A B-Feature Prime Time Retro-Special

 by

Colin Bennett

Part 1

Exopolitics, or the Thinking Ufologist’s Crumpet 

NOTE: In case anyone should think that the following article is a put-down of UFOs and Ufology, the author would like to say that he had a spectacular UFO sighting some years ago. As a direct result of that experience he lost some time. He therefore regards himself as a contactee in the twilight zones of le grande illusion. So there!

What is Exopolitics?

The Men

The Exopolitical movement is a radical sector of the Disclosure Movement in the United States. This movement aims to put pressure on the government to open secret files which will show that extraterrestrial aliens are here on planet Earth in great numbers. It assumes that we must therefore try to relate our own human society to such alien social structures in a deeply political way. But the movement doesn’t possess Professor Hawking’s caution as regards extraterrestrial aliens, see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1268712/Stephen-Hawking-Aliens-living-massive-ships-invade-Earth.html

In contrast to Hawking’s careful evaluation and warning, Exopolitical people such as the bloggers Stephen Greer, Steve Hammond, Marcia McDowall, and Ed Komarek all claim that humanoid-looking aliens mix freely with human beings and exercise a degree of control over the affairs of humanity. Exopolitics claims also that the armed forces of the world and their associated State Intelligence sections are aware of the aliens, but apparently, human power-brokers must keep the presence of extraterrestrial creatures a secret in case of public panic. The movement also claims that the famed military-industrial complex is trying to re-engineer alien technology, but the trouble is (so they say) that most of the major principles are almost impossible to understand in terms of Earth science.

Exopolitics as a continually updated Web meme has had considerable success.

It has now quite outgrown somewhat earlier crude prototypal memes such as SERPO, Project Camelot, and the much more sophisticated Caret phenomenon (see my Feature  “Meme Wars: We Have an Agenda” in Reality Uncovered).

Most leading Exopoliticians such as Michael Salla and Alfred Webre claim that the first tentative steps have already been taken as regards contact between human beings and aliens.In April 7, 2005, Salla founded the Exopolitics Institute, based in Kealakekua, Hawaii. On June 4, 2006, Al Jazeera published an article discussing a letter Salla had sent them informing them about the possibility of alien intervention in order to prevent a nuclear attack on Iran by the United States of America. From June 9 – 11, 2006, he assembled and took part in the Hawaii Conference on World Peace and Extraterrestrial Civilizations. His current Exopolitical interests have led him to assert that the undisclosed presence of extraterrestrials is one of the primary forces behind international conflict. He further states that the claims of various “whistleblowers” (informants) suggest that as many as sixteen different extraterrestrial civilizations are currently interacting with the human race while a number of other extraterrestrial races monitor Earth affairs, although they avoid contact. Most of Salla’s claims are derived from individuals who say they have contacted extraterrestrials. That he does not state that he has met such himself has aroused much (mostly negative) debate in the UFO field. In conversation with the Washington Post, Salla pointed to evidence widely available on the internet as a source for his research on extraterrestrial visitation: “There’s a lot of stuff on the Internet, and I just went around and pieced it together.”

Alfred Webre helped draft the Exopolitical Citizen Hearing in 2000 with the rather more conservative and cautious Stephen Bassett and he serves as a member of the Board of Advisers at the Exopolitics Institute. He is also congressional coordinator for the Exopolitical Disclosure Project and International Director of the Institute for Cooperation in Space.

In 1977, he joined Stanford Research Institute (SRI International) in Menlo Park, California, as a futurist for the Center for the Study of Social Policy. His responsibilities were the studies in alternative futures, innovation diffusion, and social policy applications for clients including the Carter White House Extraterrestrial Communications Study, the National Science Foundation, U.S. Congress (Office of Technology Assessment), the U.S. Department of Energy, and the State of California (Energy Plan).

Whilst that may sound impressive it is best to take a cautionary look at Webre’s latest thoughts on:

http://www.examiner.com/x-2912-Seattle-Exopolitics-Examiner~y2010m4d12-Exopolitics-researcher-develops-evidencebased-typology-of-extraterrestrial-civilizations

The language is a straight take from the BBC TV comedy series “Yes Minister,” with a touch of Dr. Who:

