Driving to Arcata and back, Garrett and I had a chance to catch several episodes of Coast to Coast AM, the popular paranormal radio program. One of the more interesting segments we caught was with Art Bell interviewing a Dr. Steven Greer, who made some bold claims that SETI, the organization tasked with scanning space for signals from extraterrestrial life, has indeed been receiving signals that they believe originate from intelligent alien life.

However, he claims that one of his three anonymous sources said that as soon as they tapped into the frequencies which bore these alien signals, they began receiving jamming frequencies from an earth-bound organization, which he labeled as the NSA. It was an interesting hour-long discussion which never really conveyed much of any actual solid information. If Greer really did know anything, he wasn’t sharing anything beyond this simple and unsubstantiated rumor. But Art Bell seemed very excited about the whole thing.

Whether or not I believe any of it though is another story entirely. But Greer did provide one of the most compelling reasons I’ve ever heard as to why an alien presence might not be revealed if it really did exist and the government knew about it. He said that if the powers that be acknowledged they were in communication with ET’s, then they would also have to acknowledge that these beings had landed on earth, which would also mean they would have to acknowledge that we were in the possession of technology far in advance of our current state. More explosive than anything though is simply that we would have to admit that we had technology (from the alien craft) which made oil and fossil fuels completely obsolete - whether that would be a so-called Zero Point energy or something else entirely. And this would simply not happen because it would imbalance existing power and money structures: oil companies and the families and nations whose wealth is built on top of them.

In the past, I’ve personally operated under the notion that governments would suppress alien contacts because they wouldn’t want to cause panic or rioting and because they wouldn’t want to invalidate traditional religions - which themselves are control mechanisms. While this may have some truth to it, Greer’s analysis makes a more intuitive sense to me, especially in relation to my recent explorations of what I believe to be the underlying philosophy of the technocratic elite. By looking at the own words of the founders of the Illuminati, we can see that they have always intended to break the power of churches and replace it with scientific civic religion. So why would protecting churches be of prime importance if that were indeed their sentiment?

Another correlation this pulled into place for me was something that ufologist Jacques Vallee and others refer to as the control mechanism of the interdimensional (ultraterrestrial) hypothesis of UFO’s. Wikipedia explains it like this:

According to this theory, the phenomenon manifests itself as a control mechanism, whose function appears to be to challenge the observer’s accepted notions of reality, by appearing to be things that common sense would disregard as being impossible, and in our modern age, as technological objects which always seem to appear to be one step ahead of our own technological horizon.

By breaking the deepest taboos of society, the phenomenon thereby gradually reinforces a permanent change in the perception of that society, by the propagation of malicious memes and erroneous belief systems. Such a change appears to undermine society’s belief in established authority, both governmental and scientific, which ridicules the phenomena and those that believe in it.

That idea has always intrigued me, but it’s always missed something in my understanding of it. If we plug in Greer’s ideas about why alien contact is being supressed though, then we reach and interesting place with it. The “control mechanism” theory would then say something like that aliens have been in contact with the rulers of this world. But the rulers chose to keep it a secret, so as not to upset their own power, and to enhance their power by gradually unveiling technological and other innovations that they learned from it. Under this reading we could speculate that this in turn angered the aliens who intended to grant these boons and to connect with all of humanity. And so the aliens have been circumventing earthly authority and trying to directly connect to individual people, showing them great visions and urging them to share these visions with humanity. The purpose would then be to break the control mechanisms of the powers that be and sort of “astroturf” directly to the people.

While I’m not sure if this is “true” or not, it certainly has a nice satisfying fictional feel to it. The thing that remains to be seen of course would be if these beings have our best intentions at heart. Also, a more broad and traditionally paranoid question would be: is this announcement on Coast to Coast nothing more than harvesting the early seeds of a plan unfolding to make us think aliens are here? A certain line of speculation would have us believe that this is the method by which a one world government would finally be formed: by faking (or perhaps revealing a real one?) a threat which will cause us all to band together (a la the movied Independence Day). For more down that road, see my article: The Coming of the Universal Adversary.

One other footnote I wanted to tack onto this conversation: why is Coast to Coast AM on such a blatantly right-wing radio station, featuring the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity? Why is that shrill political context the vehicle of choice for the dissemination of strange ideas in probably the most visible paranormal/conspiracy outlet that mainstream media has to offer?