Do you believe in UFOs? If so, be careful, you might be a dangerous Right-wing radical without even knowing the fact! A new Pentagon report released last week made the dismissive claim that historical spikes in sightings of such things back in the 1950s and 1960s were largely just the result of paranoid members of the general public innocently mistaking top-secret U.S. military craft of the era for those of extraterrestrial beings.
The report was issued on behalf of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), headed up until last December by a physicist and former CIA man named Sean Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick was the man habitually known by the media as ‘the Pentagon’s UFO chief’, in the limited sense that, whenever a journalist wanted to ask the U.S. Government whether there was any definite proof aliens had landed on Planet Earth yet, it was his job to say “No, please stop asking us”.
Nonetheless, the term UFO means just that – Unidentified Flying Object, and there have certainly been plenty of those buzzing American airspace of late, although whether they are actually extraterrestrial in nature, or simply invasive drone-like tech from an enemy nation like China or wherever is a moot point, as Kirkpatrick himself has explained.
Alien Worldviews
Yet, besides making such perfectly reasonable apolitical points, Kitkpatrick also appears to possess a certain fondness for making a few rather less reasonable overtly politicised ones too. In early February, Kirkpatrick gave an interview to politics website Politico, expressing his grave expert opinion that the authorities should be much more forthcoming in revealing details about such mysterious phenomena to the general public: hence the release of the Pentagon’s new debunking report, I suppose.
His reasons for advising this course of future action were rather interesting. Noting it was AARO’s job to investigate potential military or terrorist threats to U.S. airspace, not “to go and find extraterrestrials”, Kirkpatrick argued that “If there is a void in the information space, it will be filled with the imagination of the public Right and [their] conspiracies”.
Yes, that’s right: only conservatives ever subscribe to mad conspiracy theories of any kind. A rash of media stories in recent years have tried to link (in fact wholly unrepresentative) Right-wing American movements like QAnon and January 6th rioters to belief in UFO-related conspiracies, often with the self-evident aim of smearing anyone non-Lefty as a David Icke-style, lizard-loving loon (which rather ignores the fact Mr. Icke was once in the U.K Green Party).
As someone who has written two books exposing the fake contemporary online legend of Nazi UFOs, I would fully admit that the subject can indeed occasionally be used as a front for fascism or a handy far-Right recruitment tool. But, on the other hand, as someone who has also written another book substantially dealing with how the subject can equally sometimes be used as a front for far-Left Marxist recruitment purposes too, I can see how an honest accusation of this nature could actually go both ways. Honest accusations, however, are no longer terribly in fashion.
Obviously, with their God-given contemporary right to define precisely what counts as ‘misinformation’ in the public sphere, today’s all-wise and all-knowing Leftists hold a total and complete monopoly upon objective truth, and would never stoop so low as to begin making bizarre politically motivated claims about what are popularly dismissed as disreputable fringe topics like UFOs and alien beings. Or would they…?
The Dry Canals on Mars
Speaking to the media back in 2011, Venezuela’s former quasi-Marxist Dictator, Hugo Chávez, was very firmly of the opinion that, many years ago, there used to be life on Mars, now an utterly barren and dead globe, but that native Martian forms of capitalism had killed it off wholesale.
“I have always heard that it would not be strange that there had been civilisation on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived, and finished off the planet,” Chávez said in a speech to mark World Water Day in March 2011, whilst himself ostentatiously sipping from a glass of H2O as if to mock the tragically dehydrated Martian dead.
“Careful!” Hugo added. “Here on planet Earth where hundreds of years ago or less there were great forests, now there are deserts. Where there were rivers, there are deserts.” And why? All because of climate change, caused by rapacious Western capitalism, El Presidente cautioned. (Awkward note: Venezuela is a principal member of OPEC, has the world’s largest proven oil reserves and fossil fuels provide the backbone of its entire economy – or at least they did until Chávistas began wrecking it all like Mars with their blessed planet-loving socialism.)