“Recent whistleblower, direct witness and documentary evidence have led to the development of new typology of extraterrestrial civilizations.  The new typology establishes the following types for extraterrestrial civilizations and extraterrestrial governance bodies as concerns extraterrestrial law.  The new typology for extraterrestrial civilizations was developed by Exopolitics author and researcher Alfred Lambremont Webre, JD, MEd in response to a request by Oxford University Press, a department of the University of Oxford, U.K.The new evidence-based typological model divides extraterrestrial civilizations into (A) Extraterrestrial civilizations (3rd dimension), that is (1) Solar system civilizations (3rd dimension) based in the third dimension in our solar system, such as the intelligent human civilization living under the surface of Mars that reportedly enjoys a strategic relationship with the United States government; and (2) Deep space civilizations (3rd dimension), that is, intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations that are based in the third dimension and on a planet, solar system, or space station in our or another galaxy or in some other location in this known physical, third dimension universe. (B) Hyper-dimensional civilizations, that is intelligent civilizations that are based in dimensions or universes parallel or encompassing our own dimension and that may use technologically advanced physical form and/or transport when entering our known dimension or universe.  With regard to extraterrestrial law and governance, the new extraterrestrial civilizations typology identifies (C) Extraterrestrial governance authorities: Legally constituted extraterrestrial governance authorities with jurisdiction over a defined territory, such as the Milky Way Galactic Federation, which has been empirically located in replicable research.”

In the light of this, perhaps Webre should be booked immediately for a one-man show. Love the mock-authoritarian voice, the name-dropping, and the (obligatory) suggestion of connections to Intelligence Agencies. There follows the equally obligatory nudge-nudge about “secret” knowledge of ET daring-do. Anyone who knows anything about such Agencies knows that their sobriety and conservatism alone plus their extremely limited  gumshoe imagination (let alone their limited  finances) would prohibit them from having anything to do with foil-hat child-brides such as Webre, Basiago, or the Jerry Springer Ufologists and many others of that ilk, such as Bill “SERPO”  Ryan, who fled America leaving behind a pile of bad debts and whole tribes of ripped-off women wielding hot cattle-castrating irons.

I couldn’t find any mention of Webre on the Oxford University Press web site (as he claims). But perhaps that is to be expected. As a self-inflicted act of postmodern annihilation, Webre’s Web newspaper the “Seattle Politics Examiner” is a Dada composition updated to the Web Age. It should be read out loud to Schoenberg, or old Gerard Hoffnung’s Symphony for Vacuum Cleaners.We might ask, do these people ever come down from this cloud-cuckoo mountain top? If not, they are prime candidates for paranoia and heart attacks. Being vastly over-inspired, and seeing aliens everywhere, they are in need of depressants. Perhaps  they might do something ordinary for relief all round, like eating black pudding outside a rain-swept chip shop on an equally black evening in black Bolton, UK with one leaning street lamp for illumination and inspiration (I apologise for not knowing the U.S. equivalents here – perhaps someone might provide them).

Yes, Webre’s situation is one where a little applied depression could be positively therapeutic. Perhaps he should try a Parliamentary debate, or English cricket, but then aliens never appear within such marvellously prosaic scenarios. They always are seen in glamorous sexy high-tech contexts. The alien equivalents to debt collectors or cobblers are not seen. Aliens are always pure, powerful, and all-knowing. They do not wipe their noses on their sleeve, or steal the wallets or wives of other aliens, and they always appear to be marvellously clever. No alien sweeps the streets, falls into despair or fails in ambition or in love. Also there are no alien equivalents to British political brains, most of which resemble empty Tammany Hall broom cupboards.

What is missing therefore in Webre’s alien cosmos is love and laughter, and the absurdity of human-style anarchy of cock-ups throughout the entire field of consciousness. Exopolitical aliens are far too efficient, all-knowing, and intellectually specific (in translation!!) to be “real,” but then perhaps “reality” in the old commonly accepted mechanical sense is beside the point.

THE BLOGGERS

The blogger Victor Martinez is a kind of no-holds-barred amplifier for all the amazing streams of twisted Exopolitical consciousness. One imagines that in theory he could be given anything that could possibly be imagined, including winged horses, fairies seen in space stations or one of David Icke’s lizard-skinned aliens, and he transmit these enthusiastically (in headline fashion) as “real” existences and common experiences. This is the supreme expression of Exopolitics as art form in that art form indeed does express truth, but moral truth as distinct from mechanical truth as claimed by Exopoliticians.

Martinez is said to be a former federal employee “with an interest in space, defense and current affairs.” Recipients of his e-mail news items include a wide variety of people interested in “emerging and leading-edge scientific developments.” Well, for “scientific developments” try this for size: a summary of the recent transmissions by blogger Gary Bekkum, whose book “Spies, Lies, and Polygraph Tape” supplies the Full Monty of Exopolitical legend: black ops, mysterious government agents, alien daring-do, secret government technology and stories of aliens in the White House. Bekkum, along with Martinez, is largely responsible for the recent revival of the SERPO movement. This takes the form of a Web-born equivalent to the kiddies’ boxed board-games of long ago, such as pass-the-parcel. The moves in the game include “secret knowledge,” information from “anonymous sources” and “nudge-nudge I am in touch with insiders in the government Intelligence services.”

