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There has always been an element of the intelligence community plugged into weird supernaturalist subcultures involving UFOs and poltergeists and the like; some of you may remember Jason Jorjani and the attempt to legitimize (and co-opt) the derogatory term of the ‘alt-right’ pre-Charlottesville and its connection to Spencer, Bannon, and the like. The whole interesting part of that affair that many ignore would be the fact that Jorjani testifies to an MI-6 agent tied to Erik Prince originally roping him into that mess under the pretenses of being a “British member of the Vril Society” whose interests involved back-engineering Nazi time-travel tech. The field of UFOlogy speaks of rumors of high-ranking evangelical intelligence officials whose far-reaching and high-impact beliefs include the claims of UFOs being demons attempting to deceive the world into apostatizing from the true faith of Christ Jesus™ (Protestant Christianity), and Michael Flynn (the previous director of the DIA) being at least a certain type of person who gets power in those positions isn’t exactly lending any credence against opposing viewpoints.
Tucker might be an extension of the same belief system, insofar as this isn’t intended as some psychological operation on the part of whomever believes in the specific claims thereof (most Christians, like Tucker, believe in some version of them), but it might unintentionally act as one. That some intelligence operatives are using this to their betterment has no doubt, but that then goes to the general question of most psyop-based explanations for the current UFO craze: why? Why push demon-aliens in flying discs zapping people? It doesn’t make that much sense.
Many (most?) complex civilizations “believed in” personifications of bad behavioral inclinations and social forces, and they called them evil spirits or demons. IMO the utility of personifying invisible forces is that humans are excellent at memorizing characters with personalities, but not lists of assertions or principles. It’s easier to persuade oneself not to eat too much cake when it’s a question of obeying an ugly demon who tempts you with thoughts and who has tempted you before, versus some hazy self-negotiation involving delayed gratification and self-reward. Demons also center a person’s moral identity: your true identity always wants the longterm good, and the demons are what tempt you (not “another part of me wants…” which is sort of depersonalizing). If the intel community is religious and interested in civilization-crafting then maybe they want to bring back angels and demons? Linking UFOs to unknown forces takes the public’s interests away from futuristic cia crafts and onto spiritual concerns. Plausibly, the same org that is so high-tech that it can make UFOs is also so smart that they see no merit in a population overly concerned with mind-boggling military technology.
This is somewhat similar as a hypothesis to what’s been floated in terms of all these things being engineered to increase the religiosity of the nation in order to save as many souls as possible in the long-term (and also to defend against the ‘ultimate deception’ of the antichrist). Nick Redfern’s Final Events has a similar perspective to this in terms of being in contact with a group within the intelligence community that actually believes that this is the right thing to do, and what ought to happen, due to their belief that there actually does exist a real unexplainable phenomenon deemed to be “extraterrestrial” by the larger populace that is actually demonic in nature. Incidentally, the late Old Testament scholar Michael Heiser believed he had encountered the same group of intelligence officers going to various theologians and airing their conflicting feelings about what they had done in such an affair. Whatever’s happening, it’s probably at minimum as weird as Michael Flynn going on camera with his family saying the QAnon oath and never elaborating. (Based?)
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This thread you started is fascinating btw, just thanking you.
Personally I'm starting to believe demons might actually exist. Who knows?
The space of possible minds is exceedingly large; the space of possible disembodied minds (if such a thing is granted as possible) seems much more vast than embodied minds purely mathematically given the limitations of the permutations of matter; if Yudkowsky is correct, the vast majority of mind-space is populated by hopelessly alien minds operating on opaque decision-theories; if Scott is correct, the vast majority of actualized civilizations taken randomly from the space of all possible minds fall victim to an inexorable entropic coordination problem which isn’t just limited to embodied minds, but also disembodied ones (cf. acausal trade); depending on your theory of anthropics, coordination problems in universes with vaster mind-spaces would be preferred over ones with smaller mind-spaces, etc.
You can also tie this into simulation arguments, extortion from counterfactual agents, or whatever else, to create whatever rational™ defense of “non-local molochian agents” you want, but if it walks like a demon and talks like a demon, it probably is a demon. Jonathan Pageau analogizes the EA metaphor for picking the right mind out of a vast mindspace of minds oriented towards the great-filter of Moloch (what Yudkowsky posits as “demon summoning”, which is much easier than “angel summoning”) as “Sauron building his body from the corruptive power of the ring” which isn’t that far off from the more recondite discussions of alignment I’ve seen.
Okay yes but they don't actually visit us. Even if this is all true, the people seeing demons in this worldline are still crazy.
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If you’re interested in alien minds, you might want to investigate Catholic doctrines on the psychology of angels.
I don't normally post AI summaries, but this one is unsettling:
"Key aspects of angelic psychology in Catholic doctrine include:
"Intellect and Knowledge
Time and Consciousness
Would you like me to elaborate on any of these aspects? I find the medieval philosophical arguments about how pure intelligences might function to be particularly fascinating."
Excuse me. I'm going to have to inspect my CUDA code for signs of the holy ghost.
