than the promise of a dazzling CGI light show to fool the elect (if it were possible). Perhaps Heidegger was hoping that, too, in the saving power at the very essence of technology. If so, it may have been naïve, as currently we seem far too beholden to the ever-changing, increasingly narcissistic images of ourselves to do much besides keep digging our technological Sheol ever deeper.

22 thoughts on “When Wonder Occludes Objectivity (American Cosmic): Pawns of Disinformation (2 of 2)”

  1. It’s fair to ask who or what is being rendered unto here. The Catholic church came about when the Roman Empire coopted the original teachings of Christ and the apostles, and turned it into a vehicle of attention-management by which to establish a new form of institutional control. Now, with the UFO, the same thing appears to be happening.

    -There’s a paragraph to hold onto!

    Reply
  2. In terms of the avoidance of certain topics on Pasulka’s part, as a religious scholar, these topics of mind-control would hardly be her bailiwick, and they are deeply stigmatized in non-academic society until now, both via official channels, and in our general cultural avoidance of deeply painful topics. Previous to the opening of communication occasioned by the internet, this information was not only stigmatized, but practically unavailable. From the Amazon reviews:

    Psychoanalyst Alice Miller’s work was regarded as ground-breaking even in the 80’s:
    “This is a book of extraordinary importance, for it makes as clear as a beacon light the root causes of violence as a consequence of our misguided child-rearing practices. For Your Own Good should be read by all who are troubled by what has happened to our world and to our children. I cannot sufficiently stress the importance and urgency of reading [this book].” ―Ashley Montagu

    “A shattering, frightening [book], and eventually one of the most illuminating and life-view-changing works I have ever read . . . I challenge any thinking and feeling person to read this book [and] not in turn be changed or altered.” ―Church World

    and I am not sure exactly when the accounts of childhood rape began to come to light, but I know I had barely heard of incest in the 80’s.

    Other cultural shifts into awareness and away from child abuse , have notably been happening with significant, but less successful manifestation than the personal confrontation with one’s own abuse. They are seen as riskier, and they are more expensive and less socially supported:
    homebirth and less interventionistic hospital childbirth, growing out of a burgeoning awareness of the long-term psychological circumstances of childbirth and the reasonable safety of “Birth without Violence” (the famed pioneering book by the French obstetrician Leboyer–I think its notable that the childbirth reform that focussed on sensitivity to the infant, rather than the mother or her relationship with her husband, came from France, not the English-speaking world);

    and homeschooling, which protects the child’s relationship with his own intuition , will and integrity. As of 2013, 3.4% of US school children were homeschooling, and children are being homeschooled in other countries too.

    There seem to still be a lot of issues around that most critical “crossing the threshold”, ie. being born.

    This is unsurprising, as in our world, we have literally made this an occasion for torturing the infant–after a process which by its very nature, is stressful and difficult enough.
    We drug the infants, separate them from their mothers, shine blinding lights in their eyes, assault their senses with cold and noise, deprive them of oxygen and sometimes blood in the procedures used to separate them from the placenta. In some cases, their skulls are fractured by forceps or otherwise seriously injured. And until recently, it was the law in the US for caustic silver nitrate drops to be put in the newborns eyes.

    During birth, the infant literally closes a heart valve that will never open again, because it must shift its circulation totally from circulating its blood through the placenta to get oxygen to circulating its blood by its alveoli in the lungs. And it has to do this in about five minutes.

    Can you imagine what happens when the delicate hormonal cascade evolved over millions of years to do this, is interfered with?

    https://chriskresser.com/natural-childbirth-v-epidural-side-effects-and-risks/

    These hormones are also intimately involved in helping motivate the mother to proper connection with her infant. We can see some experimental evidence in Western science of the kind of stress infants and children experience when bonding with the mother is interfered with. This experimental evidence shows up in criminology, child developmental studies, and experiments with primates.

    What I am pointing out is there is a powerful upwelling of cultural struggle towards integrity in these two areas of human activity, and heaven only knows who is involved, but having witnessed homebirthing and homeschooling in both myself and others, while being the recipient of our Western-now-global culture’s normal procedures myself, I am confident these are positive developments. Unfortunately these options are still struggling to remain legal at all, although the less emotionally valent one, homeschooling, is better established.

    (As to its affects, both the creator of Wikipedia and Julian Assange had very significantly alternative schooling. In Julian’s case, his mother moved him through over 30 schools, and encouraged him to play hooky, so he wouldn’t “develop an unhealthy respect for authority.”)

    I just stumbled across your work a few weeks ago online, so I have not been able to get your books yet, and don’t know the range of resources you have been incorporating into your analysis. I recall some anthropological work, IIRC, of Edmund Leach’s, I read decades ago, that may be relevant to how we are symbolizing the arrival of extraterrestrial intelligence.