Of course, anyone who knows anything at all about the blessed Intelligence services knows that as far as serious operational work is concerned, they would not go near such foil-hat freaks with the proverbial barge-pole. However, certainly  the more “enlightened” branches of Intelligence may use such for dark purposes of their own. Certainly movements such as Exopolitics are fed by various branches of the “security services” as if the foil-hats were packs of hungry puppies. The reason for this is that such “Intelligence agencies” are interested in the political and military aspects of the possibilities of mythological engineering. They insert a fractal, kick start it, and see what speeding hares come out of the bag. They will insert “false agenda” and “false flag” designer-memes http://alienfalseflagagenda.net/ and fit the ebb and flow of such into new “intelligent” prototypal systems of social control. This is now a well-known military direction: already the Pentagon is seeing future warfare as being essentially a battle using information-weaponry rather than a thing involving tanks and guns, aircraft and ships. Whole countries could be shut down by levels of deception involving various types of evolving technology, including mass-media technology. Such deception might indeed include rigged “alien” Exopolitical-type invasion scenarios, complete with convincing physical displays. Thus Exopolitics could well be a manipulated howl-round of well-designed confusions.

If an “enemy” is confused he is setting himself up for rapid and final destruction.

Thus Kipling’s “great game” is changing from a Sherlock Holmes and John Le Carre world into areas inconceivable by such older Intelligence systems as described by such authors. By comparison, such horse soldiers are now faced by systems which think at tank speed.

In this sense, undoubtedly modern Pop, Rock, and Art Forms generally are become involved in vast systems of comparatively bloodless persuasion.

In this area, as designer-led Exopolitical art form, Martinez offers verbal equivalents to ancient B-Feature posters where handsome muscular men rescue beautiful women in torn dresses from tentacle-waving Martians.

Here is a recent offering from Martinez. Believe this, and you will believe anything.

http://naturalplane.blogspot.com/2010/04/serpo-release-34-operation-tango-sierra.html

“The DIA contact reportedly provided information about the monitoring and intervention by U.S. officials regarding a particular extraterrestrial being posing as a human within the U.S. The contact also noted the more general issue of extraterrestrials visiting Earth who may blend in with the human population, for various reasons. the contact stated, “In reference to your repeated requests to present some new information never before disclosed to the public … I went outside of our agency to close intelligence contacts of mine and secured the following … I just received information on a highly sensitive operation code-named ‘Operation TANGO-SIERRA’ that occurred in early 1980. It involved U.S. intelligence capturing an alien being living among us.”

The Women

Laura Eisenhower, radical New-Ager, has recently joined Webre’s Exopolitical group. She has a guru, one Ki’ Lia. Like most Exopolitical web sites, a mere glance at Ki Lai’s web site does not inspire rational confidence. Ki Lai’s guru in turn is one Sergeant Clifford Stone, a “whistle blowing” SERPO Warrior Number 1 if ever there was. This pair chase one another’s metaphysical tails and create a miniature masterpiece based on overlapping metaphors until a reader is quite breathless, drunk with stories  drawn from the four corners of belief:

“Ki’ Lia, who has worked as an accomplished innovative and multidisciplinary design consultant with many renowned pioneers, corroborates the background of how Ms. Eisenhower was targeted as a subject by a shadowy group behind the secret Mars colony, using time travel and exotic targeting techniques.”

 The whole Exopolitical thing is about management of the high frontier of metaphor. Everything is heightened, as in a commercial break for mint popcorn. There are no dogs sick in kitchens, no spilt chip-pans, and no urgent demands from debt collectors.

Ki’ Lia states:

“After years of friendship, in the spring of 2006 in Washington DC, I met Laura Eisenhower and her new romantic partner, who I will call Agent X.”

 Agent X? Outside a gay club, who would want a boy friend called Agent X?  Sounds like something from a Lady Ga-Ga video. But these people are suckers for subliminal embarrassment:

“He claimed to know himself as Joseph of Arimathea/Osiris/Orion and affiliated with different, interlinked secret societies, e.g, Knights Templar and Freemasons.  He and Laura quickly formed an intimate relationship, and I helped conduct a ‘Divine Union’ rites of passage for them.”

 What a load of transcendental occult responsibilities! Do they ever get time to fry a sausage, or ask themselves whether Agent X is really an unemployed down-at-heel lift attendant on the make from downtown Detroit? Let’s hope Laura didn’t give this risky geezer any money as he shoots one of the best chat-up lines ever conceived:

“Agent X revealed that his group had identified [Laura Eisenhower] through her bloodline, as the matrilineal great-granddaughter of 34th U.S. President Eisenhower.”

