Tag: UFOs

The AARO Finally Has a Website And is it Part of a Zero-Sum Game?

The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) finally has a website—more than a year after it was formed.

It looks like there’s an intriguing message in the section “Coming Soon: US Government UAP-Related Program/Activity Reporting.” It says AARO will accept reports of UAP from current government employees who know of any programs or activities related to UAPs dating back to 1945.

One sentence tells you “This form is intended as an initial point of contact with AARO; it is not intended for conveying potentially sensitive or classified information.  Following the submission of your report, AARO staff may reach out to request additional detail or arrange for an informational interview.”

Several other sections provide further information and pictures and videos on UAP.

I wonder if all this is a reaction to the House Oversight Committee Hearing on UAP on July 26, 2023. Either the website has been under construction for all of last year and was just finished a couple days ago or it was just thrown together recently.

This makes me think of a couple of things, one is Dr. George Dawson’s blog post “Is This An Episode of the X-Files?” The other is an X-Files episode itself, “Zero Sum” which Sena and I just saw a couple of nights ago. We don’t remember seeing it when it first aired in 1997. You can read the Wikipedia article about the episode.

The gist of it is that Assistant Director Skinner makes a deal with the Smoking Man in which the latter will save Agent Scully’s life (she’s dying of cancer related to alien experiments) if Skinner hides the death of a postal worker who was killed by a swarm of bees carrying smallpox. This is part of a complex plot by a group called the Syndicate which is either trying to work with extraterrestrials to either exterminate the human race or save it (depending on which episode you watch) by using bees as a vehicle to transmit either smallpox or a vaccine to cure the Black Oil, which screws you up pretty bad. Part of this is my interpretation because the storyline sometimes is not clear about this to me.

Anyway, the back-and-forth actions and reactions of the characters, especially Skinner and the Smoking Man, are pretty good examples of a Zero-Sum game, loosely defined in that neither gets much of an edge on the other as they both try to counter each other’s efforts in what is probably just a power struggle from the Smoking Man’s perspective and a desperate effort to save Scully’s life from Skinner’s perspective.

Anyway, I wonder if the UAP reporters and the government (including the AARO) might be in some kind of zero-sum game. UAP reporters try to get the government to admit that Extraterrestrial Biological Entities (EABs) and Extraterrestrial spacecraft exist. But the government denies it. Neither side ever seems to get much further ahead of the other.

The Empire Fires Back

I saw this reply tweet posted to the web. It was the reply of Sean Kirkpatrick, PhD, the director of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in reply to the testimony of the witnesses at the House Committee’s UAP hearing on July 27, 2023. I’m not sure we’ll hear much more about it.

Miracle Whip with Cheese Sandwiches Attracts Extraterrestrials!

We finally had lunch with Miracle Whip and American cheese sandwiches a few days ago. They were delicious! An extraterrestrial even showed up, begging for a bite.

Miracle Whip sometimes attracts ETs. I’m surprised more people don’t try this method of getting photo evidence for the existence of these creatures.

Sena is still planning to make Beignets sometime in the near future. She did make some really tasty funnel cakes though, using that Southern Living cake mix.

House Oversight Committee UAP Hearing Today

We watched the House Oversight Committee UAP Hearing today and it was one of the most interesting presentations we’ve seen in a long while.

I make fun of the topic a lot but I thought all the witnesses were credible. In my opinion, the most credible witness today was retired Commander David Fravor of the U.S. Navy. His sense of humor and down-to-earth (no joke intended) demeanor lent credibility to the issue of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.

I especially liked Fravor’s advice for anybody reporting UAPs: “Don’t make the fish bigger than it is.

David Grusch, a former U.S. intelligence officer, often deferred answering certain questions because the answer would have meant revealing classified information. Ryan Graves, a former fighter pilot for the Navy, emphasized the need for a safe way to let military and civilian witnesses describe their encounters with UAPs.

There will likely be another meeting, one which would allow David Grusch to be more open to answering questions involving classified information.

Thoughts on Extraterrestrial TV Shows

A couple of nights ago, I watched a few TV shows on the Travel Channel about UFOs, extraterrestrial abductions, implants, and whatnot. I think there was some sort of marathon given that it was the Independence Day weekend.

Anyway, I was surprised to see Marc D’Antonio on a show called Alien Invasion: Hudson Valley. The story is about a community of people there who report many encounters with extraterrestrials. I’m used to watching The Proof Is Out There on the History Channel, hosted by congenial and humorously skeptical Tony Harris. On that show, D’Antonio is one of the “analysts” who appraise photos submitted as evidence for the paranormal. He’s always pretty skeptical and presents a scientific demeanor.