    Unfortunately I can’t remember the title of the paper, and am not easily finding his development of the relevant concepts.

    The circular shape is associated with the feminine. Is it an accident that while we are trying to recover our personal intuition, creativity and connection, that in our technological, hierarchical society, we are envisioning more advanced spiritual knowledge coming to us
    in spherical craft?

    Leach’s work was on the vastly different social structures found among societies living in
    circular versus more rectangular housing.

    Reply
    • this is all interesting an relevant to my own thoughts, tho not so clear how it relates to the article itself save in the broadest of ways, or as an apologia for Pasulka avoiding this subject?

      Reply
      • Indeed I was doing more than one thing here.

        You did ask why Pasulka was avoiding these subjects: although I’m not so interested in that question myself, and am aware of the possibility of active collaboration, to be fair to her and ourselves, I thought it would be reasonable to recap the suppression of these topics especially in the professional class. So that’s one of them.

        The second was to generally address the larger questions of what is going on in our time, as it relates to the topic of UFO mythology. To some extent to see how something accurate and positive may either be being reflected (or even desecrated,
        as one might say the Independence Day movies did). To investigate what may be real, can be another avenue of helping us see what may be manipulated and toxic.

        So that’s the second. There’s a struggle for the integration of intuition and reason,
        and when the two are split, we are much more manipulable. (Oddly, television measurably turns off critical thinking functions of the mind). So we see contradictory tendencies in operation at the same time, but they are both dangerous. The emotion without reason, and the reason without emotion.

        I’ve seen our current wave of
        scientism as extremely dangerous on several levels, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen you mention that too, even beyond what you mentioned in this essay about technology worship embodied in some of the language on UFOs.

        My educational background is in science, and so I am particularly aware of how
        science-worship, which is undoubtedly being inculcated, helps certain financially interested parties promote uncritical acceptance of their dangerous products.
        That would be a whole discussion in itself.

        Sam Harris has suggested in so many words that science should become our religion, it has already become the ruling worldview of the US (I am thinking how the Supreme Court makes law, not how many people say they believe in God), and this mentality has been evolving in the West for a long time. The right of religious asylum was abolished in England in the 1600’s. The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend had already suggested that science had become a threat to democracy in the 1970’s.

        Getting back to Pasulka, it would help in understanding her to know her age and background, which I don’t, and somewhat oddly for an academic supposedly of paradigm-shifting class she does not have a wikipedia entry, and Google only returns about 40,000 results. Investigating her, you might want to look at her university at well.

        I am not sure how important sussing out Pasulka is, though. Yes, she could become a big player, but I don’t think that’s likely.

        Who knows though. Gloria Steinem became the face of feminism in the United States for a good while, but it seems reasonable to me to suggest she significantly diminished the potential of the movement to create the benefit it otherwise could have. Maybe I’m wrong about that–maybe as feminism’s impresario she created the stage not so much diminishing feminism’s thinkers, and visionaries but helping them get a platform at all. Scholarship seems to suggest intelligence agency involvement in the feminist movement.

        Maybe it could be useful to think about what might happen in terms of manipulated UFO views, in terms of what did happen in the feminist movement, which brought both gains and pains. I think most people would look at trebled rates of single motherhood in the US with something beyond alarm, if they are thinking people, for example.

        Getting back to UFOs, it seems likely to me that we are headed towards a disclosure, and it will be important how that comes out, and is interpreted. I have noticed the step by step march of science journalism in the last decade describing discoveries of liquid water in the solar system with what seems to be a peculiar degree of tension. Many of those announcements were preceded by, announcements that there was going to be an announcement.

        I am guessing the first disclosure is going to be announcement of microscopic life on Mars. Its likely different factions are pursuing different agendas, though. It would be good if the first disclosure would be announcement of microscopic life on Mars, so I wish they’d get a move on allowing the consensus reality to expand a bit rather than risking us getting the bends with a more traumatizing form of disclosure, although unfortunately that may be exactly what certain factions might want.

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  3. Disciplined Minds was a 2001 meditation on the subtle mechanisms for enforcement of political conformity in the education of professionals requiring Ph. D’s, such as Dr. Pasulka.

    I remember a funny exchange between the unmentionable MIT professor emeritus Noam Chomsky and a young reporter who did not think he was transmitting propaganda.

    Much less amusing is understanding the systematic alteration of funding for university research which has downgraded their functioning as impartial
    assessors of truth. Heroic Berkeley Professor Ignacio Chapela would be a case in point; reinstated EPA scientist and whistleblower William Marcus would be another.