 The so-called “revelation” just happens to be part of world-wide history and Laura’s relation to President Eisenhower is a “fact” witnessed by scores of books. As if inspired by this quite remarkable discovery, the pudding is quickly over-egged, as in fear of lack of metaphor. In this blog, we change planetary cultures as quickly as we change trains on a breathtaking journey. We go from Mayan prophecies to seeing Laura

“…as a unique reincarnation of Magdalene/Sophia/Isis (ever since she was young, many psychics have recognized her). He also said his group was interested in her twin sons, who they knew as Romulus and Remus (founders of Rome)”

 Of course! Who else?

Just as there appears to be no extraterrestrial alien sewage workers, in these psychic tales no alien impoverished psychopathic cats-meat men ever appear. I mean imagine, after having paid a lot of money, a customer is told that their astral body progressed through to a 3000-year-old gang of mentally degenerate loin-clothed Dhobi Wallahs on the banks of the Ganges?  It was Sam Johnson who once remarked of the 7^th Earl of Shaftesbury: “He never dined but with an Earl.”

Meantime, Agent X soon turns out to be someone you wouldn’t trust daughter with, never mind your wallet. Ki’ Lia writes:

“They (the group around Agent X) had a list of male partners, who she (Laura) could be with in possible timelines, and he (Agent X) was one of them. They targeted her (especially her heart) and these men through electromagnetic or psychic weaponry, and indeed many men tried to destroy her throughout her life.”

 Laura appears to have a penchant for basket-case boyfriends. Why can’t she get a decent Jewish Lawyer and be done with it?

Meantime, the problems multiply. This crowd doesn’t talk about what was on the telly last night.

“Agent X admitted that he (as well as his parents) was implanted with a chip and had a multiple personality disorder…”

 This is just what Laura needs for washing the dishes and shopping as Agent X morphs into a regular Screwball Messmate of the Month:

“…which involves very sudden robotic and abusive behaviors. This is the typical profile of someone who was subjected to well-documented MK-ULTRA experiments and multi-generational occult ritual abuse.”

 This sudden update is of course derived from retail Ufology, B-feature films, and much Web conspiratorial intrigue. Ki’ Lia concludes with sounding brass and tinkling cymbals:

“Their data about Laura and her partners were seemingly gathered through a time viewing device (which they had called ‘Looking Glass’ or ‘Orion’s Cube’ or possibly through remote viewing or even time travel – all part of their cadre of top classified technologies (already disclosed in increasing black projects literature).”

 We might ask, where is Agent X now? With dyed hair, new teeth and some purloined clothes, just like Bill “SERPO” Ryan, he is probably chatting up gullible Jewish Princesses in Manhattan and spinning them UFO contact and abduction stories by the tumbrel load.

Here in this vast spectrum of New Age ideas and beliefs are the new fairy stories of our own Age. But the difference with Exopolitics is that such are claimed as being within that dimension of Prime Time called  the “real.” What would we say if someone suggested that traditional fairy stories as gathered and written up by Hans Anderson and the Brother Grimm were description of so-called “real” experiences? In Exopolitical lore, Cinderella “actually” went to the Ball, and had two Ugly Sisters.

These are the full equivalent to debates about the “actual” colour of Cinderella’s shoes and the questions are equivalent to asking “exactly” which ball Cinderella went to. Thus in Exopolitical lore, rationalism in turn is transformed into a programmable form of pantomime virtuality in which discursive reasoning becomes in turn yet another gaming option.

We can laugh, but in a sense these texts are far superior to many “scientific” documents of our time written in corporate-manager tank track prose by men from the earnest lower middle class with rows of pens in their top pockets. Conservative-paranoid and scraped of all life and imagination, most “scientific” books read like instructions on back of a pack of corn plasters. In contrast, most Exopolitical texts, when considered purely as texts, are of considerable psycho-social value in that they show important features of the psychology of image formation within the development of story technology as it seeks new kinds of power.

The Theory

 We see then that Salla’s “lot of stuff” has become a vast mythological world stretching out quite equal to that of the big war-gaming software. From being a foil-hat Jerry Springer type small Ufological movement, such as Project Camelot, , Exopolitics, like its parallel movement Scientology, has now the full attention of important and influential folk, though the faces of “scientists” (being equally managers of other rival mythologies) have yet to appear.

What makes Exopolitics different of course compared to any other similar movement in this respect is its claim for the “reality” of the extraterrestrial experience. In this respect it has no problem with what it assumes to be the sheer number of space ships and aliens which are visiting Earth, although very few people see such beings or Armadas. In this sense, Exopolitics is the direct opposite of movements which assert Holocaust Denial or denial of the original Moon Landing. Exopolitics claims existence of certain things whilst the denial movements deny existence of certain things. The psychological asymmetry here represents the differential potentials of those positive and negative forces which drive all imaginative creativity.