The text above describes a mind eerily similar to the ones we summon transiently in LLM activations.
"Let's think step by step," the angel said dubiously.
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I’m somewhat familiar with that from what I’ve read from St. Maximus and Fr. Lagrange; do you have any recommendations?
Commenting here so I can also get the recommendations.
(I love collecting somewhat strange books like this)
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One of the most enduring constants in UFOlogy is that people who go down the UFO rabbit hole often find that it stares back (yeah yeah it's a horrible mixed metaphor.) I uh didn't realize that Erik Prince had been tied to back-engineering Nazi time-travel technology, though, so thanks for the spare link to peruse.
UFOs are very interesting because the intelligence agencies either have pretty hard proof or they don't, but I find it interesting that there does seem to be such an overlap within the intelligence community between people who are "into" UFOs and people who are "into" stuff like poltergeists. If you had e.g. satellite imagery of a UFO reentering the atmosphere, presumably you wouldn't connect that to woo stuff like remote viewing, but we live in a world with people like Hal Putoff and Lue Elizondo.
Makes you wonder what they know (Grush referred to UFOs as "inter-dimensional," which has been the conjecture of leading UFOlogists like Jacques Vallee – who of course has his own ties to intelligence agencies) – or if they don't know and it's just weird topics attract weird thinkers.
I suspect there's actually something to the weird, but I think it's also important to note that a good intelligence operative is probably very good at making connections between seemingly unrelated things. Seems quite likely that intelligence agencies are brim-full of people who are very good at reading a lot into very small amounts of data, which pays of spectacularly when they're right...and also when they're wrong.
What puts me off of UAPs and the idea that “they have proof” is just how little physical evidence of life, not intelligent life, just plain ordinary life, exists. The best the Pro-UAP can do is a plausible fossilized bacteria sample found on Mars. They have no ships, megastructures, signals, planets with obvious life-signs. It doesn’t surprise me that people into UAPs are into non physical phenomena as they need some plausible way to explain how these things exist without leaving physical proof.
I think the idea that UAP are necessarily connected to extraterrestrial lifeforms is wrong. We could have a ship full of dead bodies in a hangar at Area 51 and still have no proof of extraterrestrial life. Likewise, if we detect a megastructure around a nearby star that's the product of alien life, it doesn't prove anything about UAP.
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The best theory continues being that the US government employs a lot of people and does not actually have very strong gatekeeping, so weirdos (of the type that would convince themselves that they have seen UFO evidence, or perhaps make up a story for grift/wishful thinking and come to believe it for real) can get in and thrive. Every time these characters (Lazar, Elizondo, Grusch...) are brought up, what jumps out at me is how obviously different their manner of speech and even their names sound from "serious" members of the US military that are quoted on "serious" topics - the Mearsheimers, Gradies and Saltzmans, inevitably of Jewish, Nordic or sometimes Irish extraction, patrician-sounding first names and middle initials. This alone suggests that there is some ethnic-cultural divide at play here, and the UFO crowd might be different enough from normal spokespeople that heuristics of trustworthiness and willingness to make stuff up which were trained on official communication would not actually be valid.
Christopher K. Mellon (former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Irish descent) doesn't just have a patrician-sounding first name and middle initial, he's a member of an old patrician family (the Mellons), and he's one of the main drivers on the UAP topic. John Ratcliffe (former Director of National Intelligence, English extraction I guess?), John Brennan (former Director of the CIA, Irish descent), H.R. McMaster (former National Security Advisor, Scottish extraction I presume), Avril Haines (Director of National Intelligence, Jewish on her mother's side), Mark A. Milley (Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Irish), Timothy Gallaudet (Rear Admiral US Navy, French extraction I guess?), and Harald Malmgren (senior aide to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Nordic) have all publicly indicated that they take the UAP issue seriously, although some of them, like Haines and Milley, might feel under pressure from Congress to do so.
From what I've seen, the ethno-cultural divide, if there is one, are that the ones that I would view as patrician-types are often more refined in their presentation. Mellon is careful about what he says, although he indicates that he thinks that UAP are real and a serious concern. Haines, Milley, and McMaster say things like "there are puzzling things out there that we don't understand and are hard to get to the bottom of," Ratcliffe and Gallaudet refer to having seen direct video/photographic evidence, Brennan circumspectly suggests that UAP might be a type of life, and Malmgren – who is now almost 90 – decided to go on Twitter and tell the world that he was told about "otherworld technologies" by Richard Bissel (of the CIA and NRO). Perhaps Malmgren behaves a bit differently because (he says) he was never under an official oath – Bissel spoke to him informally. But I'd be genuinely interested in which of the above people you classify as "serious" and which you don't – I'm very interested in American ethnography, and it would make my day if you did an assessment of them.
On the UFO topic, I am inclined to agree that normal "heuristics of trustworthiness and willingness to make stuff up" don't apply. But I don't think that they apply to "serious" members of the US military on this topic either. People who are cleared into SAPs (special access programs) are, apparently, supposed to lie if directly asked about a SAP they are cleared into, and most of the people on the above list are or have been read into such programs. UFO fans often assume that this means that the people in the military who talk about UFOs are telling the truth and the people who are denying knowledge of them are lying, but I would remind people that the knife of deception may cut both ways.