    Obviously it is dark and upsetting to contemplate scientists being harassed, slandered, and threatened but its happening, and it gets worse if we don’t face it. We have to realize how important the issue is, and stand up for their academic freedom, which is part of our own.

    Perhaps we can take some comfort that unlike with 14th century Oxford professor John Wycliffe, we aren’t exhuming their bodies and burning them posthumously, but we’ve got to do better than forcing them to mortgage their homes for legal fees, as well.

    https://www.amazon.com/Disciplined-Minds-Critical-Professionals-Soul-Battering/dp/0742516857

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  4. I have noticed the corporate leaders are trying to achieve physical immortality of late. I wonder if they could set themselves up as techno – angels in order to harvest human ka-etheric attention in order to sustain a subliminal existence from which to influence the world. Vampires basically, and the UFO thing could be the focussing glass of mass attention.
    This came feom the Phaoronic operating manual of ancient Egypt. Heres some Vampire research i carried out recently on Bram Stokers Dracula

    Chrs

    Seems Vampires, Nosferatu or Wampyr are not as fictional as we might think. In Ancient practice of mummification to preserve the ‘Ka’ or ‘etheric body of an important person was widespread. Evidently they believed it was possible to maintain intact a rudimentary psychic consciousness in order to extend life,usually to complete ones grand mission if death was untimely. Even under favourable conditions only a few years worth of consciousness was possible (not Centuries).

    Preservation of this’Ka’ or ‘etheric’ body was contingent upon the corpse remaining intact and preserved and a living attendant making sacrificial offerings of small animals to provide etheric or ‘life’ force. Soft tissues were removed from the body and kept in sealed jars beside the corpse. ‘Etheric’ energy is.the ‘blood’ of the Vampire mythos, kind of like the feeling of being ‘drained’ by a toxic individual. In this way the revenant could influence their living successors through dreams, intuitions and strange coincidence.

    Sunlight and water are the most corrosive mediums to an etheric revenant, so darkness of tombs crypts or burial mounds was essential. Earth is the protective insulation. War or disruption resulting in loss of living servants could force a revenant to venture out in search of impromptu replenishment, although this was undesirable, especially if it caused the locals to try to raid the nearby tombs to destroy corpses. The Egyptian ‘Book of the Dead’ , translated by E Wallis Budge clearly outlines these procedures and the necessity of head to remain attached and heart to be undamaged.

    “My heart-case shall not be snatched away from me, it shall not be wounded, it shall not be put in restraint if wounds are inflicted upon me.” Budge 1895 p.28.

    and

    “ I pray thee, let me not fall into rottenness, as thou lettest every god, and every goddess, and every animal, and every reptile, see corruption, when the soul hath gone out of them, after their” – Budge 1895 p.30

    and

    “ I shall not suffer injury. My eye shall not decay. The form of my face shall not disappear. My ear shall not become deaf. My head shall not be separated from my neck. My tongue shall not be removed. My hair shall not be cut off. My eyebrows shall not be shaved away, and no evil defect shall assail me. My body shall be stablished. It shall neither become a ruin, nor be destroyed on this earth.”- Budge 1895 p.30.

    The Christian practice of burying or burning corpses is antithetical to this type of thing, and it died out except in places where the use of burial mounds persisted for much longer , such as in Eastern Europe. The Voivode (Warlord) Wallachs may have picked this stuff up durimg their Middle East campaigns. Interestingly, the Americas was another place where burial mounds persisted, and amazingly you will find Transylvania University is in Kentucky, USA, where Indian burial mounds and even pyramids were uncovered (Pyramid County, Kentucky) where 9 foot tall giant corpses were exhumed.

    https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/kentucky/8-things-archaeologists-ky/

    Even more amazingly, it seems our fearless technocratic corporate leaders have joined in the quest for immortality , and they are cryogenically freezing their own corpses in record numbers and at great expense, in the hope that technology will someday be able to reanimate them. For example billionaire investor Peter Thiel and Googles chief executive Ray Kurzweil. These cryogenically frozen corpses are positioned inverted for liquid burial, like the Norse Kings of old, hoping to reach immortality in the halls of Valhalla.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/company-will-freeze-your-dead-body-200-000-n562551

    This makes conditions ripe for a Vampire revival, and i would definitely not live anywhere near one of these facilities. Who knows how much of the knowledge of the Ancient Egyptians crazy rich power hungry people like this have been able to recover ! . Are emojis the new hieroglyphs ?. Creepy stuff.

    As an aside , maybe Quincy Adams is named after President John Quincy Adams, born in Braintree, Massachusets. Adams was the only President we know of to keep an Alligator as a pet. Braintree M.A is today home to a company called Haemonetics, a blood and plasma supplier, so maybe he ‘survived’ after all . Ironic that John Quincy Adams and William H Seward were avowed opponents of slavery in ante-bellum America. JQA spent time in Russia during the reign of Czarina Catherine (TheGreat).