As a movement, Exopolitics doesn’t really fit anywhere in history except in those rare cases of religious hysteria such as the Crusades, although it might have fitted various hole-in-a-corner cultures such as witchcraft, occultism, whirling dervishes, or even Morris Dancing. It would certainly have fitted 19^th Century spiritualist movements, as most of the Exopolitical alien “contacts” and indeed space ships are as vaporous as the ectoplasmic ghosts seen by Conan Doyle and Baron von Schrenck-Notzing.

In this respect, the Exopolitical movement has to be set in the context of the apocalyptic fears and doubts of a mass-media society in crisis. The populations of the entire world are now mind-fed and controlled by a limitless stream of images, symbols and metaphors, some basic and crude, others inspired obviously by such films as the Matrix, Avatar, and Close Encounters.

Exopolitics, like many other things of a like nature, has now found a role which has given it popular power far behind 19th century movements of a similar nature.

Soap Opera

The middle classes have always lacked a good soap opera. The popular TV models have always been strictly for the sheeple, with their dumbed-down content, and simple-minded cartoon-sketches rolled out for the hoi polloi mentality and its strange appetite for countless billions of toxic images per second. The US series Frazier and Rosanne were good tries at comic subtlety, but they are from an Age now so long gone we look at them as we gaze upon Hadrian’s Wall.

Exopolitics gives the Web-powered middle classes all they ever wanted. The peasantry won’t understand Exopolitics, and the trendy Intellectuals, utterly self-isolated from any kind of “scientific” knowledge, are not bright enough for it. The ever-frightened scientists will stay away in droves and Exopolitics is far too technological for camp media folk, and far too weird and difficult for conventional “arts” folk. In the face of the claims of Exopolitics, all priests will raise their hands in horror, the sane will flee to put their heads back into their little boxes, and “scientific” Ufologists (rather like Darwinian professors scanning leaf mould with magnifying glasses) will scream for the “facts” of the Exopolitical situation to be carefully “investigated,” thoroughly  “researched,” and “put into a proper perspective.”

Like most scientists, these people are so far behind the Big Media Age they haven’t even reached the TV Age yet, never mind the cyber culture. Exopolitics as Media in the Raw, Lady GaGa, beats all Cartesian measurement.

Like the U.S. TV series “Twin Peaks,” the UK TV series, “The League of Gentlemen,” or the delightful and edifying fantasies of “factual” or “scientific” Ufology, Exopolitics fulfils therefore all the conditions of an elitist Media form. It is now feeling its strength and has quite taken over common-or-garden Old Ufology, strangling it rather like a proliferating pond-weed. Why, says Exopolitics, spend  a whole lifetime compiling merely lists of case-histories and searching for possibly non-existent alien artefacts when an alien (of a particular species) is possibly managing the big scientific corporation across high street? “Scientific” here is the word – aliens don’t appear to be interested in anything mundane or local, such as beer festivals, sex scandals of politicians, the National Lottery, or making matchbox models of Wigan Pier. They must be very boring, and they don’t make jokes about Michael Jackson’s sexuality, or Obama’s birth certificate.

Ufology as Art Form

There are UFOs and there is Ufology.

Exopolitics  represents a post-modern meme-based prototypal entertainment system. Facts and fictions do not relate to such virtual superliminal constructs as SERPO and Project Camelot, any more than they relate to the Yellow Brick Road of OZ or Bob Hope’s Road to Morocco. If anything good could be said about them, it is that they represent cerebral Pop Art of a very high standard. This is a relatively new genre of highly wrought modern social comedy: it was born between the burgeoning games systems of web virtuality, and got caught between cyber culture, science fiction hallucinations, and countless elitist conspiracies of many a kidney. Having said that, I accept that Exopolitics is an authentic form of post-modern expression, and I rank it with Thunderbirds, Mission Impossible and the UK Dr. Who.

In that it contains techno and futurist elements Exopolitics is far superior to broad-ass TV sitcoms. Once one accepts Exopolitical culture as a form of multimedia expressionism, it becomes interesting in itself. Most of these Exopolitical people are well educated, highly intelligent, powerfully motivated, quite different to the usual Pippin-style foil-hat Okies from Muskokie. That they are all most probably quite sane is an interesting psychological mystery in itself. That they do not turn into script writers is another mystery. Conventional media may be too small and conventional a form of expression.

Like the aliens of Dr. Boylan, Exopolitical  aliens are always engaged in Flash-Gordon daring-do adventures against various Men In Black cabals. Such  do not appear near gasworks or sewage treatment farms. They always appear in glamorous hi-tech inspirational backgrounds and their environment appears to be constructed of the techno world of image, symbol and metaphor rather than good alien flesh.