However, D’Antonio is also a MUFON investigator (which I found out later) and on the Hudson Valley show, he gave a detailed account of having been visited by an extraterrestrial, lost time, and woke up later in his bed, covered in his own blood, later seeing a doctor who removed some big foreign object from his nose, which he reported had probably been implanted there by the extraterrestrial. He told the anecdote matter-of-factly and I was struck by his non-scientific attitude.

I guess he and many others like him are actors in this flood of UFO TV shows which are very entertaining and give the appearance of being investigative in their purpose. D’Antonio appeared to be an actor, which led me to doubt the authenticity of his role on The Proof Is Out There.

They kicked around the idea that extraterrestrials were implanting objects in people to track the ones who are Rh negative blood type. They suggested that extraterrestrials need to use humans as some kind of blood bank. That reminds me of a line from Men in Black II:

Newton: Gentlemen, before I start the tape, one more thing—what’s up with anal probing? I mean, do aliens really travel billions of light years just to…

On the other hand, the Hudson Valley thing was a confusing mix of ghost hunters and alien hunters. They used a device that I think they called an electromagnetic field (EMF) meter, which you can purchase on Amazon along with many other ghost hunting gadgets. The women actors shrieked predictably as they reported feeling invisible hands stroke their hair.

I thought the show was supposed to be about extraterrestrials, not ghosts. They tried to cover the bases by tossing out terms like interdimensional beings, ghosts, and extraterrestrials. Most IMDb reviewers generally panned the show as being unbelievably bad, which is right.

A program previous to that was about some podiatric surgeon named Roger Leir who removed a lot of foreign objects out of somebody’s foot and then claimed they were implanted by aliens. Leir sent the objects to a lab, which identified them as being made of common elements. Somehow, he got the idea they were from outer space.

But they didn’t mention that in the show. They brought in some other expert who claimed they were parts of alien nanotechnology. The only thing I could find out about that was on, oddly enough, an Ohio State University web page article about Leir that seemed out of place on the OSU website. The article was seemingly supportive of his claim that the objects were alien implants.

I think the shows should be more clearly identified as being entertainment in nature, not investigative. If they want to get more viewers, they might try adopting the Mountain Monsters approach, which is to make a parody about the subject. At least the humor would valuable.

Why Is It So Hard to Be A Human?

I wish I could have made the title of this post “Why It’s So Hard to Be a Human.” But that would mean I know why it’s so hard to be a human.

The reason this comes up is because of a song I heard last Friday night on the Big Mo Blues Show on KCCK radio in Iowa. The title is “Hard To Be A Human.” I’ve never heard of the vocalist, Bettye LaVette, who has been around a long time. A musician named Randall Bramblett wrote the song and he’s been around forever too, although I just learned of him as well.

I’m going to connect this song with the paranormal show I usually watch on Friday nights, “The Proof is Out There,” which I watch after I listen to the Friday Night Blues with Big Mo.

The show lives on videos from people who report seeing and hearing things like UFOs and Bigfoot or whatever that’s paranormal. There are a lot of fakes and conventional explanations uncovered on “The Proof is Out There,” including UFO videos sent in by contributors.

The reason I’m connecting the song “Hard To Be A Human,” to the paranormal is the letter “A” in the title. There’s another song with a similar title, but without the “A.” In my mind, leaving out the article “A” makes it clear that song is about humans for humans.

By contrast, the song with the article “A” makes me think of extraterrestrials. “A human” could imply that there might be some other life form aside from humans. Of course, there’s no such song as “Hard To Be An Extraterrestrial” (or, if you’ve read Douglas Adams’ book, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” maybe “Hard To Be A Vogon”). Insert “Martian” if that makes thinking about this any easier, which it probably won’t.

There is a song entitled “Hard To Be Human,” which I think is really about how difficult it is to be human, without considering whether there could be any other beings besides the human ones.

Just adding the specific article “A” in front of the word “human” led me to wonder if you could interpret the song in a galactic sense. Now, I have no problem admitting that all this is probably just because of the temporal juxtaposition of the song and the paranormal TV show.

On the other hand, I have this thought. While I couldn’t find the full lyrics to “Hard To Be A Human,” I could understand some of them. I could discern underlying themes suggestive of Christianity. There are definite references to the Bible, such as walking in the garden “apple in my hand”, the lyric “I’m just another life form,” and “First He made the mountains, then He filled up the sea; but He lost his concentration when he started working on you and me.”

I’m willing to concede that the “just another life form” phrase might have been restricted to just the life forms on planet Earth. However, might it suggest that God made beings (and mistakes) on other planets and their inhabitants?

I hope these references are familiar to at least some readers, because I think the point of the song might go beyond the everyday struggle of being human. I think there might be an attempt to raise the notion of trying to compare the sense of being a human with that of some other kind of being not from this planet.