That sounds uncannily like a Left-wing ET-related conspiracy to me. But then, Chávez always was a noted nut. Maybe he was just an unfortunate, unrepresentative progressive one-off? Sadly not. I have written before in the Daily Sceptic about Left-wing astronomers trying to contact PC ETs (see here and here), and in my regular Takimag column this week have detailed some barely believable current attempts of queer activists to contact races of homosexual ‘gayliens’. But the rival Left-wing trope of trying to spuriously relate extraterrestrial life and flying saucers to climate change is even more surprisingly widespread in today’s wokery-ridden academic and media worlds.
Guardian Readers of the Universe
In 2019, the New York Times (America’s rough equivalent of the Guardian, but even worse) ran a thought-experiment by op-ed columnist Farhad Manjoo entitled ‘Pretend It’s Aliens’. Here, Manjoo spoke of how, as Westerners today lived in a world of absurd Right-wing illusions conjured by wicked populist politicians – specifically, “full-grown adults who maintain, against all evidence, that immigration poses an existential threat to the United States”, no less – why shouldn’t Leftists like him just “perform the same sleight of hand” with causes close to their own bleeding hearts?
Some sceptics may argue they have done so already, with their hyperbolically exaggerated talk about ‘global boiling’ etc., but Mr. Manjoo proposed extending such lies even further by proposing the idea that evil extraterrestrials were actually behind our planet’s imminent eco-doom, by spreading ludicrous tweets like this:
Manjoo’s logic, such as it is, ran as follows:
This [combatting climate change] will be a long-term existential battle that will require remaking every part of society… that may involve costly and politically unpopular changes to our way of life for years to come, and will necessarily make some people [but not Manjoo himself, probably] worse off than if we did nothing. But that will be justified, because we understand the stakes: we are fighting murderous aliens… If the aliens attacked, we’d do better. I’m sure of it. We would understand the stakes in the battle ahead. We would apprehend the necessity of sacrifice and perseverance. We would be able to perceive what is happening to our planet and our species as what it plainly is: a war for survival.
Manjoo meant the public should be brainwashed to adopt this millenarian mindset as a dramatic internal motivational tool, rather than as a literal belief, much as an Olympic runner might be able to sprint faster by imagining he is being chased by an endangered Bengal Tiger. Yet there are other people out there who apparently believe such things rather more literally. And some of them, unlike humble NYT columnists, are actual scientists.
The Goonhilly Goon Show
I don’t know if you happen somehow to have missed it – and really, how could you? – but October 2022 saw the advent of something annual called ‘World Space Week’, the theme of which for that particular year was ‘Space and Sustainability’ (this year’s is ‘Space and Climate Change’; I can see a pattern developing here). Considering that, as far back as 1852, Lord Kelvin had already theorised the ultimate heat-death of the universe, it could be argued that, in the long-run, even outer space itself is not actually fully sustainable at all, but never mind.
As part of the whole pointless shindig, astronomers from METI International (METI = Messaging Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) based at Cornwall’s Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station, planned to beam out a message towards the far-distant star-system of Trappist-1, which is deemed a likely spot for potentially inhabited Earth-like planets to be located. And what would this radio-signal say? Naturally, it would tell the ETs all about our planet’s currently ongoing climate crisis.
“The great challenge of interstellar communication is to establish a common ground for understanding” between humans and aliens, the men from METI explained. Traditionally, this may have meant sending them signals based upon mathematics, reasonably guessed to be a universal language all across the cosmos, as two plus two equals four even on Alpha Centauri (although certain lettuce-headed Left-wing U.S. academics like Rochelle Gutierrez might disagree). METI preferred to send the aliens transcripts of the Periodic Table, however, hoping this may prove the initial basis for interstellar symposia about how industrialised capitalism would cause severe and damaging chemical changes in any planet’s atmosphere and environment, not just Earth’s own.
The hope was that the ETs would be a much older civilisation than ours; if so, they would surely have long passed through their foolish planet-polluting phase aeons ago, and thus have worked out how to solve the catastrophe of global warming entirely. Otherwise, how would they still be here to talk to mankind? Wouldn’t they all just have been burned to a crisp? Once the Trappist-1 aliens realised we comparatively primitive humans were facing a climate crisis too, they would surely be able to help, METI hoped, beaming us back down advice on what to do next in return.