Undoubtedly Exopolitics is Ufology at its best as post-modern Art Form. Warhol would have loved these sculpted multimedia manifestations and their do-anything say-anything claims for human habitations on Mars and Aliens in the White House.

Exopolitics also has the purely erotic nature of instant throw-away consumerism. Let’s face it – Exopolitics gives  give good intellectual sex. It represents the thinking person’s Lady GaGa in the manner (in Britain) that “arts” TV woman Joan Bakewell once was said to represent “the thinking man’s crumpet.”

Asking Exopoliticians for “evidence” of their claims and belief is rather asking Alf the Alien or Yogi Bear what kind of ice-cream they like. “Fact” in the strictest sense cannot be applied to Big Media. The liminal memes which make up the body of  Exopolitics just don’t work that way; they are performers in a comic metaphysical drama. Exopolitics is pure theatre, and damn good theatre it is, too, We must remember that in our burgeoning Global Village there is no such thing as Cartesian distance. The Global Village is a quantum plasma. It works any way which way.

Their blogs and emails alone make up one of the best English-language social comedies since Sheridan or Jonson, and it all is designed to get inextricably mixed with “real politics.” Take a look at this unblushing prose from Webre:

“A very real exercise in comparative exopolitics has come about simultaneously, (and perhaps sychronistically) in a Russian Federation and in the United States.  Exopolitics in a Russian state Duma have brought Russian President Dmitry Medvedev face to face with the same set of exopolitical issues addressed by the August 2010 ballot initiative for an Extraterrestrial Affairs commission in Denver, Colorado.

Liberal Democrat Party representative and state Duma deputy Andrei Lebedev “fears that extraterrestrials may have compromised Russia’s official secrets.  After hearing a TV interview in which the President of the Kalmyk Republic, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, spoke of his meeting with an alien spaceship, Lebedev called for instant action,” according to news reports in Russia.

President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov’s close encounter took place on Sep. 18, 1997, and Ilyumzhinov recalled it in a recent interview with TV presenter Vladimir Pozner. He stated that others “might be skeptical, but added: ‘I believe I communicated with them, I saw them. I probably would not have believed it, but there were three witnesses: my driver, the Minister and my assistant.’”  ABC News reports, “Kirsan Ilyumzhinov was at home in his Moscow apartment when they came in and abducted him, taking him to their space ship where they communicated with him telepathically.”

Following President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov’s revelation of his meeting with extraterrestrials, “state Duma deputy Andrei Lebedev concluded that Ilyumzhinov had something to hide, and warned that ‘sensitive information’ could have been passed to the interplanetary guests.”

Seattle Exopolitics Examiner

http://www.examiner.com/x-2912-Seattle-Exopolitics-Examiner

All good fun we say, but it often results in people taking things a bit too earnestly. Here is a quote from a private email:

A note about the aliens I know and I promise to try and contain myself when I reference these bastards.

I do not speak for other abductees and I do not speak about other alien beings visiting this planet of which there are apparently many. I speak of the SOBs that come to my house and remove me from my bed, whoever they may be.

Bobby says they look like: http://www.ufoconspiracy.com/reports/three_second_eben.htm

Anything and everything any of these aliens I know ever conveyed to me is a lie, flat out lie. At the time I did not realize they were telling me lies but upon returning home and finding out what happened to me I find once again they lied to me. What these bastards do to humans is a violation of our human rights. Our physical body is nothing more than to experiment with which makes one quickly realize we humans are no more than laboratory animals. My handlers occasionally take me, do their experiments and return me to bed and I’m not supposed to not know the difference. I thought I had a horrible dream until I find blood on the sheets where bone marrow was removed or more tissue samples were taken, or more blood extracted.  And then I occasionally wake up screaming in pain, often very severe pain from yet another procedure. I have woken many times screaming in pain once I was returned to bed. I have scared the hell out of my wife several times when I woke and screamed because the pain was so severe but I could do nothing else but scream until the pain subsided.”

Exopolitics is now at a stage in the Web Petri dish where it is about to mutate and transform itself into an imitation toy political system. This relating to whole new systems of experience which relate minimally to the politics and economics of the old industrial world once called the “real” world.

We have therefore a new form of political control whose existential base does not relate to objective facts and evidence any more than it relates to the horse-drawn carriage, or Gladstone’s Third Administration.

Here we have a completely new stage of story technology (see my feature for UFO magazine “Did a Fishmonger Do It?”).

Media Fission: The Alice Fractal

All cultures are advertising systems. Exopolitics is no exception. By and large, Exopolitics helps to manage and develop the core stories of our time. These stories are grouped around what might be called Domains. Examples of Domains include the Military Industrial Complex, the Pentagon, Area 51, NASA, and we may include Hollywood. All these Domains secrete hive-mythology. In their developed form they are the ultimate version of Kafka’s castle as a Central Mythological Control ant hill full of deceptions, intrigues and cover-ups within the general alien conspiratorial mysterium.