The older I get, the less sure I am that a human is the only kind of being in the universe. It’s a big universe. If we’re not the only life form in the universe, could life be harder for other life forms?

Probably the answer is no. I don’t see extraterrestrials in millions of flying saucers blotting out the sun in a desperate attempt to move here. Inflation is outrageous. And, after all, it’s pretty hard to be a human.

Thoughts on UFOs and UAPs

I was either too sleepy the other night or briefly abducted by extraterrestrials to stay up for the new spin-off TV show, Beyond Skinwalker Ranch. They hired new actors—I mean researchers. The original show, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, is actually interesting and I usually watch it. The actors are always firing off rockets into the sky to provoke either the extraterrestrials or the skinwalkers.

One of the cast members is an actual scientist. He’s Dr. Travis Taylor, PhD, an astrophysicist. He’s in charge of firing off those rockets. There’s a Wikipedia article on him. He has several degrees and has written many books. He’s a pretty good actor.

The other night, the show hosted a guest who was the guy who came up with the alternative name for UFOs: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). I can’t remember his name but he was used as bait to attract attention from the ranch, which is sometimes conceptualized as being a kind of mysterious living entity, capable of ignoring humans and not creating any weirdness—and at other times causing major atmospheric disturbances and UAP activity that makes everybody on the show say things like: “We’ve got to get Travis’s eyes on this piece of dead animal skin—it’s just crazy!”

I’m not sure how any of the cast can keep themselves from laughing. On the other hand, they’ve managed to involve the Utah state attorney general. He has the same tailor as Johnny Cash, apparently. He supports the actors and seems to know better than to try and upstage any of them. He wants to know what’s flying in the air in his state. Judging from the number of sick and dead mutilated animals strewn around the 512-acre property, my guess is that it’s mainly buzzards.

The show might talk to the guy who recently identified himself as an ex-intelligence official and whistleblower who reports that the federal government is hiding numerous UAPs, many of which have no doubt been crashed on Earth by drunken extraterrestrials, none of whom have ever taken a defensive driving course and are doing hard time in underground prisons in Utah for operating UAPs while under the influence of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, an alcoholic beverage described by researcher Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Try to say that sentence in one breath, I double-dog dare you.

I think the producers of the skinwalker show should consider hiring another actor, Nick Pope, the retired employee of the British Ministry of Defense. He investigated UAPs when they were still called UFOs, which of course made him a laughingstock, but that all changed when the name was changed to UAP. He is now a famous member of the Ancient Aliens team and the only one sane enough to persuade people from actually breaking down the gates of Area 51 during the Storm Area 51 crisis in 2019. He also has a Wikipedia entry. He has never publicly denied successfully completing treatment for Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster use.

Unless the new Beyond Skinwalker Ranch spinoff moves to an earlier time slot, I’ll just have to wait for the reruns. It’s probably not as funny as the original and certainly won’t equal the uproariously hilarious Mountain Monsters (which we can no longer watch because it left cable TV). Only a parody like that can top the current UAP TV program fare.

Men in Black Movie Marathon

Sena and I have favorite movies. We both like “Up” and “WALL-E.” My favorites are the Men in Black trilogy. That doesn’t mean I think the 4th sequel was bad. But I have lost count of the number of times I’ve watched the first three.

I haven’t watched them in the last several months because I couldn’t find them on cable for some reason. I’ve just learned that that there will be a marathon of the trilogy on January 14, 2023 beginning at 2:30 PM. They’ll be on the Comedy Central channel.

I’m a fan of comedy and I like the chemistry between the two main characters, Agent J and Agent K.

I have favorite lines from each movie. In the first Men in Black film, I like the exchange between the two agents after the recruitment scene following Edwards’ (the soon to be Agent J) first visit to the MIB Headquarters. They’re sitting on a park bench and K is talking about people and what they don’t know about them and extraterrestrials.

Edwards: Why the big secret? People are smart. They can handle it.

Agent K: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.

Another favorite where Agent K is showing Edwards a universal translator, one of the many wonders in the extraterrestrial technology room, which gives us a perspective on how humans rank in the universe:

Agent K: We’re not even supposed to have it. I’ll tell you why. Human thought is so primitive it’s looked upon as an infectious disease in some of the better galaxies.

In MIB II, the dialogue between Newton and the Agents makes you wonder what extraterrestrials really want from us:

Newton: Gentlemen, before I play the tape, there’s just one question I need to ask; what’s up with anal probing? I mean, aliens travel billions of light years just to check out our…

Agent J: Boy, move!