Hm. Certainly cause for an update if accurate, but do these people make the same claims as the "little grey men" crowd around the people that I mentioned? My impression was that there was a separate push a few years ago around the "Tic Tac" videos, which was much more measured and ambiguous and had the vibes of some intel operation that is too 8D-chessy for me to understand, rather than actual hints of confirmed aliens. (Baiting someone into revealing or believing something? My favourite theory at the time was that some branch of the USG wanted to signal to the PRC that they may have developed tech for spoofing input to/coherently dazzling complex integrated sensor systems, by way of using it on their own during a training exercise) It makes sense that that sort of undertaking would get fire support from real top brass. Did any of the people you listed directly vouch for any member of the batch that I mentioned?
Off the top of my head (so I might get a few details wrong):
The Tic Tac videos were (essentially) an intel operation – it was Mellon, Elizondo and Company getting the UAP topic into the New York Times and into the public discourse. The actual incident had been publicly discussed (and IIRC even video footage released) well before it made it into the Times, but Team Mellon was able to get the footage released with a chain of custody and get their narrative into the big leagues. The goal of the operation (ostensibly) was to get people to take the UAP topic seriously. If there's a psyop, it seems to lead straight into the little grey men territory rather than just showing off advanced technology (although of course the US of A might want China to think it has a crashed flying saucer...)
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It’s pretty funny to word it that way, but you should also probably watch the opening segments of this new interview of Jorjani when you have the time even if a lot of the things said in it is batshit crazy. Any conspiracy you can imagine, he touches on; remote viewing, time-traveling Nazi breakaway-civilizations, crash-retrieval UFO programs, future unaligned ASI simulating our pasts, etc. are not spared. The crazy thing is the fact that this guy had Steve Bannon’s ear and was clearly involved in intelligence to the point where he got his blackmail telegraphed on the New York Times even as he was basically an unknown philosophy professor in the public eye beforehand.
Which raises the point of how there are intelligence operatives and contacts saying things like what Jorjani says without batting an eye. David Grusch was involved with briefing the NSC and the President on behalf of the NRO and then says the government has knowledge of the afterlife and interdimensional lifeforms. Whatever is going on, it’s not just your run-of-the-mill false flag.
Uh, it seems plausible to me that intelligence agencies actually select for the kinds of guys that wind up getting into this stuff. Like intelligence work is basically looking for a much more boring version.
I've theorized for some time that one reason why intelligence agency types and pilots tend to be so into UFO stuff and believe UFO lore explanations for potentially more mundane elements is precisely because that's the type of a profession you get into if you want to "learn the truth", make first contact, get into space to see the secret alien moonbase and so on. In intelligence agency types you get into more of an X-Files territory, in case of pilots it's more like getting into astronaut training and then enacting Rendezvous with Rama.
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It’s not a coincidence that the CIA recruits a lot of Mormons from BYU, either, due to their lifestyle and loyalty choices; Mormons also coincidentally believe that there exists a race of infinitely many nordic-looking Supermen all living on their on planets, and that Joseph Smith upon receiving his first revelation from two of these beings was knocked effectively unconscious (not unlike many contactee experiences).
That’s a long-winded point to saying ‘you’re right’, by the by, but it’s just another piece of data that makes all these things weird (as the alien contactee experience, as independent from the causal influence of Mormonism, was something the IC legitimately investigated in the 50s.)
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The CIA literally has an occult warfare division (MK OFTEN) and maintained specialized units of remote viewers for years. Some of the intelligence they provided was actually acted upon by the military in various conflicts: they found an American general kidnapped by Red Army Faction during the Years of Lead in Italy. They gave information about new types of Soviet nuclear submarines to the Navy. They identified locations of Iraqi surface to air missile sites during the Gulf War. Given all that I could see why someone who had ties to the intelligence community like Tucker Carlson might not immediately write off the existence of demons.
But did the intelligence really come from clairvoyants, or was that a cover to distract the enemy from trying to find which one of them was selling secrets to the Americans? I vaguely recall that the British laundered some of the ENIGMA decryptions via this method....
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"has"? it was halted in 1973, unless you think the government is simply lying about everything and doing it secretly with no evidence.
“Dissolving” and reconstituting programs in a shell game to avoid oversight is an intelligence agency staple.
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Woah how have I never heard of all this stuff before? Incredible.
Yeah I strongly believe that there's some ESP/magical stuff they found out and keep under wraps.
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I don’t disagree with you. There is at least some overlap between the intelligence community’s contacts and superficial voices pushing the narrative of Havana Syndrome (i.e., microwave mind control weaponry) and the ones involved in the UFO field, too. The main pioneer of the aforementioned microwave weapons for the DIA (John Alexander) had his hand directly in the DoD’s parapsychological contractual studies before they were shut down, and these are the type of people Tucker would be aware of (and also wary of) in not only his skepticism of the IC but also his personal relation to it in his family.
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