The most minor NASA report has only to mention the word “space” in some slightly different experimental context, and swarms of mythological theorists flock like gone-mad hive-bees even to a fragmentary and slightly ambiguous sentence containing the word. This is because they have been told (through countless films alone) that “space” is where aliens come from. As in the Garry McKinnon case, countless bloggers try to squeeze a thousand interpretations from a simple sentence mentioning “space officers” (most probably meaning astronauts). This is indeed a kind of imaginary affliction rather like the legendary Morgellons’ Disease. There are now thousands of people who form their entire lives around these virtual Exopolitical constructs just as a mass TV audience forms lives around the characters in popular soap operas and make the characters so alive within themselves that they live with them as fully-formed avatars. There is now a whole thriving psychiatric practice formed to de-programme Exopolitical-type belief casualties. Gone-mad TV aficionados have had the same facilities available to them for some time.

These affectations of consumer-led junk culture such as Exopolitics we have seen previously, from sniffing glue to Bingo mania. In a harsh environment where for spiritual uplift there is nothing but political corruption and badly decayed religion, people understandably crave mind-sugar for uplift of any kind. From mind-drugs such as Exopolitics to heroin and speed, people long for a world other than the one they live in, which has no transcendental elements.

Conventional media (by now looking pretty old-fashioned compared to Web media) cannot supply such exotic drugs as Exopolitics. Though comparatively young, Exopolitics can supply greater inspiration if only because it is young in spirit and appeals to a new generation tired of standard TV formulas. By pure manipulated suggestion an Exopolitical audience is willingly drugged into new image dimensions and made almost starving for UFO “disclosure.” One has the impression that as with TV again, many would be quite ill without such liminal food being forced into their mental veins hour after hour with ever-increasing frequency.

There are of course some big differences between Exopolitics and TV.

In contrast to Exopolitics, TV viewers don’t have to search for “evidence” of their avatars. Countless numbers are there to be seen every night. Exopolitical “viewers” on the other hand have to search for the claimed “aliens” who do not have a common and easily accessible form. This is much more exciting than being served on a platter with predictable dumbed-down formulas. This gives Exopolitics a cerebral element almost totally lacking from TV, which is essentially a non-cerebral system. Whilst one of the few similarities is that both are addictive and both are consumer agendas, Exopolitics, unlike TV, does not praise its audience; it challenges them in the manner of a scrabble game or crossword puzzle.

Whilst TV is physically attractive and allows instant access to limitless full-focus colour images, Exopolitical images of aliens (where there are any at all) are dark and obscure. Both image types as styles, whether clear or unreadable, are suggestion-arrays operating different types of mass-persuasion schema. Both offer the illusion of freedom of choice. Yet viewers of Exopolitics (yes, we can call them that) are, like the TV audience, at the mercy of much interweaving and overlapping image-control software mounted by many rapidly-evolving and different technologies.

Another very important difference between Exopolitics and TV is that the former offers “reality,” whilst TV has no claims in that direction, except for so-called “reality” shows which are intended as jokes. In this sense here is another important difference: TV offers life-saving humour, whilst Exopolitics  offers no such thing; the aliens are conceived of as very boring and humourless with boy-scout New Age agendas enough to make an old hippy weep. Rather than aliens attacking us in the manner suggested by Hawking, the option of aliens boring the tits off us all has never been considered. Prim virtue does not figure in the Prime Time stakes of TV or Exopolitics.

As a nice paradox, Exopolitics states that aliens and their spaceships are all quite visible, and hence there is the tantalising possibility of a member of the audience discovering an alien and becoming as famous as Christopher Columbus. TV soap operas are a bit outclassed in this respect. No film or TV viewer searches for the “real” (US) Captain Kirk in the supermarket, or the “real” (UK) Phil Mitchell at the barbers, although given present-day mass-conditioning they might note different approximate forms as they go about their daily lives. Thus are we all now in doll-thrall with movements such as Exopolitics acting as cybernetic protein-strings full of momentary sugar-fixes. The movement formed by Webre and Salla has another cleverly designed element. It represents a powerful kind of intellectual subversion: quite unlike TV, Exopolitics is anti-authority, and it joins hands with all those folk would like to see their beloved leaders admit to alien presence with all kinds of egg over their bland, politically-correct, social-democratic faces.

