Psychological operations (PSYOP) are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_operations_(United_States)
One of the following is true:
We are in the midst of a paradigm-shifting revelation concerning the nature of the UFO phenomenon.
Or
We are in the midst of the largest disinformation campaign since Operation Fortitude in World War II.
There is no in-between.
Whatever the motive, we are witnessing an extremely robust, skillful psychological operation that is shifting mainstream opinion profoundly and rapidly. It makes “weapons of mass destruction” claims in the Bush era look like rumors spread by grade-schoolers passing notes at recess. The men behind this psyop know what they are doing.
I say men, because there are two who, at least publicly, are the force behind this operation. Just a look at their CVs should be enough to help you understand what’s going on.
There is Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, whose backstory is that he labored for years in secret there before frustration at the lack of transparency around the UFO issue caused him to resign his post and go rogue.
We’ll have to take Elizondo’s word (and the word of former Senator Harry Reid) that he was our real-life Fox Mulder, because the military basically denies it and Elizondo doesn’t have so much as an employee-of-the-month certificate to prove he was the nation’s top alien hunter. Or that he was even ever in a program called AATIP at all, for that matter.
Elizondo has the right qualifications for the job, though. For psyops, I mean, not the scientific study of aerial anomalies. Damnit, Jim, he’s an intelligence officer, not an aerospace engineer. If someone could please explain to him the difference between relativity and quantum theories, it would be much appreciated.
Joining him is Christopher Mellon, who took time off from whatever it is that oligarchs do all day to lend his considerable expertise and insider connections to this paradigm-shifting PR campaign. He is by all accounts a Serious Man with an Impressive Record of Government Service. If you look carefully, you’ll see that most of that government service also revolved around intelligence work.
Their first goal was respectability, and they got a front-page story placed in the New York Times. Ostensibly, the story was about the fact that the military was secretly studying UFOs, but the real message was that there must be something there to study.
But the New York Times is not how you influence the masses these days. And the public does not have much stomach for things like “science” and “evidence”. Instead of working to convene some blue-ribbon panels of generals and academics, the next move was to throw in with rock singer Tom DeLonge, to create “To the Stars Academy.” Why “Academy”? I have no idea. Why DeLonge? Kids love that rock and roll, I guess.
While TTSA created a science department to study some hunks of metal supposedly from a crashed alien ship, entertainment was their primary focus. So in place of regular updates from a committee of earth’s top physicists and aerospace engineers, we got a series on the History Channel, an outlet not known for its academic rigor. (Confession: the commercial time to program time ratio is so high in that series I was unable to make it past the first episode.)
Why? Why cheapen the world’s most important revelation in this way?
Because they understood how to keep the topic in the public eye.
Once DeLonge’s rather manic and nonsensical interviews began to undermine the credibility of the topic more than they could allow, Elizondo and Mellon bailed on TTSA and magically, the leaked photos and videos found a new outlet. Once again, the chosen one was not a scientist or even a scientifically minded UFO group, but the fascistically coiffed artist (mixed-media and mixed-martial), Jeremy Corbell. His rise in media appearances on the UFO topic was as rapid as DeLonge’s decline.
Corbell may not be a physicist, but knows how to get attention, and attention is the goal here. Meanwhile, Mellon and Elizondo themselves have been everywhere, from mainstream media to, well, not-so-mainstream media. They have granted more interviews than Hollywood actors promoting their latest blockbuster. They stay “on message” like the pros they are, while dropping teasers and hints about more dramatic revelations to come. I particularly like Elizondo’s technique at certain questions of stammering in surprise that someone thought to ask about, say, UFO wreckage in government possession and then dramatically replying that his security oath prevents him from saying any more.
Good stuff. And effective. From the New York Times, down to obscure podcasts and Youtube channels all the way back up again to the New Yorker and network news programs, they have saturated just about every form of media there is.
And tomorrow (May 16) there will even be a segment on 60 Minutes.