But what if the ETs replied to say: “Ignore the whole thing – it’s a total mad alarmist cult movement, just put gags on George Monbiot and Swampy and you’ll all be quite, quite fine”? I would guess, in that alarming eventuality, METI might conveniently ‘forget’ to pass the unwanted message in question on to mankind at large, or else ‘accidentally’ wipe it from their recording systems. Appropriately enough, the cult-busting ETs from Trappist-1 would be forced to remain every bit as silent as their monkish human counterparts traditionally are down here on terra firma. Either that, or Michael Mann would just sue them, like he did with Mark Steyn.
Little Green Men
And what happens if the aliens turn out not to be quite as benign as METI might hope? Anyone who has read Chinese sci-fi author Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Trilogy series of books will know it makes perfect military sense for any alien civilisation to immediately wipe out any other currently less-advanced intelligent societies elsewhere in the galaxy as soon as they become aware of them, lest their far-off interplanetary rivals one day grow strong enough to do the same to them, a bit like if the US had nuked Moscow back in 1945 to prevent the entire Cold War ever taking place at all.
A 2011 report from a group of NASA-affiliated scientists from Pennsylvania State University, ‘Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis’, argued that just such a situation really could occur, should any alien intellects “vast and cool and unsympathetic”, as H.G. Wells once put it, detect that Earth was currently undergoing climate change due to rapid post-WWII-era industrialisation.
As the ever-onwards expansion of borderless international capitalism uncaringly pushes other disposable species like rhinos, polar bears and white people to looming extinction here on Earth, so wary ET military scouts might fear the same fate being imposed upon the flora and fauna of other innocent planets, should the evil imperialist Earthlings ever advance far enough to begin colonising them too. In this case, the aliens could just blow our entire planet up with death-rays, to nip the danger in the bud, like a time-traveller killing Hitler at birth to avert his future invasion of Poland. Alternatively, they may be a race of exoplanetary Chris Packhams from the Planet PETA and decide to land on Earth and just destroy all the nasty naked ape humans, thereby to save the trees, whales and great crested newts, whose lives they may deem to be innately more significant.
According to the report’s distinctly doom-mongering authors:
Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilisational expansion could be detected by an ET because our expansion is changing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, via greenhouse gas emissions… These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets.
To be fair, the full written assessment as a whole did consider a range of possible other scenarios, and did specifically deem the above detailed outcomes to be rather unlikely – but guess which specific possibility the Guardian picked out when reporting on the paper? That’s right: its chosen headline was ‘Rising greenhouse gas emissions could tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report’. The Guardian’s story was bylined as being by someone named Ian Sample, but given its basic methodology and outlook, it may as well have been written by Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times.
All this is daft enough, but it gets much worse. In part two of this short series, we shall see how clever scientists have now also managed to model the basic path of climate catastrophes endured by other planets – other planets that do not even exist. Why was the entire world in Dune nothing more than one gigantic, globe-spanning desert? Hugo Chávez knew. And so, it would seem, do his contemporary academic counterparts: the answer is capitalism!
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
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Thank you for your insights, but frankly, I find it so shockingly naive that I’m not quite sure where to start. There are so many parallels between pharmaceutical behaviours and that of Criminals behind bars currently serving crime for truly evil behaviours, that I can’t actually command the energy to respond. It just reminds me of someone who has become so inured to the disregard for human life that they cannot comprehend that what they are witnessing is systematic annihilation. Like soldiers in Iraq clearing dead bodies with a bulldozer so they the military vehicles can pass.
It is shocking and crushing to discover that your industry and by extension you, have been complicit in doing much human harm. (I have been there myself). Especially when you entered it first altruistic reasons, and with high hopes. But you do owe yourself the examination needed to actually hold your industry to account.
