The year was 1947, a decisive turning point in our National Security State’s history. The Hot War was over: Nazis shot down, Japanese bombed out. Democracy had been saved, but there was a problem: a massive War Machine still smoking, smoldering like a Lucky Strike left over in the ashtray of our World War effort. And, things were getting colder — colder than a Siberian gulag. Put another way: out of the Manhattan Project, an alien child was born.
The first child of the Manhattan Project was, of course, the Atomic Bomb. The project itself cost about $2 billion in 1940s money, and employed around 100,000 people — the vast majority being Americans. Yet the average American, including most of those working on the “gadget,” had no idea what their Government was up to, except that it was for the War effort. Patriots don’t ask too many questions, like other citizens who do not wish to be jailed or ostracized. Asking too many questions: Just don’t do it, OK?
Cliches to live by. Nevertheless, it seems that the success of the Manhattan Project — and especially the successful cloaking of this genocidal Government program — led our Leaders of the late 1940s into fashioning a permanently secretive security apparatus, codified into Law by the National Security Act of 1947. The United States Federal Government has been manifestly militaristic ever since.
1947, incidentally, is also the year of the now-famous Roswell event, in which either a military weather balloon, or an alien spacecraft, crash-landed near the New Mexico town of Roswell. Prior to 1947, UFOs, or Unidentified Flying Objects (a term coined by the military) didn’t exist in the common cultural vernacular. At that time, Soviet Russians were the aliens that Americans were being told to be afraid of, not extraterrestrials. Today, of course, this fear has apparently morphed into an “Army of Hondurans” marching through Mexico to menace our sacred Southern Border, but that’s another story…
In the meantime, between 1947 and Now, somehow, some way, the UFO phenomenon has become a threatening thread woven into the fabric of contemporary American folklore. As our Federal Government has lifted off further — founding-farther-land further — from its rhetorically democratic matrix, or bio-political seed-pod, the popular belief in UFOs has both broadened and deepened — incredibly! Fairly recently, in fact, it has been revealed that the Pentagon maintained a top-secret program specifically obsessed with extraterrestrials. This clandestine DoD desk, known as the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, operated from 2007 to 2012, gobbling up over $20 million along the way. One is tempted to reference Unidentified Flying Tax Dollars in this context…
The United States Air Force, another child of 1947 (like its siblings CIA and NSA), also looked into the UFO phenomenon. Project Blue Book, the Air Force entity studying the UFO story, investigated over 12,000 reported UFO sightings between 1947 and 1969, before Blue Book was terminated in 1970. Bye, bye, Blue Book, because we never saw you leave. Come to think of it: we never even saw you slip, slide, or slither into our Government. You were just there — and not there — all that time!
In our own moment, today, with that Manhattanite alien project Donald Trump ring-leading the American political flying saucer circus: it sure seems like “UFO” equally signifies “Unidentified Federal Object,” our “One Nation under Drone” Government, which is entirely alien to most Americans. Frankly, since at least 1947, we’ve all been not exactly privy to this “Unidentified Federal Object,” with its labyrinthine lairs and tentacles beyond tentacles: its reach and over-reach. The Truth may be “out There,” but, in our Nation’s Capital, all’s swaddled in secrecy: so the National Security Act of 1947 decreed. If American troll farmers posed as Russian troll farmers to “hack” the 2016 quadrennial election, for example, who would be the wiser? Robert Mueller? Anyone who paid attention to the hijacked Honduran election of November 2017 would tend to believe that anything was possible where “democratic” elections are concerned. As in Honduras the United States, it appears that we have a Government rather more above than of the People; in other words, or letters: that Thing’s a UFO! Shelter in place, citizens!
In provisional conclusion, as an American — or Tall Gray from Honduras, perhaps? — who has never seen a UFO, I simply say: “E.T. me, Washington, D.C.!”
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