    Other Notes
    As an aside , Empress Wilhelmina of the Holy Roman Empire, Quuen of Bohemia failed to produce any male heirs and contracted a venereal disease (syphilis) from her husband ‘unclean’ . She is buried in a Viennese convent but her heart is buried in Imperial Crypt. Spooky. Why’d they remove her heart ?

    47 degrees North (mentioned in the book) the Northern limit of the constellation Scorpio, ruler of dex, death and Dark Lord Dracos.

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    • As a commited heathen, I really have a hard time understanding why Christianity ever took off anywhere except under pain of death and torture. But in Egypt and Greece it makes sense. The underlying meta of Christianity is a marriage of Egyptian and Hellenic philosophies. Originally, mummification was a natural process in Egypt, as burying someone in the western desert creates a mummy (a dried out husk) without any chemical intervention. So the afterlife was universally accessible. As the dynastic national epoch ended with Persian/Greek occupation, the elaborate rituals required and special equipment (like canopic jars)…an afterlife was guarenteed only to those who could afford the accoutrements…and In Greece, not even nobles had an afterlife. You just wandered the underworld as a sort of ghost. Christianity offered a sort of universal afterlife. So it’s not a wonder Christianity is still a powerful force in Egypt even today after centuries of repression. Pharaonic Egypt’s peculiar afterlife beliefs have had an influence on modern vampire mythology in large part thanks to HP Lovecraft’s fiction. I don’t think the bronze age egyptians had vampires figuring in their folklore. Snake related spirits tended to have a bigger role as desert demons.

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  5. I’ve listened to Pasulka on a podcast and found it quite worrisome that her claims of the Invisible college, materials from other galaxies, etc were not scrutinised more by the host. She appears to be too enamoured by her own experience to be objective and doesn’t appear to be too bothered by it.

    It might be worth mentioning that since your Oshana disclosure your discerning analysis hasn’t suffered but a certain lightness can be felt in the texts. It’s less desperate and anguished. Sounds like serious progress if I can ‘sense’ it by reading your posts.

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    • It is worth mentioning and great to hear it! (My wife confirms it so I will take it as solid)

      Openly expressing my anguish & desperation recently on Lim Radio might have helped also.

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      • Good to hear, it’s always those close to us who recognise genuine change, for better or worse.

        Saturday is the only day of the week that I can count on to spend with my family. So far, I have missed every single Linimal Radio broadcast. However, I just discovered that I can listen to previous shows under “Showreel”. Shame I can’t download them to listen on the go. From what I’ve heard, a great platform to add to the blog and podcast.

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  6. A great premise for a science fiction novel is that UFOs and ET are real and aliens. But that far from being benebolent space brothers o diabolical an malevolent destructors, they’re just as confused and beset by trauma as we are.
    I’m already working on a novel, so people feel free to take the idea and run with it!

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      • Thanks. I’ve begun work. The Skrauss on Twitter has really been a great help encouraging me. Probably without even really knowing it. Parapolitical and Occult researchers can be divisive and cruel, but I’ve fell in with a god crowd I think.

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  7. That was a five star ride through the galaxy of the mind. Of course no one know for certain what the end will look like but knowing something of the past and the motivations behind those who came before tells us something of what may have been planned for millions of years. Some claim that we humans are not the first to inhabit this Earth. These people died out leaving their spirits to roam the Earth in search of a body to inhabit. Plenty of evidence for this in Holy Scriptures. But I digress. Excellent read here and I love the last line especially.
    Thank you Jasun.

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  8. Jasun,

    I’m getting ready to post your review and excerpt the opening paragraphs on the sundry UFO groups on Faceborg that are all focused on TTSA. I have broached the subject there of competing demonologies interpreting UFO/ETs— distinguishing between the Fundamentalist Christian beliefs about Satan vs. the Levenda/Lovecraftian beliefs about Cthulu.

    I have one quibble though with your word choice which I highlight below.

    The main way in which they converge—besides referring to high-level anonymous government and scientific sources—is that, light or dark side of “the phenomenon,” both omit aspects that might seriously undermine a supernatural, extraterrestrial, or transcendental explanation for the UFO.

    Since TTSA presently pushes the ETH (Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis) as over against the IDH (Inter-Dimensional Hypothesis — with its subset the DH=Demon Hypothesis), wouldn’t a better word choice be “interdimensional?”

    I realize that Levenda hawks the IDH and pre-Christian DH, but the rank and file at TTSA, its cadre of fanboys and girls are all for the ETH and very much ignore Levenda and the demonic.

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