And as to genocidal cabals? Who knows. Not you and I. They certainly don’t seem to be needed if outcomes are to be judged.
I am very certain nobody is actively trying to make a vaccine that harms people.
Governments and regulators have removed the barriers and safeguards you would usually expect to expedite vaccine development. This carries risk. We are seeing these risks materialise. Personally I don’t think it was the right thing to do, but if you are CEO at Pfizer or Moderna, you are probably thinking “great! I can use this crisis to accelerate development of this technology we have been developing for years and hopefully make some money…especially if we are first to market. And then use this technology for future vaccines”
They have a vested interest in the vaccines being safe and efficacious. It helps their reputation, it helps their share price. The fact that they are perhaps not as safe as one might like, would lead to them being abandoned (in my opinion) if the threat of COVID were given anything like a sensible risk assessment and everyone were behaving rationally.
So now there is a motivation to maintain the fear. And for governments too, given that they are committed to buying loads of vaccines regardless. They don’t want to look like they overreacted,
I don’t think I am naive. I’m incredibly cynical compared to many in my industry. Maybe I am a unique case, but I have never seen anything in all my years in the companies I have worked in that has made me feel like patient safety wasn’t a priority, balanced against the benefit of treatment. COVID has skewed that, as it’s being treated like raging global Ebola, when plainly it is not.
I didn’t ask for my comment to be posted as an article so I am not about to get into a debate about it. I am just reporting what I have seen, Money and reputation, that’s what drives actions at CEO level.
Many thanks Sophie. A balanced account that carries a sound ring of truth and plausibility.
Seconded. And will all those people who have had their lives or those of their families, saved by pharmaceutical interventions such as semi-synthetic penicillins, beta-blockers, analog insulins, antidepressants, etc., etc., etc. please calm down and reflect on the totality of what the pharmaceutical industry has provided
Thanks – but that’s not to say I don’t think there may be some serious problems with the pharmaceutical industry – although Sophie’s post quoted above the line does, I think, implicitly concede that.
I’m surprised that someone “incredibly cynical” can continue to work for Big Pharma. Must cause a lot of cognitive dissonance.
They certainly wouldn’t want to harm people if they had to cough up financial compensation for side effects, but that essential safeguard against corporate greed and short-cuts is currently missing.
Even so, once the damage actually being done by these experimental gene therapies is pointed out (as it has been from the beginning of the roll out) is it still OK to turn a blind eye and keep rolling this stuff off the production line rather than stop, think and go through a full testing program?
Harsh on the author.
And unfair.
So he’s saying (1) that Big Pharma is just doing what governments want it to do? Google “Pfizer” and “$2.9 billion fine” — hardly an example of government-Big Pharma cooperation. Also, read the British Medical Journal investigation of 2010 into the role of “experts who had declarable financial and research ties with pharmaceutical companies producing antivirals and influenza vaccines” for the 2009 influenza scamdemic. https://www.bmj.com/content/340/bmj.c2912
Could we say the same about the BMGF? Have they now withdrawn their funding from the organisations that have been issuing wildly exaggerated projections of deaths in the non-lockdown case? Have they now withdrawn their funding from ResearchGate for censoring scientists? Have they now withdrawn their funding from all those organisations that systematically sidelined and demonised cheap, safe and effective prophylactics and treatments that might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives? Or are they OK with these things?
It’s called Capitalism.
Or selective capitalism, apparently Mr Johnson doesn’t believe it to be the case for football and the Superleague.
Whether on not one agrees with all the details here, I reckon the article provides a good overview of the fact that there are always a network of forces determining a particular outcome at the system level.
There’s always a tendency tho simply vilify individuals, and whilst that may be justified (see : ‘Johnson’), it’s not the whole story.
The last point is the crucial one :
“They will only do things that make money, or might make them money in future. They are not charitable organisations. Drug development is risky and expensive, and shareholders want their returns. Sounds obvious, but it underpins everything and people seem to forget that at times.”
Or as another commentator has said (above) :
“It’s called Capitalism”
Trying to abolish that impulse is futile, but it goes terribly wrong if no checks and balances are in place. The whole Covid debacle has been about that systemic flaw.
