Pay attention to how the perennialist discourse on UFOs and ETs sets them up as the new gods

Charles Upton is a name I have hardly ever seen mentioned within ufology, or conversations over UFOs/ETs, but he has brought a valuable -- and, apparently, relatively marginalized -- viewpoint to the picture. If ufology is going to stand or fall on the ability to be self-critical, I believe that Upton's voice, and voices like it, should be more widely appreciated and contended with.

I first became aware of Upton and his work early this year through Jeffrey Mishlove's YouTube channel, New Thinking Allowed. There are, to date, around eight such interviews. Upton's keenness with regard to detail, and his ability to articulate a range of ideas, to say nothing of his critical eye's perceptiveness, is always a treat. In a 2021 essay entitled "The Alien Disclosure Deception: An Exposé of the Netflix Original Series Top Secret UFO Projects: Declassified", Upton lays out a case for his sense that

...thinly-disguised and thoroughly-articulated social engineering gambit[s] [such as the documentary] essentially [announce] the advent of a new religion, one which proposes that we worship the “aliens,” whether extraterrestrial or interdimensional, in the place of God—a religion whose prophets are CIA agents, military brass, and aerospace multimillionaires—[and that] at the very least it ought to succeed in calling into question the myth that the U.S. government has been trying to debunk the popular belief in UFOs for the past 70 years rather than covertly promoting it.

He also writes:

According to Richard Dolan, leaving the ultimate authority for UFO research to the President of the United States, a mere democratically-elected official, would be “dangerous”; and Dolan ends the episode by saying that we should first pay attention to the information available about UFOs, not the sources of the information—to the spectacle itself, that is, and not to those who may be designing and controlling that spectacle. Needless to say, I have taken the opposite approach.

I've taken the opposite approach too. But this appears to be a commonly glossed over point -- so common, in fact, that the instances of it occurring stick out to me as exceptional. With events such as the release of the United States' UAP report last year, NASA's recently announced year-long UFO-oriented program, or the various articles and programs from the past four-to-five years putting the spotlight on the subject, the attendant discussions tend to focus on the quality or amount of the information, or the "authority" of the sources, rather than where it's (apparently) coming from, or why the information or interest is being provided and occurring at all.

Upton's article ultimately centers upon the intensifying promotion of the aforementioned perennialist, or "ancient ETs/UTs", hypothesis. "As for the question of who designed our designers," Upton writes, "and who designed the designers of our designers, in an infinite regression back to God knows what, this immediately invalidating objection is never dealt with." The forcefulness with which this hypothesis is gaining traction, often in conjunction with vague and contradictory sentiments about "consciousness", should be regarded with just as much scrutiny as anything else. Note how often, for instance, the "worldviews of the indigenas [...] are being recast to bring them into line with the contemporary western belief in UFOs"; or how what Upton calls a "higher spiritual caste" is posited when a line is drawn between people who have been "touched" by UFOs, or those who self-designate as pro-ET, and all of the Others among humanity.

Upton provides several possible answers for the question of “Why Disclosure Now?”, and my sense, if I am to follow the course of this scenario, is that it may be a mixture of these two situations:

1. The Clandestine Disclosurite Elite have decided, according to whatever criteria they accept as valid, that the populace is now finally sufficiently conditioned to be ripe for Full Disclosure; 2) Global tensions between the western world and China and/or Russia, not to mention the climate disaster and the U.S. capitulation to the Jihadists in Central Asia, have reached a point of unparalleled crisis where the Disclosurites feel they must play their long-anticipated Global Unity Card as fast as possible before it’s too late.

Although Upton approaches this topic from a certain spiritually/esoterically informed point of view, what I'm offering here isn't the terms for a religious debate (since that would be against the rules anyway), but observations made in the spirit of genuine skepticism. This forum's common and conceptually totalizing posts about how "Aliens have always been here" are not absolutely wrong, out of hand, but their implications, blindspots, sociocultural effects, and the potential ideological investments of the people making them, are being questioned too little.

Submitted November 28, 2022 at 04:53PM by Abrbarzan https://ift.tt/pv3IwWk