This is not the first time pilots and generals have come forward with mind-blowing tales of flying disks and floating triangles. Serious, high-ranking government and military officials across the world have given very sober, rational testimony about startling and unexplained incidents over the last 50 years. (See for example UFO: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record by Leslie Kean. Kean brings a journalistic sensibility to the topic and was the co-author of the NYT stories in 2017.) But those reports failed to overcome the ridicule factor, created, in large part, by the UFOlogy community itself, so rife with credulous “researchers,” grifters and true-believers.
Yet, in a matter of three of four years, Elizondo and Mellon have spearheaded a campaign that has shaped the dominant narrative around UFOs in the mainstream press into this:
Is it time to start taking UFOs seriously?
I have been fascinated by the UFO topic since I had fewer candles on my birthday cake than fingers on my hand. I am in my fifties now and have never seen this level of media acceptance around this topic before. But the question is, “why?” What is the purpose of this psyop campaign?
I want so much to believe that this psychological operation is specifically designed to prepare the public for mind-blowing revelations that are to come. Or perhaps also to force the hand of those in government who still resist “disclosure” either for ideological/religious reasons or fear of the social disruption such revelations might engender.
I want to believe that something is making this disclosure inevitable and that these two men with just the right backgrounds were tasked (formally, or informally) with laying the groundwork for perhaps the most momentous paradigm shift in history.
But also, I know the history of disinformation games within UFOlogy that go all the way back to the 1950s. And damnit, it also just feels like we are being hustled. TTSA felt like a hustle. In fact, they roped in investors based on a business plan of reverse engineering UFO tech and selling it to the U.S. military. Or something. And Corbell has that same grifter vibe to me, an opportunist focusing more on self-aggrandizement than journalism, given to grand generalizations that go well beyond the evidentiary tidbits being funneled to him by Mellon and Elizondo.
Maybe that’s just what any psyop feels like to those who see it for what it is, no matter its purpose or veracity. Or maybe the world of UFOlogy is so rife with hucksters and disinformation artists that anything associated with the topic has come to feel like a scam to me. The whole topic in my mind has become one giant car-warranty scam.
But who knows? Maybe the embarrassing credulity and lack of rigor in UFOlogy was always part of a long-term disclosure plan. Let out a morsel here and a breadcrumb there, but contaminate valid data with enough discrediting fabrications and illogical leaps so that the “core story” can be titrated, injected slowly into public awareness in a way that does not risk societal chaos. Maybe that explains why only snippets of grainy videos have been made available with hints that there are much better quality videos that actually show the physics defying capabilities these craft possess. Maybe clear, definitive video evidence would be too much for our cultural psyches to absorb at one blow.
That nerdy little kid lugging around UFO books in a briefcase (don’t judge) who still lives inside me desperately wants that to be true. And with the world on the brink of ecological collapse, an economic system that impoverishes so many and enriches so few, and the constant drumbeat of war, I have an almost religious hope that our new gods will come to save us. I suspect I am not alone in this.
But I also know what our government is capable of. I understand the history of our intelligence agencies: the destabilization of governments, the sponsored coups, the assassinations, the media manipulations. I know what they are capable of and I know for whom they work.
I can’t think why men like Chris Mellon would publicly trash their reputations and social standing by championing a story destined to be once again publicly discredited as has been the pattern many times before. I don’t know what purpose spreading disinformation on such a huge, public scale would serve. Misdirection around actual tech? Confusing adversaries? Creating a new religious movement to shape human behavior?
But that it is a huge disinformation campaign, orchestrated masterfully over years or even decades is also a possibility. And while that may seem unrealistic to some, surely when laying odds, a massive government sponsored hoax can’t be that much less likely than beings from another world defying physics as we know it to visit this backwater planet.
One thing I do not accept is that the pilots and military officers who are discussing their encounters with the objects captured on video are somehow just mistaken. The equipment they use alone is enough to prevent that. If these accounts are not true, these men and women are not misinterpreting mundane objects.
They are lying.
And so, I end where I began. There’s just not any middle ground here. That we are in the midst of a massive psyop is crystal clear. But, even if they don’t understand it, the people at the heart of this campaign, and segments of the military and intelligence communities they serve, know whether or not something extraordinary is going on.
And maybe, says that nerdy kid in me, maybe one day soon we’ll know, too.