Part of the problem is pharmaceutical IP rights, which are relatively recent; some European countries didn’t recognise IP on drugs until the 1970s. IP rights are not the same as physical property rights, they are about creating monopolies; there’s an interesting (free of course) book on this theme here: http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm . Germany had a flourishing pharma industry without IP in the early 20th century. Without IP rights, priorities for COVID would have been testing low-cost prophylactics and treatments, there would have been no incentive for the lockdown/mask theatre, there would have been no epidemic of malnutrition in low-income countries.
Thus my comment about ‘checks and balances’. This covers a whole range of issues, from the basic constitution (or lack of) to such nitty-gritty specifics as IP rights that you mention.
If government is allowed to ally simply with the most powerful interests, without checks, the the whole political process becomes corrupted. Like fly-paper, it attracts money-grubbers and power-seekers much more than a wider representative selection of candidates.
The whole process then enters a downward spiral as the token vilification of politics and politicians reinforces exclusion rather than inclusivity.
Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi … ‘this experimental vaccine roll out is so “goddamn dangerous” I cannot understand how my own colleagues don’t realize this?’
Worth watching …
https://twitter.com/_taylorhudak/status/1385067952534401027
A ‘must watch’.
Yes: it really beggars belief that ANYONE (even the politicians) would give such an enormous hostage to fortune.
Just imagine what the consequences would be if, say, 1% of the jabbed develop serious ill-health within a year or two of being vaccinated – that would really put a strain on the NHS! And the politicians think they could avoid blame after all their assertions of safety?
Big Pharma was in trouble until Covid came along.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks!
Not at all. In the same framework, I don’t reckon all Tory voters are inherently evil.
Sophie 123 can expect a promotion, or at least an index linked pay rise, for this bit simplistic white-washery. The term ‘Evil’ should perhaps be banned from all rational discourse in the first instance, as opposed to it being held up in the headline as an indefinable mediaeval moral yardstick against which to judge corporate ethics. Such methodology renders rational discourse meaningless.
If the final paragraph is not the most disingenuous, it is certainly the most naive:
Nobody forgets this, Sophie, but everybody is encouraged to overlook the big fat indemnification bribe that has effectively upset the delicate corporate RISK-BENEFIT control mechanism. As the AZ exec member said July 2020, the company could not have gone into production without the global guarantee of exemption from civil action (regarding death, side effects etc, from the experimental vaxx) being in place.
This is the main issue here, for with these rushed C19 experimental vaxes (whether mRNA or GMO) there is NO RISK attached for Big Pharma in taking short cuts, and the corresponding rewards for ditching medical ethics are of course potentially massive. The companies don’t have to be ‘evil’ to be in breach of long established codes of practice – just creative with their ethical code and less than thorough with their testing.
Might I ask if any Pharma company has refused this global exemption, insisted on the full carefully monitored trial period before release, and then agreed to stand four square behind its product financially?
This is a very helpful comment. Tullock and Buchanan were awarded a Nobel Prize for coming up with the economic theory of Public Choice – stated simply, that ‘actors’ and institutions act out of ‘enlightened self interest’. This is exactly what you appear to be describing. The same will be true of Whitty, Valance, Ferguson and SAGE, Farrar, the various civil servants involved – and of course the power hungry politicians. You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to see that the influential figures are acting out of self-motivation and are not necessarily evil or acting with malintent (although some sure seem to be). The law (as well as ethics and human rights codes, and pandemic preparedness guidelines, and so on) – and parliament – should have protected us. They didn’t. That needs to be addressed quickly.
“ the economic theory of Public Choice – stated simply, that ‘actors’ and institutions act out of ‘enlightened self interest’.”
Like most economic theory – a partial rather than general explanation in this most overblown of the social sciences. (see the number of dickheads sporting a first in PPE!).
See “Money Vs Science” on Youtube. A nine minute watch and well worth it.