This is part of the Men in Black 3 dialog between Agent J and Jeffrey Price about how to use the time travel device:

Jeffrey Price: Do not lose that time device, or you will be stuck in 1969! It wasn’t the best time for your people. I’m just saying. It’s a lot cooler now.

I remember 1969. Things are not perfect now, but they are better. What we don’t need is a “big ass neutralizer.” As long as we remember what dark times were like, we have a chance to make cooler times.

Sasquatch Cribbage Board Game!

Today was the inaugural game on our new Sasquatch cribbage board. It’s a very handsome item, made of walnut by the maker, David Sprouse, in Ferndale, Washington. His website is 3MoonsMakerSpace and he markets the boards on Etsy. It was delivered only a couple of weeks ago. It came with pegs and deck of cards. It has a hole in the back for hanging on a wall, if you want.

We played the game to 61 just for the sake of brevity since the point was to show off the board itself.

I don’t know really what to make of Bigfoot stories. Many claim to have spotted the creature way out in places like Washington state and elsewhere. There are reports of a few sightings even in Iowa.

I wonder why you never find corpses or even fossils of Sasquatch? Probably because extraterrestrials beam them up too quickly in order to harvest the fur for throw rugs for their space ships. The usual problem, of course, is getting the smell of beef jerky out of them.

Evolutionary Thoughts

By now, you’ve probably read the digital news article describing how we’re all going to evolve into beings who resemble extraterrestrials (ETs) because of our preoccupation with digital technology.

The authors describe us as eventually developing another eyelid that’ll protect us from the blue light emanating from our gadgets. Our hands will become claw-like and permanently flexed because of the way we’re always gripping our smartphones.

You’ll also develop a third hand that protrudes from your butt so you can catch your cell phone as it slips out of the back pocket of your skinny jeans. Come to think of it, that’ll also give rise to a weird new meaning for the term “butt dialing.”

Of course, the article is a criticism of our preoccupation with our gadgets, but it’s still fascinating as speculation about how creatures, including humans, evolve in response to the pressures in our environment.

This kind of thing makes me wonder whatever happened to Neanderthal. The males were huge, especially their arms, which came from frequent arm wrestling with Sasquatch for the last shred of beef jerky. Neanderthal had a very prominent brow which developed to keep snow and pterodactyl droppings out of his eyes.

And this reminds me of the discovery of the fossil of a giant creature on the Greek island of Crete in 2003 (I think). The skull had a huge nasal opening in the center of the skull. That was probably for a trunk, as in elephant trunk. But paleontologists thought it might have been the explanation for why ancient Greeks came up with stories about the terrifying one-eyed cyclops.

And what about that carp with a human-like face on the top of its head? I saw that one a week ago on the show The Proof is Out There. I thought sure Michael Primeau, the forensic video analyst on the show, would dryly dismiss it (“This video is clearly faked.”). Instead, the other experts thought it was natural. Tony summarized it as an example of the “plastic” evolution, by which I think he meant phenotypic or evolutionary plasticity. These are changes in a creature’s appearance, morphology, or physiology in response to changes in its environment. Regarding the carp, one expert opined that the face would confuse its main predator, the eel, by confusing it.

I still don’t get that one. How would the carp species even begin the evolutionary process? Does the carp just think, “Huh, I think that eel might get confused if I had a face like a human”? I get it that the changes occur at the genetic level, but how exactly does it get started?

Could you google the answer? I couldn’t find anything specific, like x plus y equals human-like face on a fish that many humans would not care to eat.

And how about writing? I wrote this blog post longhand using pen and paper, something I gave up doing years ago but which I am sort of rediscovering gradually. I had an old typewriter for a while, which gave way to something called a word processor, which was a stand-alone device made writing and editing text, and eventually I got a computer—which really messed things up.

The thing is, I can remember getting something called writer’s cramp. If you remember that, then you probably recall how painful it was. Back then, did anyone ever wonder whether that would lead to the evolution of a claw like hand?

Could evolution have consequences pertinent to people who are always looking up at the sky looking for UFOs? Some of them, for some unexplained reason, never seem to have a smartphone with them. Anyway, could their eyes migrate, carp-like, to the top of their foreheads to counter neck strain? And could this lead to the evolution of a third eye in the center of the forehead? It would prevent falling into manholes. There are other consequences from evolving into a cyclops.

We would be adept at forging thunderbolts. We would be very talented at cultivating vineyards and herding sheep and goats. But our tempers would still be pretty bad, even worse. We would abandon courts of law and ignore justice. We would be violent giants, feasting on the flesh of ordinary humans. All this because we kept searching the sky, hoping to see UFOs and see ETs, which we would eventually resemble anyway because of our preoccupation with our devices.

I have a pretty good supply of pens and paper.