Main Page Related Sites RSS Feed
I like weird stuff. I enjoy listening to conspiracy theories, learning about secret societies, and the like. I believe pretty much none of it, but it's interesting.
Lately, Bob Lazar's documentary (recommended, btw) has brought a renewed interest in Area 51. I thought I'd share some thoughts on it as well as thoughts on aliens in general, as a certified non-expert.
I'll be up front in saying that I do not believe that the government secretly knows about space aliens visiting earth, has been in contact with space aliens, or has any possession of any technology that is extra-terrestrial in origin. That's not all that controversial. The next thing that I say will be. I don't think there's intelligent life anywhere else in the universe.
Part of my reasoning has to do with my religious beliefs. I just don't see a whole lot of room for intelligent life off of Earth in my worldview. That said, it wouldn't shock me to my core were I to find that I was wrong, nor would it get me to question my beliefs. It would just surprise me.
My primary reason for saying this, though, is the Fermi paradox. People often say, "Of course there must be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. The universe is huge. Surely a large number of those stars have inhabitable planets." The problem is that, based on that reasoning, not only should intelligent life exist, some of it almost assuredly started out long before our species did. Therefore, the entire galaxy would already have been colonized by now. We would have evidence of it everywhere-- Constant signals that go way beyond the clarity of the "Wow" signal. We'd see frequent evidence of behavior of stars that cannot possibly be natural. We'd see massive superstructures. No organization on this planet-- Air Force, CIA, etc., could possibly hide the evidence from SETI or even just amateur astronomers.
I admit that I'm no expert, not by a long shot, but isn't a possible solution to the Fermi paradox that the hypothesis itself is wrong, and that it's just not that likely for intelligent life to exist elsewhere in the universe? In fact, I'm not the only person to come up with this solution.
By similar reasoning, I do not think that the government is hiding extraterrestrial secrets in Area 51, aka, the Groom Lake Facility. The supposed events occurred beginning in the 1950s. The government would have been able to hide it for a time, but not for nearly 70 years. We would have seen better evidence of it by now.
U.S. Presidents have famously been vague on the point. For example, Bill Clinton said, but would not elaborate, that he would not be surprised if we were visited at some point. Trump, though, has been the least vague, and in a way that really puts the final nail in the coffin-- He said that he's not a believer, but anything's possible. If it were true that the government had any involvement with aliens or alien tech, he would not have worded it that way. When asked for details, he refused to elaborate. That tells me that whatever the government has, if they have anything at all, they can't explain it, either. Unexplained does not imply aliens. It just means unexplained. There are lots and lots and lots of things in quantum physics that are, as of yet, unexplained. (And some of it is genuinely weird and vaguely unsettling.) For all I know, U.S. Presidents may only be privy to nothing more than experiments with quantum entanglement that leads to confusing and possibly unnerving conclusions.
There is more to it, though. There are a number of things that are well-established and basically undeniable that the conspiracy theorists frequently bring up. One is that the Groom Lake Facility is extraordinarily secretive. Whatever's being done there is something that they don't want anybody to know about. You will be shot on sight if you get too close. People that do enter are only allowed to enter by plane. The facility itself was denied to even exist for decades. Nobody really denies that this is the case.
But, it's really to be expected that any country as large as the U.S. has such secret military bases. They're doing something there that's super secret. The real question isn't whether or not the government has secrets, but what the secrets are. Of course they have secrets. As far as I know, the Groom Lake Facility is nothing more than a place to develop and test top-secret military weapons. Government orgs often develop technology in secret. After Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman developed the RSA algorithm, which is now used in virtually all secure communications, it was revealed that the NSA had already developed it in secret. (Or maybe it was the CIA. I forget.) It's not that much of a stretch to suggest that they're absurdly secretive about their aircrafts, especially considering that the Groom Lake Facility was originally created during the Cold War.
Then we get to Bob Lazar. There really is too much that has been substantiated to say that there's nothing at all to Mr. Lazar's story. Something happened with him, very possibly at the Groom Lake Facility. I have a hard time believing that he doesn't think he's telling the truth. Though it is possible that every bit of it is a lie, and I really don't deny that that is a possibility, he comes off as pretty convincing. It's pretty difficult to keep up a lie for decades if you believe it to be a lie. I think that he thinks that he's telling the truth, but I don't think he really is telling the truth. Something weird seemed to have happened there, but his story is unfortunately almost entirely unreliable due to the fact that he used hyponosis for memory recollection.
Hypnosis-induced memory recollection is notorious for creating far more memories than it recalls, and they seem just as vivid as normal memories. A very likely explanation here is that he saw something while working for the government that he couldn't explain and thought that maybe it was extraterrestrial tech. Then the hypnosis put it all together using pieces from another puzzle box. Unfortunately, all of the information that he gives to us is obfuscated by the fact that he underwent hypnotherapy. Apart from the things that are absolutely verifiable, we have no way of knowing which parts of his story are true and which are not.
And now, let's consider another possibility. Famous crackpot Alex Jones said that government agents are using DMT to elevate their minds to another plane of existence to communicate with interdimensional (not interstellar) aliens.
If you're not familiar with DMT, it is a bizarre drug. It is an extraordinarily powerful hallucinogen that can make people believe with every fiber of their being that they are contacting either "high-vibrational" or "low-vibrational" entities on the astral realm, and it has a lot in common with astral projection. Believe me, this is one really weird rabbithole that involves the occult, Theosophy, and just a whole mess of bizarre New Age stuff. It is well-established that people take this drug and believe that they are contacting extra-dimensional aliens. Mr. Jones' allegation is that the government has used these techniques to try to gain advanced knowledge that they can weaponize.
And, honestly, it's not that farfetched. Hear me out on this. I don't think that they've actually contacted anything, alien or otherwise, but the idea that a government would try something this stupid is actually very possible. The Stargate Project was a military operation to try to use the occult practice of remote viewing to spy on enemies. Part of the Stargate Project was to try to stop a goat's heart by staring at it, which was famously made into a book and a movie. MK Ultra was intended to devise methods of what is essentially mind control.
Clearly, the government has way too much money and is more than willing to spend it on absolutely insane experiments. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they did something as absurd as using DMT to try to contact interdimensional entities. I just don't think it could ever work. (For the record, I'm also not saying that the government definitely did attempt this, either, or even that the most likely did. Just that it wouldn't surprise me.)
Going back to Bob Lazar, I honestly wouldn't put it past the government to dose him with something to make him think he's seeing something that he's not really seeing. Possibly to use him as a scapegoat. Combine that strong possibility with the hypnotherapy, and there's really nothing we can trust of his story, whether he believes it or not. We could only go by what is verifiable, and that's not much.
To be clear, I'm not saying that this is definitely what happened. I will readily admit that there's probably an explanation that's much simpler that covers it and I simply haven't thought of what that explanation might be. (I do sometimes think we too readily assume that we have enough information to come to a conclusion, like the proverbial blind men encountering an elephant.) I'm just saying that it strikes me as far more likely for this explanation to be true than for Mr. Lazar's story to be true.
Some would argue, and I think they have good reason to, that Mr. Lazar is just simply lying. I suppose it is possible that he was involved in something at the Groom Lake Facility, got into some kind of trouble with his superiors, and decided to use this story to smear them. And it's technically also possible that he was never employed at the Groom Lake Facility at all and the whole story is made up from scratch. As I said, I have a hard time believing that, but I think it's still a far more likely explanation than to say that his story is true. I consider the idea that Mr Lazar's story is true to be the least likely possibility.