“How to Understand Big Pharma: They’re Not Evil, But They Do Want Money”
Except that money is the route of all evil.
“money is the route of all evil”
Another bit of pat nonsense.
Have you taken up the hermit’s life yet?
What hermits life? Have to say I find your contributions on here patronising in the extreme. I realise from your posts that we’re all supposed to bow down to your superior knowledge but frankly I think you’re a tosser.
Getting into ad hominem stuff is never a good idea if you have a coherent point to make.
I was just expressing a dislike of simplistic untruth in the same league as ‘Covid is unprecedented’. As to the ‘hermit’s life’ – it was just an ironic question as to whether you’d forgone worldly goods to back up your claim – or whether you – like most of us – continue to use money and are thus encouraging evil?
… and who’s asked you to ‘bow down’? Just argue back – or follow the other saw about heat and kitchens.
Sorry you’re upset – but not much I can do about that.
Actually, the correct wording is ‘the love of money..’ etc.. Poor old money always gets it in the neck.
I think the phrase is “The love of money is the root of all evil”
Thank you very much for your informed insider view. Much of it perhaps to be expected but some interesting surprises.
Blimey, you might as well say “they’re not evil but they do want racial hygiene”. Remind me what is the root of all evil?
Although all the commentary is related to the pharma trade, it is also valid w.r.t. many industrial structures, and associated political activity, such as all branches of transport technology, power delivery and so on. More of a psychological issue, in fact.
I’m not criticising Sophie123’s article though; it’s a good job, well done.
Yes, I’ve seen it in an entirely different industry.
As ever, it’s all about the money, honey ( oh, and power and control)
I’m sorry, but it’s just win win for big pharma. Regardless of whether or not they want side effects from their products, there ARE side effects, for millions of people, many adversely impacting on people’s quality of life and physical and mental health, many serious, some fatal. But rather than make those drugs safer, unless the product is withdrawn (presumably due to external pressure), big pharma profits again by developing and selling drugs to treat the side effects, drugs which have the their own side effects, and so it goes on (until the patient or gp says no more drugs, or until the person dies). It is an industry based on and driven by profit and greed (otherwise drugs would be much more affordable and safer). If any drugs or vaccines are pulled from the market, you can bet that those drug companies have another to replace it up their sleeve. Look how quickly the covid vaccines were ready to be rolled out! No questions asked. Anyone working within big pharma turning a blind eye to the harms and suffering caused by those drugs to millions of people (many of whom didn’t need the drug or vaccine in the first place!) are complicit. And now they want to test their covid vaccines on toddlers and children?! If that’s not evil, I don’t know what is.
Wakey wakey. Pharmaceuticals are chemicals produced to work on relieving/removing problems with the body’s chemistry. ALL product have side effects as they are foreign to the body. Generally, the more powerful the product, the bigger the side effects. There is a view that if the product has no side effects then it won’t be very effective.
There are many effective natural alternatives to pharmaceuticals, but the medical industry isn’t interested in these because there’s no profit to be made. “The more powerful the product, the bigger the side effects”. So, poisoning people back to health. What could possibly go wrong.
Many pharmaceuticals ARE natural products or are derived from them. And naturally occurring agents frequently have worse side effects than purely synthetic ones. One reason for modifying naturally occurring agents is to produce derivatives with less serious side effects. The idea that something natural is inherently innocuous is ignorant superstition. Many of the most lethal poisons known to science are natural products.
I never said all naturally occurring agents are inherently innocuous. So you are either trying to gaslight me, or you are just stupid. Or both.
The problem isn’t that the pharmaceutical industry favours synthetic over natural products. There’s no essential difference between them. It’s that it favours medications that need to be taken long term as these provide the highest profits. That’s why we’re running out of effective antimcrobials to treat evolving bacterial strains. Most research into new antibiotics is carried out by academic research groups rather than by industry.
Big pharma are not evil, just misunderstood says senior big pharma employee. Don’t know about you but I’m convinced particularly by the last point “they will only do things that make money”. Somewhat contradicts the propaganda about vaccines being supplied at cost.