25 January 2008

Re-Bate



The Congressman was a stitch, a real joker. I don't know who he was, but his soundbite was great. He came out of the deliberations on the stimulus package for the faltering economy and argued that only people who actually pay taxes should get a rebate check. I assume he was one of those Republicans who used to be Democrats, since he had that folksy thing down pat. He said “You have to have “bate,” before you can “re-bate.”

I had to agree with him, regardless of where he was from, or his orientation, since handing out checks to the people who are too poor to pay taxes would result only in a momentary stimulus at the supermarket and the liquor store. I continued to listen to the details on what is being proposed, and got to the point I was expecting to hear. Of course I pay too much in taxes to get anything back, so I stopped listening, and put my plans to buy that big yacht on the back burner.

Times being what they are, what with the global financial system teetering into something new, there is a parallel phenomenon beginning to play out. The Great Depression gave credence to the Orson Welles radio drama “The War of the Worlds.” Anxious people in New Jersey actually mobilized to fight the Martians. The Cold War struggle against the Soviets spawned a whole genre of horror films best typified by “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers,”   in which your spouse turns into a Communist without waarning. The current melt-down in the global market system is bringing back the UFOs.

It is simple, really, since it is a lot easier to externalize our collective anxiety. The good citizens of the Garden State did against imaginary aliens. Goodness knows we have enough real ones right here in the Buckingham neighborhood. But that threat is too close and too personal, and comes with real human faces. So we flee to something really scary to take our minds off things.

Larry King is still the King of the Late-night interview show. He needs no writers, so the strike of the creative types has left him unaffected. He has been doing UFO-themed shows for years, and lately they are resonating with his audiences.

Larry and I are on different frequencies; and I don't know how he does it at his age. I am long in bed before he comes on. I can't even stay up long enough to finish the cool new show on Fox about the cute robot from the future who fights menacing robots from the future to protect the human race in the here-and-now.

I only hear about what Larry is up to when he interviews someone important, like Paris Hilton, or some people from East Texas who see things in the sky.

I got a note of alarm from a pal, alerting me to the fact that Larry was on to something big. He was seeking authoritative information. There being no one around that actually knew anything. I searched for the transcript on the web and read it with my coffee. I realized I have been missing the real big story of the last few weeks. The flying saucers are back, and have been seen over Texas.

This is serious business. I have heard reports of strange things in the sky; I have been associated with several military aviation units and been part of training evolutions in the desert that adjoin the Nevada Test Site and the Dreamland military reservation. None of our guys ever reported anything like this, with hundreds of years combined flight experience, not there in the desert or overseas.

The absence of information is suggestive, but hardly conclusive. There are many trained observers who have reported unexplained phenomena, not with the loaded term "UFOs," but simply reporting "the fact of." I know that that perfectly ordinary things can spook people- atmospheric conditions enhanced the planet Venus during WW II, and the ominous bright light had an aircraft carrier group at General Quarters for more than an hour.

Larry had a professional de-bunker on to rebut the eyewitnesses. He claimed that A-10 aircraft from the Maryland Air National Guard had range time that night and had dropped high-intensity flares during a training evolution in Texas- an unusual phenomenon in a peacetime context and one people do not normally encounter- is a plausible explanation for an unusual event that people would seek to explain by other means.

I'm not saying that is the answer, since the people that reported the gigantic flowing object said they knew the difference between Air-deployed LUU-2 high-intensity illumination flares and Alien Mother Ships. Besides, the LUU-2B flare has a burn time of only about five minutes, and does not travel sideways at three thousand miles an hour.

Naturally, I reserve judgment, though flares seems to be an answer at least as plausible as unknown spacecraft traveling light-years across the galaxy in order to visit rural Texas.

Of course, the question is what constitutes the attraction to the aliens? If they are real, what sort of bait draws them here to this pleasant backwater planet?

The other side of the riddle is tantalizing. Larry suggested that the sighting might have been of an American classified military project. Possibly derived from technology acquired at the UFO crash site in Roswell, New Mexico years ago.

That is an explanation I did not put a lot of credence in, since during the last recession I briefly entertained a request to visit Building 5 at Wright Patterson AFB where everyone said the Alien remains were being stored. I was curious, and did not want to think about the internet bubble, and asked around.

 There are a handful of people in the Pentagon who actually have the tickets to know everything. There are, of course, unacknowledged Special Access Programs (SAPs) that have gone so deep that they essentially are autonomous.

Their managers refuse to tell anyone what they are up to; I dealt with those versions of the Secret Squirrels who are not Spooks at all- just military folks with secrets to protect.

Sometimes when one of the black programs was opened up to the light, there was nothing of substance in there at all. In more than one case, the programs had essentially assumed lives of their own, the only function being to continue to operate their protective security systems.

Of course, it is not the oversight people from Congress who found them. Al Capone was busted for tax evasion rather than murder, since it was the accountants that got him, not the guns blazing G-Men. it was the classified money people who outed the Squirrels, since what you cannot hide is the money trail. Having been in the classified budget world, I asked one of the people who actually did know everything if there was a follow-on to the Nighthawk and Spirit programs (F-117 & B-2).

We had an animated discussion, which included the fact that if there was, I did not have a need to know. But I maintained that since at the time I was responsible for a few billions of the tax-payers money, and I did. We explored the idea of how one would go about protecting a big stream of cash that had to survive outside the regular intelligence budget, which even with clandestine activities has a fair amount of visibility in the right places.

The conclusion was even if a radically new aviation program was a deep SAP, the money to fund it would leave a hole in the larger program in which it was hidden. It would be analogous to the signature or modern nuclear subs. Passive sonar (non-radiating, highly sensitive receivers) was state of the art, that drove quieting technology to near perfection. An attack submarine skipper told me that they are so quiet that the most modern boats can be detected not because of the noise they make, but rather by the anomalous silence in the space in the water they displace which should have organic background noise.

Hence the Navy's return to guns-blazing active sonar, which disturbs the whales. But I digress.

The opinion of the senior official was that the money trail could not be hidden, even if the project it funded was. There was nothing in progress with that money signature. The Air Force is too focused on the F-22 Raptor program to worry about more onesy-twosy advanced capabilities; the Generals view the fate of the Service as being at risk and everything (except cable TV and air conditioning in the Visiting Officers Quarters) has been sacrificed on the budgetary altar of the Raptor.

The Navy can't even replace the ships it has, much less take on the mysteries of the heavens, and the Army and Marines are way too busy trying to buy more HumVees and helicopters to replace the ones they have lost in Iraq and Afghanistan to worry about it.

That is not to say there is not something up there in the sky. All I am saying is that if there is something, it is not us. I finished the transcript of Larry King Live and decided that our best defense is the fact that we are located in the Galactic equivalent of rural Texas, and I wouldn't drive there on a bet.

My friend was concerned that the aliens might view us as a potential food source, like Michael Rennie did with his robot in “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” If so, I reason, it is a long drive to come and get us.

Of course, as a nation, we have been putting on a lot of weight. It is suggestive, but I don't know if that makes us worth the trip across the stars.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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