This has resulted in a somewhat alarming form of pseudo-science-based pseudo-rationalism (in cyberspace all science is “pseudo”) as regards the full assembly in complete detail of aspects of “superior” alien culture(s). Thus “scientific” rationalism becomes another social-scientific cloaking-mystique in that it vectors the verisimilitude of the mutating story-lines. Undoubtedly, throughout our daily  lives, “consciousness” consists of such instantaneous processing of countless Media scripts mounted by various image-based story technologies.

Exopolitics is therefore a big meme-game, rather like the SERPO and SPORE meme-games in that interested parties can add to the game-play themselves. Unlike traditional TV soap operas, entire families can participate and create their own episodes. Many of these “alien” tales and part-tales about UFOs and conspiracies are willingly broadcast by popular U.S. broadcasters such as Jerry “foil-hat” Pippin. No script in the conventional sense is needed. Just a thread of suggestions created on a kitchen table with a screen, a keyboard and a terminal. Yet story technology is the most powerful dialectical  viral form every created.

As distinct from traditional TV soap operas, the virtual structures of our time such as Exopolitics contain a mock-cerebral element which aids their verisimilitude. Junior and Senior and Little Miss Muffet can add their thoughts, and the wonderful thing about thus new genre (for new genre it is) is that there is no censorship, no chance of rejection and every chance that someone somewhere will catch a fragment of make-believe. This story-fragment will feedback and breed other such fragments until this postmodern plasma becomes translated to the programmatic “real.” Thus every single mind, young and old has its own magic lantern theatre being fed by an ever-advancing Big Media power.

This level of Virtuality might be called Entertainment Fission. TV alone has already created a form of life support machine in that the billions of images per second will eventually quite replace “facts” as causation. The Prime Mover will be the Media Star. For better or for worse, both Weber and Salla are moving towards this state, as is Sarah Palin, whose fundamentalist Christianity is but two cyber steps away from Exopolitics. Nothing else but the stuff of Performance and Personality (and here I again include the Exopoliticians) will be needed as science is relegated to becoming a support base for Big Media. The CERN Collider (for example) is producing as many metaphors, images and symbols as it is producing “facts.”  Exopolitics, like many other things ancillary to it, is a prototypal world. Eventually, given ever-increasing media power, its protein cells may push aside the so-called real world as described in the film The Matrix, or in a more sophisticated form by Borges’ story of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.

Thus Exopolitics is story-technology with a vengeance and as such it does not contain any kind of mechanical vector. There is no traditional “progress” in this non-dimensional Matrix-type plasma which represents a translation of older forms of political control into virtuality. People now live their entire lives within such imagined structures. In this brave new cosmos, people will be described and defined as atmospheres, rather than anything else. “Fact” will be relegated to body weight, height, and National Insurance Number. The old-fashioned “trip” or “fix” is brought up to date by Exopolitics and its myriad ancillary media forms.

Such an induction of states of mind rather than induction of ranges of linear “objective facts” creates a more flexible and psychologically penetrative weapon than passive TV viewing. By comparison with Web-born memes, TV represents a steady low-frequency dosage episode by episode. These ranges of optional image-dilutions will of course maintain the illusion of virtual “progress” in time but only as a gaming-vector in turn. In this context, the buzzwords “real” and “scientific” and “factual” as used extensively by Exopolitics are nothing more than a fairground barker’s shouts using borrowed phrases from a ”science” which is now little more than a Prime Time silver screen  itself.

Many landowners in Victorian times built huge follies, some of which still stand. Follies were ill-conceived playthings of the ill-educated nouveau riche who within a few generations found themselves with too much time and money on their hands. Such were symbols of perfect impracticality: whimsical, fanciful, eccentric decorations rather than buildings, follies were the precursors of the Hollywood mansions conceived by Fitzgerald in his novel, The Great Gatsby.

 Exopolitics is a similar folly of our own times. As a movement, it is a massive piece of Gormenghast junk, a prime cut from a pop-media supermarket. But then science and Cartesian rationalism both represent a similar kind of Baroque cave-painting by numbers. In a media-soaked Age, where consciousness itself may be described as living theatre, we cannot help but navigate mentally by such cartoons and doll’s houses, which thrive rather like giant psychedelic mushrooms in our head.

What is the ultimate function of systems of story-lines such as Exopolitics? They force a mind to imagine. We are made to carry the story-lines as hatcheries in which memes act as mutant egg-cells.

This may be the first indication of how a truly alien mind might work.

More on this in Part 2: The K-Scope

For Reality Uncovered

9^th May 2010

Colin Bennett

Author, London

Editor, the New Fortean Times

www.combat-diaries.co.uk

Colin Bennett’s award-winning Politics of the Imagination now republished as a 3^rd Edition mass-market paperback by Cosimo Books New York.

“Bennett rescued Fort from the Hobbit Cupboard”

An American Demonology 2^nd Edition paperback in preparation

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