College Days

What do I miss most about my early college days? The “bull sessions”. We would be sitting around killing time and someone would throw out a proposition. The best were propositions that rearranged disparate observations and facts to present a different picture. We would debate it. Part of the process was finally ridiculing it or concluding it might have some real merit and elaborating on it.

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There were a large number of UFO sightings in the 1950s. The public was in a panic. The Air Force established a very public investigation called “Project Blue Book”. It was supposed to be a systematic study of aerial phenomenon. The study ran for years assigning most sightings to mundane causes. They highly publicized sightings they could explain and pushed into obscurity those they could not.

“Project Blue Book” was officially closed down in 1969 with no fanfare or real explanation. The scientist that was the public visible head of the project, years later claimed the project was not set up to discover the truth. It was a PR campaign. He later recanted his statement.

There was a British produced science fiction television show by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson in 1970. The television show was “UFO”. It had one very intriguing plot assumption. The assumption that there was a parallel ultra secret advanced military organization charged with combating UFOs. The regular military did not know of its existence.

The 1950s and into the 1980s were the “Cold War” years. We were in a life and death struggle with the Soviet Union. Everything was secret. It is not hard to imagine America taking the approach to aliens depicted in the television show “UFO”.

The government’s “Brookings Report”, commissioned by NASA in 1960, asserted that knowledge of extra-terrestrials would cause havoc to our civilization.

Stealth planes have been around since 1979 and yet they were only publicly acknowledged a decade or so ago.

You will have a hard time searching the internet to find that NASA was under the Defense Department or that it had a mandate that included a public space exploration and a military support. All mention has been scrubbed.

President John F. Kennedy's offer to convert the Apollo lunar landing program into a joint project to explore the Moon with Soviet and U.S. astronauts. Soviet Premiere Nikita S. Khrushchev first said no. He reversed himself in early November 1963 and decided to accept. On November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas President John F. Kennedy was assassination.

Robert F. Kennedy made it known he would make the offer again to the Soviets if elected.

What would be so important about getting into space quickly that a combined effort was seriously in the offering?

Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi officer and scientist, was the leader of the successful American missile program. But his passion for rockets was known to be his sense of urgency to get into space. He envisioned moon and Mars missions. Why the urgency?

America landed on the moon with the Apollo Missions. There were 7 missions and rumored that there was an 8^th which failed.

Suppose the race to the Moon was really about the possibility of alien technology being discovered on believed moon bases. Suppose after seven missions nothing useful was discovered beyond things of a purely archeological nature. After all, if there was something important there, the Soviet Union would have continued its efforts to land there, even if they were second. But the Soviet Union chose another path. They chose to go in space and stay there. What we call the International Space Station is a Russian vehicle.

There is a persistent rumor America is reverse engineering alien technology.

There is a legal requirement that any discovery by SETI [Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence] must remain secret. The American Government and a select few other nations will decide if it should be or ever be announced to the public.

This is the proposition.

Aliens influence us.

There is a missing link to human development. It seems modern man spring into creation. There is wide spread mention of visitors from the stars throughout ancient societies. The government’s actions appear to be those of someone not dismissive of aliens, but someone that is certain. The government has used a masterful approach to secrecy. Make anyone that seriously questions the issue or comes forward the subject of derision.

Propaganda when you hear it

I recall in the 1980s hearing an electrical utility commercial that was repeatedly broadcasted. They couched it as a public service message. The Commercial admonished, “…conserve electricity so we [electric company] do not have to build new electric generating plants”. I had to do a “double take” the first time I hear it. The forecast for national electricity usage at that point in time was for it to go nearly double. I knew from other advertisements that a new electric plant takes 2 to 4 years to build. This approach to electricity made absolutely no sense, unless you realize the price goes up in proportion to supply. The electric companies were looking to dramatically increase rates down the road without any new investment. The Commercial was propaganda to lull the public.

I recall several decades ago a semi-documentary saying why China will never get ahead. It asserted the problem was Asians do things in groups. They lacked our American rugged individualism. I again did a “double take”. I had been a Boy Scout and Explorer. It was team training and how to accomplish things as a group. I had watched hours of old war movies with the premise of success based on coordinated effort. I had also watched Cowboy movies. The Cowboys never built anything or participated in government. They rode off into the sunset. The documentary was pushing propaganda to degrade social approaches to issues.

The first episode of the HBO television show “Newsroom” started with a forum in which the proponents declared America is the greatest nation in the world. One of the panel members broke ranks and publicly stated “America is not the greatest nation in the world”. To a shocked audience he pointed out America is not the only free society. Out of 270 some nations, 180 are free societies. America is 7^th in literacy, 27^th in math, 22^nd in science, 49^th in life expectancy, 178 in infant mortality, 3^rd in median household income, 4^th in labor force, and 4^th in exports. He said we lead in two categories. The number of incarcerated per capita and defense spending. We spend more that the next 26 countries combined and 25 of them are our allies.

As you listen to politicians and others this campaign season, take what they say with a “grain of salt”. Are they talking real “nation” issues or pushing ideology and pulling emotional strings?

Be careful of the propaganda.